Asajj Ventress is a former Jedi Padawan turned assassin who was trained in the ways of the dark side by the evil Count Dooku. For a long time, she yearned to be considered a true Sith, secretly acting as Dooku’s unofficial apprentice.
We first met her in The Clone Wars fighting for the Separatists and clashing with Jedi like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker with her twin red-bladed lightsabers in hand. However, when Dooku was ordered to dispose of Asajj and left her for dead, Ventress returned to her Nightsister clan with revenge in mind.
After the Count laid waste to her people, she reinvented herself as a bounty hunter and reclaimed her identity, neither a Sith nor a Jedi, becoming an unlikely ally to Ahsoka Tano for a time.
The Clone Wars never got a chance to end Ventress' story and her death was instead covered in the Star Wars: Dark Disciple novel by Christie Golden. In that, the bounty hunter rediscovered love, compassion and selflessness, sacrificing herself to save Jedi Quinlan Vos by taking the brunt of a force lightning attack by Dooku.
We've since learned that she somehow survived that clash and, as a result, she'll be part of the upcoming third and final season of The Bad Batch.
Talking to The Direct (via SFFGazette.com), Supervising Director Brad Rau addressed the decision to throw the villain-turned-anti-hero into the mix. "We're huge Ventress fans. And when we talked with our creative team to figure out that we could bring her into the storyline, we were very excited."
"We pulled designs from unaired arcs of the Clone Wars which inspired the novel 'Dark Disciple', and we're not contradicting anything that happened in 'Dark Disciple.'"
"I will say that not all of the answers to the mystery of interest will be told in 'The Bad Batch' show," he continued. "There may be future answers down the road in something else. But it was really great to have that character in our show to interact with our characters. [It] was really cool."
What could he mean by "something else"?
With The Bad Batch ending soon and no other animated projects on the horizon (as far as we're aware), this seems to suggest we'll see Ventress in a live-action series. Skeleton Crew and Ahsoka season 2 are the most likely possibilities, though we can't discount The Mandalorian & Grogu movie either.
Nightsister magic became a major part of Ahsoka's first batch of episodes, so we'd bet on Ventress somehow factoring into that series now Grand Admiral Thrawn and The Great Mothers are enacting some sort of sinister plan on Dathomir.
We're sure there's a lot Dave Filoni is keen to do with this character in live-action, anyway, but the question now is simple: who should play her? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.