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Matthew:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Star Wars Generations podcast. Today it’s myself, Matthew, along with co-host Erin, talking about Episode 1 of Star Wars Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi. Erin, I want to start us off right away — would you give your name to a dictator?
Erin:
Fuck no. I wouldn’t give my name to nobody. I don’t give my name to a person on the street, let alone that. “I’m Kara, La Cara” — first and last? That’s the same as Odysseus telling the Cyclops his home address.
Matthew:
What is wrong with you? Honestly, I liked that line — it felt like one of those moments that really lands. For those who haven’t seen it: we’re talking about the first episode of The Ninth Jedi. I think this is going to be a very good show, and I definitely recommend people check it out. I’m a little sad it’s not getting more attention, and we’ll talk about that as part of our discussion. I’ll admit up front that I didn’t love this first episode necessarily, but I do think people should watch it. Hopefully you’ve paused before this point, because we’re going to be doing massive spoilers for the whole first episode. But if you haven’t seen it and just want to know what we’re talking about: near the end, one of our heroes goes to confront a kind of Darth Vader 2.0 — the leader of the evil army, at least as we’re told. There’s a reveal that says more about that. When the guy asks his name before they fight to the death, he says, “I will not give my name to a tyrant.” I’m with him on keeping some information private — this is clearly someone who will go after your family, your pets, your mailman, your city, so don’t give them that info. And I love a cool “F you to tyranny” line. But “I will not give my name to a tyrant” struck me as kind of a try-hard moment. What did you think?
Erin:
I could see that, actually — especially given how hard that guy flopped afterward. That felt very try-hard. I was expecting way more from him based on his aura, and then he immediately got stabbed. How dumb do you have to be to run directly at somebody with a lightsaber when you don’t have one? Genuinely, not to be rude — how dumb can you possibly be? I can see it as a bit of a try-hard moment. I feel like they were using him as the classic trope: introduce a character who seems like they could have some power or respect behind their name, then have the bad guy kill them to emphasize just how dangerous he is. That’s kind of how it felt to me — demonstrating to the character Ethan just how far Gennoh is willing to go.
Matthew:
So this was actually Gennoh —
Erin:
Oh shit, you’re right. Yeah, it was Gennoh —
Matthew:
Right — the guy you’re talking about is the general chasing them down for Nawaam. Nawaam is the leader of the whole group. We’ll get to him. Let me jump back to the start of the show, though. First of all, I think they do what they can to help people who haven’t seen the first two episodes of Star Wars Visions that this continues from. But if you haven’t seen those, I recommend watching them — they’re very good.
If you haven’t, I definitely recommend checking out the podcast episode we did last week. But just a quick refresher: we’re in a time when we’re told the Jedi and the Sith have been long forgotten — that they pretty much entirely died out, that only tiny remnants exist. This guy, who is the father of Kara, our main character, has decided to start rebuilding lightsabers in an attempt to bring people together and rebuild the Jedi. When he does this, they find out there’s another group trying to rebuild the Sith. That group steals some of the lightsabers, kidnaps the father, and is theoretically forcing him to make sabers while trying to hunt down this group of nascent Jedi led by Margrave Juro. So we’ve got Margrave Juro, we’ve got Kara, and we’re thrown into this adventure. One theme that runs through this first episode — something I didn’t love, but I get that some repetition is bound to happen —
There’s a lot of themes we’ve seen in Star Wars before. One of them here is being chased through hyperspace, with a fun gimmick of jumping close to a black hole so their smaller ship can get away more easily. Eventually they reach a planet ruled by a guy who apparently used to be connected to the Jedi. They’re being hunted there, and that’s where our main plot happens.
There are fights, including with the general you were just talking about — Gennoh. This was originally written in Japanese, then translated into English and recorded in both languages. I’ve seen some arguments that it’s better to watch in Japanese with subtitles — my ADHD makes that pretty much impossible, which is why I watch the English dub, and I think you’re the same. But if others are finding it works better that way, let us know. And for Japanese speakers — if that “I don’t give my name to tyrants” line lands better in Japanese, let us know.
Here’s where I first started to raise an eyebrow at the show. We started out with an idea I really loved — way back, I wanted the prequels to set this up — the idea that the Jedi are truly gone. Like the Knights Templar are to us today: something remembered in history books but thought of as long gone, generations or hundreds of years back. Instead, we immediately meet a guy who was a Jedi not that long ago.
Maybe if you squint, the idea is that Margrave Juro was also trained by some rogue person out in the middle of nowhere. But it felt to me like what they’re actually saying is closer to the prequels — that when we say the Jedi and Sith are “almost gone,” we mean most of them were killed in the last 30 or 40 years. I didn’t really love that. What was your take?
Erin:
In the Visions episodes, I felt like it was left up to interpretation. A lot of Visions is vague on things people try to pin down, because they’re not trying to interfere too much with canon. But watching the original Visions episodes, I got the understanding that the biggest problem isn’t that no one has the ability or the drive to be a Jedi or a Sith — it’s that they don’t have the weapons that used to set them so far apart from everyone else in combat.
My understanding was that the lightsabers are the big missing piece. There are maybe some people around who used to be Jedi, but without the power of the lightsabers, they’ve had to find something else to do. So that aspect didn’t bother me as much, because I hadn’t assumed it had been thousands of years. I thought about it, but I didn’t put anything specific on the timeline, so it didn’t bother me. But I understand where you’re coming from — like, “dude, this is the second time I thought the Jedi and Sith were gone and now they’re still there.”
Matthew:
Right, and I think that would only make sense. I could totally see a version where the Jedi teachings are still around, but no one’s made lightsabers in forever. But when the governor character is given a lightsaber by Margrave Juro, he knows how to use it.
Maybe that’s from training with sticks or something, but it felt like he’d used one before, which suggests the death of lightsaber-making was fairly recent. Anyway, listeners — if this bothered you too, let us know. If it’s just me being an old fogey, well, a fat old fogey turns out to be a good fighter in this, so I’m standing up for the fat old fogeys today. But yeah, that’s my gripe. It felt a little more childish than the Visions episodes. Other than that, I did like it — the animation is gorgeous, I like the character work, I like the voice acting. Gramps, the old pilot droid, is voiced in English by JP Karliak, who also played Morph on the recent X-Men show and was a guest on this podcast.
So I’m really hoping we can bring him back — I heard his voice on this and got excited. What about you? What did you like, what didn’t you like, how do you feel about it overall?
Erin:
I have to say, it’s hilarious that it’s the two of us talking about this, since we’re the two on the podcast known for not being especially passionate about anime. I think Alex would have a lot more to say about the art style and how it holds up compared to other things.
I don’t know — this is hard. I struggle to tell what’s an internal bias versus an actual difference, but I feel like this leans more toward children than the Visions episodes did. Maybe that’s what I’m bumping into. From the small exposure I’ve had to anime, female characters are often infantilized with a really high-pitched voice, and I caught a bit of that with Kara — though I understand she’s supposed to be a child, so obviously she has a higher voice.
It’s just not my preferred type of media, I guess is the best way to put it. If you put Kara and Ahsoka side by side, they’re probably pretty similar — it’s just that Ahsoka feels more grounded, because she talks and reacts more like I do. I don’t relate to Kara as much.
Matthew:
I think Ahsoka is definitely a post-pubescent teenager, even when we first meet her — she’s young, maybe 14 or so, but Kara is supposed to be more like nine or ten. It’s funny, we were just talking on Superhero Ethics about the most recent Avatar thing, The Last Airbender’s Avatar Aang, and one thing we discussed was how the original characters differ — Aang is seemingly pre-pubescent, just going through puberty, while the others are only a couple of years older but already post-pubescent. At that age, the difference between eleven and thirteen is a lot bigger than between sixteen and eighteen. Sixteen and eighteen is still a big difference, to be sure, but that pre- versus post-pubescent gap — not that everyone hits puberty at the same age, but you know what I mean.
Erin:
No, I know. Five years when you’re under twenty feels way longer than five years when you’re over forty, I’m assuming — you go through so much more change and difference in life. You’re growing up versus being hypothetically more settled into what you want your life to be.
Matthew:
Right, exactly. Is five years a third of your life, or an eighth of your life? I can totally get that.
We did a whole episode on anime a while back with former co-host Ricky, and had a lot of great things to say about it. I think there are a lot of tropes involving kids of all genders, but definitely some of the ones you’re describing around women — where they’re either young-girl-type roles or very femme fatale, without much in between. I think Visions has moved past a lot of that, so I don’t expect much of it here. I imagine we’ll get a bunch of other great female characters. I don’t mind Kara, but she hasn’t grabbed me as a character — right now Margrave Juro is the one I’m most interested in.
Erin:
What you said made me think — the “complaints” are probably just things that aren’t vibing with me because they remind me of something else, and I don’t have a lot of firsthand experience with anime. My cousin and his friends were watching some once, and it suddenly got very not-safe-for-family, and I was like, “okay, we’re watching something else.” I basically never watched anime again after that, so I think I’m just a little scared it’s going to go somewhere I don’t want it to go.
And I should have more trust, honestly — Disney’s not going to put out anything like what I just described.
Matthew:
Right — I know there’s an awful lot of anime that’s pretty racy, but there’s a pretty clear distinction between that and what we’re talking about here. Even within anime there’s a divide between explicit content and everything else, and that’s clearly not what you want to watch as a kid with your family. So yeah, I get it — it’s not an art form either of us is especially excited about as a genre.
A lot of people have been critical of Disney’s marketing lately, and I don’t think this is being marketed well at all — I had to scroll down on the Disney page just to find it on the day it released. Probably the biggest marketing failure, though: Alex is our resident anime guy on the podcast, and they released this while he’s in the middle of moving. Come on, guys, get it together. We’ll definitely get Alex on for a later episode, because I think he’ll have a lot to say about this.
All that said, I want to talk about the character I thought at first I’d be bored by, until a big reveal in the last few minutes made me go, “okay, now I’m here for this.” Hope most of you have seen this, but if you really want to just follow along with us, that’s fine too. We have this leader named Nawaam — the leader of the group I referred to earlier as Darth Vader 2.0. There are a number of tropes here that felt familiar: being tracked through hyperspace, a whole bunch of droids that stop functioning once you knock out the central control on the main ship — we’ve seen that before. Some of those droids had a ball-type shape with weapons and hands. No shield, but they looked an awful lot like Droidekas.
Then we have this guy dressed all in black with a metallic helmet and a metallic voice — not the band, the actual metal — and he seems pretty evil. He’s driving this army to conquer everyone. We learn he’s issued a challenge: if anyone can defeat him in a fight, they get to take over his army. A couple of people connected to our heroes go to spy on the group and see if they can just take them down. One of them gets caught and ends up issuing the challenge himself — “I’ll fight you.” Nawaam pulls out a lightsaber, and it’s blue.
At first you might think, well, General Grievous had blue and green lightsabers, so he could have just stolen one. But it’s been established that this new batch of lightsabers — as far as we know, the only ones currently in the galaxy — change color based on the wielder’s connection to the Force, regardless of whether they’re Sith or Jedi. In one of the earlier Visions episodes, we saw them turn red in the hands of evil people, marking who they are.
His didn’t turn red. There are a lot of implications we could draw from that, but I think it’s left pretty wide open, and I’m curious about it. What was your take on that moment?
Erin:
I wasn’t sure. The character Ethan says something like, “the lightsaber is blue — is he a Jedi or something?” and I sat there thinking it through. I do believe that’s what they want us to think, because they’ve established that the only lightsaber maker currently active is building sabers that are in tune with the Force and change color based on the wielder’s morality or where they’re drawing their power from. So I think this could be really interesting. It seems too easy to say he just found an old lightsaber somewhere — maybe, it’s possible, but what would be so much more interesting is if he’s like a version of Dooku who never left the Jedi.
That doesn’t quite line up, but the idea of someone who still believes he’s a Jedi — doesn’t identify with the word because he’s actively hunting Jedi, but still believes what he’s doing will bring peace and goodness to the world, even though he’s become a tyrant and a killer in the process — that would make the character so interesting. If he genuinely believes he’s in the right and is drawing from the light side of the Force, I have a lot of questions, and I’d find that very compelling. I’m intrigued to see what the rest of the series brings. It didn’t strike me as a big deal right away — I figured they could explain it away as a cliffhanger and move on. But the more I thought about it, the more I think this could be one of the most interesting villains we’ve had in a long time. What were your thoughts?
Matthew:
Similar, I think. I came to that first part a little later. My initial thought was: if I take the universe’s rule about what lightsabers do at face value, then this person is either not fully Sith or not fully on the dark side — and those are two distinctly different things, which I think is part of what the show will explore. I also had the thought that maybe this is just an old lightsaber, or that the lightsaber smith — who we find out is also an old, very powerful Jedi — is connected somehow, because it does seem like we’re once again doing the “there are no more Jedi left, except this one, and that one, and that one” thing.
Erin:
Also, you know — your dad’s a Jedi too, apparently.
Matthew:
I think I’m just bitter about that trope because it’s happened before, but fair enough. I do want to believe it’s what you’re describing, and I think it’s important to note this has been officially designated a non-canonical story. There are some rumors it’s because it’s set hundreds or even thousands of years in the future — some interpretations suggest it’s meant to be a fictional story written by people within the Star Wars universe.
I think at some point they may try to make it canonical, or very clearly keep it non-canon. For now, I think that ambiguity lets them explore some interesting territory. I’m not someone who loves the term “gray Jedi” — I have real issues with how that term is usually used — but I do think there’s an interesting space to explore beyond the absolutes of the light side and the dark side. You brought up Dooku, who I think at some point believed he was still on the light side while thinking some dark-side powers could be used for good — especially in Darth Plagueis, that’s a big theme. The show Rebels explored something similar with Ezra flirting with the Sith holocron — mind-controlling people driving an AT-ST and knocking them off a cliff — without that fully turning him to the dark side.
So yeah, I’d be curious to see if they explore something like that here. We haven’t really seen Nawaam except through our heroes’ point of view, and he doesn’t look great — he’s definitely conquering worlds, doing all that stuff — but we haven’t seen him mowing down civilians, we don’t know why he’s doing this, and I don’t think the show is going to make him out to be heroic. But I wonder if it’s something like Thrawn in some of the later books — not “I love the Empire,” but “I think the Empire is needed against a much bigger threat.” I could see a world where Nawaam has some of that: he’s not just cackling about ultimate power, he has a reason he believes he’s the hero, which makes the morality genuinely complicated.
Erin:
I’m also interested in what’s going on with Kara’s dad, because Gennoh told Kara during their fight that her father, the sabersmith, has been collaborating with them. She’s like, “oh my god, my dad’s a bad guy.” It’s easy to assume they’re obviously lying, but we did see a conversation between Kara’s father and Nawaam, the leader.
He certainly doesn’t seem to think he’s in active danger. He doesn’t look afraid for his life — I wouldn’t say he looks especially cooperative either, but he almost jokes back and forth with Nawaam. Nawaam’s like, “oh, everyone thinks you’re just a sabersmith, not one of the most powerful Jedi ever,” and he responds — I don’t remember exactly what he said, but they were conversing very casually. I was thinking, if I were being held against my will and forced to make weapons for the enemy, I probably wouldn’t be joking around like that. So I’m curious if there’s something to her father possibly having mixed motivations.
Matthew:
Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that, because there’s a set of bars between them — I do think he’s in some kind of prison.
Erin:
Oh — I was making tuna, so my eyes weren’t 100% glued to the screen the whole time. Thanks for filling me in.
Matthew:
Maybe I misunderstood, but it certainly looked to me like he was in prison, and the way they were talking felt a little trash-talky. He was saying something like, “well, my daughter’s going to be pretty kick-ass” — because the guy had said her daughter screwed over his general, and he responded, “well, yeah, that’s my daughter.” So I don’t think there’s a lightsaber to his throat, but I also don’t think he’s genuinely helping them. I think there’s a different kind of situation going on — maybe something like a Galen Erso setup, where to an outsider it could look like collaboration, but there’s a deeper reason. Maybe the lightsabers he’s making for them are designed to fail somehow, or maybe he believes both sides need lightsabers, that the Sith need to help rebuild the Jedi. I don’t know — it’s an open question I’m curious to see the show explore.
Erin:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I’d kind of forgotten about her father’s comeback — “well, she had a pretty powerful teacher, so what did you expect? She’s going to wreck you.” So I’ll take back what I said earlier — I don’t think they were necessarily hinting at mixed motivations. But it would still be interesting.
We often see people’s minds change in captivity, or desperation drive people toward something. So I wonder if, now that Nawaam knows Kara is actively looking for her father, he’s going to spin some lies to manipulate her father about her. I think it’s certainly possible.
Matthew:
It’s certainly possible. Overall, I think — maybe not our favorite episode, but there are enough interesting questions and possibilities that we’re excited to watch the rest and keep talking about it.
Erin:
I’d agree. I feel like the first one to three episodes of an animated Star Wars show can be tough to get through — I’m thinking mostly of Clone Wars, and a little bit of Rebels. Bad Batch hit it hard and heavy from the start — they open with Order 66.
Matthew:
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, animated or otherwise, and its first couple of episodes are pretty rough. It always takes time to find its footing. Star Trek: The Next Generation is a great show too — the first episode is great, the second and third are pretty rough. So it’s not unusual.
Erin:
Just like those — even if this genre isn’t your thing, hang in there and watch the whole season. Thank you.
Matthew:
And let us know what you’d like us to talk about. Do you have questions you want us to explore, guests you want us to bring on? We’re definitely going to try to get JP on, and we’ll make sure Alex joins for the next episode, or at least one of the upcoming episodes about this show — he’s just going through a lot right now with moving.
Let us know what you think. Check out all the other great things happening at TheEthicalPanda.com and TruStory.fm — that’s where all the other shows I’m part of live. Erin’s been a guest on some of them, Paul’s been a guest too — great stuff happening across that whole podcast network. So on behalf of myself, Erin, Alex, and everyone here — thank you so much. We have spoken.
