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Star Wars: Visions: Season 3: Episode 1: The Duel: Payback

What is it ? : The Ronin is aboard a gambling casino built atop two AT-AT walkers, and his droid , R5-D56, draws attention leading to a female Sith, AneƩ, confronting it. Having drawn out his prey they fight, leading to the casino falling into an avalanche, and them continuing their fight atop the feet of the walkers jutting out of the snow.
A Jedi arrives in a modified Jedi Starfighter, and dispatches AneƩ and R5-D56, he recognises the Ronin, who was responsible for him losing his legs which are now cybernetic. They fight and the Ronin falls into the snow and cannot be found, so the Jedi orders his forces in LAAT/i's to quarantine the planet until the two sith can be found.
The Ronin is retrieved by some Ewok's, who carry him back to a Bacta spring, where he finds AneƩ, they decide on a truce until they can escape the planet, and she asks for his collection of kyber crystals.
The are taken to an island fortress where the Casino owner teams up with them to fight the Jedi, working with the Ewok's and his forces to build defences including incorporating R5-D56 into the tactical systems of the island.
They draw the Jedi and his forces to attack, and AneƩ reveals she has modified her cyberarm to end in numerous small lightsabers. The Ewoks fight the troops along with the forces of the Casino owner, as the Ronin and AneƩ fight the Jedi Grand Master.
He defeats AneƩ once again, and fights the Ronin, disarming him and preparing for a final fatal stroke, but AneƩ slashes his eyes making him drop his lightsaber. Colour blinded he cannot see which is his lightsaber and which is the Ronin's red sith lightsaber, so grabs one before being killed, as the Ronin tells him that he isn't a Jedi, he is a machine as they notice all the cybernetic pieces leaving very little of the original man.
With the Jedi defeats, the casino owner give the Ronin a boat and R5-D56 back, and wishes him well, and the Ronin tells AneƩ that their truce is over and he wants his Kyber crystals back, she says she'd like to keep them and the two ignite their lightsabers and a new fight beings. . . .

High Points : There's a number of great things in this episode, I really like the Ewok's being used, obviously still primitive and some kind of colony taken off world. They're as ingenious as they were in Return of the Jedi, and help build a number of traps to defend the island. The mini saber arm that AneƩ builds using the Ronin's Kyber Crystals is glorious, as is the casino build across the backs of two AT-AT's. The use of a force shield to protect the island much like those used by the Gungans is fantastic, making it all the more Star Wars.
I even liked the Jedi Grand Masters Jedi Starfighter, which happens to look exactly like the toy Jedi Starfighter they sold from Attack of the Clones (it had two panels you could remove from the sides to make a slimmer version with more guns).

Low Points : There's a story here, and it's more than the original season one episode The Duel, which this continues from, but there's not much of one. It hints at the Ronin perhaps during his Sith days being responsible for the injuries to the Jedi Grand Master. But if the Jedi Grand Master is this powerful, then how did the Ronin beat him? It's also suggested that the Grand Master has fallen to the dark side as he is seeking revenge for his injuries, and his constant insane grin definitely leads credence to this, which would also explain how he has increased in power. But there's an interesting story there, of a fallen Jedi managing to hide his fall by hunting Sith in revenge, but we don't get any of that.
And in the original episode I mentioned that I didn't like the animation style. Well I still don't, and in fact I dislike it even more this time as it's obviously fake. They've animated the story, and then added a fliter which looks like pencil shading on top, to make it look hand drawn. But it look so false, there's scenes where everything is still, except for the pencil shading moving as if it's been drawn on for every frame, even though if you were just keeping everything still, you'd just reuse the same frame, and if you were doing similar frames to show someone standing still, so were drawing in the shading, everything else would move slightly as well and wouldn't be exactly the same.
Maybe it was like this in the original episode, but my attention was drawn more to it this time round.

So what do you really think ? : The episode is fine, but it's just a series of fights, done in a fairly annoying animation style. I really don't know why there was a call for a sequel to The Duel, it kind of said all it needed to say, but for some reason they made this, and it's about as uninteresting as the original. Some nice stuff but the original was interesting mainly for being very different to anything we'd seen in Star Wars before, and this one is just more of that, so loses the originality.

Final Words : So we're back to Visions, and we've got 3 sequels (and a spin off series coming) from the first season, and 6 new stories. Visions has always been interesting for bringing us other nations and cultures versions of Star Wars, but they seem to have gone back to the same sources this time, so the originality and different stories we had from the first two seasons isn't really going to be there this time. But that said, there's lots of stories to be told, so perhaps we will get something really new and interesting this season, we shall see.

Score : 7.5/10

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