Let us return once more to a more civilized age, Clone Wars podcast.

I'm Rob Zachini, joined by Alia Capora, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson.

Today we're going to be talking about a one-off episode that sheds a little light on the nature

of the Republic's war machine and how its army of clones become seasoned soldiers or

with casualties. Then we're going to be back on the hunt for grievous with downfall of a droid

and duel of the droids in which Anakin gets a replacement astromec droid and struggles to bond

with it. We can start with rookies, which follows a bunch of bored newly trained clone troopers

manning one of the Republic's countless listening posts. And we get a brief taste of their day-to-day

boredom and the losing battle their veteran sergeant is fighting against complacency.

But then the base is struck by command droids who quickly sees control without the base being

able to turn off its all-clear message. This opens the door for general grievous to bring his

fleet through undetected and strike at the clone production facilities on Camino. Meanwhile,

our main clone troopers, Cody and Rex, you know, the yellow guy and the blue guy.

And the blue guy, yeah. They're coming through on an inspection tour. They realize the

bases fall into the droids, link up with the surviving clone troopers and retake the base.

But then there's an unbeatable onslaught of droid reinforcements when grievous realizes something

has gone wrong with his plan. So one of the rookies has to stay behind to blow the base up with

explosives and knock it off the airwaves. Therefore, thereby warning the Republic. And at the end of

the episode, Cody and Rex welcome the remaining rookies, the survivors. The two from the

remaining, the 501st. I'm surprised how dense that episode was, like even that summary,

I'm aligning a lot of details. So there's a lot to dig into, despite it being a single episode.

But first I thought I'd start with a quick check-in. How does everyone feel about how this war is

...