In Which We Find Out How Old Jarael Is

Knights of the Old Republic #45–46: Destroyer

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: September – October 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

She’s 25.

We open with yet another of the undated flashbacks this series so loves. A young Dace Golliard, already working for the Crucible, talks to a Zeltron professor about some mysterious shipment being delivered to his academy. Golliard then asks if the professor, in turn, has anything for him. The professor says, “Yes, take my daughter, please!” His daughter, of course, is a very young Chantique.

Twenty-some years later, Chantique observes a newly acquired slave thrown into his first combat arena on the Crucible planet Volgax. He’s supposedly a pilot for the Republic Navy pilot named Carth Kamlin who was separated from his convoy and lost in space, but his real name is Zayne Carrick and he hasn’t thought this through at all. He’s pitted against “Snout,” a seasoned Caamasi gladiator who Zayne is only able to defeat by using the Force.

Zayne apologizes to him after their bout, but Snout just sits there looking depressed. The Night’s King’s lieutenant, looking a whole lot fatter and less terrifying than he did in the last issue, says that he’s never heard Snout speak in all the years he’s been in the Crucible.  When I was first reading this comic, I didn’t even realize that this was supposed to be the same guy from the end of The Reaping and assumed that that fellow would show up again in the final arc, Demon, to play some important role. Nope, turns out he’s just a flunky named Bar’injar and doesn’t matter at all.

Later that day, Snout approaches Zayne and says that he can tell Zayne is a Jedi. He says that he has been here so long and seen so much he no longer remembers his name, but he thinks he was a history student named Ralthar Sitan. Zayne asks what the Crucible’s goal is, but Snout only has one way to show him. The Caamasi have the ability to share memes, memories of past intense experiences, with others of their species . . . or with those able to use the Force. Snout holds the traumatic experiences of every Caamasi ever taken by the Crucible, going back thousands of years, and he psychically shares them with Zayne now. Overwhelmed by the unceasing violence and death, Zayne collapses. Chantique and Bar’injar step out of the shadows and go, “Just as planned.”

Chantique takes Zayne to her room and reveals that they knew who he was the whole time. Dace Golliard immediately recognized that his supposedly lost starfighter had clearly been bought used on eBay, and they had security footage from the swoopduels of him with Jarael. They’ve already found and deactivated the tracking device on his ship so his friends on the Hot Prospect can’t find him, officially making this one of the worst plans in the history of bad plans.

She wanted him to see the Caamasi’s memories so he would understand what the Crucible was really all about. Zayne declares that the Crucible takes slaves and forces them to fight one another to the death for no reason at all; they have no great plan or ultimate goal beyond making people suffer. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power,” Chantique agrees.

Doesn’t this contradict what we’ve seen of the Crucible so far, though? They’re not just taking people and killing them for entertainment or out of some fanatical zeal; they’re running a business. They force the slaves to fight each other to weed out inferior combatants, then sell the cream of the crop to gladiatorial enterprises like the Franchise in Dueling Ambitions. They also provide expendable laborers to dangerous operations like the miners in The Reaping. Nothing wrong with committing wanton violence for violence’s sake and turning a tidy profit on the side, I guess.

Zayne demands how Jarael could have been a part of something so evil, even though he already knows she was just a kid at the time and, despite being a slave herself, tried to use her position to make life easier for the other slaves. Chantique tells him that Jarael’s birth named was Edessa, but the name she took in the Crucible’s language, which is spelled out by the tattoos on her face, means “destroyer.” And we have a title!

Elsewhere, Zayne’s friends discuss how inescapably screwed he is. His tracking device isn’t working, the Jedi won’t help them, the muscle they hired has gotten bored and taken another job (should have gotten the Moomo brothers, you dolts), and they have no idea who Zayne’s mysterious contacts are or how to reach them. Did I ever mention that Zayne has mysterious contacts now? I don’t remember if it’s ever come up in these reviews, but Zayne has mentioned a couple times that he has mysterious contacts now.

Jarael goes to talk to Elbee, their perpetually forgotten droid, because she’s overheard Zayne talking to him about this subject. He just sits there and ignores her until she mentions that Zayne has been made a slave, because he can relate. Zayne hadn’t actually been talking to Elbee at all, but using him as a transmitter to talk to Shel Jelavan, his former crush and the sister of his dead best friend.

Back on Volgax, we rejoin Zayne and Chantique in the same conversation from before. Chantique claims that Jarael is a monster who, when they were teenagers, literally stabbed her in the back and left her to die. No longer a fit slave, she was sold off to sex traffickers and mercilessly abused until she had healed enough to kill everyone and escape. Jesus Christ, Star Wars. As proof of Jarael’s duplicity, Chantique points out how Zayne never even knew that she was his senior by a full six years all this time.

Eventually Chantique found her way back to the Crucible, where she rose to the rank of Magister Impressor, the person in charge of the capture, training, and disposal of all slaves. Bar’injar, by contrast, is Magister Protector, the person in charge of defending the Crucible from threats. So is Chantique really even the head of the organization, then? Do they even have an overall leader? So many questions, so little time.

Thinking nothing of the fact that Jarael worked for the Crucible to make sure no one else was treated like she had been while Chantique went back to work for them to make sure she was never treated like that again, Zayne realizes that Chantique is a Force-user and has been reading his mind and influencing his thoughts all this time. She sends him back to the pits, where he’s forced into another duel with Snout, this time to the death or something.

Zayne tries to tell Snout, or rather Ralthar Sitan, that the Crucible can’t make them fight, but Ralthar is resigned to the fact that they have already turned him into a killer. Since his mindmeld with Zayne, his thoughts have cleared and he has been able to piece together the true history of the Crucible. They are a remnant of the ancient Sith Empire, dating back to the Great Hyperspace War if not earlier. The long-dead Sith Lord Ieldis, who was previously mentioned back in issue 29, created them to turn conquered populations into standing armies. They have continued operating in secret ever since, even after the death of Ieldis and the fall of the Sith Empire, driven solely by the purpose instilled in them by their Sith masters thousands of years ago, the need to continue on at all costs.

Ralthar attacks Zayne and wrestles him to the ground, driving a dagger toward his face. Zayne grabs his wrist to block the strike, but Ralthar turns the blade on himself, stabbing it through a gap in his armor he purposefully left exposed. I’m fairly certain there must have been some miscommunication between the writer and the illustrator, however, because the dialogue makes it sound like Zayne was the one holding the knife and Ralthar caused Zayne to kill him. The way it’s drawn, however, the Caamasi appears to stab himself without any help from Zayne.

“Try—try to forget,” says Ralthar Sitan, a tear running down his furred face. “Meaningless, wasn’t it?” asks Chantique.

Sometime later, the Hot Prospect arrives on Volgax. The Crucible has already packed up shop, but they’ve left Zayne behind, and Jarael finds him sitting in the rain beside Ralthar’s grave. And she just will not stop running her goddamn mouth:

“Zayne! Zayne! I’m so glad we found you! I didn’t think we ever would—if not for Shel! Elbee put us in touch. I can’t believe she’s on Coruscant now—working for Senator Goravvus! He escaped Taris after the Resistance fell—and now he’s a champion for refugees everywhere! What am I saying? You know this—she’s your resource! She told you where the Crucible might be before—based on reports of missing travelers. Well, she did it again. Somebody sighted the Crucible here on Volgax! Looks like they’ve pulled out already—I’m sorry we were too late. I’m sorry this happened at all. But I’m so glad to see you— Uh—Zayne? Are you all right? Zayne?”

Zayne is mad at her for working for the Crucible, then running away and not doing anything to help all the people she left behind. He demands to know why she still goes by the name they gave her, then turns away and declares that he needs time to come to grips with all her bullshit. Jarael counters that she never wanted to deal with her past at all until Zayne forced her to, and she thought that now they were going to deal with it together. Since he’s being such a little bitch about it, though, maybe it’s time they went their separate ways. Also, she adds, the only reason she kept her name and her tattoos is because, in the language of the Crucible, jarael means “protector.”

“. . . . Protector?!” gasps Zayne, turning back around, but Jarael has already vanished into the rain.

Meditations

In his behind-the-scenes blog on Destroyer, John Jackson Miller revealed that he had originally planned for this story to span three issues instead of two, but Dark Horse’s unexpected cancellation of his comic forced him to truncate the story he wanted to tell in order to have enough time to do the finale. I assume that this is the reason for Jarael’s giant exposition dump at the end, but it still looks ridiculous in the comic when she spends an entire page telling Zayne things he already knows.

I’m still not the biggest fan of Brian Ching’s art. It’s far from poor by any standard, but this series will never recover from the loss of Dustin Weaver. That said, Ralthar “Snout” Sitan looks freaking awesome. The Caamasi (another invention of EU godfather Timothy Zahn) are such a cool-looking alien design and Ching’s pencils somehow put a lot into this character that, despite the impact he’s supposed to have on Zayne, doesn’t do all that much in the actual story.

If John Jackson Miller had followed my years-late advice in the last review on how to condense Dueling Ambitions and The Reaping into a single story, he would have had enough issues to spare to do Destroyer the full justice he intended. I’d like to think that Zayne’s experience with the memes would be fleshed out a little more, since when he’s talking to Jarael he seems to confuse himself with the perpetrators of violence in the Caamasi’s shared experiences, but that kind of katra bleedover doesn’t come across until that point.

Psychic confusion aside, I still say Zayne’s being too hard on Jarael. She was kidnapped and enslaved as a small child and raised by a secret society of insane murderers, but she still tried to help the other slaves in the only way she could and fled from that life when she saw the opportunity. The Crucible has existed for thousands of years and is all but impossible to find if they don’t want you to; what was she supposed to do to stop them? Plus, it was her decision to eventually face her past and try to bring the Crucible down anyway. Quit being a dick, Zayne.

Nitpicks aside, this was still a pretty solid two-issue story. It’s good to see our heroes finally going up against the villains themselves instead of some proxy organization. Also the idea of the Crucible, an ancient weapon leftover from a civilization that no longer exists but continues to sow misery and destruction for no greater purpose because it no longer remembers its purpose, is pretty awesome. It calls to mind the GenoHaradan from the original Knights of the Old Republic, a 20,000-year-old secret society who have shaped galactic history behind the scenes via political assassinations. Man, the KotOR sub-era is so great.

4/5 Death Stars.

Don’t Fear the Reaping

Knights of the Old Republic #43–44: The Reaping

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Bong Dazo

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July – August 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

A gang of comet miners in the Core Worlds is using slave labor to perform the dangerous task of harvesting thorilide crystals from inside the unstable comets. With the Jedi off fighting the Mandalorians, they gloat, there is no one to enforce the Republic’s anti-slavery laws. Their operation has been going on for several years, though, so apparently no one cared anyway.

Zayne and Jarael come aboard their ship dressed as Crucible operatives, which means a sleeveless leather vest and pants for Zayne and a strapless bodysuit  and thigh-high boots for Jarael. Any excuse, right? They claim that their organization has come to collect the fee for their next shipment of slaves in advance. Little do the miners suspect that they’re being conned, however; while Zayne and Jarael infiltrate the mining vessel, Gryph and the rest of the Hot Prospect crew are waiting to steal all the crystals for themselves. Little does Gryph suspect that he’s being conned, however; the cargo Zayne is actually preparing to send is all of the mining ship’s slaves.

Because this plan wasn’t thought out at all, there turns out to be way more slaves than Zayne and Jarael can surreptitiously transport back to the Hot Prospect. Fortuitously, the miners call up the real Crucible and discover Zayne’s deception at about the same time, which gives our heroes the opportunity to jump out of the spaceship alongside the slaves during a dustdiving expedition. Zayne uses the Force to propel them through space to land on the comet’s surface, then contacts Gryph and tells him to start bringing the slaves on-board.

Gryph is busy sucking up the crystals with a giant vacuum cleaner and using the Hot Prospect’s giant blender to turn them into a milkshake. I don’t know what’s going on with this crystal subplot and it’s only important because they use them for some kind of hack physics gambit to escape at the end of the comic so I’m not going to go back and figure it out. Reading comprehension is hard.

Gryph is (rightfully) upset about being tricked into risking his life by going up against dangerous criminals to save people he doesn’t know, but Zayne “Forces” his hand by telekinetically levitating all the slaves off of the comet and up to the Hot Prospect, which is way more awesome than you’d expect Zayne to be able to do. Suddenly the giant Crucible battleship Gladiator appears in the system. Its captain is Dace Golliard, a creepy child molester-looking dude who, we learn through a flashback, was responsible for kidnapping and enslaving Jarael when she was a little girl.

Kids, there’s nothing more cool than being hugged by someone you like, but if someone tries to touch you in a place or in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s no good!

Golliard unleashes a fleet of, as Jarael helpfully explains, “Skyreaper drones! We called them Skreapers!” which are basically stupid-looking robots made of ribbons and tentacles (of terror!) that capture slaves by wrapping them up in giant flower petals. Jarael is predictably captured, but Zayne rescues her, then Rohlan comes out with his jetpack and pulls them both inside the Hot Prospect.

The Gladiator is shooting at them and Golliard is like “You’ll never escape!” but they do a thing with the thing and get away. Gryph complains about his friends almost getting him killed on some damn fool idealistic crusade that has nothing to do with him. Jarael comes clean about her whole back story and resolves that she has to stop the Crucible before they destroy any more families the way they did hers. “I . . . suspected something troubled you, but I wanted you to tell me in your own time,” says Rohlan. “I am honored you did,” even though she didn’t tell him squat and only admitted what was going on when she had no other choice.

Elsewhere, slaver queen Chantique is beating on Dace Golliard for being a screwup when she is interrupted by a guy who looks like this:

He tells her that they will need Golliard’s experience as a disgraced former Republic admiral now that pseudo-Jedi Zayne Carrick is involved in their affairs. Even Jarael doesn’t suspect the true nature of the Crucible, he tells her, so by trying to stop them she is just playing into Chantique’s personal vendetta against her. “Jarael may think she’s buried the past, but the past will bury her!” Chantique says cleverly.

Meanwhile, in a Coruscant hospital, Mandalorian mad scientist Demagol finally wakes up from his 34-issue-long coma. TO BE CONTINUED!

Meditations

We’re rapidly approaching the end of this series so I’m getting a little tired of these transitional story arcs. That’s my fault, I know, since Dark Horse didn’t even announce that Knights of the Old Republic was ending with issue 50 until after issue 45, but once you know how little time we have left with these characters and this story it’s frustrating to deal with this glacial pace of plot progression.

Prophet Motive and Faithful Execution were disconnected filler episodes. Dueling Ambitions properly introduced the Crucible and our new main story arc, but then Masks had more to do with the broader Mandalorian Wars than the misadventures of Zayne Carrick. Now we have The Reaping, which gets back to the Crucible plot but, like in Dueling Ambitions, Zayne only interacts with third-party middlemen and the main villains themselves don’t show up until the very end. This structure isn’t inherently bad but the Covenant arc didn’t need half a dozen issues to get moving.

It’s especially galling because the specific plot of these two issues isn’t even important in the overall plot. The main dustdiver slave we meet in The Reaping is a guy named Qohn, an alien who looks kind of like a sad dog. We spend a decent amount of time with him, we see his plight and learn his history as a slave, he meets Zayne and tells him what life is like for all of them forced to do this deadly job, then when Dace Golliard shows up he’s captured by a skreaper and never seen again. You’d think he’d show up again in a future issue about Zayne and his friends rescuing the rest of the slaves they couldn’t save today, but nope. Like Goethar Kleej, he just serves as the voice of the Crucible’s victims for one comic, then disappears.

Dueling Ambitions and The Reaping could have both been condensed into a single story, because plot-wise they end up pretty redundant. You could even fold Masks into the mix as well: do a four-issue introduction to the Crucible, either through the swoopdueling or the mining operation, that organically integrates Malak into the plot instead of having him randomly pop in and out for one issue at a time. The events of the larger story could give him a reason to leave Zayne’s group for good midway through the arc, with the most relevant parts of Ambitions and Reaping happening in approximately the same places as before, just made more coherent by a unified narrative. Then you’ve got two issues left over that you don’t have to waste on filler arcs or repetitive plots or rushed conclusions.

As it is, nothing that happens in this one matters aside from the introductions of Dace Golliard and the Night King’s lieutenant. Oh, and Jarael dresses like a floozy for the ninety-sixth time. 2/5 Death Stars for that.

Seriously, guys, why is it so cold in here?

How Revan Got His Mask

Knights of the Old Republic #42: Masks

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Ron Chan

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: June 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

The crew of the Hot Prospect has gone to the planet Wor Tandell for Spring Break. Jarael blows off steam by riding around on a giant goat-lizard, but it quickly bucks her off, leaving Zayne to rescue her with the Force. She threatens him (out of gratitude), then yells at him for wanting to talk more about her past as a slaver. She angrily explains that she was kidnapped as a child and forced to fight other slaves until she became a slave trainer, a position she used to try to make life better for the slaves she instructed. Then she met Camper and ran away with him. Put like that, it doesn’t sound like she was actually a slaver after all. So much for that shocking revelation in the last comic.

Suddenly Malak shows up on the planet and is like, “Jarael, I’ve come to take you away with me!” because he still doesn’t get that she’s just not that into him. He’s brought a detachment of Revanchist Jedi Crusaders with him, along with the Republic naval liaison to the Jedi Expeditionary Task Force. Zayne meets up with a Jedi named Ferroh, who until now has only appeared as a nameless background character in Jedi Crusader scenes but Zayne acts like they’re all buddy-buddy. Ferroh has brought glad tidings: the Jedi Order has now officially joined the Mandalorian Wars!

She’s so thrilled.

Ferroh is a Cathar, the same species as Sylvar from Tales of the Jedi. He explains that a dozen years ago he returned to his home planet, but was unable to find any trace of his people; the whole planet was unpopulated and the Cathar species had completely  vanished. The Republic apparently thought there was nothing suspicious about this and never bothered to follow up on it. Maybe one of the Cathars should have carved the word “CROATOAN” into a tree trunk.

A decade later (despite Ferroh’s “dozen years” calculation it’s only ten on the official timeline), with the Mandalorian conquest in full swing, Revan became convinced that the marauders were responsible for the Cathars’ disappearance. He led his Jedi to the planet in search of clues that could convince the Jedi Council how dire a threat the Mandalorians truly were. He found a Mandalorian mask buried in the dirt, and upon picking it up all the Jedi present, including members of the High Council, experienced a shared Force vision of Cassus Fett and a Mandalorian horde driving the Cathars into the sea. A Mandalorian woman tried to defend the Cathars, claiming, “Cassus—wait! They’re defeated! We don’t have to do this!” so she was killed alongside the Cathars when Mandalorian ships opened fire on them from the sky. What was the point of chasing them into the ocean if you were just going to shoot them? You could have blown up their cities without setting foot on the planet. I don’t get it.

So Revan—sorry, “the Revanchist”—has this chick’s helmet now and he says, “I don’t know your name—but I take up your cause. I will not remove your mask until there is justice—until the Mandalorians have been defeated once and for all. So swears . . . Revan!” And this is when he takes the name and starts wearing the mask everyone remembers from the game.

And, you know, I just . . . It’s not like the worst thing ever, but I mean . . .

Okay, so six years after KotOR comes out, they retcon it that he was wearing a Mandalorian mask the whole time. Why did it need to be Mandalorian? Are they the only people in the galaxy who wear helmets? If I ever thought about it at all, I just assumed the mask was a cultural tradition from Revan’s homeworld or maybe some sort of arcane artifact he discovered while away fighting the war. But I guess the best way to distinguish your cause from your enemy’s is to wear the signature piece of clothing your enemy is famous for.

Then he says he’ll take it off once the Mandalorians are beaten, but he just keeps wearing it, even after he’s become Dark Lord of the Sith and started his own war against the Republic (spoilerssssss!). Wouldn’t he have found like a cool Sith mask or something to swap it out with? Maybe he was afraid of diluting his personal brand, I don’t know. What is clear, given that Revan already wore a dress and now has some chick’s mask on top of that, is that he apparently had a thing for women’s clothing.

Also, like I said when discussing all the ways Malak’s depiction in these comics has disappointed me, in the game his name was already Revan. Then when he turned evil he renamed himself Darth Revan. Now we don’t even know what his original name was, and he just took the name Revan because he got tired of people calling him “the Revanchist.”

In his behind-the-scenes blog post on this issue, author John Jackson Miller wrote, “While Revan and Malak had been assumed by gamers to be those characters’ birth names, it was clear from discussions before the series began that it was an assumption. We knew from game dialogue what the names of the characters were during the games — and people referred to those character’ earlier lives by the names they knew. But we never got the equivalent of a high school yearbook for confirmation. Further, and critically from my point of view, it was always an open question why anyone adopting the Sith tradition of Darth-naming would disregard a major part of it — the muscular suffix, the evil nom de guerre.” So basically he just changed it because he didn’t like the old version. Well . . . okay?

After complaining about continuity minutiae for four paragraphs, Malak asks Jarael to join him in taking the fight to the Mandalorians with the newly sanctioned Jedi-led Republic fleet. Now that her goofball friends have been acquitted of all crimes, they don’t need her help anymore, and as much as Malak likes Zayne, he’s too controversial a figure to risk inviting along. “You belong with me—I mean, with the Jedi,” says Malak suavely.

Rohlan comes running in and punches Malak in the face, screaming that he’ll never take Jarael away. They fight and Malak actually doesn’t get his ass kicked for once. He stuffs Rohlan’s armored head into a campfire but then Ferroh and the Republic liaison show up and pull him off, saying, “Malak, stop! He’s beaten! You don’t have to do this!” Oh I get it, they’re doing like a thing.

The Republic liaison, who is wearing eyeglasses in Star Wars, chastises Malak for beating up a beloved sports hero, then Zayne comes up and is like “Sorry, Malak, but you can’t take my girlfriend to war with you,” then he pounces on Jarael and shoves his tongue down her throat. Take note, ladies: the only way to get a guy to stop hitting on you is to have another guy pretend to be your boyfriend. Especially if you don’t even ask and he just takes it upon himself to pretend for you. Works every time!

She’s so thrilled.

Malak sulks off to listen to Real Friends alone in his room while Zayne congratulates himself on manipulating the emotions of one of his closest friends and allies. “This is not a circus act—and I’m not a clown,” he tells Jarael, trying to act like he’s all badass now. As the Republic ship rises into the night sky, Malak stands at the window, glaring down at the friends he’s leaving behind. “Come on,” he tells Ferroh and Glasses Guy, “we’ve got a war to win.”

So I’m not sure to what extent this was the intention, but this scene really reads like one of the final straws for Malak crossing over to the dark side was because a girl he liked didn’t like him back. Did that really need to come into this? Like, at all?

Anyway, I’ve already covered most of my major grievances with this issue. The art is okay; it’s almost like discount (really, really discounted, like off-off-brand) Dustin Weaver. The KotOR lore is cool, as always, even if the details of how it plays out leave something to be desired. As opposed as I am to Darth Malak’s real name being “Alek Squinquargesimus,” he has one line I really like that pertains to it: “There’s nobody left who remembers who I was before. But they’ll remember Malak. I’ll make sure of that.” It’s too bad they’ll only remember him as the awkward guy who became a videogame boss because a girl broke his heart, though.

2.5/5 Death Stars.

Return of the Plot

Knights of the Old Republic #39–41: Dueling Ambitions

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: March – May 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

The next stop on our journey through the Expanded Universe is a topic that has been central to the themes and messages of Star Wars since the beginning: slavery!

The Scooby Gang stops off at the planet Pantolomin to check out the big swoopduels, which is where professional athletes fight each other while riding around at high speeds on swoop bikes and/or dragons. Apparently Zayne is a huge sports nerd—who knew?—and is psyched out of his mind to see his lifelong hero, horned Gotal swoopduelist Goethar Kleej, the only competitor to win the Solo Aerials four years in a row. Are you excited yet?

The duels are operated by an entertainment company called the Franchise, which judging by its name is probably run by some guy called Lord Business. To no one’s surprise, however, things are not as swell as they appear. It turns out that in Goethar’s victory speech he exposed the Franchise as an evil organization who kidnaps and enslaves people for their games, forcing them to live in horrible, violent conditions until they prove themselves worthy of rising to the big leagues. The Franchise used magic to edit his live speech into a generic declaration about sportsmanship and gratitude, though.

Goethar hopes the Franchise will punish him by sending him back to the pits so he can be with his autistic son, but he’s told that his son, Aubin, has already been promoted to the championship level. The only way he can stop his kid from getting killed is by entering the tournament himself to protect him.

Meanwhile, Rohlan has gotten bored and left the Hot Prospect to wander aimlessly. He’s immediately accosted by security for being an enemy combatant in a galactic war, but Gryph quickly explains that Rohlan is actually a duelist dressed like a Mandalorian for novelty’s sake. So now Rohlan is a contestant in the swoop duels. This is actually a lot funnier than it sounds.

While Rohlan’s prep team is buffing his armor backstage, Zayne comes to see him and randomly bumps into Goethar Kleej. Before he can even ask for his hero’s autograph, however, Goethar is like, “Hey, you’re Zayne Carrick, the famous not-murderer. ENTER THIS SPORTS COMPETITION TO PROTECT MY SON OR I WILL EAT YOUR FACE!!!”

Zayne and Aubin are the two winning duelists in one competition, and Goethar and Rohlan in another, so all four move on to the final round. Afterward, in the locker room, Zayne tries to convince Goethar that they can help each other destroy the Franchise, or I mean the Crucible, which is the actual slaving organization that supplies the Franchise. Goethar reveals that the woman who runs the Crucible once cut off his horns so now he wears fake ones. He reveals this by nonchalantly pulling the two ice cream cone-sized horns off his head like he’s pulling off a fake mustache. This is actually a lot funnier than it was intended to be.

Because of his amputation, Goethar has been unable to help his son learn to control the sensory input Gotals get through their horns, leaving him an insensate wreck. Zayne uses the Force to help teach Aubin how to cope. Meanwhile, Jarael has a dream that Malak, Rohlan, Demagol, and Arkoh Adasca are being mean to her.

The Franchise gets a visit from Jervo Thalien, the chairman of Lhosan Industries. You may remember him from that time he tried to blow up Gryph and Zayne on Taris for some vague plot-induced reason. Apparently there are no other corrupt businessmen in Star Wars during this time period, because Jervo is up to his fat non-neck in the Franchise’s illegal slaving and gambling operations. Upon learning that his old nemeses are involved in the games, he becomes fearful that Gryph will con their security force into selling him their pants, and orders that Zayne and Goethar meet with a tragic accident in the competition.

Gryph, hiding in the ceiling, gets all this on tape. He comes up with a plan to screw over the bad guys and come out on top with his friends, just like always. Jarael puts on blue body paint and one of her infinite supply of crop tops in order to pickpocket the games’ orchestral composer, while Elbee infiltrates the droid pit crew and steals a trash bin.

The competition finally begins, at which point Zayne the others realize that all of their weapons and bikes have been tampered with while their competitors’ weapons’ safety settings have been deactivated. They still win anyway though.

Jarael has switched the composer’s music with a recording of Goethar’s unedited speech and Jervo’s admission of guilt. Although the Franchise stops it from reaching the broader galaxy, everyone in the stadium hears it and Jervo has to flee for his life. Goethar, Aubin, and Zayne escape the field in the confusion, leaving Rohlan the last man standing and the new galactic champion of swoopdueling.

Some time later, the Hot Prospect arrives at another spaceport on Pantolomin, where its crew unloads the garbage bin Elbee stole earlier. Hidden inside are legendary sports hero Goethar Kleej and his son. Why did they have to wait until the ship landed to climb out of the trash? Because the plot needed them to meet Jarael and be able to run off in the same scene.

As Goethar is thanking Zayne for all he’s done for them, Jarael comes out of the ship sans blue paint. Goethar reacts in horror to her tattoos, declares that everything Zayne said to him was a lie, and hightails it out of there with Aubin. Zayne is understandably confused. “I never knew what your tattoos meant,” he says. “Jarael—before Camper found you—were you a slave?”

“No, Zayne . . .” says Jarael, “. . . I was a slaver. Good night.”

Then she goes to bed and Zayne is just like, “Oh, okay. That’s cool, I guess. Why would that need any kind of follow-up? I am completely satisfied with how this conversation went.”

Back at the dueling complex, Jervo Thalien is trying to sever his connection with the Crucible. Instead, the Crucible severs Jervo’s connection with his life. “You can’t hide from me, Jarael,” says Chantique, the leader of the Crucible. “And you—and anyone who helps you—will pay!”

Seriously, guys, why is it so cold in here?

Meditations

Spending three issues on a Star Wars sporting event sounds like the dullest thing I’ve ever heard of. I kind of dug it, though. It’s no Quidditch, in that the game itself and its rules and history aren’t interesting, but it reminded me of the Taris Dueling Ring and swoop-racing circuit from Knights of the Old Republic: The Game. Neither of which were all that interesting either, but anything’s better than the goddamn Pazaak minigames.

After two (practically three, except for that chilling cliffhanger) standalone adventures, the series is finally gearing up for its second long story arc. And since there are only nine issues left, it’s not a moment too soon. Trying not to pre-judge too harshly, but at this point I don’t have much anticipation for the Crucible plot. The Covenant was part of the series’ DNA from issue 1, and we spent so much time on it (pointless detours included) that it’s difficult to feel like another arc confined to the very end of the series has any hope of measuring up. I assume it was different at the time this arc was being released, before readers knew that KotOR was doomed to die at issue 50. Approaching it from that mindset . . . nope, still not that exciting.

I just don’t care that much about Jarael’s Mysterious Past™ or tattoos. I still remember the last time a long-running series felt the need to lengthily explain the meaning behind a character’s tattoos. I guess I’m sort of interested to see who this Chantique is and why she would wear what looks like some kind of fancy lingerie to a business meeting/assassination, but I’ve never wondered where Jarael came from or what she was doing before she met Zayne. What makes her interesting is her relationship with Zayne and the role she plays in his capers now, not the angsty back story that I didn’t realize she was supposed to have. Confining my thoughts just to the content of this story specifically, though, it adequately does its job of setting up the new plot and introducing the new villain. Her wardrobe may be a little impractical but I give her points for cutting off Goat Man’s horns.

3/5 Death Stars I guess. Decent story told in a kind of boring way. Just like my life.

A New Day, a New Enemy!

Knights of the Old Republic #36–37: Prophet Motive

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Bong Dazo

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: December 2008 – January 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

Gryph and Jarael try to swindle a criminal syndicate, but the crime boss instantly sees through this obvious subterfuge. Jarael is kidnapped (again) but uses the Force to escape. Zayne shows up to save the day at the last minute but ends up doing nothing to rescue his friends. Slyssk dresses like a pimp and defeats the genius crime lord by telling him his boss wants to talk to him on some other planet, then once he’s out the door I guess he can just never come back for some reason. His slaves take over the syndicate but that’s okay because as long as you’re not killing people there’s nothing wrong with swindling them.

Nothing else happens.

2/5 Death Stars because some of the slavery jokes are funny.

 

Knights of the Old Republic #38: Faithful Execution

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Dean Zachary

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: February 2009

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

This comic continues the trend started in its predecessor of being a standalone adventure disconnected from any overarching mega-plot. Unlike the previous story, however, it’s not a complete waste of time.

Aboard their new ship, the Hot Prospect, Zayne & Pals discover the lost pleasure cruiser Chancellor Fillorean adrift in a stellar nursery. Zayne, Jarael, Rohlan, and Slyssk board the vessel to find that its gravity has failed and all of its passengers and crew are floating corpses. The sole survivors are a dimunitive Bimm passenger (not to be confused with the equally diminutive but otherwise completely unrelated Bimm species) and his assistant droid, K-OB7 (or “Kayo”). Toki explains that he was hiding in his room the whole time and doesn’t know what happened to the crew.

Awwwwww!

[Continuity Note: Both species of Bimms originate from the planet Bimmisaari. The Bimms were introduced by EU godfather Timothy Zahn in the first book of the modern EU, Heir to the Empire (1991). Illustrations and descriptions in West End Games’ Heir to the Empire Sourcebook (1993) identified them as basically a somewhat hairy species of human midgets. A background extra in the Mos Eisley cantina, played by little person actor Marcus Powell, was retroactively identified as a Bimm in the Star Wars Customizable Card Game’s Premiere set (1995). The same year, however, saw the release of Dark Horse’s comic adaptation of Heir to the Empire, which depicted the Bimms as goat-faced, floppy-eared aliens. Although this series’ depiction of the Noghri was wildly divergent as well, the Bimm discrepancy was later singled out for resolution in The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons (1998), which explained that there were two different species of Bimms who hailed from the same planet.

[The “identical but different” retcon is not at all uncommon in the EU. See also: Byss and Byss, Mrisst and Mrlsst, Threkin Horm and Hrekin Thorm, Chu’unthor and Chu’unthor, Mace Windu and Macemillian-winduarté.] 

Once the crew of the Hot Prospect gets gravity restored aboard the Chancellor Fillorean, Rohlan performs autopsies on the yacht’s passengers and discovers that everyone died not of asphyxiation, but of strangulation. As Zayne tries to figure out how this is possible, they hear a clamor coming from the kitchen and rush in to find Slyssk lying on the floor with his throat crushed. Rohlan performs an emergency battlefield tracheotomy, which I didn’t realize could cure being strangled but who knows, and the adorable comic relief sidekick doesn’t die a horrible ugly death on a ghost ship.

Toki comes in to see what happened and wonders if his droid could have been responsible. Zayne and Rohlan run off to find Kayo, leaving Jarael to protect Toki. Toki is like ( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º).

Kayo is talking to a disconsolate Elbee, who is Zayne’s clinically depressed labor droid because I’m sure you’ve forgotten by now, and has somehow managed to motivate him out of his funk and gotten him to help carry heavy crap around. Zayne runs in and cuts off Kayo’s hands with his lightsaber, vowing the evildoer will strangle no more innocents today. Elbee punches Zayne in the face with a fist roughly the size of Zayne’s torso. Don’t worry, though, he just has to walk it off for a bit and he’s fine. The Force or something.

Kayo confesses everything. His sole purpose in life is to help and protect his master above all else, but everywhere they go, people keep turning up strangled. Kayo doesn’t understand how Toki could be responsible, since he’s such a little dude, but he dutifully disposed of the bodies to keep his master safe. That is, until everyone on the Chancellor Fillorean was killed, including the only people on board who actually knew how to pilot it. Realizing what fools they’ve been, Zayne and Rohlan rush back to find Toki levitating Jarael and choking the shit out of her with the Force.

Zayne shoots Toki directly in the face, but Toki’s like, “If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to shoot to kill!” Um, so what is his weak spot, exactly? Toki pulls out a red lightsaber, revealing that he was once a Sith assassin in the service of Exar Kun, but after the war was over he couldn’t make himself stop killing. He out-duels Zayne, because Zayne sucks, and is about to deliver the killing blow when he’s stopped by Kayo.

With his handless arms, Kayo seizes Toki in a bearhug, declaring that his master will never be safe as long as he keeps killing, so Kayo will protect him even from himself. But Toki vows to kill all of them, “especially the woman,” because in addition to being a serial killer he’s apparently also a misogynist, which is even worse. Rohlan’s like:

Zayne tells Rohlan that he didn’t have to murder both Toki and Kayo in cold blood (because Zayne had such a great handle on the situation) and Rohlan tells him that if Zayne can’t help protect Jarael he’s of no use to him. Everyone gets back on the Hot Prospect and Elbee goes back to sitting by himself in the cargo hold and not talking to anyone. Zayne tells him that things are getting too intense for him. Rohlan’s acting wildly out of character, Slyssk has lost all confidence in himself, Jarael can suddenly use the Force and Toki seemed to recognize her from somewhere, and Zayne himself has a secret he can’t tell anyone. Elbee says nothing. Zayne’s like, “Thanks for listening, buddy,” and goes back upstairs.

Meditations

Unlike Prophet Motive, this little comic is actually pretty decent and worth reading. It has a cool mystery plot in a creepy setting, with a moody atmosphere amplified by Dean Zachary’s dark, heavy pencil work. I would have really loved to see this plot stretched out a little longer. Completely ditch the pointless syndicate con game from the last comic and play out this murder mystery for the full three issues with Zachary’s illustrations. More spooky explorations on the dead ship would have provided ample opportunity to fit in the only relevant thing that happened in Prophet Motive, Jarael realizing she had the Force. You could add a few more surviving passengers and play up the Agatha Christie Murder on the Chancellor Fillorean angle. It would have been awesome.

What we got instead was still pretty good, though. Toki Tollivar was actually first mentioned in The Adjudicator Special Report: The Outer Rim, a news periodical bonus feature in the second issue of Days of Fear, as “Kelven Garnatrope, the Corellian Strangler.” Anyone reading this story in Dark Horse’s trade paperback or Omnibus editions, however, wouldn’t know that, as for some reason they omitted all bonus features from their collected editions. They are included in Marvel’s Epic Collection reprints, however, so those are the ones you want to look for.

I feel like I had something else to say here but I forgot. Whatever, 4/5 Death Stars.