As Star Wars as a franchise beings to shy away from theatrical releases and charters further onto Disney+, we’re getting a lot of truly unique stories I would’ve never imagined. Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi is another animated series, created by Star Wars godfather Dave Filoni – the series tells the origins of Count Dooku and Ahsoka Tano, both getting three episodes each in this six-episode series. Ahsoka’s episodes largely focus on things we already know about her but are a fun peak into timelines we haven’t seen the entirety of. For example, a really unique addition to this series is an episode that shows one of her early days of training as a Padawan under Anakin and how it mirrors what she went through during the fall of The Jedi Order during Order 66.

Ahsoka’s episodes here are pretty solid, as they feel very in-tone to everything we’ve seen from the character thus far. It’s even really neat to see her upbringing from her parents and their learning of her being force sensitive. However, her episodes do stop at being just solid and never really chart into truly impressive territory. It’s nice to see these moments with her, as she’s one of my favorite characters – but it feels ultimately pretty slight and just a bit of an extension from what we’ve already seen from her in Clone Wars.

However, Dooku’s episodes here are genuinely fantastic and feel like the best of what Star Wars storytelling can be. We get to see Dooku’s early days as a Jedi, before his turn against the Jedi Order in order to service Sidious. On top of seeing his origins, there’s also a genuinely solid dramatic through-line into seeing his get more and more morally corrupted each episode as he becomes jaded to the ethics and politics behind the Jedi Order. These three episodes in particular are a true stand-out in terms of what we’ve gotten from the franchise in the last few years, and I can’t recommend them highly enough to Star Wars fans!

As a whole, I think Tales of The Jedi is a really interesting project. The Dooku episodes are great, the Ahsoka episodes are mostly solid, and as a whole it combines about an hours worth of storytelling. There are some themes that slightly overlap, but I still question the pairing of Ahsoka and Dooku into one series as they never entirely coincide with one-another. It feels like a somewhat bizarre format for these individual stories that are quite solid on their own. However, I can see future seasons that dig deeper into fan-favorite characters and give insight into their histories and state of minds being even better than this. The possibilities are truly endless for this, and I can’t wait to see which characters Filoni decides to utilize next!

3.5/5