It’s a pretty cool lair actually.
In the last episode Ventress had to prove her worth to the Separatist/Sith side, and in this one, General Grievous has the same challenge. Jedi Kit Fisto and Nahdar Vebb are lured to Grievous’s lair by Count Dooku, who deactivated Grievous’s defenses.
I have to say, I feel bad for Grievous in this episode. He did not sign up for this.
For half the episode he has to monkey bars across the ceiling to get around for goodness sake.
Seems to me that his boss is a jerk to him, his droid is a jerk to him, and as much as he wants to believe he is still the “proud warrior” he once was, his life kinda sucks.
Maybe it was easy to be on Grievous’s side for this one, because the other side is just a traditional-Jedi-of-the-day and his random former padawan (who is introduced only to die in the same episode) bickering about what is or isn’t the Jedi Way, neither of whom are particularly interesting or likable.
You insult the clones you insult me buddy. Though the clone commander’s death (I don’t know his name, he was also uninteresting) led to Nahdar wanting revenge (which is not the Jedi way btw, in case you didn’t get that) (this whole ep was pretty much “say it again louder for the people in the back”), I lost interest in Nahdar by the time he seemed to care about others. Plus I wasn’t convinced.
And sure, this is Kit and Nahdar’s first episode so it’s hard to make them immediately interesting or likable but 1) maybe you shouldn’t have killed one of them off immediately if you wanted me to care and 2) the show proved it can make me care about someone dying in their first episode in Rookies, so this certainly could have been done better. But the episode is called “Lair of Grievous” not “The Tragedy of Nahdar” so I assume it was intentional for me to be more interested in Grievous’s side of the story.
My favorite part:
Grievous sounds so sad about his pet dying (also angry, obviously, but that’s an emotion we’ve seen). He seems a lot more aggressive for the rest of the episode, which makes me think he’s more motivated by revenge for his lost pet than impressing Dooku. Yep I think I’m more sad about Gor dying than a Jedi.
I’m looking forward to getting back to the characters I actually care about though.
Bonus – How I imagine 90% of Kit Fisto’s training of Nahdar went:
