By the third ‘Tales of..’ series you’d think Lucasfilm Animation would have figured out how to make this format not just work but sing. Yet, they haven’t. Tales of the Underworld is an odd experience and very much a tale of two halves. Composed of six animated shorts, three following Asajj Ventress and three exploring the origin of Cad Bane, the season is the weakest Tales show yet. But while I began viewing very excited for the Ventress story and claiming I didn’t care to learn Cad Bane’s backstory, the end result was flipped: I thought Asajj’s tales were a disappointment while Bane’s were a wonderful surprise.
The Ventress storyline ultimately felt like an odd choice for a show with this format. Instead of three interconnected shorts, her episodes are simply one long story, a three-act structure awkwardly split into its component parts. It should have been a single animated special rather than forced into this weird mould. It’s also not a standalone story, feeling unfinished, and very generic. At this point Lucasfilm could tell this type of story in their sleep, and it feels like they might have done.
Asajj’s return was teased in The Bad Batch and Tales of the Underworld just feels like another tease rather than the main event. I’m okay with her being brought back from the dead if there’s a reason, a cool story left to tell, but so far there hasn’t been. She is offered resurrection if she promises to give up her love for Quinlan, which surely makes a reunion with him the grand payoff to this story but I was shocked that didn’t happen in the third short. I want to explore the consequences of this decision but the series doesn’t show them. These three shorts combine to feel like a pilot for another show, one I’m now not all that interested in watching.
By contrast Cad Bane’s story does fit this format quite well. It’s still one extended story but there are sufficient differences and time jumps between each short to make them feel like distinct episodes. Cad Bane is one of my favourite bounty hunters and I’ve never cried out for an origin story: him being a mysterious badass is kind of the point. What makes it work is that it’s a solid story in and of itself, not falling back on tropey prequel issues of overexplaining his entire past. We may learn where he gets his penchant for hats but it never feels like there was a checklist of information the episodes were ticking off. And the reveals of his past recontextualises his story in interesting ways while not turning him into some tragic sympathetic victim; if anything it made him seem more villainous.
As with Tales of the Empire before it, it’s a stretch to name this series Tales of the Underworld. It fits for Bane’s narrative, very much a crime story, but much less for Ventress, who has seemingly abandoned her life of criminality before the series begins. Thematically, pairing the two stories together is interesting. It doesn’t work as well as Dooku and Ahsoka in Tales of the Jedi but I can just about see the contrast. While Cad Bane begins and seals his fate as a criminal, something he’ll never be able to escape, Ventress has a redemption arc, leaving behind the life of darkness for good. I like the idea but the execution less so.
To help further examine the series, lets rank the episodes from worst to best:
6) Episode 3: One Warrior to Another
There’s plenty of potential here but an awful lot of disappointment, too. We’ve spent so much time with Republic factions after the rise of the empire but so little with post war separatists. That’s a fascinating perspective and Ventress encountering someone from the CIS military is a neat idea but barely touched on, the episode opting for more cliché storytelling instead. There’s a dispute over water and Asajj has to take the Jedi high road and get the two factions to speak to each other and come to an understanding over sharing the supply. An ex-separatist? Great. A Mad Max desert tribe? Also great. But using them to tell such a simple, tropey story feels like such a waste for a Ventress short.
And then we get the most generic ending possible, with the young Jedi Lyco deciding to stay with Ventress instead of joining The Path, making this just another post-Order 66 story following the same old beats, teasing future stories with these two I’m no longer interested in watching. It just punts the real meat of the story further down the road, the legacy of The Clone Wars never ever concluding. Surely a Ventress and Quinlan Vos reunion has to come so why not here? The animated shows have yet to justify Asajj’s resurrection and I’m getting increasingly frustrated that they won’t fully dive in and explore the story they keep teasing.
5) Episode 1: A Way Forward
The three-episode Ventress arc feels like a condensed half measure of a story without a clear beginning or end, and that’s most apparent in the first short. It begins with the ending of Dark Disciple, which is great if, like me, you’ve read and are a fan of the novel, based on unproduced episodes of The Clone Wars, but by answering (in not the most satisfying way) how Ventress returned from the dead it’s going to confuse a whole lot more people who never realised she was dead in the first place. It sets up this relationship with Quinlan Vos which we’ve never seen onscreen before and it doesn’t pay off by the end either.
I do like seeing the brief glimpse of Asajj trying to hide during the reign of the empire, and Nika Futterman’s great vocal work making her sound older, but I don’t buy that Ventress is quite bad enough to make her following arc across these three shorts work. Of course she’s going to help the young Jedi, it feels less of a redemption and more a reinforcement. The Jedi himself is barely a character in his own right, purely there as a stock character to support Asajj’s development. I only know the kid’s name is Lyco because of the credits. It’s a classic ‘wolf and cub’ story that is not poorly executed but is very simple and overly familiar. The end lightsaber fight with the Inquisitor is cool at least.
4) Episode 2: Friends
The middle instalment of the Ventress story is my favourite for the action set piece alone. It’s the best of the season. Fighting atop one of those big shield generator balls from a Star Destroyer as it rolls around is good fun and makes for a dynamic sequence. All the production value elements are as strong as they have ever been, with the animation and music by the endlessly talented Kiner family being top tier, so when the show delivers big action it works. The episode is also the only one of the first three to have underworld elements, seeing the welcome return of Latts and Highsinger. It does feel like a crime story, a heist, and yet I could also have seen this as a Bad Batch episode. Asajj and Lyco learning to trust each other is handled decently but, again, is very generic.
3) Episode 5: A Good Turn
Part of why I wasn’t excited for these Cad Bane stories is that I’m tired of the western tropes in Star Wars. The Sergio Leone gunfights and close ups. So Tales of the Underworld is a huge success on that front because it made those overused elements feel exciting again. They work when juxtaposed against a modern metropolis backdrop and I’m glad this arc isn’t set against a western town or desert outpost. Although Bane does seem to have a more southern drawl to his voice in this era.
What makes this episode work as well as it does is the stakes and scale. It’s small and personal: the bombing of one store instead of a huge heist and the killing of two father figures damaging their adoptive sons, turning friend against friend. By this second episode I’m truly invested in these characters and it goes to show how dense these shorts can be, that this format can succeed.
2) Episode 4: The Good Life
I’ve called the Ventress episodes generic and by that I mean that they are generic for Star Wars, with beats we’ve seen a million times in these series before. The Cad Bane episodes could also be called generic yet they feel fresh for the franchise. They are inspired by classic crime stories, gangster films, featuring characters on both sides of the law. They are unapologetically tropey but gain new life when translated to a galaxy far, far away. Despite there being many underworld stories in Star Wars these felt unique and I was shocked when watching this first short of the arc how much I enjoyed it.
This is a street level crime story, with young kids who have to resort to petty crime to get by being preyed upon by career criminals who can use them. It’s the first part in an origin story, yes, but it works as an original story, too. The fact that one of the kids is Cad Bane is irrelevant to this short, I’d enjoy it just as much if it wasn’t. It’s a dark tale, brutal when it needs to be, and I love the setting. It’s a very human story yet I love how most of the characters we see are aliens, in a very alien city. It very quickly makes you care for these two kids, which is a necessity for the following two episodes.
1) Episode 6: One Good Deed
A really great episode both in its own right and as a conclusion to this three-instalment arc. There’s such a strong sense of foreboding for most of it, with Bane being discussed but not seen for much of the episode as he makes his way back home for revenge. It’s amazing the level of investment I have in these characters after such a short amount of time. I’ve watched plenty of storytelling with Cad Bane but I’ve never hated him (in a good way) as much as I have in this episode, his villainy increased. He guns down Niro, an irredeemable act, and neglects his son, leaving him there with his adoptive father’s body. It’s deliciously dark and I like the relative subtilty of not spelling out that Isaac is Bane’s son. It puts his future relationship with Boba into a new perspective.
It’s a strong end to a consistently good second half of Tales of the Underworld, and despite my concerns it feels like a purposeful story worth telling, unlike the preceding lacklustre Ventress episodes.
