Impact Dissonance / Why Order 66 should have felt bigger

That's a pretty accusatory title, especially for the first larger Star Wars post on the blog. So let's clear up any potential confusion first. I love Star Wars. Basically the whole thing. There were parts that weren't as good as other parts, parts that are overrated and so, so many parts that I really enjoy.

We will undoubtedly get into Star Wars again from various other angles (including more granular taste triangles, EDIT: Oh hey, I did.), but for the sake of brevity in this article I want to focus on what is probably one of my favourite things in the entirety of Star Wars, Order 66.

A Quick Summary / The Lay of the Land

If you're reading this I assume you're roughly familiar with Star Wars, including the pivotal scene in The Revenge of the Sith where Palpatine executes his master plan and eliminates the Jedi Order. That said, it probably makes sense to give a small recap here since a lot of the nuance and detail didn't make it into the films. I'll do my best to keep this short, don't worry.

The Clone Wars were a galactic conflict sparked by a number of planets trying to secede from the galactic republic and the yoke of their regulations and taxation. It was named after the clone soldiers deployed by the republic at an unheard of scale, fielding millions to face the droid armies of the separatist Trade Federation and Techno Union head on.

Behind the scenes Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine had orchestrated the rise of the separatists and the war. This started publicly with the Trade Federation's blockade and subsequent invasion of his home planet Naboo in Phantom Menace to foster conflict while raising his own significance as the senator for the planet, but long before then he had already placed the order for the clone army by proxy, setting gears in motion for a war that would shake the galaxy to its core and rid it of the Jedi.
He was doing this because he was also Darth Sidious, Sith Master and sworn enemy of the Jedi Order.

The Sith had an established rule where only two may exist at a time, a Master and an Apprentice. The 'Rule of Two' was implemented to ensure that no Master could be dethroned by weaker apprentices working together, ensuring that any Apprentice that defeats their Master will have surpassed them on their own merit and deserves the Master title as well as the right to take an apprentice.
This had the clear downside, however, that they were consistently and vastly outnumbered against the Jedi Order whose ranks at that point in history numbered into the tens of thousands.

So some subterfuge was needed in order to defeat this foe, to say the least.
Many Jedi Knights died in the instigating Battle of Geonosis at the end of Attack of the Clones, in which they mounted a daring rescue to save Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme from execution, but many thousands remained, including basically all of the Jedi Council.

Actual Jedi casualties during the Clone Wars were very rare, the Force making them less likely to come to harm, allowing them to endure more and recover faster. Fortunately for Palpatine this was never the intent of the war.
The intent was to scatter the Jedi Order, deploy it to as many fronts as possible in the war by opening up new fronts and both prolonging and exacerbating existing conflicts. Making them rely only on their clone troops for immediate support and assistance, rather than the incorruptible backing of the Order. Ready to be betrayed.

If the clone soldiers had been instructed from the start to kill the Jedi when given the chance then the Jedi would have been warned of this through the Force. The clones were not allowed to be aware of the objective in order for the Jedi to stay oblivious and this gambit to work. So the plan was hidden in plain sight in the conditioning of the clones, as part of a long list of contingency orders drilled into the clone soldiers (and in some sources even enforced by bio-chip, although this was never mentioned in the films).
For example, Order 65 is about removing the Supreme Chancellor from power by force if a Senate majority agrees that this is justified. As far as the clones and everybody else are concerned Order 66 is 'just' a contingency protocol on how to deal with rogue Jedi, they have no clue that it is the very purpose of their creation, and are unable to inadvertently (or intentionally) give the Jedi any indication of what is to come.

With that the stage is set. The Jedi are stretched thin across the galaxy, they are under more and more public scrutiny as the war drags on with no end in sight and their greatest enemy is at the head of the republic they are sworn to protect, holding a secret weapon aimed at each and every one of them in the form of the soldiers they have grown to rely on.

Order 66 / The End of an Era

So, what caused Palpatine to finally trigger Order 66? A number of things happened concurrently, chief among them most of the Jedi council being off-planet (including Yoda), but the Separatists had also just lost General Grievous (and Dooku was also already out of the picture) creating at least a perceived power vacuum for the supposedly overwhelming army that his war was supposed to protect the Republic from.

Mostly though, it was all about Skywalker, as tends to be the case with (the numbered) Star Wars films. Palpatine had been grooming and mentoring Anakin from a young age, alongside (and subtly counter to) his training in the Jedi temple. With all of the conditions as good as they were likely to get Palpatine finally played his hand, feeding off of Anakin's fear of losing his childhood crush and secret wife Padme and revealing himself as the Sith Master the Jedi had been searching for since Phantom Menace (and far more actively in the slew of books set during this era).

In his penultimate act of defiance Anakin still tries to do the right thing first and informs the council, who take him seriously but refuse to take him along to confront Palpatine. Of course he secretly follows them anyway, and interferes when Mace Windu tries to strike down Palpatine, afraid that the knowledge to save Padme would die with Palpatine. Palpatine survives, albeit horribly scarred from the reflections of his own Force Lightning, and the four Jedi Masters who had come to stop him lie dead, with the most renowned one, Mace Windu, having fallen by Anakin's hand.

With this Anakin has no choice but to side with Palpatine / Sidious, and he leads a direct assault on the Jedi temple along with his personal battalion of clones (the 501st) to overthrow the empty throne. This is when Darth Sidious declares Order 66, informing each clone squadron deployed with a Jedi general that they should be executed immediately. Ending the reign of the Jedi in an instant.

The film cuts to a number of deployed Jedi out in the field, including Obi-Wan, to show them being ambushed by the clone troopers assigned to them. It's a dramatic moment and, in my opinion, one of the best single sequences Star Wars has produced so far.

In total we see six such ambushes. Obi-Wan and Yoda survive theirs, Ki-Adi-Mundi, Aayla Secura, Plo Koon and Stass Allie do not. That's six attempts, four successes, of something that is happening thousands of times all across the galaxy, almost exclusively successfully. This might be my favourite sequence, but it's also one that could have used a lot more.

Alternative Angles / What other source material covered this?

Of course an easy justification for this would be that there's only so much screen time available to portray Order 66, and I would accept this if there were other sources that do really show us either the scope or the depth of this momentous upheaval. And there just aren't any.

Our first stop in this small (de)tour of the various media that also covered Order 66 is the film's official script. It obviously sticks close to the final product, and also just has those four scenes, but the one on Felucia with Aayla Secura was originally intended to have dialogue and even Barriss Offee in the same scene, also shot down by clone troopers. Not nearly enough of a change, but it would have been nice to see the dialogue.

(Barriss Offee of course being Luminara Unduli's Padawan and mainstay of the animated Clone Wars tv show as a friend and friendly rival to Anakin's padawan Ahsoka Tano. Her other film appearances have been minimal, limited to a background role in Attack of the Clones next to her master. It's a good thing she wasn't in the final cut of the Order 66 sequence because it wouldn't have allowed for the storyline she has later (or earlier when considered in-universe) in the tv show.)

Then there is the official companion novelisation by Matthew Stover, which doesn't dwell on it much at all. Instead it chooses to focus on the relationship between Anakin and Palpatine as well as Anakin's internal struggles and the siege of the temple. Which makes sense from a narrative standpoint, turning it into a cohesive whole instead of a shot-by-shot description of the film, so this shouldn't be seen as a criticism or diminution of his work at all.

Next up is the novel that is actually called Order 66: A Republic Commando Novel, by Karen Traviss. It's fourth in a novel series about two squads of elite clone commandos and the lives they touch (uh, not just lethally). It's a solid series, but my hopes were too high for this particular entry. Not only does Order 66 not happen until ~80% into the novel, it also doesn't really directly impact the commandos, their loyalties slowly having shifted over the past few books (and without the earlier mentioned conditioning or bio-chip enforcement, they just appear to have general knowledge of the contingency Orders). It's not a bad novel, and the titular Order 66 does throw a significant wrench in their own plans, but it's not giving me the portrayal of Order 66 that I'm looking for.

Beyond that there's nothing. There's some stuff in the official comics, the only ones currently in canon being those for Kanan Jarrus' backstory. None that I've found really go into the betrayal the Jedi felt as their troops turned on them, and I don't understand why.

Fixes / What I arrogantly propose should have been done

So what would have helped convey this profound betrayal and failure of the Jedi?
I've got a thought or two about that, one small and one large, which I'll describe in order.

I get that we don't have unlimited screen time and can't really show the long term bonding that took place between the Jedi and their clones, how they slowly came to terms with them more than being tools despite being vat-grown clones and earned their respect and admiration. But we do see Obi-Wan interact with Clone Commander Cody a bit, and a little could have gone a long way if Obi-Wan had paused to reflect on Cody's fate for even a single on-screen second after Order 66.
These are the men he has spent the majority of the past years with, and he just shrugs off that they will never see each other again without so much as a forlorn look? I get that (prequel era) Jedi are supposed to let go of their feelings, but it devalues the sequence by not even addressing this.

Now, on to the bigger one.
George Lucas sprinkled the original trilogy and prequel trilogy with so many wipe transitions between scenes that they have become iconic for the series' cinematography, but Order 66 didn't have any of them. I imagine that this was an intentional decision to make the sequence feel more like a single scene, with the wipes normally used to stitch together scenes and location shifts.
My suggestion would be the exact opposite, and results in a sequence that looks something like this:

We see Palpatine give the order to Commander Cody and Cody opening fire on Obi-Wan, screen wipe to Felucia where we see Aayla Secura gunned down, wipe to Mygeeto where Ki-Adi-Mundi is betrayed, wipe to Plo Koon in the skies of Cato Neimoidia in a slightly faster cut than the original film, wipe to Saleucami where we only see the speeder bikes drop back to take aim on Stass Allie, wipe to Depa Billaba dying, wipe to Eeth Koth, wipe to Shaak Ti, wipe to Oppo Rancisis, faster and faster as every single Jedi is literally wiped from existence, only then cutting to Yoda sensing the disturbance.

It'd feel larger, more far-reaching, more at the scope I feel it should be.
This isn't a villain wiping out a group of heroes, this is a mostly successful attempt to extinguish all light and hope from the galaxy by betraying those that stand for all that is good.
And we should feel and mourn that.


(Footnote for the nitpickers: I listed several example Jedi to die in the Order 66 sequence, most of these already have established canon and/or non-canon deaths. I am aware of this, the selection was relatively arbitrary. Although Depa Billaba feels like a no-brainer to include in any revision since she actually did die in Order 66.)

A New Hope / Let's end this right

I've been tinkering with this article in some form or another for a few months now, so I was quite a long way into it when the out of the blue reveal happened.
We're getting another season of the animated Clone Wars tv show.

I didn't really mention it much during the rest of the article because it unfortunately ended after 5.5 seasons on the cusp of Order 66. This is a show that did all the things I wanted in the setup for an impactful Order 66. It gave us sustained interactions between clones and Jedi where they bonded and grew together, it even set up a pretty obvious-looking potential target for a dramatic victim of Order 66 in Anakin's Togruta apprentice Ahsoka Tano (because she's not seen or mentioned in the films).
Many, myself included, were sad to see it cancelled so abruptly before it got to an actual ending.

And now we're getting a new 12 episode season. The fanbase exploded with happiness.
Many people are hoping to see adaptations of the stuff that was already storyboarded for the second half of season 6, mostly focusing on recurring antagonist Asajj Ventress or what happened with Ahsoka (for spoilery reasons we already know she won't die there).
Cool as all of that sounds, I most of all hope they finally do Order 66, and do it right.