Another May 4th went by (a while ago now, admittedly) and with it was another pack of six animated shorts that fill in continuity gaps! This time we answer “how was Asajj Ventress alive in the Bad Batch?” and then throw in “What is Cad Bane’s origin story?”, which is admittedly not a gap that needed filling in, but it was a fun 40-ish minutes so why not? Let’s take a look!
The Asajj Ventress story starts with her corpse being tearfully placed in a Dathomir pit by Quinlan Vos and Obi-Wan in a scene that must have confused the hell out of anyone who followed the Clone Wars cartoon but didn’t read the book “Dark Disciple”, or at least heard about what happened in it (basically Quinlan and Asajj fell in love but while Quinlan starting veering towards the darkside he was pulled back after Asajj sacrificed herself) We see that in some sort of Dathomirian afterlife… thing the ghost of Mother Talzin tells Asajj that she can return to her body and resurrect herself thanks to the emotional bond she has created with Quinlan but to do so she must “sacrifice her heart’s desire”, which I assumed meant her love for Quinlan, but that doesn’t seem to be the case as the story goes on and she starts to search for him… Well, anyway, alive and well and now in the early Imperial era Asajj becomes a bodyguard at a spaceport and ends up giving that job up to save a kid called Lyco Strata when he is outed to the Empire for being a former Jedi Padawan by the spaceport receptionist. She fights off an Inquisitor and then the two spend Episode 2 helping old bounty hunter acquaintances of Asajj’s steal an “Imperial Shield Relay Unit” in exchange for info on the Path, the group of people helping ex-Jedi go into hiding.
Preparing for a fight… not against the old Battledroids in the background, for the record.
The heist goes wrong (and includes a fun set piece involving being inside the large rolling Relay Unit) so the bounty hunters also try and sell Lyco off but Asajj stops them. This then leads to Episode 3 where the two find a desert planet with links to the Path but end up encountering an old soldier who was formally on the Separatist side of the Clone Wars and has gone all closed in and hating on the local species who he thinks are stealing his and his daughter’s drinking water… I’ll leave it there for the spoiler section, not that it’s massively interesting or hard to predict (well, the old Separatist storyline part anyway…)
Then we get the Cad Bane flashback, which starts with Cad (then called Colby) and his friend Niro surviving on the harsh streets of Duro before meeting a cowboy gunslinger type gangster called Lazlo who gets them to do some jobs for him. Eventually they help them rob a casino and Niro is caught while Colby escapes with Lazlo and his crew. In Episode 2 we flash forward from there to when Colby is now going by Cad Bane and has modelled himself after Lazlo, and now has a girlfriend called Arin. They return to Duro because Lazlo was killed by the Marshall there and Cad wants revenge, which he eventually gets when he confronts and kills the Marshall responsible, but in doing so he confronts Niro, who was now the deputy Marshall and during the standoff Arin is hurt in the crossfire. Cad is arrested to end the episode.
It’s Cad Bane! The animated (and once Live Action) gift that keeps on killing… I mean, giving. Wait, no, killing. That’s the one.
That leads to Episode 3 (of the Cad storyline) where after a few years in prison Cad returns to Duro this time to get revenge on Niro, who had settled down with Arin. The two have a child called Isaac but all is not as straight forward as it seems…
Overall Thoughts:
Another nameless / rankless Inquisitor appears before Asajj. How many of these twisted Darkside users did they create?!
Both storylines are fun little chunks of Star Wars. Obviously the Asajj Ventress stuff is more important in the long run but there is at least a little plot thread that could be pulled down the line with Cad Bane. Overall, given the short runtime, you could do a lot worse than settle down with these, but if you’re not super into the wider lore you can easily skip them.
The end of the Asajj story sees Lyco communicate with the locals via the Force and create peace between the two sides and then find the Path ship that was taking Force Sensitives off to another place, but he decides to follow Asajj instead, much to Asajj’s surprise (and hidden delight).
Just when you thought Cad Bane couldn’t get any more Western-ised, here you go!
As for Cad Bane? Despite all the pleading, the fact Arin is already dead and the fact that Niro’s “son” is right there Cad kills Niro dead on the street in front of Isaac, who is clearly the son of Cad Bane and Arin and Niro was just looking after his old friend’s family. Whether Cad realises this or not is not directly stated, but if he does realise he’s so far gone that he doesn’t care…
Hogan Reviews 