Nine from Outer Space

The Ninth Jedi Official Trailer Is Here!

Star Wars: Visions Vol 1 -3 successfully showed, I think, two things.

One is that Star Wars can be creatively unlocked from canon without breaking anything. The aesthetic is so rich and realized that it can be used as paint to dip a thousand brushes in.

The other is that some elements of Star Wars seem near-universal: a helpful droid, the battle between light and dark, family dynamics, twins in conflict, Masters and Apprentices. Some Visions felt like they hewed very closely to the known and were simply reskinned avatars; and some Visions felt like they merely inserted Star Wars iconography into an impulse that bore passing resemblance to the core concepts.

That’s what made Visions great. It was a burst of impulses.

But one Vision duology - The Ninth Jedi and Children of Hope (which I wrote about here) - stood out as seeming to just scratch the surface of their characters’ and concepts’ possibilities.

Which is why it’s so thrilling that The Ninth Jedi is becoming a limited series, beginning in just about a month: August 5th.

There’s lots to be excited about in the trailer, which was released yesterday. Some of it familiar: a young naive hero facing down a villain in a dark mask. I found the first short more compelling than the second because it’s follow-up felt a little more conventional (even if both have outstanding visual verve); so I’m intrigued to see where this limited series winds up on that scale. There’s room here to really let loose. Will it?

The story starts with this idea that the Jedi and Sith have disappeared, but, I don’t know? I’m looking at a lot of Jedi vs Sith action! So is the idea that the Jedi and Sith were gone for millennia and this is their reemergence? And, I’m curious if the intention here is that this takes place in the far future of the existing timeline - if this is, in fact, intended to be canonical - or if this is Star Wars in an alternate history entirely. (I assume that’s so, but I’ve read reports that imply otherwise!)

But of course, richest part of The Ninth Jedi lore is how lightsabers respond to character or intention. Kyber Crystals as mood rings, responding to the soul of the wielder, has already proven to be such a loaded concept, it made us all collectively gasp at the end of the first short. The trailer implies the concept will be fully employed to surprise us even further. That’s good news.

The other good news is that there’s so much mysterious about this series. Star Wars is rife with filling-in-the-blanks out-of-order storytelling that can strain to create a sense of mystery. We often know where any given character is on timeline, in which era they live, and how much of the galaxy they can really impact with their actions. Colonel Ward may not know what the Imperial Remnant is planning, but we do: The First Order will emerge and eventually decimate the New Republic. The clones in the Clone Wars may not know that they’re fighting for what will eventually be the Empire, but we do: we see the train coming down the tracks before Commando Cody. Anakin Skywalker might not suspect Palpatine is up to something, but we know for certain he’s a villain. That has its own dramatic tension - we get to see how things play out, and sometimes that surprises us (Anakin was a VIRGIN BIRTH?) but mostly we’re along for the ride that’s on rails, confirming theories or dispelling them.

Stories like The Ninth Jedi have the potential to solve that dramatic problem: the thrust us into the unknown. It’s why I’m more excited to watch this than I was the excellent Maul - Shadow Lord. I’ve spent a lot of time with Maul, I’ve seen his birth and I’ve seen his death. Not so much with Kara, whose story remains a Hidden Fortress.

So! What do you think of the trailer? Do you hope we get more limited series inspired by Visions, or is this a test case for you? If you could pick out another of the Visions shorts and expand it into a larger story, which would it be? Is it Black? It’s Black, isn’t it?