All six episodes of Tales of the Empire debut on Disney+ on Saturday, May 4.
On its surface, Tales of the Empire does everything right. It has painterly animation, rousing music that adds to every action sequence, and storylines that weave together new chapters in the lives of two characters from Star Wars history. What it lacks are names as big as those at the center of its predecessor, 2022’s Tales of the Jedi. Where that series boasted stories that felt precisely crafted to flesh out previously unseen moments in the lives of Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku, Disney+’s latest Star Wars Day offering can’t do the same for the notable-yet-less-well-known likes of The Mandalorian’s Morgan Elsbeth and The Clone Wars’ Barriss Offee.
Tales of the Empire aims to shift the perspective of Star Wars animation to the Dark Side, taking a look at how Morgan and Barriss fell to its alluring power. The series serves as an origin story for the former and and an epilogue for the latter, attempting a closer look at a fall into and a redemption from fear, anger, and hate. But it often struggles to achieve these aims for either of its protagonists.
Morgan’s are definitely the more disappointing of the six episodes, granting the audience a surface-level look at how she got to where we met her in The Mandalorian. Promising something more, the three episodes that follow Morgan are titled “The Path of Fear,” “The Path of Anger,” and “The Path of Hate,” which any longtime Star Wars fan would know as the steps towards the Dark Side of the Force. The first in this trilogy does the best job of tracing Morgan’s undoing, highlighting what frightens her, and how that leads to anger. The subsequent episodes feel less concerned with how anger leads to hate (and don’t forget the suffering), but instead focus on the more superficial aspects of her life that lead to her eventual antagonistic role in the Ahsoka series. An inner look at Elsbeth’s psyche is ditched in favor of retroactive setup for a whole other show.
Tales of the Empire finds much more success in Barriss’ storyline, taking her down a path tailor-made for the character. The padawan’s fate was left somewhat ambiguous at the end of The Clone Wars, and stories of the Inquisitors have been told in various forms and avenues since then. Being a former Jedi disillusioned of the Order’s ways, Barriss makes an obvious candidate for a league of Jedi-killing assassins. The problem is that it might be too obvious a story to tell, moving along without any surprises and with a pace that makes things feel rushed. With the brief, 12 to 15 minutes we’re given in each episode, there isn’t much time for her to sit with her cognitive dissonance, so when she makes her pivotal decision, it feels abrupt, or like she arrived at the end of her arc too early. The final episode’s focus on character, however, is able to solidify Barriss’ arc into something more satisfying as a whole, and succeeds at giving her a conclusion worth telling.
Series creator and Lucasfilm honcho Dave Filoni is just as much a fan of these characters as any of the best Wookipeida contributors, and has made sure that Tales of the Empire will have Star Wars diehards pointing and whistling at the TV like Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time… in Hollwyood, and that might be enough. Not to say that that kind of stuff isn’t worth talking about – it’s one of my favorite parts of the vast Star Wars universe – but with Tales of the Jedi, we got all of that on top of deep, meditative stories about two fan-favorites. Tales of the Empire attempts to do the same for Morgan and Barriss, but with so little of their stories being previously told, these episodes had a lot of heavy lifting to do. They end up feeling like they’re checking boxes instead of being the introspective character studies they aspire to.
