To Take the Trigon

Escape Into Terror

Writer: Peter Sauder

Medium: Television

Air Date: September 14, 1985 

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

En route to the big speeder race on the planet Boonta, Kea Moll's starship experiences a hyperdrive malfunction. Fortunately, there's an astromech droid aboard, and R2-D2 sets about repairing the hyperdrive just like he did on the Royal Naboo Starship seventeen years earlier. Unfortunately, this time he's assisted by C-3PO, who somehow lets the entire hyperdrive float away into space. Somehow this isn't the most catastrophic thing ever, and the gang decides to go stay with Kea's mother on the planet Annoo until they can get a new hyperdrive. How long will it take them to get there at sublight speed? Don't worry about it.

 

Meanwhile, the comical I mean notorious Fromm Gang is still hard at work building the Trigon One superweapon so they can become the number one criminal organization in the galaxy. I wonder what Black Sun has to say about this. We meet the big man himself, patriarch Sise Fromm, who we're told is 900 years old. Just like Yoda! Maybe they went to high school together.

Sise is upset about the events of the previous episode, where his son's incompetence caused their scheme to be discovered. He's got it out for our heroes, whose roster he describes in a very specific way three times in twenty-one minutes: "The two who infiltrated our secret base are here on Annoo with a girl and two droids. I'll find those two young meddlers myself, the girl, and the two droids. My men will find them: two males, a girl, and two droids." Geesh, Mr. Dramatis Personae over here.

The gang lands on Annoo, where two Fromm goons are waiting for them at the spaceport. R2-D2 creates a distraction by spraying C-3PO with oil and spazzing out like a "mad droid." Nonsensically this allows the humans and droids to escape undetected in the White Witch.

 

At Kea's mom's house, the droids bungle onto a secret room and discover that both women are secretly members of the Rebel Alliance! Which shouldn't exist for another thirteen years! Let's just assume they meant lowercase "rebel alliance" instead of the formal Alliance to Restore the Republic. 

"Freedom is everybody's fight," Kea's mother declares. This becomes C-3PO's new mantra that he repeats while practicing the fabled martial art of gravik-nez at inopportune moments throughout the episode. Threepio’s martial antics were played for laughs in this episode and then never mentioned again, but the Expanded Universe took his combat programming very seriously, revealing that Threepio could be seen attempting (and failing) to use it against one of Jabba’s Gamorrean guards in Return of the Jedi, and that gravik-nez was in fact an Affan martial art. (Affa, of course, was the planet where C-3PO was originally built almost a century before Anakin Skywalker salvaged his disassembled parts on Tatooine.)

Also, Threepio observes, "Why, I'd rather be feeding tauntauns on Hoth." It's weird that Hoth and its native fauna are apparently common knowledge at this time.

 

They hatch a plan to destroy the Trigon One. Thall Joben and Kea hide in a shipping container about to be loaded onto the Fromms' ship. After they're locked in, Jord Dusat announces to no one that he's going to stay behind to bang Kea's mom while the droids load the container. High jinks ensue, but in the end our heroes easily hijack the Trigon One right in front of Sise Fromm's fat face and blast their way to orbit. Strangely, the superweapon is explicitly called a satellite, but it seems to be just a spaceship.

 

The Fromms dispatch a group of droid starfighters to retrieve their weapon, fourteen years before George Lucas featured droid starfighters in The Phantom Menace. These ones are just about as useful and our heroes get away. Kea argues that they should use the Trigon to end all organized crime in the galaxy or something, which seems like it would outside the scope of the [r]ebel [a]lliance's goals, but Thall insists that the Trigon One is too dangerous to be left alive and Kea immediately agrees with him because she has strong convictions. Threepio tries to do a karate move and falls down.

I'm ashamed to say I laughed more times at this episode than was appropriate.

 

"Stop, Artoo! ARTOO, STOP!"

MyComyc #1: Neutralizing Trigon I

Writer: Uncredited (translated by Abel G. Peña)

Penciler: Beaumont Studios

Medium: Comic

Publication date: 1986

Timeline placement: 15 BBY

MyComyc was a Spanish-language anthology comic telling short, two-page stories featuring characters from various licensed properties. In Star Wars' case, that was the Droids and Ewoks animated series. These comics' place in Expanded Universe canon is a fuzzy one, however; while the events of the some of the Droids strips are directly referenced in the two-part StarWars.com article The Droids Re-Animated, the behind-the-scenes word is that Dark Horse wanted to include them in one of their Omnibus collections, but "despite the comics bearing appropriate copyright information, Lucasfilm was unable to locate paperwork proving Editorial Gepsa had actually licensed the titles." So while at least some version of at least some of these comics happened in continuity, the strips themselves as published cannot be considered fully canon.

 

This first strip in particular proves that point, as Neutralizing Trigon I tells a story seemingly incompatible with the events of the Droids cartoon. Thall Joben and Jord Dusat eavesdrop on a video call between Tig and Sise Fromm and discover that the Trigon One (here called the Trigon I) is hidden in the desert mountains. While Thall and Threepio distract the Fromm guards, Jord and Artoo sneak about the Trigon I, where Artoo "disconnect[s] the computer's main memory," because "without its central memory, this machine is worthless!" Then they escape, and Threepio tells Artoo that he's proud of him.

 

For this story to coexist with "Escape Into Terror," it would need to take place during the events of that episode, as Thall and Jord first learn of the weapon during the episode and have stolen it by the end. However, there's no real time in "Escape Into Terror" where Neutralizing Trigon I could logically take place. The sequence of events would have to be: 1) Kea's mother tells them about the weapon, 2) they travel back to Ingo to sabotage its central memory, then travel back to Annoo the same day, 3) the next morning they sneak onto the Fromms' ship to go back to Ingo again, where they steal the Trigon despite having just rendered it inoperable.

 

Alternatively, this could be taken as a retelling of the events of "Escape Into Terror," like a drastically more extreme version of the Adventure in Beggar's Canyon vs. Luke Skywalker's Walkabout case. In that event, this comic is completely pointless and there was no reason to even bring it up.

 

Since the MyComyc stories aren't confirmed canon anyway, I don't see any point in getting bent out of shape trying to make Neutralizing Trigon I fit. The strips that already conform to established continuity make for easy headcanon, and the ones that don't can just be ignored. Wait, what was I talking about?