Tales of the Underworld Fails To Improve Its Story
Tales of the Underworld didn’t stick the landing. The second part—the Cad Bane part—is not nearly as good as Asajj’s section. The action isn’t as interesting, dynamic, or even as intense. Lightsaber fights are just way cooler than blaster standoffs unless you try really, really hard. And they clearly didn’t.
But the actual issue is the plot. It manages to be good for the first section, while Cad is still a kid. You can see how he starts down the life path he does. He and his friend—basically his family—are literally starving, forced to dart from garbage can to garbage can to find anything edible. It’s actually amazing they have the energy to even run as much as they do. And no one seems to even want to help them. So, of course, they don’t fully understand what this person paying them could lead to. They know enough to be wary, but the two of them respond to it in very different ways. And, absolute credit to the animation, the slow divide between Cad and his friend is handled very naturally, presented without much actual dialog, just small moments.
The Opening Part Has Most Of The Best Moments
But then the story falls hard. Episode two is much, much worse. Once again, a character in Tales of the Underworld goes to a place and immediately finds the person they’re looking for. Even a short scene, with one clue, would’ve made it work better. And then, somehow, the dialog even becomes too convenient—and never recovers. Almost every line is either hardcore hinting at the one “twist,” or just openly talking about how concerned they are about Bane.
And that twist is arguably the first of only two effective things in this story. A trail of connecting acts of vengeance is fine as a narrative, but it’s not satisfying without more underlying it. They felt staged. The only reason the fights held narrative weight at all was I was interested in how Bane continuously destroys stuff around him every time he fires a shot, and he doesn’t stop long enough to even process what happened. That tells me something about his character. That tells me something about what drives him.
Tales Of The Underworld Does Establish Bane Well
And that segues into the second thing that works in this story. I don’t need to know a lot of backstory to watch this section of Tales of the Underworld. I don’t need to have seen Clone Wars. There are gaps, of course, for the sake of runtime—but it doesn’t make me feel like I missed anything important. Sure, I would be curious to see Cad learn to be a criminal. Learn to be so good at shooting. Heck, I wouldn’t have minded a scene or two with him in prison just to see what happened there. But you get enough information just from these episodes.
Don’t be mistaken, though. This section of Tales of the Underworld is still almost unfixably flawed. I can easily slam back into negativity to round this out. There are lots of boring moments and bad dialog. It’s awkwardly paced in so many spots. There’s a lot of showing and not a lot of telling with the very little worldbuilding we get. And, to top it all off, Tales of the Underworld fridges the only major female character and kills the only Black character. It’s only about forty-five minutes of content, and somehow it manages to do both of those tropes. Of the various “Tales Of” series sections, this is by far the worst one.
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