Star Wars: Visions: Season 3: Episode 8: The Bird of Paradise
What is it ? : A Jedi Padawan, Nakime, fights a Sith, Aman, while Aman taunts her for being unprepared. Nakime's Master joins the fight, and using this as a distraction, Nakime gets her droid, Daruma, to launch her into the air. However, Aman is ready for this and slashes her across the eyes, causing her to tumble down a cliffside.
Nakime awakens to find herself blind, sensing partially through the force, and through her other senses she locates her lightsaber, but it won't work and she casts it aside, causing it's Kyber Crystal to fall from it's housing.
Nakime explores the forest, thinking she senses someone, but it turns out to be a statue. She ventures further into the forest, and can feel rain on her hand, sensing the raindrops landing all around her confuses her awareness of the environment and she stumbles into a pond, which she drinks from, but becomes violently ill.
She awakens and speaks to a frog spirit which tells her to meditate under a waterfall, which she does. She gets a vision of facing off against Aman once again, and as the two fight, Nakime becomes aware that she's not fighting the Sith, but an aspect of herself, the impulsiveness and immaturity that caused her to ignore her master and strike at Aman which led to her current situation.
Accepting this she allows the vision of Aman to strike her with it's lightsaber, and the two fade away as Nakime accepts that part of herself.
She awakens in the water, and walks once again, thanking the statue as she passes it by, and climbing to a cliff face where she opens her eyes and looks into the sunrise. . . .
High Points : It's a really interesting attempt at showing us via the medium of vision the world as seen by someone who has been blinded but has extrasensory perception such as sensing the Force. We see things she touches become visible, as the rain falls the world she can see just becomes rain falling and splashing on the ground to the exclusion of everything else.
It's also pretty interesting that the whole thing can be looked at as a hallucination caused by drinking bad water from the pond she encounters. The frog spirit and the fight against Aman all happen afterwards, and she awakens in a pool of water.
I was also very taken by the way that her story is broken down into days, that we're told that this entire story takes place over 5 days, with each having it's own title card and name.
Low Points : But for all the way it's nicely presented, and has some really interesting ideas in it, it's not really that interesting to watch. The dreamlike quality makes it drag and makes it difficult to understand, and I just found myself wondering what happened to her droid and master, why did they leave her to wander in the wilderness for 5 days, she'd only fallen a short distance and was easily visible from where they were fighting. In reality did Aman kill the master and destroy the droid and just leave a blinded Padawan to just die in the wilderness?
So what do you really think ? : As said above, I found it very interesting. And that makes a lot of what Visions episodes are all about, trying something different and letting us see stories we've never seen before in Star Wars. And this is very much one of those, we've never seen the world from the point of view of a blinded Jedi, and we've never seen someone hallucinate and come to wisdom through that.
And to tell the truth, the blindness only being temporary was nice, as another Zatoichi like Jedi was the last thing we needed, and having a happy ending was nice.
Final Words : I was really torn on this, while it's a unique and interesting story, it's slow and confusing. So while I want to score it highly for telling the kind of story that Visions was intended to tell, but I really found it difficult to enjoy, Nakime was annoying (which again was kind of the point until she realises she's fighting against her own bad traits). So it makes an episode which I'll probably talk about a lot in the future, but I probably won't recommend or watch again.
Score : 8.5/10
Comments made about this Article!
|
06/Nov/2025 13:09:42
|
Posted by josejay00@gmail.com
|
|
|
I did like the visual displays. In some ways, it makes me think this is how blinded Jedi - like Rahm Kota, Kanan Jarrus, and Zao - or Miraluka Jedi like Shoaneb Culu see. I also wonder if this kind of represents how Daredevil sees.
There's one thing about Nakimé that doesn't make sense to me, and it applies to Kanan as well. We have a few Jedi who were slashed across the eyes by a lightsaber. Considering its cutting power, you'd think the victim would have their eyes destroyed. Rahm Kota is the only one whom we see that happen to, as he wore a band across his eyes afterwards. But with Kanan and Nakimé, they open their eyelids, and we see their eyes. You can tell they're blind, but their eyes were still there. You'd think they'd be destroyed, or that their eyelids were seared shut. So what gives?
After the battle, it seemed to shift into the more metaphorical or figurative than reality. By that, I mean we see her go through the journey. Was she really physically doing that? Or was it her spirit that was making the journey? In other words, she died, and her spirit was currently in limbo until she resolved her issues. Then she could pass on to the light or become part of the chaos. It was as if she walked through the land of the dead to come back to life - sort of like what Jacen did in Traitor.
And the ending, was she still physically blind, or did her eyes actually heal like Kanan's did right before he died?
And I didn't even think about the fates of her Master, the droid, or Aman until you mentioned it. And now that I think about it, the ending did leave a large plot hole unresolved. Maybe they could have worked on that before finishing it.
|
|
|
07/Nov/2025 08:49:44
|
Posted by Freddy
|
|
|
For the lack of visible scarring, I'd guess the animators just didn't want to show the horrific damage a lightsaber would do to someone's face. For Nakime, I think the damage was light, as my interpretation is that she did recover her vision at the end, although it could have just been her standing looking at the sunrise and feeling it's warmth on her skin rather than her appreciating it's beauty.
I really took most of the episode to be like a bad trip she was having. She drank stagnant water, which gave her a fever and hallucinations, as it's only after this she sees the magical frog (why do so many representations of drug trips involve frogs?), and while she came to a revelation about herself in this state (as many people do when on hallucinogens), and while this might have been enhanced by her connection to the force (someone who already has a sixth sense has their perceptions opened further by the trip), I do think the entire middle portion of the episode just happens in her head rather than her questing into the land of the dead or other realms.
|
|
