Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi

The Ninth Jedi released August 5, 2026, a Lucasfilm and Studio I.G. collaboration expanding one of the Star Wars Visions shorts into a full mini-series. It exists in its own corner of the galaxy, disconnected from the Skywalker saga, free to tell its own story. It starts genuinely strong, then trips over itself hard by the finish.

The original Visions short established Margrave Juro’s call to the galaxy’s masterless Jedi, hoping to rebuild the Order. Sabersmith Lah Zhima built a set of lightsabers to arm that effort and sent his daughter, Kara, to deliver them, only for him to get captured by bounty hunters along the way. Kara escapes, delivers the sabers, and helps beat back a Sith assault. The Jedi win, but their numbers are thin: Juro, Homen, Ethan, and now Kara. Juro promises to help save her father while continuing to rebuild the Order.

The series picks up from there, expanding the world and the cast while keeping Kara’s core mission intact: save her father. We now learn who took him. General Nawaam, commanding one of the galaxy’s largest military forces, wants the remaining Jedi wiped out and has captured Zhima specifically for his expertise with kyber crystals, aiming to build a weapon that cements Nawaam as the most powerful force in the galaxy. Our heroes now have three jobs: rescue Zhima, recruit more Jedi, and stop Nawaam’s bid for conquest.

This show is genuinely odd to talk about, because a lot of what it does well is really well done, and then it makes strange choices and lands on a villain that undercuts the whole thing.

Episodes one through three are great. Genuinely great. Visiting former students who trained under Juro but never became full Jedi because their master was killed makes for compelling episode structure, building real mystery around who that master was and who killed him. The plot goes somewhere I only partially predicted, either the master was secretly evil and the apprentice was justified, or the apprentice was evil and is probably Nawaam himself. Learning that Kara’s own father killed his master caught me off guard and hooked me completely. Episode three, where Kara learns the full story and we get the actual fight between Zhima and his master, is genuinely gripping, including a great visual beat where his lightsaber’s color shifts mid-fight.

Unfortunately, all that momentum starts collapsing in episode four, once Nawaam and the heroes finally meet. Zhima’s blade turned silver during that earlier fight, representing a state of total emotional nothingness, a flow state free of distraction. Nawaam, a padawan who witnessed that, spent his life chasing the same state, believing “nothingness” is the truest form of power in the Force, above both Jedi and Sith. It’s reaching for grey-Jedi territory, and it lands worse than that, playing like a fourteen-year-old’s edgelord OC: better than the Jedi and Sith because he feels nothing, unmatched with a lightsaber, commanding the biggest army in the galaxy, wouldn’t care if his mom grounded him because nothing gets to him, just like me, I don’t care either. The delivery makes it worse: flat, monotone line reads that drain any remaining tension from the character. He’s the main antagonist, the entire back half’s obstacle, and you end up rooting for the heroes mainly so he’ll leave the screen. Nothing to empathize with, nothing pulling you forward with him in the picture.

Kara gets a brief dark-side flirtation that’s handled reasonably well, though it also funnels into the same nothingness concept. In the finale, fighting Nawaam, her blade returns to a traditional green as she calls out the whole “state of nothingness” as a hollow justification hiding real motives underneath. Nawaam’s saber turns red in response, confirming his actions were simply evil all along. Decent idea on paper. It doesn’t land with the weight it’s clearly going for.

Animation swings between genuinely well done and shots that look stretched and low-resolution. Most of it holds up fine. What I can’t fully pin on the animation or the story alone is how, as the season progresses, this stops feeling like Star Wars and starts feeling like generic space fantasy. Ship design is a big part of that; nothing here reads as an X-wing, Y-wing, or any TIE variant with the specific silhouette language Star Wars ships carry. Alien designs lean into straight fantasy archetypes too, dwarf-coded asteroid miners, elf-coded blue-skinned species. By the end, lightsabers get handed out fast enough that it feels engineered to hit the “nine Jedi” of the title rather than earned.

The biggest problem, though, is the music. It sounds like the most generic, royalty-free take on Star Wars scoring imaginable, thin enough to feel like a fan project rather than something Lucasfilm actually backed. John Williams set an impossibly high bar, sure, but Ludwig Göransson’s work on The Mandalorian proves you don’t have to just imitate him to succeed. Some cues here genuinely sound MIDI. It’s bad.

This didn’t have to turn out this way. I can picture a recut with a real score and a less monotone Nawaam performance that would elevate this considerably. Nearly every piece needed for a great show is already here. Swap the villain for someone genuinely interesting instead of a walking Death Star metaphor, and this could have been an easy 9. As released, 6.5 out of 10. A decent mini-series. Not worth a Disney+ subscription on its own.