For a while now, Star Wars has been exploring the eternal conflict between the light side and the dark side, the Jedi and Sith, as well as ordinary civilians and raiders. Even with all of the animated and live-action projects, there’s rarely a place to tell different short stories that would fill some gaps. That is where Star Wars: Tales of… series becomes an important part of this universe. While Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire focused on characters with some more and some less interesting stories, Tales of the Underworld focuses on some of the more morally ambiguous outcasts.
This six-episode “season 3” is split between two legacy characters who have consistently walked the line between being a true villain and being a hero for money. They are Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman) and Cad Bane (Corey Burton). Both were created from ideology and betrayal. They were shaped by their environments, and written interestingly enough for fans to love them.
Asajj Ventress: From Count Dooku’s assassin to hero in Tales of the Underworld
Asajj Ventress’s return is perhaps the biggest surprise of the last few years in the Star Wars universe. The last time we’ve learned what happened to her, was in the novel Dark Disciple, where Ventress sacrificed herself to save her loved one, Quinlan Vos. The novel was based on unreleased scripts from The Clone Wars. Her return in Bad Batch gave viewers more questions regarding her fate. But, the explanation of her return is handled with mystical and emotional authenticity that honors her past, not making it a forced decision to bring her back, yet it preserves the potential for her future.
Asajj’s story opens in the mystical caves of Dathomir, where the energy of the Nightsisters brings her back to life. Through a haunting ritual, Ventress is resurrected as a broken soul, searching for purpose. Her return to life is not happy. It’s painful. She awakens to a galaxy that has changed, a galaxy that has forgotten her. Her past as a Sith assassin, a Nightsister, a bounty hunter, and even a would-be Jedi is a history. And yet, Ventress does not return to the shadows to pick up a lightsaber and resume her old ways. Instead, she decides to have a calm and quiet life.
One of the most important arcs in Ventress’s three-episode run is her decision to avoid reuniting with Quinlan Vos. Their romance in Dark Disciple remains one of the most intriguing relationships in Star Wars, and the fact that she chooses not to look for him, even after knowing he’s safe, shows a lot about her transformation. Ventress realizes that her presence in Vos’s life might only serve as a reminder of trauma and loss.
Her partnership with Lyco (Lane Factor), a Jedi Padawan who tries to survive, serves as a perfect opposite to her former self. Lyco is young, cocky, and impulsive. Their dynamic is not immediately good. But this is a good show to explore the partnership that naturally develops between them. In guiding Lyco, she finds a resemblance of peace, perhaps even redemption, that she sought. She may not call herself a Jedi, nor does she claim to be anything at all, but her actions now speak louder than her previous jobs ever did.
Cad Bane: backstory of the Gunslinger’s for hire
Cad Bane was considered to be the second greatest Bounty Hunter after Boba Fett. He is a survivor who will do everything to live and make money. Unlike Ventress, Bane has never shown interest in redemption. He operated by a simple code. The job pays, or it doesn’t. The three episodes focused on him are less about action and more about the long-overdue confrontation with the consequences of his choices from the past.
Bane’s story begins with a job he did as a kid that got him entangled with thieves and bounty hunters in order to get a better life. He abandoned his best friend, Niro (Artt Butler), who later becomes the Marshal on the planet they’re from. Their reunion is tense, filled with threats and a humble, merely visible regret. Niro, now The Marshal, once a fellow outlaw, has taken a different path. He upholds law and order, providing safety for people. In confronting his best friend, Bane is forced to face a possible alternate version of himself, a version that chose community over money.
This ideological conflict is wonderfully shown in quiet scenes that give us the emotional themes of old Westerns. When they meet after many years, there’s no redemption offered, only understanding. The Marshal doesn’t seek to arrest Bane, nor does he try to change him. He simply reminds him that other paths were always available. Bane, just like we know him, thinks that he deserves everything, and whoever opposes him and his friends should be punished.
The final moments of his arc are appropriately interesting, but sometimes unnecessary. After killing his best friend and learning that he has a son, he leaves the town. Alive, but visibly changed and scarred. He was a cold-hearted bounty hunter when we first met him, and now we know how he became this person.
Possible future spin-offs
With Tales of the Underworld, Lucasfilm has once again proved the narrative power of short anthology stories. These six-episode stories allow for deeper dives into underexplored corners of the galaxy without the burden of tying them into other bigger projects. The Tales of… series is just there to tell interesting stories in various corners of the universe.
One obvious candidate to show in the future in a potential sequel is Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), whose arc in the sequel trilogy teased a lot about his unexplained past. His previous jobs, escaping Kijimi, joining the New Republic/Resistance, and showing what happened to him after the last time we saw him. His story could be one of slow, painful self-discovery, especially if it were mixed with showing how he fights the First Order.
On the other hand, we could get a series exploring the stories of characters like Master Sifo-Dyas or General Grievous (before he became a cyborg). The previous projects left plenty of plot holes, and characters whose stories could have been told in a bigger manner. In the future, there’s also potential for more politically focused tales. After Andor, a Tales of… series focused around Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits/Benjamin Bratt) or Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), before we learned more about them, could give us even more insight on who they were, how they joined the politics, and what they did to be so popular (in Palpatine’s case, we know there was a lot).
Final thoughts on Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld
Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld is about finding your true self, evolution, acceptance, and the enduring human need for connection in a galaxy that often punishes it. By focusing on Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane, the show showed a different take, this time focusing on characters who balance between good and evil storytelling. Each episode shows us elements of regret, resilience, fear, confusion, and redemption. It reminds viewers that the most interesting journeys in Star Wars are often the quietest ones.
Even though I liked the episodes this time, I see a negative pattern. In Tales of the Empire, all we needed were the episodes with Barriss Offee (Meredith Salenger), and this time, all we needed were the episodes focused on Ventress. Instead of focusing on necessary and interesting stories, we get those like Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) or Cad Bane.
Even though there are parts of the show that I dislike, the animation continues to keep the realistic visual boundaries as presented in season 7 of Clone Wars or in Bad Batch. In an era where Star Wars content is usually common but often overwhelming, Tales of the Underworld stands apart by bringing personal, precise, and profoundly human relations and characteristics.
Check out: Barriss Offee and Morgan Elsbeth Feature in Star Wars: Tales of the Empire
