TV Review - The Characters of Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane Are Expanded Upon in "Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld"

Today is May the 4th, 2025 (as in May the Fourth Be with You) and that means Lucasfilm’s latest series of animated shorts Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld is now available to stream on Disney+. Below are my thoughts on this new release from A Galaxy Far, Far Away.

In 2022 and 2024 respectively, Lucasfilm and Disney+ released Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire, which are both miniseries of six animated shorts zooming in on some of the supporting characters from A Galaxy Far, Far Away, such as Count Dooku from the prequel trilogy and Morgan Elsbeth from the “Mandoverse." Now that tradition continues with Tales of the Underworld, giving us half a dozen adventures (across three episodes each) with the characters of Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane, both originally from the acclaimed Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series. Created by Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni (Star Wars: Ahsoka), these Tales of installments offer the opportunity to spend some time with characters who wouldn’t otherwise be given the spotlight, and here a couple fan-favorites get that chance.

When Asajj Ventress (voiced, as always, by actress Nika Futterman) popped up in the third and final season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, devotees of the multimedia franchise were left scratching their heads regarding how she managed to survive the events of the novel Star Wars: Dark Disciple, and the first episode of Tales of the Underworld (shown in its entirety during the Lucasfilm Animation 20th Anniversary panel at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Japan) kicks off by dealing directly with that bit of discontinuity. Then we check in on what the Dathomirian Nightsister / former Sith assassin / bounty hunter is up to post-resurrection, and mostly she’s trying to keep her head down and herself out of trouble. But when an escaped Jedi Padawan named Lyco Strata– on the run from the evil Galactic Empire after Order 66 brought an end to the Jedi Order– stumbles into her life, Ventress finds herself trying to help the Padawan track down the underground network known as The Path (first seen in Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Along the way, Asajj and Lyco encounter an Inquisitor, double-crossing smugglers, and various other friends, foes, and obstacles. I thought this first batch of episodes was just okay, considering I just don’t have a lot of investment in Asajj Ventress as a character– I keep meaning to read Dark Disciple, but haven’t found the time just yet. From what I have seen of her in The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch, and some of Lucasfilm Publishing’s other output, she hasn’t grabbed onto me as a character so far, and that trend continued here. Story-wise I was also left a little cold by these outings, as though there wasn't enough forward momentum along Ventress’s own path, and the conclusion felt a bit too open-ended… almost as though Filoni and company have more plans for Asajj down the line.

The bounty hunter Cad Bane is a slightly different story for me. His design (influenced heavily by spaghetti-western filmmaker Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) has always been appealing and up until now I don’t believe we’ve been given his backstory, so I was intrigued by that possibility. And indeed there’s a lot more western influence– along with film-noir gangster pictures– in this trilogy, as we travel back to Bane’s (then called Colby, voiced by AJ LoCascio as a youth) inner-city childhood as a street-rat ruffian, until getting mixed up with a familiar-looking outlaw named Lazlo (Philip Anthony-Rodriguez) separates him from his only friend Niro (Eric Lopez). Those two pals grow up to be on opposite sides of the law, with adult Cad Bane (Corey Burton) going into a life of crime, while Niro (Artt Butler) becomes a sheriff’s deputy and eventually sheriff of their home neighborhood himself.

I did a little research with the help of a cinephile friend, and I believe this plot pays homage to the 1973 Sam Peckipah movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid– a film that I admittedly have not seen– but like I said there’s a lot of cinematic influence at play here, which is not unusual for Dave Filoni specifically or Star Wars in general. It also makes perfect sense that Cad Bane’s backstory is a semi-tragic one, though I imagine some fans will be at least a little disappointed that Tales of the Underworld didn’t fill in a different part of his narrative instead: namely the part of his life when he was training Boba Fett to be a better, more ruthless bounty hunter, which would have been depicted in an infamously uncompleted and unreleased arc of The Clone Wars. Still, there’s a good amount to chew on here and I’d say Bane deserved to get a little more depth added to his character, especially after his live-action death in Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett. So ultimately my opinion is that the back half of this miniseries is stronger than the front, but in general I would want future installments in the Tales of series to feel a little less disposable and a little more consequential.

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld is now viewable in its entirety, exclusively via Disney+.