The first series under the Star Wars: Visions Presents banner, The Ninth Jedi, continues the story of Lah Kara from Star Wars: Visions Volume 1 and Volume 3, directly following the events of “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope.” As a quick refresher, Kara was previously tasked with delivering lightsabers crafted by her legendary sabersmith father to Margrave Juro, who hopes to revive the Jedi Order. With her father kidnapped, Kara joins forces with Juro on a mission to rescue him.
Episode 1 of this eight-episode series wastes no time getting started. The viewer is thrown directly into the action, with Juro’s freighter-class starship fleeing the much larger capital-class warship of General Nawaan. With a tracker embedded on board the heroes’ ship, they are unable to shake Nawaan until a daring maneuver leaves his vessel trapped near the event horizon of a black hole. Kara’s team then escapes to an independent planet in search of help, only for Nawaan to catch up and launch a droid assault on the city in an effort to flush her out.
While I found the episode generally entertaining, portions of the plot felt recycled and contrived. The idea of all the droids being controlled by a single slave system immediately recalls The Phantom Menace, and the fact that General Nawaan apparently had no non-droid personnel aboard his own ship to prevent it from crashing felt difficult to accept. That becomes even harder to buy once the episode later reveals that he has an entire army of humans and aliens at his disposal.
Nawaan is clearly meant to be a powerful villain. He is strong enough in the Force to survive what should be a fatal encounter with a black hole, yet Kara still faces him one-on-one in the very first episode. She is badly overpowered, but Nawaan ultimately withdraws once his ship begins to crash. It is an exciting sequence, but it also makes the episode feel compressed. With eight episodes totaling roughly two and a half to three hours of runtime, the pacing still feels as if the production team is scripting for a short rather than a full series. That is unfortunate because some of the episode’s ideas deserved more room to breathe. The black hole escape sequence was visually beautiful and one of the episode’s most striking moments. I would have liked to see the series linger there a little longer. Production I.G’s animation is smooth and energetic, but the use of 3D CGI vehicles against 2D environments and characters was occasionally distracting.
Still, The Ninth Jedi remains an intriguing expansion of one of the strongest shorts from Star Wars: Visions. The fact that the directors emphasized this as the first series under the Visions Presents banner also suggests that other Visions stories may receive similar expansions in the future.
All eight episodes of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu beginning August 5.
