As of last week, the beloved unfinished animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars returned with all-new episodes. Well, sort of. Disney+ released the first episode of the series in nearly six years, titled “The Bad Batch.” The episode follows fan-favorite Clone Trooper Rex as he goes on a mission alongside a team of clones with genetic mutations that essentially give them superpowers. Together they work to uncover a secret behind sinister Separatist military techniques.

If that sounds familiar it's because these episodes already released years ago -- from a certain point of view. In 2014, Disney canceled The Clone Wars after acquiring Lucasfilm, which left a large number of stories unfinished. One such arc featured a storyline almost identical to this, made up of four episodes: "The Bad Batch," "A Distant Echo," "On the Wings of Keeradaks" and "Unfinished Business."

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Though work on the series was entirely halted by the studio’s new owners, unfinished story reels were released online for these episodes, composed of fully voiced audio and unfinished animation. These clips are not easy on the eyes, but they tell the full tale of four episodes worth of the show. For the last six years, this has been the only way that the story was distributed to the public, buried on special features discs and YouTube clips. Though it may have satisfied hardcore fans of Dave Filoni’s show, most casual viewers don’t even know these clips exist, unaware of how they conclude many stories for important characters.

But now, it appears the first four episodes of Clone Wars’ revival will repurpose this content, finally wrapping up the long-lasting project. “The Bad Batch,” on Disney+ now, is a nearly shot-for-shot expansion of the first story reel. Though it does tweak a few moments, the episode is almost exactly the same, down to the way it frames most of the shots.

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The next three episode titles of The Clone Wars Season 7 also take the exact names of those story reels, so it looks like this trend is set to continue for a few more weeks. Filoni recently confirmed to io9 that when he looked at how to wrap up his series in a revival of only 12 episodes, he was forced to settle on three major arcs.

Some die-hard fans may be disappointed that at least a third of the series’ long-awaited return isn’t wholly “new,” but it functions as a perfect avenue to reorient viewers to the world of the show. By making the first arc a full, proper release of those four story reels, it's not only introducing the stories to a larger audience but finally concluding a journey that began long ago. As the audience settles back into the world with a story they may or may not have seen before, they get everyone back on the same page before the story dives deep into the last two arcs.

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As for what is set to happen in those next eight episodes, details have been largely kept tight-lipped. In that io9 interview, Filoni confirmed that the story will follow series protagonist Ahsoka in her journeys after leaving the Jedi Order and then the Siege of Mandalore, which many suspected after seeing the trailer. But on top of this, there are a handful of other unfinished episodes that may see content repurposed in the style of “The Bad Batch.”

For starters, the four “Bad Batch” story reels dropped alongside another arc of four unfinished animatics, titled “Crystal Crisis on Utapau.” These episodes followed Anakin and Obi-Wan as they journeyed to Utapau to prevent a Kyber Crystal from falling into sinister hands, planting early seeds for the Emperor’s work on the Death Star.

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On top of this, unfinished pieces of episodes were most notably turned into Son of Dathomir, a Dark Horse comic book that followed Darth Maul after he was last seen and Dark Disciple, a novel about morally gray Jedi Quinlan Vos and antihero Asajj Ventress. Other bits and pieces of Filoni’s unfinished work were also revealed in many convention panels, and specific bits of info even made it into Star Wars: Ahsoka, a young adult novel by E. K. Johnston that was largely an original story. The most likely of these to make it into Season 7 is the Darth Maul arc, given the trailers have featured the Sith Lord prominently.

As of now, the only two more episode titles we know are episodes five and six, “Gone With a Trace” and “Deal No Deal.” Neither of these resembles the previously published work on unfinished episodes, so fans are just three weeks away from Dave Filoni’s final journey with these characters truly beginning.

Airing now on Disney+, Star Wars: The Clone Wars stars Matt Lanter as Anakin Skywalker, Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka Tano, Dee Bradley Baker as Captain Rex and the clone troopers, James Arnold Taylor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan and Sam Witwer as Maul.

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