Ah, the schizophrenic nature of The Clone Wars. Last week, we learned that war was awesome and pacifists are idiots, and this week, it's all about the destructive paranoid nature of war. Conflicted much?
Perhaps it's because my own personal politics resonated more with "Trespass"' story of a soldier who's so used to war that he sees everything as an enemy and battle to be fought, but this week's episode seemed much more successful than many recent episodes. For one thing, the smaller scale - in terms of the dramatic core of the story, at least - gave us a story about characters, as opposed to finding excuses for fight scenes, and the writing managed to use sleight of hand well to push Obi-Wan and Anakin off to the side without it being obvious, allowing us to have an episode that included a genuine character arc for a change.
It wasn't perfect, of course; for all of its success, we've seen this story many, many times before, and this episode in particular felt like an old Star Trek episode more than usual, even down to the excuse of having the old soldier be from an alien race outside of the regular conflict. The story also moved in broad strokes that occasionally brought you out of the story (Especially when things moved to fullscale war essentially because one character said "So it's war, then!"), but that kind of thing has almost become expected on this show.
Overall, it was one of the better episodes of the series so far. The problem is that, at this point, that's beginning to look more like that's damning with faint praise. With little over a month of new episodes left, I'm sadly still waiting for this series to live up to its potential.