Re: Jon Favreau Star Wars TV series..
I think for the books, the main problem is the lack of the brain chip to explain Order 66. In those books they treated it as just another order. The Nulls could maybe not have that chip depending on when it's implanted since they were labeled defective.
There's much more of a disconnect as far as the clones go. I'm fine with the biochip to enhance unthinking obedience to certain conditioned things. I'd even advocate Order 66 being just one of many. Either one on its own would invite scrutiny. The two together as individually innocuous parts of the overall program are much better to hide the trap of that one order.
Clone Wars showed that the biochip is there in still-gestating clones, so it's early. The Nulls in the books were early attempts -- certain things tweaked too far one way, others not sufficiently squelched, etc. Possible the first few prototype batches didn't have the biochip. Possible they did, but were too independently minded to fall under its sway when the order went out, etc. There are workarounds a good author could do.
The disconnect I mentioned was... Well, first of all Karen noted what many of us did after AOTC -- "one million units", if referring to individual troopers, was woefully insufficient to wage a galactic-scale war. More than that died just on one side, just in one battle in WWII -- and this is just one planet. One solution some fans put forward is that "units" refers to multiple individuals. It could be squads, it could be companies, brigades, whatever. Enh... Maybe. That was just one of the many issues I had with how the clone army was presented in the film. We had the active troopers who we saw armoring up, and who were in that first battle... But we also saw not-yet-fully-grown troopers, half-grown trainees, and many, many still in the gestation tanks. Those latter categories were
definitely not going to be ready to fight unless the war dragged on for many years. What portion of that "one million units" was actually ready and fighting in the couple years of the Clone Wars?
Cue my refrain of "Dammit, George".
Karen's solution was to bring out the Spaarti cloning tech of the older EU that could grow clones much faster, set up in secret by Palpatine to swell the army even faster. This was the origin of the Coruscant Shocktroopers and the 501st, late in the war... Except Clone Wars has now shown us the Coruscant Guard and the 501st operating far earlier, being Kaminoan clones, and no hint at all of secret accelerated cloning facilities.
Sooo... I like and want to keep Kal Skirata and the other Cuy'val Dar as part of the training cadre; I like and want to keep Omega Squad, the Null and Alpha ARC Troopers; the ARC Troopers and Republic Commandos being combined into the Imperial Commandos after Empire Day, later to evolve into Storm Commandos... And so on. Including the specifics of the stories that aren't specifically overwritten.
So, basically, there are problems in both the canon and the old EU, and it would be locely if something new came along that found a happy medium addressing the issues in both.
--Jonah
