Animated Shorts Tales of the Empire (Spoilers allowed)

You and your run cycles

 

Loved the Barriss arc, and enjoyed Morgan's well enough. Much the same feelings as with Dooku and Ahsoka's arcs from TotJ.

Spoiler: Mild spoilers for Morgan arc

Feel like Thrawn's scene might cause some continuity issues with the novels, but quite happy to steer clear of that whole discussion when it happens. Rukh looked great.

Spoiler: Major spoilers for Barriss arc

Beautiful but sad story for Barriss. Though I do wish we got at least an acknowledgement of Luminara's existence. No need to hear from Fourth Sister again, her story is both complete and open-ended.

 

You seen them already?

 

Yep. Timezones.

 

Damn you lucky

 

Why do timezones matter? I thought Disney+ stuff all drops at the same time.

 

How much Vader do we get to see?

 

I guess only the first episode with Darth Vader

 

May 4th stuff typically drops at midnight local time. Happened with TCW Season 7 finale too.

Spoiler: Mild spoilers

You pretty much saw it all in the trailer already.

 

I’ll spoiler block my questions

Spoiler

Does Barris redeem fourth sister? Because that would mean she’s an inquisitor for ten years as obi wan takes place 10 years after rots. Also do we see second sister or ninth sister from the Jedi games? Thanks a lot

 

Spoiler

She catalyses Fourth Sister's abandonment of the Inquisitorious, yes. By that point, Barriss has been living as a healer on an icy world for at least a decade.

It's very much a Barriss and Fourth Sister story. No other inquisitors besides the line-up from the trailer.

 

I watched the first three episodes and I’ll get to the last three later today, but I enjoyed what I saw.

Morgan’s story probably could have carried an entire season of material, but I liked these little snapshots. The stuff with her mother was especially affecting.

For those concerned about canon:

Spoiler

They don’t specify which massacre is happening on Dathomir. So those obsessed with Grevious having hands or not, it’s fine.

Pellaeon is shown working as an agent of Thrawn pre-Treason, though that’s not an outright contradiction since Thrawn was fully aware of him and his qualities in that book before Palpatine formally reassigned him to the Seventh Fleet.

 

Spoiler

Poor Star Wars Explained. There will be no release from the Barriss questions.

Spoiler

Out of curiosity, do the Mountain Clan get wiped out too or are they still potential players in future material?

Yeah that isn't the biggest deal. On the other hand...that wasn't the biggest deal - like, would it really have been that hard to swap out Palleon with Eli Vanto to both make the continuity smoother and please the book fans?

 

Mountain clans:

Spoiler

They live, (including their matriarch) so potentially they could show to counter the Great Mothers.

Pellaeon:

I suppose they could have used Eli, but given the tone of the episode and the eerie depiction of Thrawn’s faction I’m not sure the naive country boy would have felt appropriate. Pelly’s still affable, but he’s very much the Mouth of Sauron here....

Spoiler

Thrawn has him going out through the Empire recruiting talented people for a Post-Palpatine era.

 

I see most people are spoiler tagging, so I'll hide my thoughts:

Spoiler: Thoughts on Story Choices

Meh.
The Morgan episodes were just backstory to the Mandalorian/Ahoska series that we really didn't need to know and don't add anything to the overall story. Much of what happened was implied already. She survived the attack on Dathomir, joined the Empire, had a relationship/partnership with Thrawn, became Magistrate. We knew all this already. These episodes only fleshed out the details.
She was brutal to the people of Corvis for no real reason. Her motive for setting fire to the planet didn't make a lot of sense to me.
The only storytelling choice that impressed me was following Morgan through the Clone Wars, Empire, and New Republic eras.
Great looking animation. Enjoyable way to spend an hour one morning while sipping coffee, but I doubt I'll ever revisit it.

I was disappointed by the Barriss arc. The first episode featuring her was great. I love seeing more of how the Inquisitors operate. I was excited to see her as an Inquisitor. In my opinion, it's a waste of her character that she ends up growing old as a healer on some backwater planet and then dies trying to redeem another Inquisitor (her fate could be ambiguous to some, but she took a lightsaber to the torso and talked of how there would be no need for her friends to return for her - in my opinion she died - but this is Star Wars, so anything is possible.) To me, she shouldn't have left the Inquisitors so quickly, if at all, after embracing the Dark Side to join them. I had an idea in my head of what her story was: she helped the Empire hunt down Jedi, potentially outlived the Empire/Vader/Palpatine, confronted Ahsoka at some point... but the creators of this series had a much different idea of her arc. Oh well.
Again, great looking animation and I'll watch most anything if it's Star Wars, but once is probably enough for me.

 

watched the first three. The first 2 are ok, i liked the 3rd one. The 3rd one is brutal. Makes me despise Morgan even more.
The credit music kinda sounds Dune-ish to me, i love it.

 

Morgan stories: very interesting stories, sometimes should be more longer, my favorite is the third one
All of them together: 9/10

 

No interest in Elsbeth at all, so won't watch them.

Spoiler

The Barriss arc was also kind of meh. Some good concepts but would have benefitted from probably actually being a show with 20 eps to be honest, would have made her path through this more captivating. The whole getting stabbed thing was also a bit silly. It seemed Lynn was turning anyway, not sure getting stabbed was really necessary to make that happen. And so much left ambiguous, just not sure what the point of it all was other than as a potential back door pilot to something?

 

Bariss: also really interesting, my favorite short is the first one, but once again, why not make these shorts longer?
9/10

 

Spoiler

The Barriss episodes felt a bit like the Ventress episode of The Bad Batch to me, by which I mean you could replace her with any generic ex-Jedi and the story would pretty much be the exact same. Apart from her being in jail for a couple of minutes at the start, the TCW betrayal arc might as well have not happened for all of its relevance here. Her redemption loses a bit of its punch when the event that she's making amends for is barely even alluded to, and on that note we never really get a clear sense of how or why or if her ideology has changed by the final episode. I'm not saying the Barriss half of the series was bad - taken on its own, it was fairly solid! - but by the end I just wasn't sure what about this story demanded the use of this particular character beyond the name recognition.

IMO there's a real divide between the TOTJ Dooku shorts, which meaningfully expand on their centred character's motivations and thus massively recontextualise his other appearances, versus the Ahsoka, Morgan & Barriss episodes, which sort of feel like they exist to fill the gaps in their characters' Wookieepedia pages. Also, weirdly little Imperial focus for a series called Tales of the Empire? I don't think we see a single stormtrooper, and a full third of the series isn't even set in the Imperial era.

 

I loved this series, its the best animated content we’ve had in a long time and one of the reasons it was so good is because it wasn’t super dumbed/toned down like certain other projects have been.

I wish we could get a full animated series like this in terms of being dark, gritty and having crazy variety.

 

I love these shorts! Scratches an itch The Bad Batch never really did. Actually feels dark and violent and the stakes are actually there. I’m not an edgelord but the constant use of stun setting in Rebels and Bad Batch drives me crazy.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed both arcs, especially Barriss'. Morgan's primarily because it brought back the massacre on Dathomir and its aftermath from an alternative perspective, and Barriss' certainly fulfills the seemingly decade-old question of what happened to her. Sure there's been guesses as to her being incorporated into the Inquisitorius program, but this confirmed it. Even though this thread allows spoilers, I won't get into the details. But I was pretty much satisfied with the conclusions. Morgan's fate has already been sealed, and Barriss? We'll see.