Screenshot: Lucasfilm
Ultimately though, all these issues come down to a singular question: is Tales making effective use of the anthology format, four stories in? The answer feels increasingly like “no.” Part of this might just be a character selection issue—of all four characters in either Tales series so far, Barriss is really the only character we didn’t know the future fate of (Ahsoka in Jedi, of course, we knew would go on and on across Star Wars continuity, but we still knew the direction she was going in around the context of her episodes), and Barriss is ultimately the only character the series did something particularly interesting with.
But regardless of that, each character Tales focuses on gets about 40 minutes of airtime, and even that has to be parceled between three delineated episodes of 10-15 minutes each. The window to effectively communicate an individual story in each of those slots, and have them build an arc over all three of them, is an incredibly fraught tightrope to walk—and it’s arguable that beyond Barriss in Empire, the series hasn’t really effectively been able to add something meaningful to the stories of the other character’s it’s played with.
Not every Star Wars story has to be strictly definitive. The series is often at its best, perhaps, when there are gaps left open for new stories to be told, for interpretation on the part of its audience. But there’s a difference between that and a vagueness brought about by ineffective use of form and pacing. There’s also something to be said that while it’s good that there’s room for more to be said about these characters, Star Wars only really gets one chance to tell these stories for the first time—and if they’re so hampered by the form they’re being told in, were they really worth telling like that in the first place?
It’s not like Star Wars doesn’t work in an anthology format, either—Star Wars Visions is a perfect of example of the series taking the idea and running with it. But if Tales is going to become a regular entity for Star Wars animation, whether it finds new institutions to build stories around beyond the Jedi Order and the Empire, or returns to revisit those settings with more characters, it needs to find a better way to use its time—whether that’s focusing on just one character instead of two, or freeing itself from needing to be quasi-episodic, or going for depth rather than breadth. Whatever it decides, with Jedi and Empire now under its belt, something needs to change.
Star Wars: Tales of the Empire is streaming on Disney+.