The Legend of the Spear

It’s hard to rate what exactly qualifies as “essential” Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same.. Clearly the movies are essential, even the terrible ones from the Sequel Trilogy. Bad movies aren’t necessarily inessential. They tell their own story, they tell it badly, and everyone afterwards goes, “what the hell were they thinking with that?” But you can have moderate and even good stories that somehow, despite that, feel like they just weren’t necessary viewing. The Clone Wars has some bad episodes (and a mediocre movie), but its epic highs far outweigh its mediocre lows, and it ends up telling a great story about the fall of the Republic from the perspective of Ahsoka. And yet, even with her character involved, Ahsoka is an absolutely inessential story right now, basically existing to tie up one loose end of one show that many viewers might not have watched at all. It’s a near total waste of time.

As Star Wars continues to explore the same eras over and over again, delving deeper and deeper into the tiny fractions of time already not covered by some other production in the franchise, we’re going to get more and more stories that feel inessential to the overall continuity. It’s fine if a story doesn’t directly influence events and sits self-contained. Skeleton Crew doesn’t directly tie to anything (yet, although who knows what Disney will do in the coming seasons, if there are any) but I wouldn’t call it inessential because it’s a very well made adventure that works on its own. If Star Wars were interested in making those kinds of tales, I’d be fine with it. That’s basically the way Star Trek has operated for years, each show focused on one ship, on crew, and their continuing adventures. But then you get stories like Tales of the Empire that are just as inessential as you can get, and it makes me wonder just what everyone in charge of this franchise are doing?

Like the previous Tales of the Jedi, Tales of the Empire is a set of six animated short episodes (15 minutes a piece each, or less) fleshing out a couple of different stories focused on largely background characters to the greater franchise. The first set of three episodes are about Morgan Elsbeth, a tribal warrior who fought against the Separatists during the Clone War. Her people were wiped out, and Morgan went off to a different tribe to recover. But she had revenge in her heart and wanted to strike a blow. She ended up dragging some other kids from the new tribe to aid her in gathering weapons, and this caught the attention of the droid army. The rest of the girls were injured or killed, and Morgan fled, realizing she made a mistake.

If you’ve watched the second season of The Mandalorian, then you already know who Morgan is. In that series she’s the Magistrate of Calodan, ruling over the planet and her people while they work to build special Tie ships for the Empire, and then the remnants of the Empire wanting to continue their rule after the Rebellion wins and becomes the New Republic. Essentially this is her backstory, a prequel focuses on letting us know who she was and why she was in charge when Mando and Ahsoka came a-calling in that season.

In other words, this whole three-episode arc is all about fleshing out a tiny story for context in an episode we already saw. Honestly, Morgan wasn’t all that interesting in her live appearance in The Mandalorian. It’s hard to know why the creators, showrunner Dave Filoni most of all, felt the need to give her a detailed backstory. She’s a character that shows up for all of five minutes and is then promptly forgotten about again, simply existing so that Mando can earn a pure beskar spear. Looked at from that perspective, this is really a three episode backstory to explain his spear, and even from that perspective it’s stupid.

I do understand that every character in Star Wars has an intricate backstory. Fans have known that practically since the first movie, Star Wars, debuted. Every character, every action figure, every comic told some novel length story about each and every person you saw, leading many to think the whole of the universe was plotted out. “See that bounty hunter who appears in the background of this one see? That’s Ivo Caalaran, and he fought bravely in the first battle of the Clone War before becoming disillusioned with the politics of both the Republic and the Separatist movement. He went to work for himself and joined with the Huts, and…” That’s what these first three episodes read like. We get a detailed story for a character we don’t care about, simply because Filoni and his crew are in love with every one of their characters and can’t let them go.

They should have. Morgan Elspeth isn’t that interesting and her story doesn’t provide us any useful information that we didn’t already figure out on our own. For the rest of it, anything we didn’t know isn’t useful to our understanding of the series, and so we don’t really care. This is just a three-episode arc of utter filler.

The second set of episodes are better, but only by degrees. They focus on former Jedi Barriss Offee, who we last saw in season five of The Clone Wars after she attempted to frame Ahsoka for a murder she actually committed. Barriss is arrested and sent to Jedi prison, but when the Republic falls she’s given a second chance… under the rule of the new Galactic Empire. She’s offered the choice to either die or become one of the new Inquisitors, and is trained by the Grand Inquisitor himself. But when she’s forced to choose between helping people or turning truly evil, Barriss finds she can’t take the path of hate any longer.

On the one hand I do like Barriss’s story a little better. She’s at least a character we saw for more than 10 minutes in a single episode. She has history, between her appearances in Episode II: Attack of the Clones and The Clone Wars, so that means we have more of a connection with her. Learning what happened to her after the Republic fell, and watching her journey through the ranks of the Inquisitors and then back out again, actually gives us some answers we might have had… if we ever thought about Barriss again. Admittedly I hadn’t, but maybe some did and this gives her a chance to shine.

With that said, her story also feels truncated and weird. Barriss turns against the Jedi and becomes a terrorist. It’s hard to align that version of the character that we saw in The Clone Wars with the person she evolves into, essentially becoming a not-Jedi like Ahsoka, over the span of these episodes. Her turn is sudden, and strange, and it doesn’t quite sit right. I don’t think it’s a failing of the character, as I can kind of see what the creators were going for and the arc they were creating. I think it’s more a matter of three short episodes actually doesn’t do Barriss enough justice.

It’s actually the opposite problem I had with Morgan’s story. There the character we were focused on was so uninteresting and unmemorable that we could have spent less time with her and it would have been just fine. But Barriss is a character we know, who has a more involved and interesting arc. She should have been given more time to breathe, maybe even a short, three-season spin-off series, so that her story could be explored more fully. One season to show her getting brought into the Inquisitor order, one to focus on her missions and her realization that what she’s doing is wrong, and then a final season with her an older, wiser not-Jedi, fending off the forces of the Empire as she learns to find her own inner peace. That’s a satisfying arc, but these three episodes gloss over that due to time constraints.

And it’s weird, giving three episodes to Morgan, a character we don’t care about, and three to Barriss, who we kind of do. It equates them at the same level, saying that each of these characters are just as important as the other. They aren’t, and the argument doesn’t really work. Morgan is given too much time, which only shows that her story is threadbare and uninteresting, while Barriss isn’t given enough, rendering her story shallow and basic. There’s something here that could have worked, but Tales of the Jedi fails to deliver on it.

I want to like this short-form, anthology format. I actually think parts of both this season, and the preceding Tales of the Jedi, were interesting. But on the whole this season fails. If we do get further Tales, well, tales, then the creators really need to figure out a way to make these stories feel essential because, right now, they are truly far from it.