Tales of the Jedi: The Freedon Nadd Uprising
We rejoin Arca Jeth and his apprentices on the planet Onderon, where their victory over the dark side has been undone between story arcs and the walled city of Iziz has been infiltrated by evil magicians called the Naddists. Arca believes that moving the dark-side loci of Freedon Nadd’s and Queen Amanoa’s sarcophagi to the moon of Dxun will quell the uprising. Why don’t they just shoot them into the sun? Would that turn the sun to the dark side, too?
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Actually, knowing how the dark side works in these comics, it just might. |
Master Thon’s student Oss Wilum arrives with the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta just as the sarcophagi are being loaded onto a spaceship. At that moment, however, the Naddists attack! Led by Warb Null, who looks like Wile E. Coyote in a Darth Vader suit, they burrow up from underground in a giant drill machine, grab the sarcophagi, and escape. Queen Galia suggests that her ancient and ailing father, King Ommin, might know something about the Naddists. Having already killed her mother, Arca decides to go for the deuce and demands a meeting with the king.
King Ommin’s bones have grown soft with use of the dark side, so he is no longer able to stand or move without the aid of a mechanical skeleton apparatus. Galia takes the Jedi to the old folks home where the king spends his days lying on a table. Arca Jeth respectfully tells the king how honored he is by this audience, then immediately starts threatening him and demanding the return of the sarcophagi. Pretending to be a confused geriatric, Ommin beckons Arca to lean closer to hear a secret, then blasts him with dark-side energy.
Standing upright in his metal exoskeleton, Ommin reveals that not only does he come from a long line of dark-side magicians, but he and his entire ancestry were trained in the dark arts by the spirit of Freedon Nadd himself. Nadd’s ghost, or at least the ghost of Nadd’s upper torso, materializes behind Ommin to disinterestedly confirm this. Warb Null and a bunch of Naddists burst in out of nowhere and battle the Jedi while Ommin escapes with Master Arca.
Warb Null’s history is never revealed in the comic itself, but according to Tales of the Jedi Companion he was once a blacksmith named Shas Dovos. Following the instructions of an ancient Sith spellbook on metallurgy, Dovos crafted a suit of armor imbued with the dark side, but his will was subsumed by the ghost haunting the book and he was cursed to wear the armor forever, becoming Warb Null, a “merging of man and metal.” I wonder how that back story will figure into his character arc through the rest of the series oh Ulic Qel-Droma just decapitated him.
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Certified super-genius. |
Meanwhile, Master Thon has brought his apprentices, Nomi and Vima Sunrider, to the Jedi library world of Ossus. Here, Nomi is taught to build her own lightsaber by Jedi Master Vodo-Siosk Baas, a giant lobster. Nomi spends months on Ossus training in the Jedi arts, but eventually a messenger arrives from Onderon bearing the news of Arca Jeth’s capture and the fall of Iziz to the Naddists. Master Thon and Master Vodo handpick a team of five up-and-coming young Jedi superstars to help Ulic and the others: Nomi Sunrider, blind Miraluka Jedi Shoaneb Culu, perpetually squinting Dace Diath, Nazzar prince Qrrrl Toq, and Kith Kark, whose last name is one of several Star Wars equivalents of “fuck.”
At this point we are introduced to incestuous cousin-lovers Satal and Aleema Keto, scions of the royal family of the Empress Teta system and founders of the Krath, a secret occult society for bored young one-percenters. While visiting Coruscant, Satal’s kleptomania gets the best of him and he is overcome by the desire to possess an ancient Sith artifact. Fortunately, it’s easier to shoplift from the Galactic Museum than from American Apparel and the Ketos make off with a small Sith tome. Much to his dismay, Satal realizes that he can’t read ancient Sith, but while browsing Yahoo News he learns about the Freedon Nadd Uprising and he and his cousin travel to Onderon to find someone who can translate the book for them.
Meanwhile, Nomi and her Jedi strike team land on the planet and break the Naddist siege on the Beast Rider fortress where Ulic and the others are holed up. Noticing that she is unable to employ her Battle Meditation ability, Nomi reaches into the Force to locate the source of the dark-side oppression smothering Onderon. She senses the presence of King Ommin, but his power overwhelms her and she passes out.
Ulic, Cay, Oss, and the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta come staggering out, looking haggard and hungover. One of Nomi’s indistinguishable entourage demands to know why they didn’t come out and help during the battle, and Ulic explains that the dark side has been sapping their will and stamina for months as they waited for help. Now they feel better though. Ulic is turned on by the sight of Nomi fainting and rushes over to check her out. When she regains consciousness, Ulic immediately hits on her and says that her arrival means they may finally have a chance of stopping this evil.
Also Kith Kark was killed but no one cared, because kark him.
Out in space, Satal and Aleema’s ship, the Krath Enchanter, is shot down by the Republic fleet as it deploys troops to combat the Naddists, but while Satal wets himself Aleema can feel the hand of destiny on her shoulder. They land within the walls of Iziz and are brought before King Ommin, who will give them a magical talisman that will allow them to read the Sith language if they allow his scribe, Novar, to handwrite a copy of the book first. Novar previously appeared in Queen Amanoa’s service in Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon, in which he was drawn completely differently. While the Ketos wait, Ommin shows them the captured Jedi Master Arca Jeth. Ommin has him naked for some reason, suspended in a web of dark-side energy.
Suddenly Ulic, Nomi, Cay, Oss Wilum, Shoaneb Culu, Dace Diath, and the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta burst into the king’s private sanctum. The textbox specifically says that only seven Jedi are there, so I guess Qrrrl Toq just had something better to do, which makes him the smartest character in this book. Meanwhile, Cay Qel-Droma gets his arm cut off again.
King Ommin tries to bring his dark powers to bear but Ulic cuts through his metal armature, causing the king to collapse into a boneless puddle of flesh-textured jelly, much like Elvis Presley. He cries out for Freedon Nadd to save him, but Nadd’s ghost manifests only to kill Ommin himself, claiming the king’s soul for the dark side.
Satal and Aleema Keto escape during the chaos, retrieving their Sith book from the dead Novar, already murdered by Nadd’s baleful spirit. Nadd bestows on each of the youths a Sith sword from King Ommin’s treasure trove, promising that the future of the Sith rests with them. Arca Jeth gets up and puts on some clothes, impotently shaking his fist at the shade of Freedon Nadd, but Nadd promises that the Jedi have already lost, mumbles some foreshadowing about Ulic falling to the dark side, and disapparates in a pattern of horizontal green lines.
The remains of Freedon Nadd, Queen Amanoa, and King Ommin are interred on the moon of Dxun to prevent any future dark acolytes from harnessing their power. Why don’t they just shoot them into the sun? Ulic Qel-Droma asks Master Arca what Nadd meant when he said that the Jedi had already lost, and Arca reveals that the ancient Sith prophesied that the Dark Lords would one day return. “Remember, Ulic . . .,” he says, “where there is light . . . there can be no darkness.” Very pithy, Goethe, but you might want to rethink that one before adding it to your Facebook quotes.
Meditations
Tales of the Jedi is often held up as a classic EU series but we’ve gone through five of its eight story arcs and so far it’s been pretty underwhelming and mediocre. The Freedon Nadd Uprising is only two comic issues long, but I still lost interest halfway through and forgot what was happening. It almost feels like a retread of Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon, without the tedious Beast Rider marriage subplot. The monarch of Iziz is secretly a dark-side devotee of Freedon Nadd who betrays the Jedi and tries to seize control of all of Onderon. Oh, no!
I would rather Ulic Et Cetera, The Saga of Et Cetera, and The Freedon Nadd Et Cetera had been folded together into a single longer story instead of split up into three short independent arcs. There’s the potential for an interesting narrative there but I think there were some major missteps in the way it was told. George Lucas gets a lot of flak for how boring the Jedi Order was in the prequels, but Veitch hasn’t done much to capture my imagination in these early arcs either. That said, the past three arcs have been mostly setup for the coming Sith War, so I maintain hope that things will pick up somewhat, for the story at least if not the characters.
Art-wise, things are pretty dire, as this book reintroduces Nomi’s absurd male-pattern-baldness look. The alien characters, however, look mostly okay and King Ommin has a cool, creepy, Boris Karloff-esque design. Onderon is still boring, but at least Galia and the Beast Riders’ role in the story is mercifully short.
As seems to be a running theme with these stories, there isn’t much to write home about. Besides Ulic Qel-Droma meeting Nomi Sunrider and the Ketos meeting Freedon Nadd, very little that happened in this arc will have an effect on the rest of the series. Dark Horse couldn’t even bother keeping it in print, making the two-issue collection of The Freedon Nadd Uprising one of the rarest Star Wars trade paperbacks, along with the two-issue trade of Empire’s End. Oh my god why am I talking about this
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NYAAAAAAA |
2/5 Death Stars, I don’t care!
Tales of the Jedi, the Official Audio Drama
This is an audio adaptation of the first three Tales of the Jedi story arcs: Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon, The Saga of Nomi Sunrider, and The Freedon Nadd Uprising. There is some minimal effort to weave these stories together into a single narrative, as the Nomi Sunrider portion is interspersed with two or three short scenes set on Onderon, but for the most part it just feels like three separate tales glued together end-to-front, similar to the Human Centipede.
This adaptation is delightfully cheesy and suffers from all the shortcomings you might expect of its medium, from characters awkwardly describing the scene for the listener to line readings so comically bizarre you can’t believe the director couldn’t get a better take (“My baby. It’s got my baby,” an Onderonian woman says flatly as a Dxun beast devours her child). Ulic’s voice actor is probably the weakest in the cast, seemingly incapable of delivering a reading that sounds at all natural or unstilted, but most of the performances range from acceptable to okay.
Given its structural ungainliness, John Whitman’s (better known for his Goosebumps-knockoff series, Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear) adaptation is a very faithful retelling of the comics, with a few points of curious exception, one of which is how that ungainliness affects not only the plot but the narration as well. A narrator introduces the story and chimes in again with a brief recap at the halfway mark, but at certain points Nomi Sunrider lapses into first-person narration as well. It’s very confusing and unnecessary, especially when those segments, which were clearly written as narration, are actually Nomi monologuing at other characters
There are also a lot of weird continuity errors, like Whitman wrote the whole thing in one draft and just turned it in without proofreading it for any sort of consistency. When Nomi Sunrider first sees Oss Wilum, her fake internal monologue says that she instantly sensed he was a Jedi. Later, however, when he identifies himself as a Jedi, she appears to be surprised and only then mistakes him for Master Thon.
When Ulic and the others first arrive on Onderon, they’re told that King Ommin has recently died, but shortly thereafter Princess Galia mentions that he is “dying” and no one is at all confused by this, except me. Later still, when Master Arca and the others confront Ommin for the first time, Galia tells him that she thought he was dead. What.
Galia’s attitude toward the Jedi doesn’t make much sense either. The comic explicitly states that she’s eighteen, but when Ulic and the others arrive on Onderon in the audio drama, she’s all down on them about their age, calling them “untutored youths” and mocking them for being “such young Jedi,” even though they have to be at least early-twenties.
She’s also much ruder to the Jedi when they mistakenly rescue her at her wedding, and when Ulic calls her out on allowing the Beast Riders to murder Iziz soldiers as part of her masquerade, something he doesn’t do in the comic, she dismisses the victims as “cruel men, evil men.” Even though they just seemed like normal dudes trying to do their job, and the Beast Riders easily could have just stunned them like they did Galia’s demonstrably much more evil mother.
But those soldiers “deserved to die,” says Galia. Ulic begins to protest that no one deserves to die, but the princess cuts him off to complain more about her teen problems. I’ll still take this characterization of Galia over the one in the comics, however; at least this version has a character.
Warb Null remains an uninteresting waste of time and sound editing software, but the new manner in which he is dispatched bears mentioning. Rather than the swift beheading he receives in the comic while fighting Ulic Qel-Droma, here Null is at first only maimed. Ulic severs his arm and Warb Null cries out in pain, begging for mercy. Ulic is too stoked with rage over Arca’s capture, however, and brutally murders his enemy after he had already surrendered.
Ulic never shows any signs of remorse over this cold-blooded execution and apparently no one noticed him do it because it never comes up again. It’s a pretty dark moment to just throw out there and then not comment on, but the comics probably could use more moments like this given the way that Ulic’s fall is eventually written (spoiler alert!!!).
This section of the audio play also introduces a new character named Gomie, apparently for the purpose of comic relief although he never does anything funny. I guess technically he’s not a new character since there’s an unnamed Beast Rider in the comic who does something in like one panel that Gomie does in the play but whatever. After the Beast Riders shoot down the Nebulon Ranger, the scene with the bomas is completely omitted; instead, Gomie is the dumb animal tricked by the Jedi into revealing Oron Kira’s stronghold. The last we see of him is when he unwittingly stumbles across King Ommin’s lair beneath the city of Iziz. I assumed he was killed but Wookieepedia’s entry on him mentions nothing of the sort so I’ll always wonder.
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| Oron Kira: “Did he say ‘die’?” Gomie: “That’s what he said!” |
Speaking of ambiguous deaths, Novar’s role is somewhat expanded in this version. He is now the one who severs Cay Qel-Droma’s arm, replacing the nameless soldier in the comic and somehow accomplishing this feat with a handheld blaster instead of a large bladed weapon. He also faces off against Oron Kira during the Beast Riders’ assault on the city. Oron is struck dumb by Queen Amanoa’s dark-side power, but Master Arca’s Battle Meditation restores his will to fight and he wrestles Novar’s knife away from him and apparently kills him with it. Apparently he doesn’t actually though since Novar still has to grow a beard and show up for one scene in The Freedon Nadd Uprising.
There are a few notable deviations in Nomi Sunrider’s story as well. We spend a lot more time with Gudb and Bogga the Hutt’s other henchmen in this adaptation, as they completely replace Finhead Stonebone and his crew in the final confrontation with Nomi and Master Thon, demonstrating just how redundant that subplot was in the comic.
Gudb is also much more proactive in discovering the Sunriders’ Adegan crystals; instead of Andur running his mouth about their precious cargo in a wretched hive of scum and villainy, Gudb and his coworkers scan each ship as it approaches the Stenness Hyperspace Terminal and detect the crystals on board. (“Adegan crystals!” exclaims Quanto joyfully. “Oh, boy, Gudb! Adegan crystals! Ho, never thought I’d ever see any, uh . . . hey, Gudb? What are Adegan crystals?” You know, that old classic.)
Also I’m not sure what the point was in making Gudb’s gorm-worm, Skritch, an intelligent accomplice instead of a trained pet. He now gleefully anticipates Andur Sunrider’s murder with a high-pitched cackle, sounding almost exactly like Jabba the Hutt’s imp in Return of the Jedi.
There’s an odd sentiment about Andur Sunrider’s death that comes up a few times. It was touched on a little in the comic and gets brought up here as well, first when Gudb mockingly chastises Andur to Nomi for splitting his focus between so many enemies and again when Oss Wilum lends his insightful commentary. “The protection of the Force is a matter of attention,” Oss explains. “A Jedi can be undone if his attention is drawn away from his attacker. Over the centuries, some opponents of the Jedi have learned to exploit this vulnerability.” Thanks for the protip, dude, but this seems like pretty common-sense stuff. “A Jedi can be undone if his attention is drawn away from his attacker,” well duh. I’m pretty sure the Jedi don’t have a monopoly on that fatal flaw.
The entire subplot with Nomi traveling to Onderon to build her lightsaber and study under Master Vodo is excised, replaced by a new scene in which Nomi and Thon go to Coruscant to address the Galactic Senate and convince them to intervene on Onderon. Master Thon is actually my favorite part of this adaptation; the whole production is dripping in cheese, from the voice acting to the sound effects to the inappropriate musical cues, but Thon has two legitimately well-written scenes that didn’t exist in the comic and I appreciated their counterbalance to lines like “That’s nothing compared to the hole I’ll make in you if you don’t freeze like an ice cube on Hoth!”
The first comes in the aftermath of Nomi’s first use of Battle Meditation against the hssiss dragons in Lake Natth. Confused by what she’s done, she returns to Master Thon’s house and asks why he’s been ignoring her all these long months, refusing to speak to her and communicating only in bestial, incomprehensible growls. For the first time, Thon says words she understands, and Nomi gasps in shock.
“Of course I speak,” says Thon. “All the time, in words and otherwise. In the Force, every moment is an oratory. . . . I have waited for you, daughter. My words have not changed, but now you have ears to hear me.” This scene has a very Star Wars-y tone and would feel right at home alongside Yoda’s meditations on Force mysticism in The Empire Strikes Back; by opening herself to the Force, Nomi has unwittingly dropped the blindfold from her eyes and can now understand the universe on a level she never realized existed before.
Thon’s second great scene comes when Nomi is about to ship off to join the fighting on Onderon. Nomi confides in him that she’s frightened of ending up like her husband and asks if she really has to go through with this. “No,” Thon answers concisely. “There is nothing you must say and no one you must see. There is nothing you must do, and nowhere you must go, Nomi Sunrider. That is the wonderful, terrible truth of life. You are putting yourself in grave danger, Nomi Sunrider. You do not have to do so.” Then he just turns and walks away.
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“You know I’m too timid to be a Jedi, Andur . . . I’d rather just stay home and dye my hair.” |
Despite the many shortcomings of this audio drama, I’d still recommend it over the three comics it’s adapting. Their inconsistent art, forgettable plots, and underdeveloped characters have less to offer than the unintentional comedy and weirdness of their adaptation. (My favorite scene comes when Master Arca is being tortured by King Ommin. Ulic Qel-Droma and Princess Galia calmly describe what’s happening with no sense of interest or urgency while Arca screams continuously in the background.)
And despite the many lackluster performances, hearing these characters emote flat dialogue is more interesting than reading that flat dialogue on a flat page; what little personalities they have pop that much more, and it’s easy to forget how little we care about the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta when he’s constantly exclaiming, “By the Goddess of the Twi’leks!” Listen to it if you can find it and have literally nothing better to do for 160 minutes, or if you’re compelled to experience the first three Tales of the Jedi arcs firsthand for some ineffable reason.
3/5 Death Stars on the masochism scale.
Continuity Spotlight: Freedon Nadd
It’s stated in Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon (1993) that Freedom Nads fell to the dark side and apprenticed himself to a Dark Lord of the Sith. According to Sith tradition, there could be only one Dark Lord at a time, so Nadd, knowing his potential for career advancement was severely limited in that field, went to Onderon and used his powers to make himself king.
This back story was further fleshed out in Tales of the Jedi Companion (1996), which explains that Nadd was once a gifted Jedi prodigy on the fast track to Jedi Mastership. He was put to a test by the Jedi Masters, however, when they refused to promote him from apprentice to Jedi Knight in order to gauge his response.
In confusion, he sought out Master Matta Tremayne to ask for advice, but she refused to explain what was stopping him from achieving Knighthood. After provoking him to rage, she challenged him to a lightsaber duel, and Nadd cut her down. At the moment that he did so, however, he realized that this had been his true test, and he had failed. Nadd then fled to the Sith planet of Ashas Ree to learn forbidden Sith knowledge and take his revenge on the Jedi.
At this point in Nadd’s story, the Companion contradicts Arca Jeth’s version of events. Now, rather than fleeing to Onderon out of frustration with his inability to become the Dark Lord of the Sith, Nadd killed his Sith teacher and named himself the new Dark Lord, then went to Onderon for no apparent reason.
Star Wars: The Essential Chronology (2000) established that the Dark Lord who trained Nadd was in fact our old friend Naga Sadow, which makes sense given that post-Companion canon established Sadow as the only Sith Lord still alive at the time (that would eventually be retconned as well but we’ll get to that later). Its wording is ambiguous but implies that Sadow had already died and Nadd merely encountered his ghost. The Dark Side Sourcebook (2001) backs up this idea, and further wrinkles Freedon’s Nadds by claiming that the Jedi he slew was his own personal Jedi Master, rather than some lady he didn’t know and only talked to in search of guidance.
It wasn’t long before Naga Sadow’s status returned to the original narrative in Tales of the Jedi Companion, however. In its short biography on Sadow, Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Characters (2002) claims that he entered a state of suspended animation on Yavin 4 and that his fate after encountering Nadd remains unknown, although it is believed that he perished at his pupil’s hand.
“The Shadow of Freedon Nadd,” an article in The Official Star Wars Fact File #90 (2003), backtracked yet again, making Sadow’s existence less certain than Schrödinger’s cat’s. This article claimed that Sadow was inspired by the visitation of Marka Ragnos’s ghost to preserve his own consciousness after death. He did this by having his remaining Massassi warriors construct huge temples on Yavin 4 to focus and preserve his power.
After learning from Sadow, Nadd then destroyed his lingering spirit, a detail which I guess was meant to somewhat preserve the earlier narrative of Nadd killing his Sith predecessor when in this version that predecessor was already dead. “The Shadow of Freedon Nadd” also restored Matta Tremayne to her previous position of some random woman Nadd had never met before.
(In a completely irrelevant point, the title “The Shadow of Freedon Nadd” apparently originated as a section heading in The Essential Chronology. Evidently some editor at LFL had a real hard-on for it, because in researching this article I’ve found it reused in Fact File #90, Chronicles of the Old Republic, The New Essential Chronology, and Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force.)
Chronicles of the Old Republic (2004), an online article published by LucasArts as back story to their Knights of the Old Republic games, tweaked Nadd’s tale yet again. In this version, Nadd was already a Jedi Knight when he turned to the dark side, thus removing his entire reason for turning to the dark side.
One of the last amendments to Nadd’s story came in “Evil Never Dies: The Sith Dynasties” (2006), an article exclusive to subscribers of StarWars.com’s Hyperspace feature. Strangely, this account doesn’t mention Nadd’s tutelage under Sadow, but it does reintegrate Nadd’s journey to the Sith world Ashas Ree. On that planet, it says, he discovered a holocron belonging to Adas, the ancient king of the Sith people who drove the invading Rakata from Korriban in the centuries before the Old Republic. It was the knowledge Nadd gained from this device that allowed him to conquer Onderon.
Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force (2007) includes this account, but rather than saying that he went first to Ashas Ree and then to Yavin 4, it holds the Ashas Ree version of the story in opposition to the version involving Naga Sadow. Those stupid fictional history scholars just don’t know what to believe! Jedi vs. Sith also goes back to the idea of Matta Tremayne being Nadd’s instructor, which was reaffirmed for the last time in The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (2008). I think it’s also the first source since Ulic Qel-Droma and the Beast Wars of Onderon to posit that Nadd fled to Onderon because he knew he could never hold his Sith master’s title.
So we have Freedon Nadd, a man who may or may not be a Jedi Knight, who kills a woman who may or may not be his own Jedi Master, then may or may not learn from Naga Sadow, who may or may not be alive, and then either kills Naga Sadow or destroys his ghost, whereupon he may or may not name himself the new Dark Lord of the Sith.
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