Star Wars has always worked best when it’s rooted in a tongue in cheek humour. From the hilarious banter between all the characters in A New Hope and Threepio’s head-mixing hilarity in Attack of the Clones, to the Ewoks and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, humour has grounded the saga and made us care more. This is a humourous episode designed to make us laugh and smile, attaching happy feelings to this show, making the dark moments to come (remember, we still have Nightsisters!) even darker.
Evil Plans, a prequel to the season 1 finale (Hostage Crisis) and a sequel to the season 2 premiere(Holocron Heist), revolves around Cad Bane’s quest to get the plans for the Republic Senate building for the Hutts. He’s chosen Threepio as his target, and abducts him while he’s out on an errand for Padme and Anakin with Artoo Detoo.
This episode is a lot of entertaining fluff and I loved every minute of it. Threepio and Artoo are, in their own right, one of the classic comedy pairs in the history of film, right along with Laurel and Hardy and Abbot and Costello, and this episode reinforces that beautifully. In fact, I could see bits of those guys in this episode.
Another thing I liked about this episode is that it sees the return of one of my favorite characters from season 2, Todo 360, voiced by Seth Green. He’s a techno-service droid and a very funny foil for a villain like Cad Bane to have. Apparently, he’s been rebuilt since the last time we saw him he exploded.
There isn’t a lot of substance to this episode, the Hutts have hired Bane to steal the plans for the Senate (which come in handy since that’s what Bane uses to bust Ziro out of prison) and then they hire him to bust out Ziro. That’s pretty much the story. There’s a side story involving cake toppings for a dignitary banquet that Artoo and Threepio need to retrieve by a street vendor.
While Threepio is abducted by Bane, Artoo finds himself at a brightly colored droid spa for a massage and cleaning. Sure it sounds ludicrous and some of you probably hated it, but everything about the droid spa was great. The lighting and colors were vivid and fantastic, the female droids were incredibly cool, and Artoo gets treated like a king before he too gets abducted by Todo and an IG droid.
Bane is pretty ruthless when it comes to torturing droids, and makes EV-9D9 look like a saint.
Bane gets what he needs and Bane tosses them back into the street, having wiped just enough of their memories so that no one is the wiser to his plot.
This episode served a small, modest function, but was incredibly entertaining. My son and I were both laughing hysterically through it and agreed that this was almost as good (in the humour department) as Bombad Jedi. But really, can you get more hilarious than an episode scripted by Kevin Rubio? Probably Not.
The other big thing I was glad to see were more classic trilogy locations. Jabba’s palace popped on screen and looked incredible. This season seems to be making leaps and bounds toward tying the prequels in with the classic trilogy in a way a lot of fans are eager to see.
Overall, I think this is a pretty good episode. Not great, but really fun. In fact, it’s probably as much fun as you can have with an episode half devoted to simulated torture of a humanoid droid.
Next week sees the sequel episode to this and Hostage Crisis, and sees Obi-Wan and Quinlan Vos tracking down Ziro the Hutt. (You can watch an exclusive clip of that episode here.)
(It’s probably also of mild interest to note that the cake-baking Too-Onebee droid was a cameo appearance by the guy from that Ace of Cakes show. See? Mildly interesting… Right?)