Hope
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.
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| Ow my skin |
The Third Lesson
“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.
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