Films and Fiction

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Lucasfilm have released the latest Star Wars show, Tales of the Underworld, another entry in their ‘Tales Of’ series, after ‘Jedi’ and ‘Empire’. Like them, it takes a look at a couple of previously established characters, and fills in some of their backstory.

The first of these characters is Asajj Ventress. She originated in the Clone Wars microseries, as Count Dooku’s assassin, and later apprentice, before being cast out and almost killed when Sidious became suspicious of her. Seemingly, she died in the book Dark Disciple, after a failed attempt to kill Dooku, but last year in the third season of The Bad Batch, she joined the ranks of Star Wars characters who’ve “somehow” returned from the dead.

So how did she survive? Nightsister magic. It seems that Dave Filoni is a big fan of the Nightsisters, as they form a big part of the Ahsoka show, and will likely have an even bigger role in season two. I’m fine with them up to a point, but they do need to be used carefully and in moderation. This strange kind of Force-magic could easily become diluted with overuse, or else end up being nothing more than a plot device, because it can literally do anything.

The story in these three episodes follows Ventress as she meets Lyco Strata, a young Padawan survivor of Order 66, and agrees to help him find the Path, the secret organisation that helps Jedi escape from the Empire.

It’s all pretty standard stuff that we’ve seen before in things like Rebels, and really, it doesn’t add much to her backstory. I’m not entirely sure if this comes before or after her appearance in TBB, where she refuses to train Omega. I get a sense it might be earlier, but it doesn’t make much sense either way. If it’s after, then what happened to Lyco, and if it’s before, then why would she have helped Omega at all?

It hardly seems worth the trouble, and the potential lore-breaking effects, to bring her back when so little is done with her. All it does is add another two Force users to the list who are around at the time of the Empire (as well as another mook Inquisitor, as if we don’t have enough of them). I mean, it’s not like her story is the most important, or desperately needed expanding upon, and while it could have been interesting to see more of what she was up to during this time, there’s really not much going on here.

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The second three-episode story follows Cad Bane, the legendary bounty hunter from The Clone Wars, showing him as a young kid, living on the streets with his friend Nimo, until a meeting with a gunslinging stranger throws him into a life of crime, turning friends into enemies.

It seems to be the standard for all origin stories that there has to be some older mentor who the main character steals their entire act from, rather than building it up over years of experiences. There also seems to be a thing for showing where they got their cool hats, too.

The problem with this is that it’s become so derivative at this point, and feels like a quick fix to try and establish a character’s backstory through a “one-shot” story. Bane, and those similar to him, are cool because they are so mysterious, like The Man With No Name from the Dollars movie trilogy. There’s little chance that any attempt to tell their backstory will live up to fans’ own ideas and speculations, especially in such a short show like this, as opposed to something like a novel, where there’s at least more room to explore things in depth.

Not to mention that this whole things ends with one of those terribly corny situations where a single line of quick dialogue would have changed everything, if a character had revealed the truth, but it seems to be too much trouble to spit it out, so we have to do things the hard way.

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Neither of these stories do anything for their respective characters, and as with any new addition to the lore, they risk spoiling them by showing too much. The Ventress episodes are the better of the two halves, but not by much. They miss out on what could be a very interesting aspect of her life, when she was a Jedi Padawan, as shown in TCW, something that seems to be completely forgotten about her. Instead what we get is some very by-the-numbers gap-filling that doesn’t show anything revelatory or intriguing about her

Bane is even more of a sad waste of potential. It’s all such simple, surface level development, that doesn’t do him justice. A typical origin story we’ve all seen before that makes him so much less interesting, as he’s now just a copy/paste of an identical character, rather than his own unique figure. Again, the most interesting aspect of his life is left out, as we see nothing of his relationship to Boba Fett, hinted at in that character’s show. Granted, that could be explored in some ‘Tales Of The Bounty Hunters’ series yet to come, but it doesn’t change the fact this is a very shallow look at such a compelling villain.

I know these shows are just small asides that fill in a few gaps, but I really think they could do so much better than this, by telling better stories and telling them well. There seems to be an unwillingness to take risks, to show any true development in these characters, or go deep into their origins. Which is a shame, because they look really good, and the animation is top notch. If only the narrative would live up to it.

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