The Many Lives of Asajj Ventress

Or, at least, rest enough.

“Harbinger,” the ninth episode of The Bad Batch’s third and final season, presents us with an Asajj filled with many questions, but little in the way of answers. She is alive once more—and even jokes to the Batch at one point that she has a few more lives left in her still—and once again operating in the world of hunters and bounties. But something has changed in Ventress as we see her cross paths with the Clones and Omega on Pabu. A survivor of the Rise of the Empire thus far, this is no longer a woman consumed by vengeance, pushed and pulled by the machinations of sides seeking to manipulate her: this is, at last, a Ventress who has made her own path, free from the clutches of galactic events, and content to live her life in shadows of her own making.

And yet, it’s also a Ventress that we see coalescing all those lessons of her past into a character of balance. She is still a furious warrior in her own right, but she’s also a woman who uses her connection to the Force to understand, rather than dominate. In testing Omega’s own Force sensitivity, we see both the legacy of the Jedi training that shaped her early life, and the sharp senses that honed her career as an assassin—and beyond that, a personal sense of justice that sees her willing to try and protect Omega from her own potential future, in the name of keeping her close to the people that care for her the most.

All it took was a lifetime of changed hands, of deaths and rebirths both literal and philosophical, but at long last Asajj Ventress has found a path of her own choosing—one that leaves her Star Wars future wide open and brimming with potential once more.