Dawn of the Jedi: Prisoner of Bogan
It’s been two months since the concurrent events of Force Storm and Into the Void, and Predor Skal’nas, evil Rakatan overlord, is starting to wonder why he hasn’t heard anything from his brainwashed human slave, Xesh, and the Rakatan spies sent to Tython. Since we learn at the end of this story that Skal’nas had psychically programmed Xesh to murder his master and everyone on their ship, you’d think he might suspect that has something to do with why they haven’t called him back.
Another of Skal’nas’s slaves, an albino alien chick named Trill, reveals that she and Xesh were childhood BFF’s before they were forced to fight to the death and Xesh refused to kill her, thereby betraying her? I don’t get it. But Trill claims this former bond of theirs will allow her to track him so her boss sends her to join the plot.
Meanwhile, Xesh is hanging out on Bogan, the Evil Moon of Tython, with nothing to do but watch the Good Moon, Ashla, pass overhead every month. There is only one other prisoner on Bogan: an insane Je’daii named Daegen Lok, who was teased in both Force Storm and Into the Void and is finally about to make his debut and pull this series back from the brink of failure. He attacks Xesh for some reason, even though he wants his help. Xesh is about to kill him (which would put a real damper on his plans, I suspect) but Lok reveals that, like the three Je’daii Journeyers in Force Storm and Lanoree Brock in Into the Void, he too had a vision of Xesh’s arrival on Tython. Xesh is intrigued and the two agree to team up to escape their imprisonment.
Back on Tython, the Three Caballeros—Sek’nos Rath, Tasha Ryo, and Shae Koda—are being despondent about Xesh’s exile and how the Je’daii Council ignored their visions, just as they did Daegen Lok’s seven years ago (twist!). A minor character from Into the Void, Master Tave, tells them to grow up and quit their bitching, then sends them on various trivial assignments.
Elsewhere, we are introduced to General Rajivari, so far the only Je’daii Master we’ve met who dresses identically to the Jedi in the prequels. His character originated in BioWare’s aesthetically derivative MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, where he was named as one of the founding members of the Jedi Order. I assume he’s included here by way of apology for the lore inconsistencies in the previous volume, because he does dick-all in this book. (Also revealed in TOR is that Ravioli eventually went insane and was killed trying to destroy all of the Jedi, so at least there’s a happy ending to his character arc.)
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Master Rajivari, the dullest first Jedi imaginable. |
Daegen Lok takes Xesh to a crashed starfighter that he’s managed to mostly repair. Lok reveals that, seven years ago, he and his best friend, Hawk Ryo, ventured into the Chasm, a seemingly bottomless abyss on Tython rumored to drive insane any Je’daii who travels too far into its depths. In the Chasm, Lok had a vision of Xesh (although he believes it to be himself) leading an army and holding a “sword of flame,” which from what Xesh has told him he now believes to be Xesh’s Forcesaber. The Je’daii Council declared Lok mad and exiled him to Bogan until he recanted his vision, which he refused to do.
Lok asks Xesh if he can build more Forcesabers, but he’s unable to do so without a specific type of crystal. As luck would have it, Krev Coeur, the convenient crystal planet, is nearby. Xesh generates Force lightning to recharge the starfighter’s depleted power cells and they jet off to take their revenge.
At the Forge, Tython’s weapons manufacturing temple, the Je’daii are studying Xesh’s Forcesaber, which is basically a lightsaber that will only work if you use the dark side, and trying to figure out how to turn it on. Being Je’daii, practitioners of harmonic balance, they mostly fail. They give it to Shae to try, since she was the only one able to activate it before, but I guess she’s not on her period anymore so she can’t do it. Hawk Ryo walks in and turns it on without a problem, revealing that he was once exiled to the Evil Moon of Bogan and learned to master his own dark side there.
While Shae and Sek’nos dick around with that, Tasha Ryo, the most boring character from the first arc, gets the much more interesting task of investigating the alien remains recovered from Xesh’s ship. Unable to find anything in the Je’daii archives, she is taken by librarian Ters Sendon to an underground chamber and series of passageways that predate even the Je’daii’s 10,000-year-old library.
Here, Master Sendon shows her a floating crystal shaped like a Tho Yor. Tasha touches it and for the first time in Je’daii history the crystal comes to life, emitting a small hologram of a dude that looks like DC’s Darkseid after joining a monastic cult. The figure introduces itself as Master A’nang, last of the Tython Kwa, and offers to answer any questions they might have. Why this millennia-old recording speaks English (or “Basic,” as I guess it’s called in Star Wars) and uses the same name for Tython that the Je’daii use is conveniently not addressed.
A’nang reveals that his people, the Kwa, once traveled throughout the galaxy from their homeworld of Dathomir using technology called “Infinity Gates.” They settled on many worlds, spreading civilization and advanced technology to the more primitive races of the galaxy. Having read Into the Void, we know that not long ago there was a huge kerfuffle with some nut searching for a Gree hypergate beneath a ruined city. So why did ancient Tython need to be settled by both the Kwa and the Gree using nearly identical technology? Storytelling 101: Keep it simple, stupid.
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Master A’nang prepares to lead a group of Kwa through an Infinity Gate. |
Tasha shows Master A’nang an alien skull from the crashed ship. After flipping out and retreating inside his holocron, which is basically a flash drive you can access only by talking to Clippit the Microsoft Office Assistant, A’nang’s holographic avatar eventually explains how the Kwa unwittingly unleashed the Rakata on the galaxy. One of their Infinity Gates took them to the Rakatan homeworld, Lehon, where the Kwa tried to uplift the Rakata as they had other species. The Rakata repaid them by using their technology to take over the galaxy. The Kwa destroyed all their Infinity Gates and retreated back to Dathomir, powerless to stop the Rakata’s bloody conquest. So basically the whole history of Star Wars happened because of Seerow’s Kindness.
Meanwhile, Master Ravioli convinces the Je’daii Council to reexamine their stance on Daegen Lok’s vision in light of the dead Rakatan scouting party. A group of Je’daii that includes Shae, Sek’nos, and Hawk Ryo goes to Bogan to retrieve Lok and Xesh, only to find that they have escaped. They battle terentas, alchemically engineered creatures bred by the Je’daii to sniff out bombs. Because giant monsters with huge fangs and talons are ideally designed for that task. Presumably the terentas have some connection to the Jedi-hunting terentatek monsters from Knights of the Old Republic, but we’ll always be left wondering.
The Je’daii find a giant statue that Lok carved of himself holding a Forcesaber. Hawk Ryo, having perhaps tired of being Mr. Boring McBland, admits that he shared Lok’s vision when the two of them ventured into the Chasm seven years ago. Afterward, he refused to back up his BFF and let the council think Lok was insane. He also randomly goes crazy and tries to strangle the blonde chick he’s ostensibly in love with who looks kind of like Jane Krakowski. Hawk Ryo is awesome now!
With the Je’daii on their trail, Xesh and Lok crash their ship on Krev Coeur, where Xesh builds a new Forcesaber for each of them. Half of the Je’daii team, including Sek’nos and some others who are probably supposed to be important but aren’t, arrives on the planet and tries to take the darksiders into custody. Daegen Lok uses a “Mind Twist” to convince one of them she is on fire and then beats the crap out of another in a sword fight, while Xesh and Sek’nos duel and Sek’nos falls off a cliff.
Their pursuers defeated, Xesh and Lok steal a ship and head to Nox, the poisoned planet with the domed cities from Into the Void, to complete the next phase of Lok’s plan: gathering an army. Unbeknownst to them, Trill has finally tracked Xesh to the Tython system and happens to be flying by at the exact moment Sek’nos falls to his death, and he is saved by landing on her ship. I guess it was the will of the Force or something.
Lok explains to the reader that he was the Je’daii hero responsible for ending the Despot War twelve years ago when he seduced the evil Queen Hadiya and then murdered her in her bed. During the time he spent as her lover, he got to know all the generals and crime lords who supported her, and even though they hate his guts now, he’s convinced he can use their influence to build an army to fight off the coming Rakata invasion. Or . . . to fight the Je’daii in order to convince them that they have to fight the Rakata. I’m not completely clear on what his plan is. But it turns out to not matter anyway because his clandestine meeting with these retired war criminals is interrupted by the other Je’daii!
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Daegen Lok and Queen Hadiya in an act of true love, I mean murder. |
While Hawk Ryo and Daegen Lok duel one another, Shae pursues Xesh, outraged at him for betraying her trust by breaking out of jail and allegedly killing Sek’nos Rath. Their fight is prematurely aborted by an attack from a dianoga, the one-eyed tentacle monster from the trash compactor scene in Star Wars: A New Hope. The one in the movie lived in like six inches of water but this one is the size of a freaking house for some reason. It rises out of a nearby river and, true to tentacle monster form, grabs Shae and carries her off while completely ignoring Xesh.
Xesh dives into the water after her and kills the monster by stopping its heart with the Force. My bad, its hearts, because I guess it needs several. He brings Shae back to the surface but she isn’t breathing, so he gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and totally cops a feel out of frame. After reviving her, Xesh says, “You are my prisoner. You will not resist.” (Man, how many relationships have I started with that line?) He then carries her off into the night.
Elsewhere, Hawk chases Lok to the edge of a chasm. Lok claims that they were like brothers and Hawk should stand with him because they shared the same vision. Hawk denies this, even though he just admitted it was true a little while ago. Lok escapes by flinging himself into the abyss. Hawk tells the blonde Je’daii that Lok used a mind trick to make him think that Lok was there when he wasn’t, but I have no idea if that’s supposed to be the explanation for how he survives falling to his death or if Hawk is lying to make himself look better. It never comes up again though so I guess it doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, Trill nurses Sek’nos back to health and offers to help him get back to his friends. Trill, who is flying a ship of a presumably alien design, shares her name with a letter in the stupid Star Wars fake alphabet, Aurebesh, and has that same letter tattooed on her face. Sek’nos draws no connection between her and Xesh, who recently arrived in an alien ship, shares his name with a letter in the stupid Star Wars fake alphabet, and has that letter tattooed on his face. He’s too busy staring at the incongruous cleavage window in her otherwise modest outfit.
Xesh and Daegen Lok, with Shae as their hostage, flee to the planet Shikaakwa to meet with Hawk Ryo’s crime boss brother, Volnos “Ox” Ryo, who is also the father of Tasha Ryo, who has once again forgotten that she is supposed to be a main character. Volnos was the one who vouched for Lok with Queen Hadiya in order to get him close enough to kill her. Lok still plans to raise an army to make himself the leader of the Je’daii, even though his plan for raising that army already kind of fell through spectacularly. Actually maybe the Je’daii didn’t even arrest all those retired war criminals he was meeting with. The plan could still be on, I don’t know.
Trill, Sek’nos, Hawk, and Jane Krakowski arrive on Shikaakwa and rendezvous outside Ryo Fortress. They are attacked by another giant dianoga, because apparently those are super-common now, but Trill shoots it in the eye, killing it like a low-level boss in a Metroid game. They then make their way into the fortress, where Volnos decides he is going to kill Xesh and Lok and makes a veiled rape threat against Shae, who Lok has put into a mind-control trance. Before we can get to that, though, the invading Je’daii attack!
Lok collapses the ceiling with the Force and he and Xesh run off with Shae again. I wish this comic had a dramatis personae so her identity could be upgraded from simply “Love Interest” to the more prestigious “Damsel in Distress.” Xesh tells Sek’nos he’s glad he didn’t actually kill him on Krev Coeur, but Sek’nos can’t take a compliment and talks trash about Xesh being Lok’s minion, so Xesh blasts him unconscious with Force lightning. There are a lot of panels of Hawk and Lok screaming at one another and then Lok cuts off his friend’s foot. Somehow this, but none of the other crazy stuff he’s done since Shae was kidnapped, is enough to break Lok’s concentration and Shae is released from her trance. She picks up Hawk’s fallen Forcesaber and duels Lok.
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| “Lok removes Ryo’s leg.” (Caption courtesy of Wookieepedia.) |
Xesh goes to help his newfound friend but Shae argues that Lok is just using him to gain power and he has the power to choose not to be a slave. For some reason this prompts Lok, for the first time in the story, to claim that he is Xesh’s master at the most inopportune moment possible. Xesh turns on Lok and says he is done being a slave. Lok reaches into his mind to try to turn his greatest fear against him, but Xesh is such an emo douche that the darkness inside his brain overwhelms Lok, rendering him temporarily insensate. Xesh goes for the killing blow but Shae tells him there has been enough killing, and for some reason that’s enough to stop this clearly deranged maniac. Sek’nos comes up to them and Shae calls him “Big, Red Geejaw.” I don’t know what that means.
A week later, Daegen Lok has been returned to Bogan, but he warns the Je’daii that the Rakata are coming and can only be stopped by embracing the dark side. Hawk Ryo confesses to the Je’daii Masters that he shared Lok’s vision of the shadow army and the sword of flame in the Chasm seven years earlier, but adds that in the vision he also saw Xesh (I guess he’s their last hope or something). Trill joins the Je’daii in preparing for war, a stranger to Xesh because of his brainwashing. This volume ends with her sneaking off to report to Predor Skal’nas, who orders his Rakata to prepare their fleet for the invasion. TO BE CONTINUED PREMATURELY CONCLUDED BECAUSE THE SERIES GOT FUCKING CANCELED!
Meditations
There’s a lot to poke fun at here but mostly because there’s a ton of stuff packed into these five issues. Overall, this is a marked improvement from the previous volume. Most of the characters get more stuff to do (except poor Tasha), including a few like Hawk Ryo who had been one-note or uninteresting until now. Sadly there’s next to no Rakata action in this volume, but it’s made up for by the wacky antics of Daegen Lok, the best new character and probably the overall best character we’ve met so far. Unlike almost everyone else in this story, Lok is a vibrant, entertaining character with comprehensible goals that, while ridiculous, he takes tangible steps to realize. As the titular prisoner of Bogan, he drives pretty much all the action that takes place, and does so in an amusingly eccentric and flamboyant way, such as picking up a human skull off the ground and using it in an impromptu ventriloquist act for no reason.
Xesh is somewhat more interesting as a protagonist now that he’s gotten over his “just kill everyone” phase, but he still has the personality of cornstarch and is blander than a color episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Shae’s characterization doesn’t fare much better, and here the solution is so obvious it’s actually painful that no one on the creative team thought of it: Shae should have been Lanoree Brock.
Not only would this cut out an extraneous redhead from a
comparatively small cast, but it would also be advantageous to the roles of
both characters: the “hot girl who redeems the brooding antihero through the
power of love” character would become more interesting than “not interesting at
all,” and the “cool, kickass female lead who only gets to do stuff in one book
and then never shows up again” character would get to show up again. It also
would have generated some real cross-promotional synergy instead of the Dawn of the Jedi spinoff novel having
nothing to do with the plot of the Dawn
of the Jedi comics. Plus it would explain why Lanoree saw Xesh in a vision
when the only other characters to do so eventually ended up meeting him. You
have failed me for the last time, Dark Horse.
Plot-wise, Prisoner of Bogan is fairly straightforward (the Je’daii chase Daegan Lok while he tries to recruit an army to fight the Rakata), but there’s a lot of information packed in there, mostly because Prisoner takes after the previous volume in having a crap-ton of exposition. Last time they gave us the back story of the previous 10,000 years of Je’daii history, this time it was the history of the Despot War and A’nang’s Kindness. This setting and its accompanying lore is not uninteresting, but at times it can get a bit disconcerting to be bombarded with so much fictional history that is a) only tangentially related to the actual plot and b) more interesting than the current story being told. It’s like A Song of Ice and Fire that way.
Like Into the Void,
this book also contains an excessive amount of planet-hopping. It’s like John
Ostrander said, “Okay, I planned out this whole setting with these eleven
completely unique and distinctive planets and I’m going to show off every last
one of them, goddammit!” The Je’daii are doing Je’daii stuff on Tython, now
let’s visit the Evil Moon of Bogan, now we have to get crystals from Krev
Coeur, now we need something from the domed cities on Nox, but then we have to
meet someone on Shikaakwa, and meanwhile that one chick what thought she was on
fire is in a hospital on Kalimahr! I don’t blame the writer for this, because
having a very limited time to not only establish this setting but also sell
readers on it must have been a bitch, but it’s something that stuck out to me
and made the story feel busier than it needed to be.
Pretty good overall though, which I’m sure will only make the aborted finale all the more disappointing.
3.5/5 Death Stars.
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