Lost Tribe of the Sith: Purgatory
We’ve been away more than a thousand years, so it’s probably time we checked in on the stranded Lost Tribe of Sith on the planet Kesh to see how they’re coming along.
After Nida Korsin’s only son died without leaving an heir, the Sith abolished their dynastic system of rule, replacing it with an oligarchical meritocracy. Part of their new social hierarchy saw the implementation of the slave caste, a class of humans subject to the Sith overlords but still above the native purple-skinned Keshiri, the lowest of the low.
One such slave is Jeff of Minnesota, a herbalist hermit who has attracted the attention of 25-year-old Orielle Kitai, a Sith Saber and the daughter of the newest High Lord on the Sith ruling council. None of these goofy ranks matter at all so don’t bother trying to figure out what they mean. Ori has made several trips out to Jeff’s isolated woodland home on her flying uvak in order to procure the best decorative flowers in the tribe, and also to admire Jeff’s well-muscled arms and fantasize about him shoveling mud onto a boat.
Ori’s mother holds an important position on the Sith council; newly promoted to High Lord, her political allegiances are not yet known, making her the tie-breaker when the Sith vote to elect a new Grand Lord to replace Lillia Venn, who is like 100 years old. Things go south for the Kitais just as they were starting to look up, however; during a rake-riding competition to celebrate the Sith holiday Donellan’s Day, the contestant put forth by Ori’s mom tries to assassinate the Grand Lord. He’s immediately killed, but blame falls on the Kitai family. They are kicked out of their estate and demoted to the slave caste.
While Ori’s mother is put to work mucking out the uvak stables, Ori goes on the run before she can be enslaved and have her uvak confiscated. She flies out to Jeff’s farm because she has nowhere else to go. Initially consumed with rage, she plots ways to discover the truth of what happened and restore her family to glory, but Jeff tells her that the whole thing was probably orchestrated by Lillia Venn herself. Knowing that the political factions on the council were planning to install a new Grand Lord, she wiped out their only way of securing a majority vote and used the opportunity to eliminate her other political rivals as well.
Ori realizes that she is doomed to live in squalor, bereft of the life of luxury she has always known. Jeff senses a deeper humanity within her, however, and believes that she is not completely consumed by hate like the other Sith. He allows her to stay with him despite his better judgment, and eventually they screw.
Ori has been out in the hinterlands for about two weeks when the Luzo brothers, minions of the Grand Lord, show up looking for her while Jeff is out hunting. They kill her uvak and confiscate her lightsaber, as slaves are allowed to own neither. After they depart, Ori flies into a rage and destroys Jeff’s garden, and in the process discovers something metal buried beneath a large pile of manure in the barn. She continues digging to uncover a Republic starfighter.
Up in the mountains, Jeff senses Ori’s distress through the Force and rushes back to the farm, where he finds his ship exposed and Ori gone. A former Shadow agent of the Jedi Covenant, Jeff went on the run after the Covenant fell three years ago. Shortly afterward, his starfighter was caught in a meteor shower and crashed on Kesh, where to his horror he discovered the Covenant’s greatest fear come true: the Sith still lived. He had almost completed the repairs to his ship when Ori Kitai came into his life and complicated everything. Now he rushes off to find her, determined to stop her from giving the Sith a way off Kesh, no matter the cost.
Like most of the Lost Tribe stories, this one’s pretty short, clocking in at just about 30 pages. That’s probably for the best, because it allows these characters to hook us with their situation instead of their personalities. There isn’t time to get to know them that well; we’re just shown the gist of who they are and allowed to fill in the details ourselves while the plot carries us along. What’s not interesting about a budding romance between an impoverished slave and a former aristocrat fallen from grace? It’s just long enough and the characters are just fleshed out enough to work.
The final few pages, once Jeff’s secret is revealed, are very tense and suspenseful, and the way this seemingly isolated narrative ties back into the greater affairs of the galaxy is a smart twist. The Old Republic era may have started with Tales of the Jedi, but I like how John Jackson Miller, through Knights of the Old Republic, Lost Tribe of the Sith, and later Knight Errant, has basically made it his own, with interconnected narratives spanning almost the entire length of it. I was not expecting the Covenant to show up in this series; the fact that it does, so soon after reading about their botched crusade against Zayne Carrick, was another fun reminder of how continuity can work when it’s done right.
I haven’t talked much about the characters because, as I said, the story is too short to really get into them in any meaty way, but you actually find yourself really liking them and rooting for their relationship, which makes the revelation that Jeff is a Jedi trapped on a planet full of Sith all the more unexpected.
4/5 Death Stars.
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| Ori Kitai, another 25-year-old QT in the EU. |
Lost Tribe of the Sith: Sentinel
Jeff of Minnesota sits in a Keshiri bar, trying to get drunk on sparkling water. “I think . . . I might have ruined my life,” he tells the bartender. “Sounds like you met a woman,” the bartender observes.
Jeff has been unable to track down Orielle Kitai, the Sith girl who has discovered that he is a Jedi Knight stranded on a planet full of Sith, and who he also kind of has a thing for. Knowing she must be headed for the Sith capital of Tahv, Jeff resolves to hunt for her there, despite how ill the concentrated psychic malevolence of all the Sith makes him.
Ori meets with her mother and tells her that she has discovered a way off the planet but because she’s just a kid she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Her mom tells her which Sith High Lords she has to talk to to trade Jeff’s ship in exchange for their family’s reinstatement in the aristocracy. After doing this, she heads up to the rooftops of Tahv to steal an uvak, the giant flying lizards ridden by the Sith, where she runs into Jeff. They have a brief lightsaber duel in a fountain, ending when Ori drops her weapon in the water and can’t find it, which is awesome. This is easily the best lightsaber fight we’ve seen so far because both fighters are so incompetent. It’s great.
Jeff appeals to Ori’s better nature and through the power of love he’s able to convince her to give up on her dreams of galactic domination. Which is fine, you know, whatever. They team up and head back to Jeff’s farm, hoping to give the Sith Jeff’s blasters so they will go home without noticing the spaceship in the barn. Jeff hides in the woods while Ori goes to meet the High Lords, only to discover that Grand Lord Lillia Venn herself has come out to see the ship. It turns out that Ori’s mom has betrayed her, as the Sith are wont to do, in return for not having to shovel lizard crap anymore.
Ori is taken prisoner by the Sith guards while Lillia Venn climbs into the starfighter and somehow figures out how to turn it on. Suddenly Jeff comes running out of the woods, grabbing his blasters with the Force and gunning down the Sith holding Ori captive. The remaining Sith get their lightsabers out but because no one on Kesh has deflected a blaster bolt in a thousand years they are unable to defend themselves, which is a cool detail. Jeff grabs Ori and they make a run for it while the starfighter rises into the air.
“She won’t even need us to sever the moorings,” one of the Luzo brothers observes.
“Moorings?” asks the other, and looks down to see two cables running from the bottom of the fighter into the pile of uvak manure. He goes, “Oh, sh—” and then the cables snap, triggering the proton torpedo booby trap buried under the ship. The fertilizer ignites and the whole barn goes up in a ball of fire that consumes the remaining Sith along with Jeff’s starfighter.
Later, we find Jeff and Ori constructing a hut deep in the forest, where the canopy is too thick for any uvak-riders to find them. Each of them has lost everything, except for the other. The only remnants Jeff has left of his old life are his lightsaber and the transmitter from his ship. The atmosphere of Kesh prevents him from sending any messages out, but he has occasionally been able to hear transmissions from the broader galaxy. Eight weeks after the loss of his ship, he receives a warning that makes him realize he can never go home again.
“The Jedi are at war with one another,” he tells Ori. “A Jedi named Revan. When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy. From the sound of it, something’s gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It’s at war with itself.”
Jeff blames the Covenant for this. They were the first to divide the Jedi into sects, and now they are so divided the galaxy can’t trust any of them anymore. He decides that, if the Jedi have been corrupted and the galaxy is again at war, exposing them to an entire planet full of Sith is the last thing he wants to do. He smashes his transmitter, sacrificing his last chance of rescue or escape to protect the galaxy. He and Ori will build a new life here in the hinterlands of Kesh, free at last from the shackles of who they used to be. “The cords were cut. It was time to live.”
I didn’t like this one quite as much as Purgatory because that element of surprise and revelation, while still there in the form of the intercepted transmission about Revan, wasn’t quite as strong this time. Jeff being a Jedi was something I didn’t see coming at all, whereas the news about the Jedi schism, while unexpected, wasn’t as shocking since a connection to major events outside of Kesh had already been established.
It was still pretty good, though. The characters, although not much more sketched out than they were before, are still likable and make you want to root for both of them even though they start off with opposite goals and you know both of them can’t succeed. The battle in the fountain was a particular highlight, as I noted before, because Ori is unbelievably sucky at saber-fighting and Jeff’s heart just isn’t in it, resulting in one of the most entertainingly pathetic lightsaber duels of all time.
It makes no sense to me that a Sith society has lasted this long since it seems like they’re all always trying to kill each other. That said, it was great to see Grand Lord Lillia Venn’s own treachery come around to literally blow up in her face. Miller could have done a bit more to sell Ori’s abrupt abandonment of the Sith ways, but it was set up enough in the previous story through the time she spent on Jeff’s farm and Jeff’s perceptions of her that it didn’t take me out of the story or make me roll my eyes in embarrassment or anything.
I suppose it’s the mark of a good story that I really wish we had more time to spend with Ori and Jeff, to watch their relationship evolve in greater detail and see what happens to them next, but these two stories are all we get. After 50+ issues of KotOR, I guess I’ve gotten used to characters sticking around for a while.
Oh well, 4/5 Death Stars, now get this crap out of here. Didn’t you hear what Jeff said? The Jedi Civil War’s already begun!
