Star Wars Generations Podcast • Beyond the Screen

Star Wars Generations is going on hiatus for a few months. We’ll be back in December to get you ramped up for Ahsoka Season 2! **************************************************************************This episode is a production of Star Wars Generations , an Ethical Panda podcast and part of the TruStory FM Entertainment Podcast Network . Check out our website to find out more about this show and...

Would you give up your name to save your life, if a tyrant demanded it first? Matthew Fox and Erin McGowan open Star Wars Generations’ new episode-by-episode watch-through of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi with exactly that question, then dig into the animated premiere: a girl named Kara hunting for her captured father, and a warlord named Nawaam commanding an army behind a lightsabe...

Can lightsabers work like mood rings for your soul? Matthew Fox and Erin McGowan get listeners ready for "Star Wars: Visions Presents - The Ninth Jedi," the new eight episode series expanding two existing Visions shorts about a girl named Kara, her captured father, and lightsabers that change color depending on who's holding them. They break down both shorts scene by scene, plus read written thoug...

What happens when the people who raised you decide you’re guilty before you get a chance to prove otherwise? Matthew and Erin spend this episode of Star Wars Generations on one of “The Clone Wars”’ most consequential stretches, season five’s “Sabotage” through “The Wrong Jedi,” where Ahsoka Tano is framed for bombing the Jedi Temple, expelled from the Order, and left to clear her own name while th...

Before he became the paranoid revolutionary from Rogue One, Saw Gerrera was a scrappy fighter who thought sheer force could win a war. Matthew, Alex, and Erin head back to "The Clone Wars" Season 5 for the Onderon arc, the four episodes that introduce Saw and his sister Steela Gerrera as they lead a rebellion against a separatist-backed puppet king, with Jedi advisors Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka t...

Queer people have always been in the Star Wars universe — the franchise just keeps hiding them. Matthew Fox, Alex Kormann, and Erin McGowan of Star Wars Generations on The Ethical Panda network take stock of LGBTQIA+ representation across the full canon for Pride Month 2026: from the covert queer coding of Lando and Admiral Holdo, to the openly queer High Republic novels, to the all-female coven o...

Seven years between Star Wars films, and the galaxy came back with a tin-can dad, a green gremlin, and a muscled teenage Hutt with an identity crisis. Matthew Fox of Star Wars Generations joins Pete Wright, Justin Jaeger, and Ocean Murff on The Film Board to work through all of it — the parts that soar, the parts that drag, and the twenty minutes in a swamp that made everyone forget they were watc...

“Heel” is one word, and it sent listener mail pouring in from every direction. Alex Kormann and Erin McGowan take over the mailbag while Matthew Fox is away, working through questions and reactions on both Maul: Shadow Lord and The Mandalorian and Grogu: the empathic link Maul’s lightsaber formed with Devon, Captain Lawson’s flat ending, and whether a single training command reveals something abou...

Star Wars Generations takes a deep dive in to the movie everyone’s been talking about. Matthew Alex, and Erin each saw “The Mandalorian and Grogu” - Erin and Alex saw it twice - and came back with very different scorecards: Alex at a solid 7 and warming, Erin filling six notebook pages, Matthew the most skeptical of the three but glad Star Wars is in theaters again. They dig into what the movie ac...

Matthew Fox and Erin McGowan recorded this less than two hours after walking out of “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” and they did not land in the same place. Erin found it a charming, Clone Wars-nostalgic adventure. Matthew respected the fun moments but couldn’t shake the feeling that three solid TV episodes had been stretched into a theatrical release and then asked to justify the format. The debate...

Star Wars has been building to this for six years, and "The Mandalorian and Grogu" opens this week as the first big-screen chapter of Din Djarin and Grogu's story. Matthew, Alex, and Erin put together the primer you need: Din's origins as a foundling of the Children of the Watch, Grogu's choice to stay with Mando over the Jedi, where Season 3 left the two of them, and how the Shadow Council connec...

“Maul: Shadow Lord” just finished its first season, and the full trio is back to take stock of the whole thing. Matthew, Alex, and Erin dig into what the show got right, what that Vader appearance in the final episodes actually means, and where a certain young Jedi is headed now that her master is dead. The conversation covers a lot of ground. How does Vader’s cold, strength-heavy fighting style l...

Darth Vader shows up in Maul: Shadow Lord without saying a single word — and somehow that’s the most terrifying thing he’s done in years. Matthew Fox is joined by Pete Wright and AK Ahab to wrap up Season 1: the Vader reveal, Devan’s accelerating fall, Spybot’s acid-bath farewell, and the Crimson Dawn cliffhanger hiding a very familiar face from Solo: A Star Wars Story. The core debate here is one...

Darth Vader shows up in Maul: Shadow Lord episodes 9 and 10, and not a single character in the room knows what he is. Matthew and Erin close out the first season of the Maul: Shadow Lord Disney+ series with a deep dive into the finale’s most jaw-dropping choices: the silent Vader entrance, the lightsaber choreography that deliberately echoes Return of the Jedi, and what it means that this version...

Maul: Shadow Lord episodes 7 and 8 hit different, and Erin is here to tell you exactly why. From one of the most viscerally cool fight sequences in recent Star Wars animation to a solo episode-length descent into Maul’s fractured psyche, these episodes make a case for animated storytelling as genuine cinematic art. Episode 7 delivers the action: Maul versus the Inquisitors, Devin making a pivotal...

Maul is the only one in the room telling the truth and nobody will believe him. At the halfway point of Maul: Shadow Lord, Matthew Fox is joined by returning guests Pete Wright and AK Ahab to dig into what kind of show this actually is and what to make of a character who has been a Sisyphean tragic figure across every corner of Star Wars canon. The three hosts debate whether Maul is genuinely mani...

The Empire has arrived and no one asked for it — least of all Maul, Lawson, Daki, or Devin. Maul: Shadow Lord episodes 5 and 6 bring the full weight of Imperial authority crashing down on every faction at once, and Matthew, Alex, and Erin are here to sort through the wreckage. The hosts dig into Two Boots’ catastrophic naivete (snitch? narc? rat? — there’s a Morgan Freeman monologue that settles i...

Maul doesn’t threaten Devon — he listens to her, needles her anger, and offers to be whatever monster she needs him to be. Matthew and Alex dig into episodes three and four of Maul: Shadow Lord, breaking down why Maul’s approach to dark side recruitment is so much more effective than anything Palpatine ever tried, and what it means for where Devon is heading. The hosts debate the droid at the cent...

A heist on a crime-syndicate planet, a “Duel of the Fates” needle drop that hasn’t been heard since The Phantom Menace, and a Sith lord who barely has to break a sweat... Maul is off to a hell of a start. Matthew and Alex welcome TruStory FM co-owner Pete Wright to break down the first two episodes of the new animated series, set in the lawless underworld of Janix at the dawn of the Empire. The co...

The long wait is over — Maul: Shadow Lord is here, and episodes one and two make one thing clear: this is not a redemption arc. Matthew and Erin bring their first reactions to a Star Wars series that plants its villain firmly at the center, broken and dangerous, with Sam Witwer delivering a performance that is already carrying the whole show. The hosts dig into a surprisingly grounded world: a cop...

Darth Maul was cut in half at the end of The Phantom Menace — and then he spent a decade going slowly insane on a trash planet, came back, conquered Mandalore, and watched it all collapse again. With Maul: Shadow Lord arriving, Matthew and Erin lay out everything you need to know about how one of Star Wars’ most iconic figures ended up here. Whether you’re walking into Maul: Shadow Lord as a lifel...

Darth Maul was never meant to be a true Sith and the Legends novels make that case with devastating clarity. Matthew is joined by Jonah Kellman, host of the Legends novel podcast The Archives Are Incomplete and director of the Judge Program for Star Wars: Unlimited, for a deep dive into the pre-Disney expanded universe books about Maul: Shadow Hunter, Lockdown, Saboteur, and the sweeping Darth Pla...

Pong Krell doesn't just make the clones suffer; he makes the audience question everything the Republic claims to stand for. Matthew and Alex dig into The Clone Wars' Umbara arc, one of the darkest and most ethically uncompromising storylines in all of Star Wars, in which a Jedi general treats the 501st as expendable cannon fodder, refuses to learn their names, and engineers a situation where clone...

Just as Asajj Ventress finally finds a community that wants her for herself, Grievous shows up and takes it apart — and that's only one of three Clone Wars arcs Matthew and Erin are dissecting this episode. They're covering Season 4 episodes 14, 19, and 20: Ahsoka's stubborn, sweet, and slightly chaotic mission to protect Lux Bonteri on Carlac; the brutal fall of the Nightsisters; and Asajj's firs...

Darth Maul doesn't just survive; he conquers. With Matthew out of town, Alex and Erin take over Star Wars Generations to dig into Maul's arc across The Clone Wars Seasons 4 and 5: the Death Watch alliance, the takeover of Mandalore, and the cold, calculated murder of Satine — engineered specifically to break Obi-Wan. The hosts trace how Maul goes from drifting through space to ruling a planet and...