The Ninth Jedi, Episode 5: The Storm of Violence

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SSW270: Kara’s lightsaber turns red at the end of this one, and none of the three panelists saw it coming.

Season 1, Episode 5 of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi is “The Storm of Violence.” Jeff Haecker, Thomas Salerno, and Kathryn Laffrey take on the darkest turn of the series so far. Thomas expected a quiet, grieving episode. He got a firebombed village and a Jedi who cuts her way to a starship’s bridge.

Kara has been hiding on a forest world, living in a hut at the edge of a village of gentle aliens who keep bringing her fruit. Then Nawaam‘s hunters find her. They bomb the village, and Kara answers with a stolen speeder bike, a leap onto the ship, and a lightsaber through the hull.

So when did she fall? Jeff says it was the moment she drove her blade into the captain after he dropped his weapon and begged for mercy. He was no threat by then, and she had other choices. Thomas counters that she had already cut down a lot of the crew, with the blade still green, and that her smile as she tells the villagers “I killed them all” is the most chilling moment of the episode. Kathryn calls it what it looks like: Anakin among the Tusken Raiders, down to the speeder bike.

Kathryn also sees the bookends. The episode opens with Nawaam cutting down an army with no feeling at all, like knocking down bowling pins, and closes with Kara doing the same thing out of rage. If she learned anything in the last episode, Thomas says, it’s that giving in to her emotions won’t beat Nawaam, and she will have to deal with this before she faces him again.

Thomas finds a scriptural echo in Moses, who kills a man and flees, and Jeff brings in the question of mercy toward someone who can no longer harm anyone.

Elsewhere: Gennoh wakes up as a cyborg and still can’t work out what Nawaam is, if not a Jedi or a Sith; Nawaam thanks his workers instead of killing them, sets his mobile fortress toward Hy Izlan in search of one giant kyber crystal, and leaves the helmet behind for good. Homen pulls the oldest trick in the book to lose a Jedi hunter, and the hunters Eht and Bee-Toh take the villager Eesha hostage to force Kara out.

Kathryn thinks the series leans too hard on callbacks to the rest of Star Wars. Thomas loves the villagers’ design and the way Kara’s fall was handled. All three wonder how much time has really passed, and what Kara does now that her own lightsaber has called her a Sith.

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