The Many Lives of Asajj Ventress
It’s been 16 years since Asajj Ventress stalked her way into Star Wars canon—five years after her actual debut, in 2003's Star Wars: Clone Wars—and the Clone Wars 3DCG series. Since then, she has walked many paths along the road to the one we found her in this week, when she returned in The Bad Batch for a new chapter of her life. As one of the most fascinating—and long lived—veterans of the Clone War, her new life presents a chance to look back at the chapters that shaped her.
Slave
Ventress was born on Dathomir to the Nightsisters that called the world home (or perhaps, as we now know more accurately after Ahsoka, a second home within Star Wars’ primary galaxy), but she was not raised among them. While still a child, Ventress was part of a deal between the Nightsister matriarch Mother Talzin and a crime lord named Hal’Sted—exchanging Asajj into a life of slavery for peace between the Nightsisters and Hal’Sted’s forces. Brought to Rattatak, Ventress was torn away from the home she never knew—and given a gilded cage in Hal’Sted’s protection from the world’s tumultuous warring factions.
Apprentice
But Hal’Sted couldn’t protect Ventress for long. Killed during a raid on his holdings by rival pirates, Ventress was rescued by a similarly stranded soul on Rattatak: the Jedi Knight Ky Narec, who had traveled to the Outer Rim in the hopes of combatting the growing piracy and criminal elements on the Republic’s fringes.
Narec sensed Ventress’ connection to the Force, and began training the child in the ways of the Jedi. Although Ventress served as Narec’s student for two decades, her training was far from traditional by Jedi standards—less master and apprentice, more sheriffs and partners, protecting the innocents of Rattatak from piracy and warlordism.
Warlord
Ventress’ apprenticeship wouldn’t last, either. Narec was killed by pirates in a skirmish, and with her training still so nascent, Ventress found herself giving in to the grief and rage that filled her in her master’s death: not just striking down his murderers, but transforming herself into a Rattataki warlord in her own right, ruling by strength and fear.
But even that unguided rage couldn’t stop forces moving against her. Captured after failing to assassinate her final rival, Ventress was forced to fight for her life in gladitorial combat—until a visiting Count Dooku saw her prowess in the arena and heard the tale of her power. Killing the final warlord himself and freeing Ventress, he offered her the chance that Narec had once given her: to learn how to control her power.
Assassin...
Ventress’ early days with Dooku are cloaked in shadow, as an agent tasked with cleaning up the Count’s past as he laid the groundwork for his own master’s machinations from within the Republic. It was Ventress that was tasked with seeking out Dooku’s sister, the Lady Jenza, before she could expose his history and family secrets to Republic Intelligence, and it was she he prepared to serve as a leading commander in the nascent Separatist movement.
... and Acolyte
But it wasn’t all cloak and dagger. Ventress aligned herself with Dooku not just to learn how to control the Dark Side she had embraced, but to strike back against the evil she blamed for the death of her first master: the Jedi Order itself, which she believed had abandoned Narec on Rattatak and left him to fight back against piracy on his own. Given the Sith’s own tradition of only keeping two of their kind in existence, Ventress’ apprenticeship to Dooku, although established early on in their relationship with each other, remained a secret, to keep Dooku’s plans to use her to strike out against Darth Sidious under wraps.
General
By the time the Clone Wars began, however, Ventress was ready to step out from the shadows that had shaped her. She didn’t just become Dooku’s right hand, but a leading commander in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, commanding droid armies on a series of fronts. From Teth to Kamino, to smaller operations like the rescue of Nemoidian Viceroy Nute Gunray, Ventress was a key player in the early days of the conflict—even as she found her plans foiled regularly by the Jedi she had come to hate.
Abandoned
Although Ventress regularly escaped her failures in one piece, eventually her public star waned, and Dooku could no longer protect Ventress’ status as his Dark Acolyte from Sidious. As she and her forces engaged the Republic over the planet Sullust, Dooku moved to betray his agent, leaving her to her seeming death in exchange for avoiding Sidious’ ire. Nearly beaten as the Republic turned the tide, Ventress escaped Sullust and found herself in a position she’d already held many times in her life: alone, and eager for revenge.
Nightsister
It was only then that Ventress found herself returning to her roots. Secreting her way back to the planet Dathomir, Ventress began to explore her connections to the Nightsisters, all the while plotting her revenge against Dooku. Ventress became an assassin once more, re-embraced by the Nightsisters and taught in their ways and Force magicks—first as a warrior in her own right, and then as the shaper of the Nightbrother agent Savage Oppress, a would-be agent offered to Dooku but in reality intended to betray him to the Nightsisters and Ventress.
Exile
Although Ventress and the Nightsisters’ multiple attempts to assassinate Dooku failed, she still found kinship on Dathomir, formally going through the baptismal rituals to join Talzin’s coven—a rebirth years in the making, after she was whisked away from her home as a child. But Ventress’ peace among her kind would be short-lived. Moving to eliminate Talzin after the multiple attempts on his life, Dooku sent General Grievous to Dathomir to exterminate the coven, forcing Ventress, Talzin, and other survivors of the battle into hiding. Again, Ventress found herself a wanderer without purpose—but instead of seeking it in others, this time she would make a name for herself.
Hunter
Ventress found that selfish purpose in a path that took her away from the Jedi, Sith, Republic, Separatists, and their war—and in many ways, back to the kind of life she had lived in her unorthodox Jedi tutelage. As a bounty hunter, Ventress flitted around the galaxy as a solo operative and as a team player, crossing paths with old foes and allies alike as she distanced herself from the machinations of the Clone Wars, from the likes of Obi-Wan Kenobi to Ahsoka Tano. Basing herself out of Coruscant, Ventress used her abilities, as brutal as they were, to not just make a living but protect people from harm in the city-planet’s underlevels.
Agent of Vengeance
Ventress once again began making her reputation known further beyond the core as a Bounty Hunter—even claiming a new lightsaber with a yellow blade for herself after losing her Sith blades to the turncoat padawan Barriss Offee. But it wasn’t much longer until she found herself inadvertently worked into the plans of others once again: tasked by the Jedi Order on a controversial mission to assassinate Count Dooku in the name of the Republic, Jedi Master Quinlan Vos infiltrated the criminal underworld and worked his way into a partnership with Ventress, hoping to learn from her history with Dooku to get close to the Separatist mastermind.
Together the two formed a formidable alliance, working against the Black Sun crime syndicate—but burgeoning feelings between the two blossomed into the messy exposure of Vos’ true purpose, and pushed Ventress back closer to her former path as a Dark Acolyte—agreeing to help Vos get revenge on Dooku, and training him in the same dark arts she had learned from her former master.
Fallen Hero
Although the duo’s dark partnership first resulted in a failed attempt to kill Dooku on the planet Raxus, Ventress came to Vos’ aide and rescued him from Dooku’s capture on Serenno, the Count’s homeworld, after working with Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi to infiltrate the Separatist stronghold. But with Vos’ return—and his seeming conflict over falling to the Dark Side wholly in the wake of his capture—Ventress found herself alone once more, albeit now with a pardon from the Jedi Order for her past as a Separatist agent.
Eventually, Ventress reunited with Vos in secret, unable to avoid the connection they had forged together, and she rejoined him in a final effort to assassinate Dooku—taking her back to one of the earliest fronts of the Clone War on the planet Christophsis. Engaging the count in a duel to the death, while Republic Forces assaulted the Separatist armies on the world, Ventress found herself taking a blast of Force lightning intended for Vos after he found himself unable to commit to killing Dooku—and falling to the Dark Side entirely. Dying in his arms, Ventress’ sacrifice redeemed Vos in the light, at the cost of her own life, and her body was returned to the waters of Dathomir for eternal rest.
Survivor
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.
