Summary
Extraordinary visuals help to get the second volume of Star Wars: Visions off to a fine start, with an episode that finds a new angle from which to approach the franchise’s moral duality.
This recap of Star Wars: Visions Season 2 Episode 1, “Sith”, contains spoilers.
The extraordinary painterly aesthetic of “Sith” is reason enough to watch the episode, and perhaps the second season of Star Wars: Visions in its entirety. In a franchise now shepherded by Disney, rendered as clean and sanitized for mass-market consumption as possible, there is no better way to celebrate May the fourth than with a bit of Star Wars storytelling that lets the paint splotches show.
Star Wars: Visions Season 2 Episode 1 Recap
The creation of art, the manipulation of color, and aesthetic beauty are all essential to “Sith”, both in terms of its visuals, but also its plot, which revolves around a woman, a Force-user with hair like Rogue from X-Men and a droid named E2, living in isolation and daubing the walls of a remote planet with beauty.
Is Lola the Sith?
When one of the planet’s beacons is deliberately sabotaged, the woman, Lola, heads out to investigate. The culprit is a hulking Sith lord, part alien, part machine. His dark and towering physique represents the past, and the one-sidedness of Star Wars’s essential moral conundrum. Light, and dark. Good, and evil.
But Lola’s story is about the balance that can be achieved between those things. The “twist” of the episode, so to speak, is that she’s not a noble Jedi Knight on the run from evil, but a former Sith apprentice on the run from her own master – and to some extent herself.
READ: Which Episodes of Star Wars: Visions Season 2 are Canon?
There are always two Sith, which is a pretty established in-universe rule, but Lola isn’t interested in being the master or the apprentice. When she tries to flee, though, she’s forced to fight, with a yellow, slightly bent lightsaber she has made herself.
Star Wars: Visions Season 2 Episode 1 Ending Explained
The two duel in front of the artwork. By embracing the darkness and the light within her, which manifest as two differently coloured sides of her lightsaber, Lola is able to strike down her former master without losing herself.
In the aftermath of the battle, Lola fixes up E2, who was damaged, and the two leave the planet together for pastures new.
A Sith finding color and beauty in the light is fairly new territory for Star Wars, and the expressive, living-painting visuals of this short are breathtaking.
You can stream Star Wars: Visions Season 2 Episode 1, “Sith”, exclusively on Disney+.
