Josh reviews Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld

I’m thrilled that this series of gorgeously made Star Wars animated short stories has returned for a third installment with six new episodes!  Previously we’d gotten Tales of the Jedi, exploring Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku, and then Tales of the Empire, exploring Morgan Elsbeth (who appeared in The Mandalorian and the Ahsoka show) and Barriss Offee (a tragic supporting character from the animated Clone Wars series).  And now we have Tales of the Underworld.  Once again, we get six short episodes (each about 15 minutes in length), focusing on two characters from the Star Wars universe, one who is rising towards the light and one who is falling towards the darkness.

In this case, the rising character is Asajj Ventress, a villain who was introduced in the animated Clone Wars series, while the falling character is the bounty hunter Cad Bane, who was also introduced on the animated Clone Wars series before entering live-action in The Book of Boba Fett.

As readers of this site know, I deeply love the animated corner of the Star Wars universe, overseen by Dave Filoni.  It’s a pleasure to get to dip our toes back into this world and these characters with these “Tales of the…” shorts.

The three episodes that focus on Asajj Ventress are terrific.  Ventress was a fun, loathsome villain on The Clone Wars who began to show some unexpected layers by the end, souring on Dooku’s evil ways and even sort of befriending Ahsoka Tano in her final on-screen appearance.  The writers had planned on wrapping up Ventress’ storyline on the series with an incredible eight-part epic.  The scripts were written, but sadly were never made when Lucasfilm as sold to Disney and the Clone Wars show was cancelled several years before its planned finish.  The scripts for those episodes were eventually adapted into the novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden.  It was a very cool storyline in which Ventress fell in love with the Jedi Quinlan Vos and is fully redeemed before dying a heroic death.  (By the way, the character of Quinlan Vos also has an interesting history; he’s made brief appearances in live action — in Episode I: The Phantom Menace — and also in the animated Clone Wars show, though the place he was really explored was in Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Republic comic book series.)  It was nice that this novel allowed fans to discover the planned conclusion to Ventress’ story, though it remains a bummer to me that these episodes were never actually made.  Things then took an intriguing turn when Ventress popped up in the recent animated series The Bad Batch, set after the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire.  It was intriguing to see the show reject the ending of Dark Disciple (which fans had been previously told was canonical) and for us to get to see an older, wiser, nobler version of Ventress.  That was a cool tease, and I was excited to see what would be next for this character.

These shorts fill in the gaps between what we’d seen on The Clone Wars and what we saw in The Bad Batch.  The show opens in the final days of the Old Republic; I was giddily happy that we begin with a brief adaptation of the end of Dark Disciple, with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Quinlan Vos returning Ventress’ dead body back to Dathomir, the homeworld of the Nightsisters to whom she had once belonged.  What a cool development!!  So Dark Disciple IS confirmed as canonical after all!!  That was so fun and clever!!  That made me so happy.

We then see confirmation of what fans had guessed after Ventress’ appearance on The Bad Batch, that Nightsister magic was somehow responsible for her resurrection.  It’s a cheat, but I’m happy to roll with it in order to get more with this great character.  We then get a fun tale of Ventress hiding out and winding up, against her better judgment, protecting a former Jedi padawan who’d survived Order 66 and was now on the run from Imperial Stormtroopers and an Inquisitor.  There’s nothing too groundbreaking in this arc; it follows familiar beats of the grizzled mentor reluctantly protecting and befriending a young innocent.  But I love this version of Ventress — she’s not yet an out-and-out hero, but she’s clawed her way out from the darkness and is trying to walk a better path.  I loved getting to meet a new Inquisitor — the three-way fight between the Inquisitor, Ventress, and the boy Lyco was spectacular.  The animation on this series is incredible, and that night-time lightsaber battle is a highlight.  I also loved the attack on a shipyard building Star Destroyers in episode two.  (It’s cool to see the transition between the Republic ships and the new Imperial Star Destroyers.)

There are lots of fun Star Wars continuity connections in these first three episodes.  I liked seeing the bounty hunter Latts Razzi again (she’d popped up a few times on the animated Clone Wars show, alongside the young Boba Fett).  I liked hearing about the Hidden Path (the “underground railroad” for surviving Jedi, mentioned on the Obi-Wan Kenobi show).  Star Wars fans had previously linked Quinlan Vos to the Hidden Path, so it’s fun to see that connection confirmed on-screen.  (I do wish the show had brought back Vos after he appeared at the very start.  I’d have liked to have actually seen that he’d survived and caught up to how he was involved with the Path.  But that’s left for future stories to explore.)

(My only complaint about this Ventress storyline is that the show jumps over what happens after she’s resurrected.  Did she try to find Quinlan Vos?  Was something in the Nightsister magic actually preventing her from reuniting with him?  I’d have liked for it to have been explained a little more clearly why Ventress couldn’t be back with him after her resurrection, beyond the voice of Mother Talzin just telling her that she couldn’t.  Watching the opening, I’d guessed that by the time Ventress returned to life, she’d discover that Order 66 had happened and Vos was dead — or, at least, she believed him to be dead.  Maybe that happened; we don’t know, because the show skips right over all of that.  Oh well…)

The second half of the show explores the backstory of Cad Bane.  We see him as a child and how he’s eventually sucked into a life of crime that leads to his growing up to be the hardened, merciless bounty hunter we’ve met before.  Cad Bane is a fun character, and I’m happy to see him back in the mix after The Book of Boba Fett bungled his demise.  But unfortunately I was a little less interested in this storyline than any of the other stories on these “Tales of the…” series.  This arc was very predictable, and I wasn’t interested enough in any of the characters.  I never felt we needed to learn Bane’s backstory, and now that we’ve seen it, I didn’t feel it added much to his character.  (I also didn’t care for the way that, a la the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it turns out that Bane took most of the aspects of his persona from a mentor criminal, rather than being original to his character.)

So, yeah, the second arc didn’t quite do it for me.  Nevertheless, I had a great time watching these six shorts.  I hope we get lots more!!  (Better yet, I hope we get a new animated Star Wars series that can stand alongside The Clone Wars and Rebels.  Sadly, the two other series we’ve gotten since then, Resistance and The Bad Batch, both disappointed me.  Here’s hoping the in-the-works Darth Maul series is better.  I also hope that series involves both Ventress and Bane; it definitely feels like it could, if it’s going to explore the era of Maul as a crime-lord that was teased in Solo!)

For now, I loved the chance to visit new corners of Dave Filoni’s animated Star Wars universe.  I can’t wait for more!!