Star Wars Stuff I've Been Watching on Disney+

I haven't written about any Star Wars media outside of SWTOR in a while. In fact, the last post I made on the subject was about season three of Visions last year.

I meant to write about season two of Andor when that first came out, and I still have the empty draft for it saved, but even though I enjoyed it a lot, I somehow couldn't get myself to put down any words about it at the time. I'm doing a rewatch now to see if that sparks anything in me.

In the meantime, I thought I'd do a summary post to cover a few other Star Wars things I watched on Disney Plus over the last few months. I enjoyed all of these, but at the same time they didn't have a huge impact on me.

Maul: Shadow Lord

When I first heard about this show, I honestly rolled my eyes. Darth Maul was never among my favourite characters, but I guess he was kind of cool as this mysterious, quiet assassin type in Phantom Menace. The way they brought him back in Clone Wars though... oof. Even if they did end up doing some pretty interesting things with him towards the end, he still remains a character to me that has been horribly overused and about whom I needed another show about as much as I need a hole in the head.

However, then I realised it was going to be animated, and the animated Star Wars shows from the last decade have all been quite good to be honest, so I gave it a chance anyway and it was... indeed pretty good!

It does use a lot of known Star Wars tropes, so if the thought of seeing another young padawan of a wise old Jedi Master slowly getting lured to the dark side makes you want to puke, this show is probably not for you. But if you can at least tolerate more of the same old, it's done extremely well. In fact, I thought that was what really made the show interesting: it was always clear that the young Jedi and Darth Maul were going to end up working together somehow, the intrigue was in how exactly this was going to happen in a manner that still made sense.

I definitely enjoyed the end result, even if I still think it's funny that Sam Witwer's excellent voice acting has turned Darth Maul into an incredible smooth talker when he was originally introduced as a character who basically didn't talk at all.

The Ninth Jedi

So that one episode of Visions got a whole spin-off show! Like the past two seasons of Visions, it basically seemed to get zero marketing and I only found out about it via a random reddit comment.

As I mentioned in my Visions Season 3 post, I never thought that Kara was a particularly interesting protagonist, and after watching this show I would in fact go so far as to cite her - or rather, the fact that her English voice actress makes her sound like she's eight years old at all times - as my prime annoyance with the whole thing. Is that just one of those anime tropes? Because I noticed the same "problem" in other Visions episodes.

That's largely where my criticism ends though, because while I found her portrayal slightly grating, it wasn't enough to put me off the show as a whole, and I still found her journey and the plot as a whole quite interesting. Yes, it's once again a light side/dark side story, but with what I considered an interesting twist from approaching the subject a bit differently than canon Star Wars usually does. It also included the best use of lightsaber colour crystals reflecting a person's personality that I've ever seen.

I saw someone comment that they wished the sequel trilogy had approached Kylo Ren similarly to the way the antagonist was handled in this, and I've got to concur that that definitely would've made the sequels more interesting.

The Mandalorian and Grogu 

So this film had the dubious honour of being the first Star Wars movie I didn't go to see in theatres... not because I thought anything was particularly wrong with it, but because I had simply fallen out of the habit of going to the cinema (though I finally broke my nearly seven year streak of not going by seeing Nolan's Odyssey in August).

I was happy to watch this on Disney+ though, and there it lived up to everything I had been told about it months earlier, which was that it was basically... fine. A fun romp that feels like several solid episodes of the TV show strung together into a single plot. Grogu was cute, Mando was badass, and the new friendly Hutt character was likeable. I guess "fine" is not what people want to see when they go to see Star Wars on the big screen though, is it? I will say that I'm still not sure what exactly the goal was in releasing this as a big feature instead of "just" having more TV episodes.