The Ninth Jedi, Episode 3: Voice from the Past

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SSW268: A holo recording changes who the villain is.

Kara has spent three episodes carrying the idea that her father murdered his master in cold blood. The footage she finds in the hold of a derelict ship on Bibin shows Reno Tsutara igniting his blade and going after Zhima once the argument was already over, and it reaches her about a minute after she has started accepting the worse version.

Season 1, Episode 3 of the Disney+ series The Ninth Jedi, part of Star Wars: Visions Presents, is called “Voice from the Past,” and the title works two ways. There is a literal recording. There is also Lady Tafflah, who watched all of it happen and has been telling the wrong story ever since.

Thomas Salerno, Jeff Haecker, and Kathryn Laffrey start with the disaster, because it is a good one. The Kyber cannon misses the mining ship, grazes Bibin’s atmosphere, tears a hole in the gas giant the moon orbits, and shakes the asteroid ring loose. Rock starts falling. Thomas likes it as a planet-killer that runs on orbital mechanics rather than a beam wide enough to crack a world, and Jeff notes that The Expanse built a whole season out of the same physics.

Kathryn spots the Lord of the Rings shape again, with the dwarves rescuing the elves this time, and Jeff backs it up off the character design.

Then the flashback. Reno gathered Padawans on Bibin and rebuilt a Jedi order in a galaxy that had no Republic and no Empire left. He sent Zhima out to hunt the last of the Sith, kept the trade and diplomacy for himself, and the two of them fell out over Jedi in politics. They dueled, Zhima’s blade flashed red, and Tafflah banned the Jedi and dissolved the order.

The panel keeps landing on Palpatine, and Kathryn sharpens it into the episode’s best line: Reno is the better version, because he disguised himself as a Jedi. The carbonite hold is the receipt. His trade rivals are still down there, frozen well past the point the process would have kept them alive, and the panel reads him as a mob boss keeping leverage rather than a man tidying up.

Nawaam gets his own argument. He does not talk like a Sith, he does not rage when the cannon backfires and takes out half his control room, and his lightsaber is not red, which is why the discussion keeps reaching for Baylan Skoll from Ahsoka and the Stranger from The Acolyte rather than for Sidious.

Also in this one: the World War II radial engine bolted onto the Kyber cannon, Kara’s saber shifting between clear, blue, and green depending on what she is feeling, an underemployed droid called 99-99, and why “e chu ta” beats “dank farrik.”

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