Publication Date: March 2010 on StarWars.com (republished on Unbound Worlds)
Timeline Placement: 3,660 BBY
Today on Suicide by Star Wars Apocrypha, we’re looking at a pair of short stories about two female NPCs from Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s World of Warcraft clone that ruined the Old Republic era forever.
The first stars Hylo Visz, a sexy green-skinned smuggler chick
delivering an illegal shipment of prototype ion drives to the Rendili
Vehicle Corporation for her employer, Barrga the Hutt. Hylo is
superstitious to the point of being mentally infirm, so when the
hyperdrive generator on her crappy ship stops working during the
delivery, she begins freaking out and tries to abandon the assignment.
Barrga’s tagalong enforcers beat her up and take over her ship,
completing the delivery and leaving her behind when they take off with
their payment. But it turns out that they were paid in bombs, and
Hylo-Vision Eye Drops’ ship explodes as soon as it’s in the air.
Hylo sneaks into the Rendili facility and disguises herself as a
mechanic. She discovers that the facility is about to perform a test
flight for a new model of starfighter designed specifically for the Jedi
Order, the high-speed Vanguard corvette. She decides to steal the ship
and use it to escape the planet, but her grand theft starship is
interrupted when the worst Jedi Knight in the world enters the fighter.
Hylo hits him in the face with her welding mask, immediately knocking
him unconscious. She contemplates murdering him in cold blood, but
decides this will probably bring her bad luck and elects to just throw
him off the ship instead.
She takes off in the Vanguard and sets course for the Hutt moon of
Nar Shaddaa, trying to think of a way to explain to her boss what
happened, when she realizes that Barrga the Hutt probably thinks she’s
dead and she can go anywhere she wants. So she does. The end.
This short story is pretty long for having so little happen in it.
There are one or two somewhat suspenseful moments but mostly it’s boring
and not very engagingly written. Also at one point the author wrote
“bold-faced lies” instead of “bald-faces lies,” which makes this story
terrible.
1.5/5 Death Stars.
Hylo-Vision HD Plus Eye Drops provide
immediate relief and refreshing for tired eyes and redness from dry air,
contact lenses, allergies, chlorinated water from swimming pools, etc.
Sith acolyte Lana Beniko and her friends, Bensyn and Kagan, have
begun their final trial to prove themselves worthy of becoming
full-fledged Sith: retrieving the helmet of Tulak Hord from the Valley
of the Dark Lords on Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil
planet in the galaxy.
[Continuity Note: The story itself gives no
indication of when it takes place. Wookieepedia places it between 3,644
and 3,640 BBY, but in “The Final Trial” Lana is still an apprentice and
text in The Old Republic refers to her as already being a Sith Lord by 3,653 BBY.]
Kagan has been injured by some kind of slug monster, but together
they press on, helping and relying on one another to succeed and
generally not acting much like Sith at all. Suddenly they are attacked
by a crazed former student who has been lost in the tomb for years. Lana
has the opportunity to kill her, but pity stays her hand and she allows
the dangerous crazy person to leave.
Eventually they find the helmet and are making their way back out of
the tomb, Bensyn forced to carry Kagan as she grows ever weaker, when
suddenly the insane student reappears and attacks them again, plunging a
knife into Kagan’s chest. Lana quickly decapitates the lost acolyte but
it’s too late to save their friend. Lana expects Bensyn to lash out at
her in rage, but instead he continues carrying Kagan’s body out of the
tomb, insisting that they all leave this place together.
Lana Beniko is a romanceable companion character in The Old Republic,
and from what I understand she’s supposed to be a “good Sith”
character, which seems like an oymoron but ooooh shades of gray or
whatever. In this story, though, her un-Sith-like compassion comes back
to bite her and gets her friend killed. Since it doesn’t really work as
an origin story for why she’s a Sith Lord but not really evil, I’m not
sure why it exists. Unless it’s, like, Bensyn not attacking her when she
expected him to taught her that just because you’re a Sith you don’t
always have to be a dick, or something. I don’t know, though; I didn’t
get that vibe.
Not horribly written, I just don’t see the point of it. 2/5 Death Stars.
On the planet Alderaan, a platoon of Republic soldiers wearing what is clearly clone trooper armor that shouldn’t be invented for another 3,600 years faces off against an invading battalion of Sith warriors and what are clearly destroyer droids led by Darth Malgus. Jace Malcom, the trooper we previously saw in the Return trailer,
shoots Malgus in the face with a BFG, slightly burning one side of his
jaw, but he is quickly overwhelmed by the Sith Lord’s Force lightning.
Things look bleak for the Republic soldiers when suddenly Satele Shan
arrives and starts kicking everyone’s ass in bullet time. She and Malgus
duel but Malgus is too powerful for her. He destroys her double-bladed
lightsaber and is about to impale her but she’s able to use the Force to
catch his lightsaber blade with her bare hands. While Malgus is
distracted by how awesome this is, Jace Malcom tackles him and tries to
take down a Lord of the Sith in a punching contest. Malgus is like “Dude
wtf are you doing?” and Malcom detonates a grenade six inches in front
of their faces.
Rather than killing either of them, all this
does is blacken both their faces like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Malgus gets
back to his feet but Satele Force-pushes him into the side of a cliff
and collapses a mountain on top of him, so I guess he loses on a
technicality. The Republic troopers shoot flares into the air all across
the planet, signalling the Republic fleet arriving in orbit that
they’ve somehow held off the invasion by beating one guy. Malcom
solemnly intones in a voice-over that the courage they’ve shown here
will ignite a spark of hope across the galaxy.
It’s hard to give a fair rating to these
trailers because there’s virtually no story in any of them, they’re just
showcases for sweet action scenes. But in that regard this was pretty
awesome so 2.5/5 Death Stars for making everyone wish Lucasfilm had made
an animated series out of this instead of the freaking Clone Wars
again.
Ow my skin
The Third Lesson
Author: Paul S. Kemp
Medium: Short story
Publication Date: March 2011 in Star Wars Insider #124
Timeline Placement: 3,667 BBY
Series: The Old Republic
“The Third Lesson” picks up right where Hope left off, with
the Sith forces in retreat from Alderaan as Republic reinforcements
arrive. Darth Malgus has somehow unburied himself from the rubble Satele
Shan dropped on him and is making a reluctant getaway aboard his
personal shuttle. Enraged by having victory snatched from his jaws by a
Republic trooper and a “Jedi witch,” and dealing with a respiratory
infection brought on by a grenade detonating in his face to boot, Malgus
is looking for someone to take out his frustration on. Through the
Force, he senses a Jedi below him in one of Alderaan’s ravaged cities
and hurls himself out of his shuttle to go murder it. As Malgus and the
Jedi fight, Malgus thinks back to when he was a boy named Veradun and
his father taught him three important lessons that help him win this
battle.
1. “Senseless savagery is the province of animals, not men. Savagery
is useful only if it’s controlled and put in service to an end. The end
is everything.”
2. “Often things that pretend weakness await only the right moment to show strength.”
The third he learned the day he was accepted for training at the
Dromund Kaas academy, when his father showed him a cage in their family
zoo covered with a tarp, which Veradun removed to find nothing inside:
3. “Sometimes there’s just an empty cage.”
He puts this lesson to use when he allows the Jedi to think he’s
going to spare him, then runs him through with his lightsaber while he’s
still wondering why Malgus would show him mercy.
This story is very short and probably didn’t take the author much
more than an hour to churn out, but if you’re reading the EU in
chronological order like I am you might be shocked by how much better it
is than the last prose
we read. Look at this simile: “The burned-out buildings below stuck out
of the scorched earth like rotted teeth, crooked and black.” That’s not
the most sophisticated or original imagery I’ve ever read, but at least
it’s something, which is so much more preferable than nothing.
The story is fine for what it is: our first glimpse into the mind of one of the TOR era’s
most notable villains. Obviously it isn’t great literature, nor is it
trying to be, but this small sample has increased my interest in the
Paul Kemp books waiting for us down the timeline. 3/5 Death Stars.
“Oh God,” you say to yourself, “he’s reviewing trailers now?” Well, the trailers for Star Wars: The Old Republic
are somewhat of a special case. They’re more akin to animated short
films than regular trailers, depicting important events from the game’s
back story that are otherwise relegated to exposition and inference.
Still, there’s only so much you can say about a five-minute cartoon of
wizards fighting with laserswords.
We find ourselves once again at
Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil planet in the galaxy. Jedi
Master Kao Cen Darach is there with his apprentice Satele Shan, a
descendant of Bastila Shan and Revan, to arrest smuggler Nico Okarr for
being a Han Solo ripoff. Suddenly, a fleet of warships that look
uncannily like Imperial Star Destroyers drops out of hyperspace and
begins attacking the Republic outpost. “The Sith Empire has returned!”
Cow Ken Derecha exclaims, which you might think is a hell of an
assumption to make, assuming that he should have no idea there is even
such a thing as the Sith Empire anymore, if you didn’t know that Sith
forces had already engaged the Republic fleet in another sector of the
galaxy to lure them away from Korriban. I didn’t know that until I
looked it up; now I wonder why Ken Jennings was wasting his time
prosecuting petty criminals when the galaxy was under attack.
There is a lot of shooting and explosions
and then two Sith Lords appear: Vindican, a Red Sith, and his
apprentice, Darth Malgus, a bald albino. Ta-Taka-Ki-Kek sacrifices
himself so Not Bastila and Definitely Not Han Solo can escape with Most
Assuredly Not R2-D2 Or T3-M4 and No Way Is That A Clone Trooper aboard the Absolutely Not Millennium Falcon,
striking down Vindican before being slain himself by Malgus. Vindican
watches in triumph as the Sith fleet reclaims his ancestral birthplace,
to which Malgus derisively comments, “Welcome home,” and then cuts his
master’s head off.
Undoubtedly one of the most narratively
complex and thematically resonant stories we’ve experienced so far.
Looks cool though, 2/5 Death Stars.
The Old Republic #4–6: Blood of the Empire
Author: Alexander Freed
Artist: David Ross
Medium: Comic
Publication Date: April – September 2010
Timeline Placement: 3,678 BBY
Series: The Old Republic
The Great War has begun!
Wheeee!
Three years into our latest entry in the Sith Wars, the one that
nobody asked for but we got anyway, we’re introduced to Teneb Kel, a
down-on-his-luck 18-year-old Sith assassin who’s stuck doing the Dark
Council’s dirty work as penance for his master’s religious heresy. Upon
successfully assassinating Mayor Tom of the planet Bergeron, Kel is
tasked with his greatest assignment yet: to find and kill Exal Kressh,
the Sith Emperor’s apprentice. Apparently she’s gone rogue and has been
betraying military secrets to the Republic. Also for some reason she
just looks like a human female with red skin. Sith women are creepy-looking broads, but Exal’s basically a Zeltron.
Real women have face tentacles.
Kel and his personal slave, an Abyssin
he calls “Maggot,” travel to the space station Lenico Colony Blue in
the Lenico system, where he confronts Exal and gets his ass handed to
him. Exal destroys the station to cover her escape, leaving Teneb Kel
and Maggot stranded in the inhospitable wastelands of Lenico IV. Kel
leaves Maggot behind to repair their ship and ventures off into the
desert in search of his quarry.
Close to death, Kel calls upon the forbidden knowledge of his
disgraced master to summon a Force vision. A “thought form” of Exal
Kressh appears to him and explains that the former population of Lenico
IV, a primitive tribe of Ortolans, or blue elephant people,
possessed secrets desired by the Sith Emperor, passed down among their
tribal myths and legends. Exal came to the planet and learned the
Ortolans’ secrets, then destroyed them. In the process, however, she
also discovered the Emperor’s true goal, his secret use for all the
arcane knowledge he had sent her to gather: he plans to create an army
of thralls called the Children of the Emperor, a collection of mindless
puppets whose husks will serve as his eyes and extensions of his will.
Exal Kressh was to be the first of his Children, but she realized what
he had planned for her and fled before he could complete her possession.
Teneb Kel awakes from his vision to find that he’s been discovered by
a Miraluka Jedi called Jerbhen Hulis, presumably some relation of
Krynda from the Knights of the Old Republic comics. Hulis and
his apprentice have been searching for Exal Kressh to try to determine
the validity of the information she’s provided. Hulis and Kel strike a
deal: if Hulis reveals what Exal Kressh has told the Republic, Kel will
help him rescue the survivors of Lenico Colony Blue. Hulis agrees,
reasoning that Exal’s information is soon going to become public
knowledge anyway, and Kel lives up to his word.
After helping Jerbhen Hulis get the survivors to safety, Teneb Kel
returns to his ship, where Hulis’s apprentice has already met and
befriended Maggot. “He steals your dignity. You become the animal he
makes you,” the apprentice insists when Maggot explains how his master
doesn’t treat him like a slave. “Claim your freedom, my friend.” He
walks out the door and straight into the point of Teneb Kel’s
lightsaber.
Kel and Maggot set course for Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and
most evil planet in the galaxy. When they arrive, it’s already under
siege by Republic and Jedi forces, its defenses betrayed by Exal Kressh.
Kel knows a secret backdoor into the Sith Academy (presumably the same
one you can enroll at in Knights of the Old Republic), however,
and rushes off to confront the tergiversator, telling Maggot that if
Kel dies, he wants the Abyssin to have his freedom; he doesn’t see him
as his slave or his apprentice, but as his loyal companion.
Kel finds Exal Kressh already in the process of destroying the
academy. The ritual by which the Emperor will create his children will
soon begin here in this very building, she explains, and she will
confound his centuries of planning as revenge for how he betrayed her.
Suddenly Maggot appears and shoots her with a giant gun. For some reason
this doesn’t seem to hurt her at all, and Kel watches in horror as she
blasts Maggot away with a burst of Force lightning.
He attacks her but the Emperor’s apprentice is too powerful; she
destroys Kel’s lightsaber and seizes him in the grip of the Force.
“Maybe you are Sith,” she tells him, preparing to strike the final blow, “but you’re still a failure.”
Teneb Kel uses the Force to propel another lightsaber into her back. As
Exal Kressh dies, the last thing she hears is the Sith Emperor’s
mocking laughter in her head.
Kel rushes over to attend to his friend. “Maggot!” he exclaims. “You
came to save me.” Maggot addresses him in the Abyssin language, which
Kel cannot understand: “My name is Qawohl, of the warrior clans of Byss.
It is time I had my freedom.” Ignoring him, Kel asks how much he
overheard. Qawohl grudgingly admits, in Basic, that he heard something
about the Emperor’s children, which he didn’t understand. “It doesn’t
matter,” says Kel. “Suffice to say, we won.” They turn to go, and Teneb
Kel stabs his friend in the back.
Back on Dromund Kaas, Kel reports to the Dark Council. He refuses to
kneel to them and announces that he will no longer serve as their
puppet. In exchange for his knowledge of the Emperor’s true plans, which
are unknown even to the Council, he demands to be made a Sith Lord.
“You will name me Darth Thanaton,” he says, in a way that makes me suspect I’m supposed to know who that is. The end!
“F” is for friends who do stuff together!
Meditations
This comic is far from terrible but I have mixed feelings about it. The art is quite decent for a trashy Star Wars
tie-in comic made to promote an MMO, but the comic is very short, only
three issues long, though it was originally published as a biweekly
series of webcomics. As a result, the story and characterization feel
very rushed. There are occasional glimmers of hidden depths below the
surface, especially with the character of Maggot/Qawohl and his
complicated relationship with Teneb Kel, but there’s just not enough
breathing room to flesh these things out sufficiently.
The script for the comic was written by Alexander Freed, a senior writer for The Old Republic.
I haven’t played the game, but his writing was perfectly adequate here.
There are a few passages that I actually really enjoy, like Teneb Kel’s
disgraced master describing his former student as “The one I found
dreaming in the slaves’ quarters . . . The one who devoured books like
scraps of bread . . .” and Exal Kressh’s recollection to the Sith
Emperor: “Remember the Ambrian monastery? I woke up in crushed snow and
glitterfly wings, and the monks wouldn’t say what happened. They just
cried and cried.” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it sounds
interesting. I want to see that story.
Oddly, my biggest problem with the script is the opposite of the one I had with most of Tales of the Jedi.
That is, I kind of wish there were more textboxes explaining what’s
happening. The narrative is so compressed and things happen so quickly
that it’s difficult to follow certain actions and characters motivations
from panel to panel. Like on one page Teneb Kel is trying to escape the
exploding space station and unable to get Maggot to answer his
communicator so he can get their ship ready, then on the next page he’s
somehow inside the ship and Maggot is already there and Kel’s dialogue
starts seemingly in the middle of a sentence but Maggot somehow
understands what he’s talking about. It’s not like the story is a mess
of fragments that make no sense, but there are a few quick moments like
this where I felt like I was missing something.
Overall a decent comic, but too short, especially since we’ll never
see “Darth Thanaton” again outside of the MMO. 3/5 Death Stars.
