Tales of the Jedi Trailer Finally Shows a Rarely-Seen Part of Star Wars
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Before Star Wars started making TV shows, the morality of the saga as a whole was very cut and dry: the rebellion is good and the Empire is bad. In the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, we saw the fall and the rise of the Empire, but the finer points of the regime outside of its nondescript evilness weren’t really explored. Once Star Wars television like The Mandalorian and Andor were released, we finally got a more complete image of just how a new galactic authority can operate.
In a new animated series entitled Tales of the Empire, Dave Filoni will dive deep into two of the most fascinating women in Star Wars TV: Barriss Offee and Morgan Elsbeth. This series of shorts, which premieres on Disney+ on May 4, will shed some much-needed light on the Dark Side and the complex ways of the Empire at its height. Check out the trailer for the series below.
This series is a follow-up to the previous short collection, Tales of the Jedi, which followed mini adventures from the lives of Ahsoka Tano and Qui-Gon Jinn. Much like Tales of the Jedi, it shares its title with an existing Star Wars Legends property — in this case, a 1997 short story collection.
This time around, the subjects are two people Ahsoka has faced off against. Barriss Offee, the Jedi who appeared in the prequel trilogy, was revealed in the “Wrong Jedi” arc of The Clone Wars to have betrayed the Jedi Order and framed Ahsoka for bombing the Jedi Temple. Currently, we don’t know much about what happened to her afterward, but this series will finally reveal that.
The other focus is Morgan Elsbeth, who we first saw as an Empire Magistrate in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. She faced off against Ahsoka and Din Djarin in that episode but reached a new height in Ahsoka when she traveled to Peridea and was inducted into the Nightsisters. In Tales of the Empire, it looks like we’ll see her early life and how she came to be such a powerful agent for the Empire.
Thrawn will return in a whole new animation style in Tales of the Empire.
Along with these under-explored characters, beloved villains will also return. Jason Isaacs will reprise his role as the Grand Inquisitor, and Lars Mikkelsen will take his portrayal of Grand Admiral Thrawn from live-action in Ahsoka back to animation. There’s even a tease of a Darth Vader appearance.
In the past, the Empire has existed as little more than a faceless threat. But with this series, we can finally see how the Empire can actually give people the idea of making the universe better. You don’t have to be Anakin levels of corrupted to fight for the Empire, sometimes it’s just the best alternative. Through these two complicated women, we will finally be able to see that in a big way.
