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Tales of the Empire

A Visually Rich but Narratively Hollow Journey

With Star Wars just announcing Tales of the Underworld as its latest entry in their animated anthology series. I thought it was an excellent time to look back at the last one Tales of the Empire, which mirrors the structure of 2022’s Tales of the Jedi, offering six short episodes split between two characters. This time, the spotlight turns to Morgan Elspeth and Barriss Offee, two characters on the fringes of the Star Wars canon. While the series promises deeper insights and personal journeys, it largely misses the mark—especially when it comes to relevance, impact, and necessity.

Episodes 1–3: Morgan Elspeth – A Strong Start That Stumbles

The first two episodes focusing on Morgan Elspeth start strong. Episode 1 shows the Nightmother survivor's early trauma during General Grievous’s devastating attack on Dathomir, which establishes her deep hatred for Jedi and her ruthless pragmatism. Episode 2 jumps forward, where Elspeth is seen killing an Imperial governor and catching the eye of none other than Thrawn, who is so impressed by her brutality that he enlists her help.

It’s in this episode that the show awkwardly introduces one of the most implausible beats of her story: Morgan Elspeth, a woman raised among mystic warrior witches on a pre-industrial world, somehow becomes the designer of the Empire’s most advanced starfighter—the TIE Defender. It’s a jarring leap that strains logic, and it’s never explained in any meaningful way. Her transformation from a Dathomiri survivor into a top-tier weapons engineer happens entirely offscreen, and the series expects us to just go with it.

Then comes Episode 3, which should have been the emotional or narrative capstone of her arc—but instead, it fizzles. Set after the fall of the Empire, it shows Elspeth resisting the New Republic and causing a distress signal to be sent that ultimately leads to Ahsoka tracking her down in The Mandalorian. That’s it. That’s the episode. It serves only to backfill a moment we already understood: Ahsoka was hunting Elspeth to find Thrawn and Ezra. We didn’t need to see a clunky dramatization of how Ahsoka got her first lead. It answers a question no one was asking.

What began as a promising dive into Elspeth’s dark evolution ends with a shrug—more concerned with tying up loose threads that didn’t need tying.

Episodes 4–6: The Barriss Offee Arc That Goes Nowhere

The second half of the series shifts focus to Barriss Offee, a fallen Jedi Padawan whose betrayal of the Order was one of the most haunting twists in The Clone Wars. Her story picks up in an Imperial prison, and she’s offered a new path as an Inquisitor. There’s massive potential here: guilt, indoctrination, possible redemption.

But it never goes anywhere.

Barriss trains, struggles briefly with her conscience, fights a few enemies, and then quietly walks away from it all. There’s no meaningful resolution to her story. No confrontation with her past. Not even a strong emotional core. It’s a passive journey where nothing of consequence happens—not to her, and certainly not to the larger galaxy.

Considering how long fans have waited to see what became of her, this arc is particularly disappointing. Barriss Offee deserved a more thoughtful continuation—or closure. What we get instead is vague, meandering, and ultimately hollow.

A Series With Style But No Substance

There’s no denying the visual quality of Tales of the Empire. The animation is fluid and cinematic, the atmosphere richly rendered, and the lightsaber combat satisfyingly sharp. But none of that can make up for the lack of narrative purpose. The stories either strain believability (Elspeth as weapons designer), fail to move characters forward in meaningful ways (Barriss’s arc), or exist simply to explain things the audience already inferred (Elspeth’s distress signal to Ahsoka).

These aren’t tales so much as deleted scenes dressed up in dramatic lighting, which just makes me worry what they're going to do with Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane. Do we really need to see how Bane gets from his final appearance in The Bad Batch to his next appearance at the end of The Book of Boba Fett? Do we really need an origin story for him. With the same going for Ventress, we don't really need to see how she gets to the arena where she first met Dooku and became his assassin, although knowing what she did after her appearance in The Bad Batch, how this Sith Assassin lives during the days of the Empire, is probably worth more than the single episode they're probably going to give it.

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