This Dark Side spin on 2022’s Clone Wars-style anthology series might push the envelope on its patented artstyle even further, but it doesn’t manage to offer up anything more substantial than its predecessor with another miniscule batch of episodes that unnecessarily fill out gaps in the stories of characters I don’t care all that much about; ultimately nailing home that there just isn’t any future for this series in its current form.

Whether you’re celebrating and thinking fondly on your most cherished stories from a galaxy far, far away, or bemoaning the present state of the once-mighty entertainment franchise, I’ll start with a little positivity in wishing you all a Happy Star Wars Day! To celebrate the occasion, Lucasfilm have dropped their latest series Tales of the Empire on the Disney Plus streaming service – a direct successor to the 2022 animated anthology that centred on the Jedi. Between failing to offer anything particularly new for its characters, nor managing to captivate me through its plotlines, Tales of the Jedi didn’t quite hit the spot for me (you can read my review here), but there was certainly room for improvement, and enough of it that I figured its follow-up would nevertheless be worth a shot.

Spoilers ahead!

Off to a better start than the previous season solely on the basis that the episodes were placed in a coherent order this time, Tales of the Empire‘s first half centres on Diana Lee Inosanto’s Morgan Elsbeth, who you may remember from The Mandalorian Season Two and last year’s Ahsoka – the latter of which you probably didn’t want to remember, but now you have, feel free to read my review of that disaster here! Shameless self-promotion aside, the first episode, The Path of Fear, delves into the character’s Nightsister origins (which I’m still pretty sure were tacked onto her character after the fact) through retelling the Separatist attack on Dathomir as seen in The Clone Wars. It spins a half-decent story as you see how her actions ultimately cause the death of an ally and leave her banished from what remains of her home, which might have been a decent foundation for her characterisation had the episode been capable of delivering anything more than a barebones plot in its allotted runtime. Unfortunately you can expect even less from the next two episodes, The Path of Anger and The Path of Hate, which offer less so any insight into her character or motivations and more of a point-by-point display of exposition that contextualises her alliance with Thrawn and her first appearance in The Mandalorian, that while I’m sure will go a long way in filling out sections of her designated Wookiepedia article, doesn’t make for an engaging story whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure the character’s backstory might’ve made for a cool book or a comic series, and probably would’ve been better off that way with a little more space to explore it, but there just isn’t any apparent reason why they’d take the time and the resources to put a miniscule part of a forgettable antagonist’s history to the screen when there are countless characters and stories from the era of the Empire that would’ve been infinitely more interesting for this series to cover.

The second character chosen to make up the back half of Tales of the Empire is The Clone Wars‘ Barriss Offee, a once-devout Jedi Padawan who turned against the Order and tried to frame a number of crimes on series mainstay Ahsoka Tano before being caught and imprisoned by the Jedi. Given that Barriss’ story was left open-ended, it was nice (in principle anyway) to see it tied up here, and given that it takes place parallel to the rise of the Empire it seemed an inherently far better fit for this show than Morgan Elsbeth’s backstory. Unfortunately, it’s not a two-way street, with the once-again miniscule runtime severely limiting the show’s capacity to deliver an effective story, even in spite of the Barriss episodes’ best attempts to construct an arc for her character. Said arc begins with Devoted, where the former Padawan witnesses the fall of the Jedi Order and the Republic, before embracing her ruthless streak in her gruelling training to join the Inquisitors, which lands her face to face with Darth Vader himself for all of about five seconds before the episode ends – a moment that I’m sure wasn’t just thrown in to add to the trailers and garner viewership. Nevertheless, it’s the next episode, Realization, that marks the turning point for Barriss as the heartlessness of a fellow Inquisitor, The Fourth Sister, weighs on her to the point that she returns to the Light Side and defects from the Empire, while The Way Out chronicles her final encounter with her former ally; ultimately proving to be a fatal one, although not before she is able to turn her foe from the Dark Side as well. It’s a decent enough story on paper, but there just isn’t enough room provided to flesh it out, leaving the conclusion feeling unearned and emotionally weightless, and as much as it might be nice to round out that character’s arc, I can’t help but feel like there were again a multitude of ways they could’ve done this with far more depth and grace than in a trio of 15-minute long shorts.

After two sets of episodes, it’s becoming clear that the Tales format as it is just doesn’t work – there isn’t enough room in the allotted time to provide adequate development for these characters, and I can’t see it getting any better unless further instalments either offer up extra runtime, or just commit to the quickly evaporating novelty of six visually impressive shorts by leaving them unconnected from wider narratives in the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately, Tales of the Empire remains trapped in a nebulous void between the two, and while it does fill in some gaps in the lives of its two focal characters, neither the premise nor the content of the stories themselves give me any real reason to care; ultimately leaving the show feeling cripplingly aimless.

3/10