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I don't just mean against the clones. You have Mace Windu taking on thousands of droids all by himself on Dantooine. You also have Obi-wan besting Destroyers (something we have yet to see in the movies. Jar Jar has a better record against them than the Jedi). Yoda throwing droids around like gnats. I guess the hyperbole is good for dramatic effect, but it's wildly inconsistent with the power level of the Jedi displayed in the movies.

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Clone Wars Cartoon Questions (say that three times fast):

Is K'Kruhk dead or what?

As many, many, many people have noticed, K'Kruhk appears to be killed by Grievous at the end of Clone Wars' first season. His death is even more strongly suggested at the beginning of the second season, when clone troopers fail to pick up his life signs and leave his body in the wreckage. A couple years later, however, K'Kruhk shows up on Saleucami as right as rain (in addition to, I believe, one or two other prior appearances). So did the cartoon screw up and contradict the comics?

Well, it's not so much a contradiction as it is misleading. The thing you have to understand about the cartoon is that the majority of the people who saw it know nothing of the Expanded Universe. That's why Ventress and Durge are defeated in a manner that suggests their demise; there needs to be a sense of finality for the people who won't go on to see their future roles in the books and comics. The same applies here; as far as the cartoon alone is concerned, yeah, K'Kruhk is dead, but for those of us who do read the comics and have seen his other appearances, Lucasfilm reps have explained that his species can enter a sort of hibernation state when severely wounded, which would explain why they didn't detect his life signs. It's continuity spackle, pure and simple, but it works well enough.

What's all this Nelvaan stuff? Labyrinth of Evil shows Anakin and Obi-Wan on Tythe just before they head to Coruscant.

Okay, now things get complicated. If we take everything we've seen at face value, Anakin and Obi-Wan's adventures immediately prior to RotS go something like this: they defeat the Separatists on a rainy planet that may or may not be a very loose interpretation of Cato Neimoidia, get ordered to Nelvaan, then forget entirely about that, spend a month or so hunting for Darth Sidious, ultimately end up going after Dooku on Tythe...Dooku flees, they find out Coruscant is under attack, decide "we've got to help them!", then...decide instead to chase Dooku to his decoy destination of Nelvaan, where they have a nice, leisurely adventure over what looks like at least a day or two, not involving Dooku in the slightest, then board their ship, find out Coruscant is under attack again (or, perhaps more accurately, is still under attack), and THEN go to Coruscant to rescue Palpatine.

Based on the handful of comments we've seen from Lucasfilm's continuity people (unless I've missed something; someone kindly let me know if I have), it looks like we're gonna be stuck with something along these lines as the official version of the events in question. While I put a lot more trust in the VIPs than it appears many people do, in my personal opinion, the best way to handle this is to simply move things around. Just like Ventress appears to die for the dramatic purposes of the cartoon, the scenes on the rain planet and Nelvaan could actually happen long before they appear to; we're simply only being given certain chunks of the story for the sake of dramatic flow. It's certainly not without precedent; the beginning of the same cartoon is presented in a way that implies Anakin's knighthood is granted immediately following Muunilinst, without a hint of Praesitlyn or anything else that we've seen from the intervening two years. Those events have to be spaced out a bit; I see no reason why we can't do the same with Nelvaan.

In fact, with the release of RotS, continuity nuts now face a similar issue with the film itself; the brief scene at the end of the movie depicting the Death Star's construction couldn't possibly happen as soon after Vader's transformation as it appears to. Though there are numerous possibilities for solving this, the easiest might be to simply regard the scene as a flash-forward, actually occuring years later.

But I digress. =) And now, the biggie...

Was Palpatine captured according to the cartoon's depiction or Labyrinth of Evil's depiction?

Okay, now things really get complicated. The Nelvaan/Tythe thing is illogical at worst, whereas here we've got vastly different versions of the exact same events. The only incontrovertible details on the capture of Palpatine are that it started in his office, eventually led to a train, and ended up at a bunker. Wihout covering all the sordid details, between the cartoon and the novel, we're given two completely different versions of what happens at each of those locales (and, perhaps more notably, who's involved). Some of the scenes can be wedged in around each other similar to the Nelvaan stuff, but some, like Palpatine's office, are trickier. Labyrinth depicts no fighting whatsoever within 500 Republica, while the cartoon tosses Grievous right in through the window, not to mention the hallway/elevator stuff. The cartoons have frequently been called stylized versions of the GFFA; how well this can be worked out depends on just how stylized you think they are. One sensible interpretation that has been presented is that the book is the extensively researched documentary, and the cartoons are holodramas; some of the facts are off, other things are made up entirely, and in the end, excitement takes precedence over accuracy. This kind of approach helps with things like the train yard; in the cartoon Palpatine and company are seen fighting Grievous off, then leaving the station without ever getting on a train, while the book has them on a train with Mace Windu dueling Grievous on the roof. A loose interpretation of the cartoon would allow you to, for example, throw out merely the shot of everyone leaving the train yard; in actuality, they might have fought Grievous off, then boarded a train with the newly-arrived Mace Windu; Grievous eventually caches back up to them, duels with Mace, and so on. This is, of course, just my own rambling thoughts on the matter, but the point is, the less strict your interpretation of continuity, the less of a headache all this will give you.

A lot of people have been outspoken in their desire to throw the cartoon version out the window entirely - it's kid stuff, after all, isn't it? Mace Windu can't really surf a droid fighter by pulling on its wires; Yoda can't push around an entire droid lander, let alone two! It's cool to look at, but it can't be what really happens!

I can hardly predict Lucasfilm's policy decisions, but I've seen RotS a couple times now, and I distinctly remember Grievous coughing like crazy at the beginning of the movie, and we all know he didn't get his chest squeezed in Labyrinth of Evil. It looks like we're stuck with the cartoons, for better or worse. My advice would be to simply enjoy them for what they are and leave the spackle to the professionals. I'm betting all the madness will be ironed out quite nicely by the time the New Essential Chronology arrives this fall.

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