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SSW269: Juro dies in this one, and the panel saw it coming.

Thomas guessed it from a Disney+ thumbnail. The art for the final episode shows the whole crew in a group hug, and Juro isn’t in it. By the time Nawaam‘s ships plow into the asteroid fleet, all three hosts had the old master marked.

Season 1, Episode 4 of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi is “Nawaam Attacks,” the halfway point of the 8-episode Disney+ series. Thomas Salerno, Jeff Haecker, and Kathryn Laffrey take it apart.

It’s a messier death than Obi-Wan’s. Juro jumps in to protect Kara, she’s standing right beside him, and Nawaam finds the opening. Then he tells her so to her face. Thomas expects that guilt to shape the rest of her story, and Kathryn points to the slow shot of the blade reflected in Kara’s eyes as the moment it lands.

Then the helmet breaks. Nawaam is a young man, closer to Kylo Ren or the Stranger from The Acolyte than to Palpatine, and he was a boy, maybe 10 by the panel’s guess, when he watched Lah Zhima strike down his master. His eyes are gray and empty. Kathryn connects that to an old story about a crusader who recognized the devil because his eyes reflected nothing.

So what does Nawaam want? Nothingness. Thomas hears the prequel Jedi ideal of detachment cranked up until it swallows every feeling, and wonders if it’s armor over a traumatized kid. Kathryn brings in director Kenji Kamiyama‘s own explanation: because Nawaam uses the dark side for the benefit of others, he remains, in a sense, a Jedi. To Catholic ears, the panel says, the means count as much as the end, and Thomas calls it the old excuse that the ends justify the means.

Jeff has a smaller complaint about the series as a whole. At 8 episodes there isn’t room to build attachment the way Rebels or The Clone Wars did, so the characters work as archetypes: Juro is the master, Kara the hero. Kathryn needed no more than that. Juro looked enough like King Théoden that she felt she knew him the moment she saw him.

Kathryn also has trouble with the backstory. A child who only watched the duel decides he wants that path? Her comparison is a kid who learns his baseball hero was on steroids and decides to start doping.

Also here: Zhima sitting in a cell he could have left whenever he liked, the silver blade he swore he’d never draw again, Nawaam walking off with Juro’s saber, 99-99 finally getting in on the action, the medieval border office that gave Juro the title of margrave, and the white ribbon on Kara’s costume that nobody on the panel can explain. Kathryn would love to hear from anyone who knows what it means.

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