[WARNING: This contains spoilers for the final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.]
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Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith. The four-part series finale aired its final installment on May 4, and the end of The Clone Wars' much-anticipated seventh season did cross over with elements from the third of George Lucas' prequels. But the finale ultimately did veer in its own unique direction with Anakin Skywalker's Jedi apprentice, Ahsoka Tano.
The ending of The Clone Wars' final episode, "Victory and Death," features a fully transformed Darth Vader finding his now-former Padawan's lightsaber that she left behind. It gave Ahsoka and Anakin their own ending rather than weave her too deeply into the events of Revenge Of The Sith. And while the series does using some of the movie's actual dialogue, the conclusion of her arc and relationship with Anakin/Vader took center stage by the end.
Filoni, who wrote each part of the Clone Wars finale, went into detail in a Q&A with Deadline on why he avoided a total crossover between The Clone Wars and Revenge Of The Sith. Asked whether he envisioned the Clone Wars finale the same way all along, Filoni itted he always wanted to involve Darth Vader in some capacity. On Vader and Ahsoka getting their own ending separate from Revenge Of The Sith, Filoni explained that he felt giving Ahsoka her own side story was better than forcing her into the events of the movie and risking unintended problems - creating new potential plot holes, for instance.
Filoni also said Ahsoka laying down her lightsaber took him back to conversations he had with George Lucas about the concept of Jedi giving up violent acts to help people in different ways. Before that ending, as she created a burial site for fallen clone troopers and left her lightsaber behind for Vader to discover, Ahsoka had to rescue Rex from following Order 66 and accept the reality that many of her friends had turned on her by orders of Darth Sidious. Along the way, Filoni also deftly avoided creating a plot hole involving who knows and doesn't know the true identity of Darth Vader.
The way Filoni wrote it out, he got the best of both worlds. He avoided the potential pitfalls of mixing a story that had already been told with an entirely new one that's only partially related. He got Ahsoka and Rex deeply involved in Order 66 and the fall of the Jedi without having to sacrifice the integrity of the storylines of either the movie or the show. One could argue that The Clone Wars even fixed a few problems from the prequels. And the finale ultimately keeps the focus on Ahsoka, which is where it deserved to be in the end.
Source: Deadline