Publication Date: February 2, 2015 on on SWTOR.com
Timeline Placement: c. 3,643 BBY
We’re introduced to Darth Lachris, a female Sith apprenticed to Darth
Marr, a dude in spiky armor who previously appeared as a member of the
Dark Council back in Blood of the Empire.
There’s even a reference to the hero of that comic, Darth Thanaton.
Good to know he’s still hanging around doing whatever it is he does.
The Dork Council convenes.
Lachris is meeting with her master on Korriban, homeworld of the Sith
and most evil planet in the galaxy, to discuss their strategy for
pacifying the world of Balmorra, which is apparently in open revolt
against its Sith rulers. Marr tells his apprentice that if she can put
down the rebellion he will give her control of the planet, but to do so
she must employ the heretical clairvoyance technique developed by
Thanaton’s dead master, Calypho. The only way this technique works,
however, is for the user to be on the brink of death.
Marr and Lachris duel one another, with Lachris blasting her master
with Force lightning, to which he responds by telekinetically throwing
her into the wall. She hits her head and has a vision of the field of
human skulls from Terminator 2. Standing above the skulls is
the leader of the Balmorran Resistance, a Republic soldier. John Connor
reaches out to grab her but suddenly he’s cut in half by a shadowy
figure whose face she can’t see. She reaches down to grab a handful of
soil and is seized by roots that spring out of the ground. Two more
anonymous figures loom over her and then she wakes up.
“You cannot escape death,” Darth Marr says, lifting her up by the
throat. “Consider this my final lesson.” He tells her she is not a
coward, which is the only compliment he’s ever given her.
Darth Lachris departs for Balmorra with the hope that she may still be able to change her fate.
Darth Lachrymose
The writing in this story is actually pretty decent, but, like in “The
Final Trial,” it’s far too short to leave any lasting impression. It’s a
shame the author never got the opportunity to pen anything more
substantial before the Expanded Universe was decanonized into Legends
and left to continue exclusively as these sporadic TOR shorts; I
definitely would have been interested in seeing how it turned out. As
it is, this story adds some well-written context to characters in the
MMO and the game events on Balmorra, but if you haven’t played the game
and don’t know who these characters are you probably won’t get too much
out of it. Still, decent writing is decent writing. 3.5/5 Death Stars.
The Sixth Line
Author: Courtney Woods
Medium: Short story
Publication Date: April 24 – April 28, 2015 on SWTOR.com (Part One and Part Two)
Timeline Placement: c. 3,643 – 3,636 BBY
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
As anyone who’s played Knights of the Old Republic knows,
these are the five lines of the Jedi Code, often mentioned in the
prequel trilogy but never recited on-screen. But what if there was a
sixth line? A line that said:
There is no contemplation, there is only duty.
It would be pretty lame, right?
Apparently there’s a group of five Jedi who don’t think so, though.
Surro, Landai, Garault, Onok, and Danak are a militant faction of Jedi
aiding the Balmorran Resistance. Although the Treaty of Coruscant
between the Sith Empire and the Republic is still in effect, military
deserters have been fighting the Sith occupation for years. It’s these
insurgents that Darth Lactose was sent to quash in the previous story.
By this point she’s been largely successful, and the Jedi have sent in
the “Sixth Line” to help out without letting the Sith know that they’re
violating the Treaty. Even the Supreme Chancellor doesn’t know they’re
here.
Honestly though I’m not sure what’s so great about these guys. Danak
has been captured by the Sith, who mistake him for a mere Resistance
spy. While the other Sixth Liners watch from cover of darkness, an
Imperial officer named Bowenn blows their friend’s brains out. Garault
in particular isn’t too happy about this, as Danak was his brother and
Master Surro forbade him from intervening so their cover wouldn’t be
blown.
They overhear Bowenn mention that a blue Balmorran Twi’lek named Ivo
was responsible for turning Danak in. They go to this dude’s house and
bust in while he’s making dinner. Surro asks why he would betray his own
planet, to which Ivo replies that the Republic abandoned them and
resisting the Sith is suicide. Garault prepares to murder Ivo with his
lightsaber, but Surro hands him a blaster instead, presumably so there
will be no evidence that Jedi are on the planet. For absolutely no
reason established in the text, Garault doesn’t go through with killing
Ivo, but instead uses the Force to erase his memory of meeting them.
We jump forward in time a few years. Surro enters her apartment on
Coruscant (not sure if having your own apartment is a perk of being a
Sixth Line Jedi, or if all the Jedi have to live in cheap off-campus
housing after their Temple burned down) and finds Theron Shan waiting
for her like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Is this like his trademark or something?
Theron Shan is like, “Yo, adding a line to the Jedi Code? Totally
dope. I need some badasses like you for a secret mission to the planet
Ziost, adopted homeworld of the Sith and third most evil planet in the
galaxy following Dromund Kaas, second adopted homeworld of the Sith and
second most evil planet in the galaxy.” Then the story ends.
All of these shorts from the TOR website feel kind of
pointless and uneventful if you haven’t played the MMO. They basically
just exist to give a little more backstory and context to certain
characters and missions you encounter in the game, but without the
context of the game to ground them, they’re kind of just floating out
there in the EUther with no internal explanation of when they’re
happening or why they matter. (In this case, you meet the surviving
Sixth Liners on Ziost, where their minds get taken over by the Sith
Emperor and I’m pretty sure they’re all killed.) “The Sixth Line” isn’t
terribly written, but it might be better if it was. As it is, it has
nothing to offer unless you’re already an invested fan of the MMO.
2/5 Death Stars. Why didn’t Garault just kill that guy?
Artists: Dave Ross and George Freeman (issues 1, 2, 4, 5), David Daza (issue 3)
Medium: Comic
Publication Date: June – October 2011
Timeline Placement: 3,643 BBY (with flashbacks to 3,653 BBY)
Series: The Old Republic
We’ve finally reached the end of the TOR comics, and unlike Zayne Carrick’s last adventure in Knights of the Old Republic, it’s come not a moment too soon. First, if you recall, we met Teneb Kel, who killed a girl with red skin and stabbed his best friend in the back to become the dreaded Darth Thanaton, a sad chimpanzee with a metal neck. Then we revisited the Treaty of Coruscant and experienced a side of those events much less entertaining and more poorly illustrated than that we saw in Deceived. Both of those stories were originally webcomics that were later reformatted as traditional comic book issues, but The Lost Suns changed things up and debuted in stores as five monthly single issues. Did it make any difference to the quality of the storytelling or the art? Nope!
The Lost Suns marks our timeline’s introduction of Theron
Shan, the son of Grand Master Satele Shan. Aside from his mother, he’ll
soon become the closest thing we have to a main character in this time
period of the EU. If you don’t count the eight player characters from The Old Republic itself,
that is (and even Satele, for all her appearances, is never the main
character of any story she appears in, except maybe the execrable Threat of Peace).
Unless you’re spending hundreds of hours playing the MMO, the TOR
sub-era really doesn’t have a lot to offer you. Sure, the cinematic
trailers and those timeline videos (which BioWare never even bothered to
finish) are cool, but Dawn of the Jedi, Tales of the Jedi, and Knights of the Old Republic each had their own established cast and a singular identifiable main character. With the TOR spinoffs, we’ve had a new protagonist in practically every story, and almost none of them have ever appeared again.
Even Theron Shan, who headlines this comic, the next novel, and a few
short stories, never really feels like a true protagonist; he shows
such scant personality in these five issues and we learn so little about
him that he might as well be another one-and-done lead like Teneb Kel
or Zeerid Korr, whoever that was. He’s a video game character
transplanted into a comic book, and it’s clear that the author isn’t
interested in saying anything about him or the world he inhabits. Unlike
John Jackson Miller’s KotOR comics, which were spun off from a
game but refused to live in its shadow and forged their own identity
independent of their namesake, anything marked with the brand The Old Republic
is wholly subservient to its source material. All of these comics and
novels and short stories are conscious of their own lack of necessity.
You can feel it when you’re reading them, and if they don’t care, why
should we? It’s like reading a Mass Effect comic: here’s a character, they’re doing something in a setting you love, then it ends.
The complete time frame of The Old Republic, from the return
of the Sith to the latest game expansion, covers more than 50 years.
That’s a lot of time to play with, and it’s almost criminal how little
advantage TOR‘s supplementary material took of it. Instead of
telling scattershot filler stories about disposable characters that do
nothing to build any meaningful sense of the era, why didn’t they do a
single ongoing series like KotOR? Commit to a cast and use them
to explore the world you’re building. You can have appearances from
game NPCs, but focus on original characters so you’re not enslaved to
preexisting personalities and narrative endpoints. I see no reason why a
quality series set during the Great War or Cold War couldn’t have
functioned as a promotional tie-in just as ably as the garbage they did
put out. I’m not even sure who’s to blame for this—BioWare, LucasArts,
Dark Horse, Del Rey—but someone really dropped the balls.
Anyway, let’s get into this thing.
The Lost Suns begins with a flashback to ten years prior, in
the last days of the war before the Treaty of Coruscant. Four Jedi
Knights, led by Satele Shan (and including Sith sleeper agent Syo
Bakarn, for those keeping track of recurring minor characters), head a
battalion of Republic troopers fighting the forces of the evil Darth
Mekhis on Rhen Var, the desolate ice world where Ulic Qel-Droma lived
out his self-imposed exile in Tales of the Jedi: Redemption.
I’m not sure why Mekhis wants the world or why the Jedi don’t just let
her have it, since it appears to have no strategic or resource value,
but here we are. I’m also not sure if the illustrator knew that there
was only a ten-year gap between this flashback and the rest of the
story, as here Satele looks about the same age she was during the Battle of Alderaan (and in fact Alderaan is named alongside Rhen Var as one of the final
battles of the war), when according to the finalized timeline she should
be 46. Apparently The Lost Suns suffers from the same chronology snafu as Threat of Peace where the writer placed the Treaty of Coruscant 30 years before the start of the MMO rather than 10.
Satele Shan bursts into Darth Mekhis’s command center, but the
flashback ends before we see what actually happens between them, even
though Mekhis spends the rest of the comic complaining about how badly
Satele fucked her up. Back in present times, we meet Theron Shan, a
cyborg spy working for the Republic Strategic Information Service, the TOR
CIA. He busts up a Black Sun slaving ring and arrests one of the
slavers, an 18-year-old female Twi’lek named Teff’ith. Instead of taking
her to jail, though, he just keeps her locked up on his ship and drags
her around on his spy assignments, which seems . . . unorthodox.
Theron reports in to his boss and tells him he’s thinking of taking
some vacation time. His boss tells him, “We need you, Theron. No one
else can do what you do: spy on people through binoculars then run up
and punch them.” It turns out that Ngani Zho, the revered Jedi Master
who raised Theron after his mom got knocked up, carried him to term, and
then decided she didn’t want him because of the whole Jedi “no
attachments” thing, has resurfaced after going missing in the aftermath
of the war. He’s been sighted near the Imperial border, ranting like a
crazy person about a sinister Sith conspiracy. Republic Intelligence
wants to know if he has valid intel to share, and since Theron is
personally invested in this mission, there’s no better operative to
send.
It’s also mentioned that Zho trained half the Jedi Council, including
Grand Master Satele Shan, and it’s here that I again have to stop
recapping the story to recap my own confusion. When we first met Satele
Shan, she was introduced alongside her Master, Kao Cen Darach, in the Return cinematic trailer (June 2011). He was killed in that short, then when we met Satele again in Threat of Peace (February 2009), she had a new Master, Dar’Nala, who turned to the dark side and was also killed. Now The Lost Suns
(June 2011) is giving her a third Master without any mention of the
other two. In fact the comic implies that Ngani Zho trained Satele
before the Sith Empire returned, which makes her apprenticeship to
Dar’Nala 28 years into the war seem a little odd. Is who trained Satele
Shan another one of those EU stories that everyone wants to tell no
matter how many times it’s been told before, like the theft of the Death
Star plans or Boba Fett’s escape from the Sarlacc? Why?
So Theron sets out to retrieve his old Master, accompanied by
Teff’ith and his faithful astromech droid, M-6. I wonder what kind of
difficulties he’s going to face in his search, what misadventures await
him as he uses his specialized skills as an intelligence operative to
track down his old never mind he just immediately finds him standing
around in the street. It’s fine. We’re fine.
They share a brief reunion and are soon attacked by Sith Knights,
cybernetic creations of Darth Mekhis made from captured Jedi grafted
into robot bodies. M-6 releases Teff’ith and she shoots the Sith Knights
in the face with a giant gun. They escape.
A further flashback reveals that, of the twelve members of the Sith
Emperor’s Dark Council, only seven survived the war, and one of the
conditions of the Treaty of Coruscant was that the Republic cede each of
them a specific star system of their choosing, sparsely populated and
of no strategic value. My initial thought was that each Sith Lord wanted
a system to rule as their own domain, and what a cool idea that is, of
different regions of space governed by the individual whims and personal
cruelties of seven Sith, subservient to the Emperor but each powerful
enough to pose their own distinctive threat. That sounds like a fun
setting for a video game. But it turns out all seven systems went to
Darth Mekhis for her experiments and apparently none of the other six
Dark Councillors were involved at all.
I was planning to wait until we got to the New Sith Wars (one novel
and a few short stories to go) to talk about the New Sith Wars, but I’m
compelled to touch my briefs on it now because Darth Mekhis is basically Belia Darzu.
Belia Darzu was a female Dark Lord of the Sith most notable for her
knowledge of Sith alchemy and cybernetics, as well as being a
shapeshifter. She created the technobeasts, a legion of self-perpetuating mutant cyborg monstrosities, through the Sith incantation of mechu-deru vitae.
All of this sounds nerdy as shit but it’s fucking awesome, all right?
Darzu reigned during the New Sith Wars, the 1,000 years of Jedi-and-Sith
warfare that preceded the 1,000 years of peace that preceded The Phantom Menace.
Like so many of the most intriguing tales populating the Expanded
Universe, her story is told entirely through sourcebooks and reference
articles; she never appears in a single work of narrative fiction.
Belia Darzu: hot or not?
In fact, the New Sith Wars themselves, which
have existed as a concept since 1999, feature in only a handful of
stories, virtually all of which are set within the last 30 years of the
1,000-year conflict. Looking at the EU as a whole today, following its
discontinuation in 2014, the failure to capitalize on the narrative
potential of the New Sith Wars stands out as one of the most painful
missed opportunities in Star Wars. This era, known as the
Draggulch Period of galactic history, is bereft of stories but brimming
with lore, from the Frankensteinian experiments of Belia Darzu to the
depredations of the Dark Underlord, a Sith spirit summoned from Hell and
made incarnate by black sorcery. Suffering through all of these tie-ins
to a game that didn’t need to be, I’m reminded of an old message board post from TheForce.Net, written the year before The Old Republic was first announced.
Dear LFL and affiliated licensee people,
Okay, so, you now how it’s like really hard and stuff to do a new or
creative story without being worried about established continuity? Like,
if you want to make a Jedi vs. Sith game or something, but crap! where
do you set it? Or you want say a new giant story arc, but oh no! there’s
already fifteen hundred books, comics, and short stories right where
you want it to be? Or, like, you want to create your own special
Character of Galactic Importance, but the trouble is no one remembers
anyone like your dude doing anything in the time frame you pick?
Well, guess what! I was just reading some stuff, and I found the
really AWESOME era to set stories in!!! It turns out that, like, there
was a period of a THOUSAND YEARS called the “New Sith Wars” or something
like that when it was just nothing but constant Jedi on Sith ACTION!
Think about it, fellas: a THOUSAND YEARS! That’s like, three hundred
times as long as the Clone War or something! And, even better, it turns
out that this ENTIRE era of– remember, ONE THOUSAND YEARS!– is almost totally empty of any stories at all! That’s right– there’s NOTHING to worry about contradicting! And, even better, what little we do
know about the era is, like, FULL of storytelling/gaming potential! I’m
serious. Thousands of Jedi. Thousands of Sith. Different factions of
Sith and other Force-users. Zombies. ZOMBIE JEDI. Creepy mysterious and
possibly un-dead Sith Lords. Mandalorians. Mysterious secret societies.
Cameos by characters from other eras. Shape shifting Sith Lords. Sith
alchemy. Jedi Supreme Chancellors. Galaxy-wide devastation. And did I
mention Zombies? I mean, shoot, you name it, this era’s got it, PLUS
room to make up, oh, whatever you want (pretty much).
I’m tellin’ you, guys, this is a can’t-lose opportunity. Post
apocalyptic stories, good ol’ fashioned Jedi vs. Sith action,
Mandie-centric romps, zombie plagues, whatever you want, it’s here.
Hell, you could even set one of them online role-playing thingies here
and not have to worry about mucking stuff up– talk about having your
cake and eating it, too!
Now, get to it! Give us some New Sith Wars stuff! We’ll eat it up! You can do whatever you want! It’s win-win!
You can thank me later.
No offense if you’re a TOR fan, I don’t mean to trash the
game because as I’ve said before it looks fun as fuck and if it had come
out five years earlier I’d have played it until I died of exhaustion
and dehydration. But from a continuity standpoint, it’s a logistical
nightmare. Not only did it shit on both KotOR games and ruin
any chance of them ever receiving a proper follow-up, it also dropped
the lengthiest and most destructive war in the entire EU into a space on
the timeline with no previous mention of any significant galactic
conflict. Now instead of an era characterized by unique episodes of
localized dissension like the Kanz Disorders or the Alsakan Conflicts,
we have Sith Empire, Jedi versus Sith, reclusive body-hopping Sith
Emperor on a quest for immortality, Grand Moffs, superweapons, soldiers
in white armor and helmets that look kind of like stormtrooper armor,
Imperials, bad guys are racist against aliens to show that they’re the
bad guys, triangular warships, Jedi Council, a hot brunette Jedi chick
with a double-bladed lightsaber, Sith Troopers, six-spoked Imperial
crest, the public views the Jedi with mistrust, droids that look like
destroyer droids, the bad guys attack Coruscant and the Republic is
defeated, and more of the same.
Again.
Basically the point is that they could have just made a few minor changes to The Old Republic’s
backstory and it would have fit perfectly into the New Sith Wars era
without upsetting continuity or adding yet another redundant Sith War to
the timeline, and in the process fleshed out one of the coolest time
periods in the EU with the most untapped storytelling potential and
opened it up for further exploration.
But because they didn’t do that, we have to talk about this stupid comic.
We learn through yet another flashback that Ngani Zho raised Theron
Shan since he was six months old and tried to train him in the ways of
the Jedi. As his final trial, Zho had Theron trek across a desert to
find a Jedi enclave on the planet Haashimut, where Zho believed his
pupil would be taken in as a Padawan. Much to Theron’s dismay, he was
told by the Jedi there that he actually had no sensitivity to the Force
at all, and he would have to leave.
Back in the present, Zho explains that whatever he saw behind Sith
lines was so horrible he can’t remember what it was, but he knows that
have to stop it. They swing by Port Nowhere, which I think was a
location in Guardians of the Galaxy, and Zho mind-tricks some
dude into giving them flight clearance to enter the Vesla system. Their
journey there must be uneventful because the story skips it completely.
Charlize Theron, Zho’s Hope, Teflon, and MI6 make camp on an outlying
planetoid in the system, where Theron uses his Super-Spy Mega-Telescope™
to investigate the nearby planets. One has been cracked apart,
seemingly by some kind of gravity weapon, and another poisoned and
infested with space monsters.
Theron then turns his telescope on the system’s sun itself (something
you should never ever do btw), where he beholds . . . THE SUN RAZER!
Hey I just said that.
It is a massive shipyard that completely encircles the star and uses its energy to manufacture superweapons for the Sith Empire.
Currently such superweapons include: “The Gauntlet: light-speed cannon
capable of eliminating hyperspace targets. Emperor’s Shadow:
third-generation cloaking technology commissioned by Darth Malgus. The
Undying: unknown. Ascendant Spear: long-range battle-cruiser with Class
0.5 hyperdrive. The Silencer: rapid-recharge ‘fleet killer’ mega-laser.”
Apparently there’s one of these things in each of the seven systems
that the Republic gave the Dark Council. “They’re eating stars now,
Theron,” says Zho. “This is what the Empire does.” Jeez, I hope no one
tells him about the Star Forge.
Theron and his friends make a run for it but their ship is captured by the Sith dreadnought Valor Prevails
as it lifts off the planet. They manage to hide Teff’ith somewhere
aboard, but Theron and Zho are captured and M-6 is killed, I guess.
Credit where credit is due, there’s a legitimately funny moment when a
flashback, narrated by Zho recounting his years of spying on Darth
Mekhis’s experiments in the Vesla system, transitions back to the
present to reveal Zho strapped to an interrogation table, where he asks a
masked Sith, “What’s your story, then? Did you always want to torture people?” and the scene just ends.
The dreadnought’s captain tries to impress Theron with the size of
his superweapon, inviting him to come work for them. “Can I have a slave
brand like yours?” Theron asks, making fun of the marking tattooed on
the captain’s cheek. The captain feels self-conscious and has Theron
beaten up by the guards and taken to the torture chamber. “I’ve spent
the last twelve hours rebooting my cybernetics and gaining access to
prison security,” Theron tells Zho, because I guess that’s just
something he can do. They escape.
After rendezvousing with Teff’ith, they decide that there isn’t time
to warn the Republic and they have to destroy the Sun Razer. Zho and
Teff’ith will create a distraction while Theron infiltrates the control
room and deactivates the Razer’s shields, which should theoretically
destroy it instantly. If it’s so close to the sun that it would
immediately burst into flames without its deflector shield, how much
energy must they be wasting just to keep the shields up and running
24/7? Can we get a lore book with a reproduction of the Sun Razer’s
monthly power bill, please?
Zho gives his lightsaber to Theron, even though Theron insists he
doesn’t know how to use it, and they part ways. Zho and Teff’ith tangle
with some guards and are forced back into a hangar bay. The Sith melt
through the door and Ngani Zho pushes Teff’ith out of the way of their
incoming blasterfire but is killed by the barrage.
“Such an unexceptional death,” Darth Mekhis observes, watching on a closed-circuit TV in the control room.
Theron Shan drops out of the ceiling and
shoots some dudes but is immediately apprehended by the Sith Knights. An
Imperial officer holds a gun to his head, then the scene changes, and
when it changes back it’s a random Sith soldier holding the gun.
Flawless continuity.
“Darth Mekhis!” Theron shouts, pulling out Zho’s lightsaber. “Take a close look before you kill me. My name is Theron Shan. You know that name, don’t you? I’m the son of Master Satele Shan, who broke you on Rhen Var. I was trained by Ngani Zho. Ten generations of Jedi blood flow through my veins. You can sense the truth. Are you afraid to face me?”
Darth Mekhis is like “Huh?” and Theron drops the lightsaber and shoots her in the face with a poison dart.
Famous Last Words: “.” – Darth Mekhis
Theron kills everyone, pushes the blow-up
button, and jumps aboard his ship just as Teff’ith is taking off in it.
The Sun Razer explodes. They escape.
After dropping off Teff’ith at the nearest
space port, her recent history of slaving apparently forgiven, Theron
returns to Coruscant and reports to his boss. His boss tells him that
the Sith are unable to complete the other six Sun Razers without Darth
Mekhis’s technical genius, but the superweapons they already constructed
are still out there and, thanks to Theron’s actions, the Sith are
likely to terminate the truce and put them into action. By this point
the earliest events of The Old Republic itself, which spans
several years, have already taken place, meaning that the end of the
Cold War is looming and the galaxy is teetering on the brink of the next
major war.
In the meantime, though, Satele Shan walks into her house on Tython and finds Theron waiting for her like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale.
She hasn’t seen him since he was six months old and doesn’t recognize
him. Theron informs her that Ngani Zho is dead. Satele asks if his
lightsaber survived so it can be preserved in the Jedi Archives, but
Theron says, “Sorry. Must have been lost in the chaos.” At first I
thought he was lying and the comic would end with the revelation that he
had saved the lightsaber and was keeping it for himself, to remind
himself where he came from even though he ultimately couldn’t be a part
of that world. But nope, he just left it on the Sun Razer. I guess he
really didn’t care.
Satele asks his name but Theron tells her
it’s classified. “I see,” she says. “Is there . . . anything else you
want to tell me?”
Author: Sean Williams Medium: Novel Publication Date: July 2010 Timeline Placement: 3,643 BBY Series:The Old Republic
From across the galaxy they’ve come: agents of both the Republic and the Sith Empire, an investigating Jedi Padawan, an ex-trooper drummed out of the Republic’s elite Blackstar Squad, and a mysterious Mandalorian. An extraordinary auction has drawn them all together—in quest of a prize only one can claim. Each is prepared to do what he must to possess the treasure, whose value may be the wealth of a world itself. None intend to leave empty-handed. All have secrets, desires, and schemes. And nothing could ever unite them as allies—except the truth about the deadly danger of the object they covet. But can Sith and Jedi, Republic and Empire—enemies for millennia—join as one against the certain doom of the galaxy?
Just kidding, Fatal Alliance isn’t that bad. Actually it’s not really bad at all. Nor is it good. It’s . . . fine. The characters are . . . fine. The plot is . . . fine. The writing is . . . fine. The whole book is thoroughly mediocre.
Okay that’s my review 2.5/5 Death Stars be sure to like us on
Facebook and follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to vote out those
Republican bastards in Congress this November okay byyyyye!
Revenge of the Sith High School
Author: Ahsoka_snips_fangirl
Artist: Shaq
Medium: Fanfiction Publication Date: January 2017 (ongoing)
Timeline Placement: 5 months BSWVIII Series:Legal Gray Area
When we got to the class room a group of students were making a ring around someone. “What’s happening in there?” I asked Rey. I was a little to short to see over the ring of people. She went up on Her toes. “There beating someone up!” She gasped. “Who!?” I said. “He’s tall a skinny, he has gold blonde hair and is wearing gold and ye-” THREE-PEIO!” I gasped.
Oh god I can’t do it.
So the dramatis personae in Fatal Alliance lists eight main characters, one for each of the eight playable character classes in Star Wars: The MMOld Republic.
They are: Dao Stryver, a Mandalorian mercenary representing the Bounty
Hunter class; Darth Chratis, a human male representing the Sith
Inquisitor class, although the term “Sith Inquisitor” is never used in
the book; Eldon Ax, Chratis’s sixteen-year-old female apprentice and hot
redhead, representing the Sith Warrior class; Jet Nebula, male human
Smuggler; Larin Moxla, a female Kiffar for the Trooper class; our old
friend Satele Shan, Jedi Consular; Shigar Konshi, male Kiffar
representative of the Jedi Knight class even though he’s still Satele’s
apprentice; and Ula Vii, male Epicanthix Imperial Agent.
Okay we’re not even on page one and already I have a few issues. First of all, while it’s kind of cute to make a TOR book with a character for each TOR
class (even though it’s a dead giveaway that the book is soulless
tie-in trash that only exists to promote the game), I think the author
missed a trick somewhere by not also using the cast to show off the
diversity of species available to players. When TOR debuted,
you initially had the option of playing the game as one of eight
different alien races: Chiss, human, Miraluka, Mirialan, Rattataki,
Sith, Twi’lek, or Zabrak (there was also a ninth race called Cyborg, but
it was basically just a human with metal bits glued on; Cathar and
Togruta were added later). But instead of mapping eight species to eight
characters, the author just made everyone human, Kiffar, or Epicanthix
(with the exception of Mandalorian warrior Dao Stryver, who is revealed
in the epilogue to be a giant talking lizard that doesn’t even appear in
the game). If you look up the latter two species on Wookieepedia, you
will find that they are both “near-human,” which for all intents and
purposes basically means human.
Which brings me to my next point. According to Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook
(West End Games, 1996), “The Epicanthix are a near-human people
encountered relatively recently and known for their combination of
warlike attitudes and high regard for art and culture. Physically they
are quite close to genetic ‘baseline’ humans, suggesting that they
evolved from a ‘forgotten’ colonization effort many millennia ago. They
have lithe builds with powerful musculature. Through training, the
Epicanthix prepare their bodies for war, yet tone them for beauty. They
are generally human in appearance, although they tend to be willowy and
graceful. Their faces are somewhat longer than usual, with narrow eyes.
Their long black hair is often tied in ceremonial styles which are not
only attractive but practical.” Also consider that it is likely they
were named after the epicanthic fold, a feature of the eyes of many Asian peoples. Keeping all of this in mind, do you see anything horribly offensive here?
You got it: the Epicanthix weren’t
supposed to be discovered until “relatively recently” at the time of the
movies but there’s one working for the Sith Empire 3,600 years
earlier!!! Where were you on that one, Lucasfilm Story Group?
With Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily
So Jet Nebula and his droid Clunker are
smugglers-cum-privateers in the employment of Tassaa Bareesh, a Hutt
crime matriarch who inexplicably has a given name and surname like a
normal person instead of being called Something the Hutt. They intercept
the starship Cinzia, bound for parts unknown. At the behest of
his mutinous crew’s guns, Jet orders the ship to hand over its
potentially valuable cargo, but the people aboard elect to blow
themselves up instead. They do a poor job of it though and the only
things to survive the explosion are the ship’s navigation logs and the
very item they were trying to destroy.
Tassaa Bareesh sends word to both the Sith
Empire and the Republic, still in the midst of their uneasy truce ten
years after Darth Malgus burned down the Jedi Temple and urinated on its
ashes, asking them to send representatives to bid on the Cinzia’s
navicomputer as well as the mystery item. The device is constructed of
alien materials, promising that the world the navicomputer leads to is
rich in resources desperately needed by both beleaguered factions.
The Sith and the Republic are both inclined
to write off the Hutts’ offer as a prank until Mandalorian warrior Dao
Stryver shows up and starts asking questions. On Coruscant, Stryver
tangles with Larin Moxla, whistleblower and disgraced former Republic
commando, and Shigar Konshi, a disgraced Jedi Padawan who just flunked
his Knighthood trial, and burns down a slum while looking for
information on the Cinzia. On [Sith planet], Stryver ties up
Sith apprentice Eldon Ax and questions her about someone named Lema
Xandret. Ax’s master, Darth Chratis, who is so evil he sits around
naked entombed inside a sarcophagus all day, reveals that Lema Xandret
was her mother, a master droid-builder and citizen of the Sith Empire
who went on the run with a band of deserters when the Sith took her
Force-sensitive baby away. ELdon AX’s
name is just based on her mother’s initials for some reason; her birth
name was Cinzia. What a twist, and we’re only thirty pages in! I hope
this rollercoaster pace continues.
Chratis, despite supposedly being one of the
eight main characters and taking up the whole goddamn cover, barely
appears in the novel, sending Ax to the Hutts’ auction in his place
while he stays at home and jerks off in his coffin. Satele Shan sends
her apprentice, Shigar Konshi, in the hope that he will earn his
Knighthood and redeem himself for embarrassing her in front of the Jedi
Council. Shigar invites Larin Moxla to go with him because they’ve
bonded over their homeworld of Kiffu being annexed by the Sith or
something. Shigar will be undercover, however; the true representative
of the Republic will be Ula Vii, aide to Supreme Commander Statorrs, who
happened to be in the room when Shigar was making his report and so
gets stuck with the assignment. Little does anyone suspect that Ula is
actually a deep-cover Sith agent making frequent reports to his masters
on the dealings of the Republic military command. He is also a huge
pussy with an overpowering anxiety disorder that seems like it might
impair his ability to function as a reliable informer. I don’t know too
much about spies, though; I just seen the James Bond movies.
Espionage.
This whole section of the novel, introducing
the characters and establishing their goals and interrelationships,
seems like it’s the setup for a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-type
situation with various rival teams racing against time and one another
to obtain some valuable prize. And for a little while it does play out
sort of like that. Everyone arriving at the auction, eyeing one another
up, trying to make sense of the strange device they’re bidding on, and
exploring Tassaa Bareesh’s castle is the most interesting part of the
book.
[Continuity Note: The auction takes place on the Hutt homeworld, which ever since its introduction in Dark Empire in 1991 or ’92 has been called Nal Hutta, which translates in the Hutt language to “Glorious Jewel.” {Continuity Note2: Hypernote: The 1992 children’s book Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge, part of the infamous Glove of Darth Vader or Jedi Prince
series, identifies the Hutt homeworld as Varl. This was later explained
with the retcon that Varl was the original planet on which the Hutts
evolved, but it was destroyed many thousands of years ago by either
cosmic cataclysm or global warming. The Hutts then moved their empire to
the planet Evocar, where they enslaved the native Evocii and renamed
the world Nal Hutta, which remained the capital of Hutt Space for the
rest of EU history.} The Old Republic, however, inexplicably chose to just refer to the planet as Hutta, which is what it’s consistently called in Fatal Alliance.
[According to the in-game codex, “the planet
more commonly called Nal Hutta is considered a paradise to the
gluttonous tastes of the Hutts. To anyone else, though, the planet is a
living nightmare—a disgusting and dangerous place to visit, and an
unthinkable place to live. Current Underworld slang has shortened the
name to a simple ‘Hutta’—a place where more civilized people threaten to
send their children if they misbehave.” So they even directly reference
the established name within the game, but don’t use it for whatever
reason. This is more of a curiosity than an annoyance or complaint,
though; it’s certainly no Mon Calamari naming disaster, but we’ll get to
that eventually if God wills it.]
Jet Nebula and his poorly described droid
are already at the castle, hanging out and watching everyone arrive.
Nebula sees Ula Vii and immediately identifies him as a Sith spy. He
invites him to get drinks in the cantina, where Dao Stryver gases the
entire room and abducts them. Stryver interrogates them for the location
of the Hutt vault containing the artifact. Ula spills his guts and
Stryver escapes through the ceiling just as Ula’s bodyguards come
through the door. With them is Larin Moxla, who Ula Vii immediately
falls in love with. Of course, unbeknownst to him, Larin is already
crushing on Shigar, who has no interest in her but will shortly develop a
semi-flirtation with Eldon Ax, even though those two characters will
never interact again after the second act.
All
of this love quadrangle nonsense is irrelevant to the plot, however, as
things soon kick into high gear when Eldon Ax, Shigar Konshi, and Dao
Stryver independently try to infiltrate the Hutt vault to steal the
navicomputer and mystery item. Ax and Shigar have the book’s
prerequisite lightsaber battle but everything goes to hell when bizarre
combat droids start shooting their way out of the vault. All the
characters start referring to the droids as “hexes” because the author
describes them as having hexagonal bodies, but that’s pretty much the
extent of their description and it’s not a very good one. I had
difficulty picturing them throughout the book, especially once they
start shapeshifting and linking up with one another like the Indian
Terminator. Also according to the cover illustration they look like
this:
Not really like a hexagon at all.
All the characters convene on the vault and
there’s a huge shootout with the droids as the palace starts collapsing
around them from all the explosions. There’s some really weird usage of
the Force during this battle, with characters basically using it to
create shields around themselves that can withstand blaster bolts with
no real difficulty. It feels like how the Force is portrayed in video
games, which I guess makes sense given the nature of the tie-in. Too bad
none of the Jedi who got Order 66ed in Episode III thought to do that.
Eldon Ax cuts off part of Larin Moxla’s hand
with her lightsaber and escapes with one of the disabled droids, hoping
its memory banks will contain the location of its planet of origin.
Meanwhile Dao Stryver absconds with the navicomp. Eldon Ax blows up the
Republic shuttle on her way offworld, which is clearly an act of open
war during peacetime but nobody seems to care. Shigar, Larin, Ula, and
Jet are stuck on [Nal] Hutta with a very unhappy Tassaa Bareesh, but
Shigar makes a deal with her to not kill them in exchange for finding
the planet and helping her recoup her losses.
The Hutt matriarch strong-arms Jet Nebula into ferrying everyone else about in his ship, the Auriga Fire.
Also going with them is a random Republic trooper named Hetchkee, the
sole survivor of Ula Vii’s bodyguard contingent. Despite never getting
any character development or point-of-view sections he continues to hang
out with the heroes for the rest of the book, pretending to be a main
character.
Someone figures out that the weird contraption they recovered from the Cinzia
was a portable droid factory, and at the rate it was able to
manufacture the number of droids they encountered, whoever created them
could mass produce enough to take over the galaxy. Also the droids have
some kind of biological component inside them, a blood-like red fluid
that the Jedi can use to temporarily manipulate the droids’ minds.
This development brought to mind another oft-forgotten EU book, Steven Barnes’s The Cestus Deception, a Clone Wars novel that came out six years before Fatal Alliance. The plot of that book dealt with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Kit Fisto
investigating the new “Jedi Killers,” combat droids containing psychic
dashta eels that help them fight Force-users. Did the author of Fatal Alliance rip off this plot device for his own dull-as-dishwater book? No one remembers The Cestus Deception or anything that happened in it, so probably not. The unoriginal concept of the hex droids is just Fatal Alliance bringing nothing new or interesting to the table. The writing is . . . fine; the ideas, not so much.
Also not a hexagon.
Just writing this recap is putting me to
sleep so let’s try to speed through the rest of this slog. After the
firefight at the palace, Shigar tries to use psychometry, his people’s
unique Force ability to see the history of objects by touching them, on a
piece of hex, but it doesn’t work because he doesn’t believe in
himself. He calls Satele Shan, who tells him to believe in himself, and
then he’s able to do it. Meanwhile Ula and Larin bond over her severed
fingers.
The planet the droids came from is located
in the galaxy’s halo, which is a really cool part of spiral galaxies in
real life. Rather than just being a flat disc like we see in
illustrations, spiral galaxies are actually round; above and below the
disc of spiral arms, which contain the majority of the galaxy’s stars,
the seemingly empty space is full of dark matter and old stars. It’s
here that Shigar and Ax find the world of Sebaddon, where Lema Xandret
and her followers fled after escaping from the Sith Empire, orbiting a
black hole. It’s remarked upon multiple times how characters can see the
whole galaxy and its spiral arms from where they are, but I’m pretty
sure you’d have to be much, much farther away to see that. I could be
wrong, I ain’t no astronomer, but Star Wars has an established history of bad science like this.
Darth Chratis and Satele Shan each show up
with a fleet. One of the Republic’s ships flies too close to the black
hole and is immediately sucked in and destroyed, but no one cares. They
try hailing the planet but Sebaddon launches a missile at them that
explodes into thousands of hexes. Every ship that they latch onto they
are able to take over and turn against the rest of the two fleets. Dao
Stryver, who has beaten both sides there and is hiding on the planet’s
moon, contacts the Sith and Republic forces and proposes that they all
team up to defeat this menace before the hexes take over the galaxy,
finally bringing us to the fatal alliance of the title. Satele Shan and
Darth Chratis agree to swap apprentices and infiltrate the planet
separately, while Larin Moxla leads a squad of troopers who will drop
from orbit. Everyone agrees to put Ula Vii in charge of the combined
fleet, where he plans to betray the Republic as soon as he gets the
opportunity (spoilers he never does). Before everyone goes their own
way, Larin kisses Shigar and gets shot down hard.
Darth Chratis and Shigar Konshi’s ship is
attacked by hexes and crashes on the planet. Chratis tries to turn
Shigar to the dark side, and Shigar gets really angry and tries to shoot
Force lightning at him but only succeeds in burning his glove off, then
he gets distracted by something and that’s the end of this plot thread.
Meanwhile, Satele Shan and Eldon Ax land on
the planet and find a spaceship buried in the lava or something, I don’t
know. Anyway they get inside and find a young clone of Ax living in a
tank of the red fluid that’s inside all of the hexes. The girl, Cinzia,
explains that their mother created her after the original Cinzia was
taken by the Sith, and built the hexes, which are really called
“fastbreeders,” to protect her. When her mother and the other rebels
sent the ship that Jet Nebula found to discuss an alliance with the
Mandalorians, the droids interpreted this as a potential threat to
Cinzia’s safety and killed Lema Xandret and everyone else on the planet.
Cinzia explains that her mother is still alive, though, because her
consciousness lives on in the red liquid or something? The liquid tells
Cinzia not to trust her evil Sith self and somehow, like, pulls her away
from the wall of the tank. Satele Shan thinks that she’s being killed
so she smashes the tank. Cinzia comes spilling out in a flood of red
liquid. She makes Ax promise to save their mother, by which I guess she
means the ketchup spilled all over the floor, then dies of shock in the
arms of her “sister.” Way to go, Satele.
Eldon Ax realizes that since she has the
same DNA as her clone, she should be able to control the hexes. Satele’s
like, “What about your promise to wetvac up all this momjuice?” Ax is
like:
Oh snap!
Out on the planet’s surface, Shigar and Ax
reunite with their respective masters. While Shigar and Satele watch
from a distance, Eldon Ax has a wave of hexes converge on Darth Chratis,
apparently killing him, and then they leave. What an unsatisfying
conclusion.
Also while all of this is going on Larin
Moxla has some zany misadventure while falling from orbit where her
parachute doesn’t open and it’s super uninteresting.
Sebaddon starts falling into the black hole,
preventing either side from controlling its rare minerals and
destroying all of the droids. The Republic recovers Ula Vii from an
escape pod where Jet Nebula abandoned him before taking the Auriga Fire
and escaping. Larin Moxla gets a robot hand and gets reinstated as a
Republic Blackstar commando and Ula asks her out. Eldon Ax reports to
Darth Howl, a member of the Sith Emperor’s Dark Council, and he takes
her as his new apprentice while he forces his previous apprentice to
watch them shoot her pets (I guess? They’re shooting animals and it’s
vaguely implied that this is the context). Shigar Konshi finally gets
promoted to Knighthood now that he can control his psychometric ability,
but he’s like a dick now and urges the Jedi Council to launch a
preemptive strike against the Sith before open war breaks out again.
With so much setup for these characters’ futures, I’m very excited to
never read about any of them ever again in any future stories.
In the epilogue, Dao Stryver tracks Jet
Nebula and Clunker to a cantina on Tatooine, where we learn startling
revelations about all three of them that for some reason were saved for
the last eight pages of the book instead of at a point where they could
have maybe made the bland cast a little more interesting. It turns out
that Dao Stryver, rather than being a man like the book’s dramatis
personae stated and all the other characters assumed, is actually a
female Gektl, a species of giant lizards that previously only appeared
in a comic strip from 1980. This has such a negligible effect on the
book I’m not sure why it was even included, except to inspire little
girls with the message that they too can be badass space warriors, as
long as they are a talking gecko.
Stryver tells Nebula that she has come for
his droid, who demonstrated his value during the space battle when
Clunker took remote control of the Imperial and Republic fleets to
ensure they followed Ula’s orders. Jet reveals that Clunker was a
defective soldier droid he rescued from the junk pile. Every few days
his memory completely resets and all he remembers is Jet and their ship.
“I found him on a scrap heap two years ago,” Jet explains. “His vocoder
was dead, and when I tried to fix it, he just broke it again. That
proves how smart he is. He’s worked out that if you don’t respond to
orders, no one can prove you heard them.” The robot that never talks is
the most interesting character in this goddamn book.
Stryver reveals that Jet Nebula’s real name
is Jeke Kerron, which means nothing. She goes to take Clunker and is
suddenly stun-blasted by several people in the bar who Jet had paid off
to defend him. When she regains her senses, Jet and Clunker are gone.
She leaves to make a report to Mandalore and await further instructions,
and wishes Jet good fortune in the coming battles. Then the book ends.
Not a great book, but up to the end of the
Hutta sequence it’s fairly decent, and afterward it’s never terrible.
Mostly it’s just dull and occasionally confusing. The climactic battle
at Sebaddon goes on for way too long, and the pacing isn’t helped by the
action constantly cutting back and forth between four different
locations. It’s like the Ending Multiplication Effect from the end of The Phantom Menace:
too many unnecessary stories running concurrently saps whatever tension
or interest we might have in the events that actually matter.
For a book called Fatal Alliance,
the eponymous alliance didn’t last very long and wasn’t a particularly
memorable or significant part of the book. Even while the Republic and
Empire (as is customary throughout TOR media, the Sith are
constantly referred to as “Imperials” or just “the Empire,” which
further reinforces the lack of creativity characterizing this era and
how much it steals from more interesting time periods) were allied, they
were each still mostly doing their own thing. Putting Shigar and
Chratis together was a non-starter, and while Satele Shan and Eldon Ax’s
partnership yielded a few more interesting character moments, it was
ultimately irrelevant. Ax killed her master, which was her stated goal
from the beginning of the book, and then went back to the Sith to
continue being evil. No one learns anything and nothing changes, except
Shigar goes a little bit dark side and Ula decides to stop trying to
effect positive social change within the Sith Empire without completely
giving up the double agent game.
It would have been more interesting if
specific Jedi and Sith characters had to work side by side in close
proximity for most of the novel. After the auction, for instance,
instead of having the good guys and bad guys go their separate ways, I
would have liked to see all of them stuck together at that point and
forced to set aside their differences for the greater good. Because in
the book, even when they do eventually team up, Ula and Darth Chratis
are still planning to backstab the Republic and take the planet for
themselves. The mutual respect set up between Shigar and Eldon Ax ends
up going nowhere because the book never allows them to actually be on
the same side, and they’re separated for the entire climax anyway.
Instead of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace devolving
into an all-out clusterkriff before anyone can even make a single bid,
it could have been more interesting to see the auction actually play
out, or some kind of heist where they have to acquire the droid factory
by stealth instead of fighting over it. Shigar and Larin investigating
the palace in disguise is a fun little sequence; I wish it had been
expanded on and made more central to their mission instead of being cut
short so we could have a bunch of incoherent shooting. Why is there so
much shooting in this book? Because it’s Star Wars, I guess,
but it’s really uninteresting. Much of that time would have been better
spent getting to know the characters beyond a few basic personality
traits. In that regard Ula Vii is perhaps the most interesting character
in the book. He contributes the unique perspective of a
non-Force-sensitive citizen of the Sith Empire who believes that the
galaxy will be a better place under Imperial rule while still disliking
the ruling class of the Sith elite. It’s still not quite clear why he’s
so patriotic since the book doesn’t give any examples of the Empire not
being pure evil but at least it’s something.
The red liquid thing that somehow contains
Lema Xandret’s consciousness and is inside all of the droids but also is
put in danger by some of it being spilled on the floor (?) is kind of
weird but the whole Cinzia clone bit was a potentially interesting
development. Sadly, it was undercut, like the Clunker explanation, by
being introduced way too late and resolved in the very same scene.
Satele Shan is basically responsible for the death of this innocent
young girl and seems completely unfazed by it.
The deepest cut, however, is the fact that
Eldon Ax has dreadlocks. That’s cultural appropriation, and that’s the
worst crime of all.
Still 2.5/5. I think I remember saying in an earlier review that the Old Republic was my favorite Star Wars era. Dear god, what was I thinking?
