I Am Ashamed That You Care to Remember Me

The Final Exit

Author: Patricia A. Jackson

Medium: Short story

Publication date: November 1994 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #4

Timeline placement: 5 BBY

 

Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, Corellian smuggler and captain of the YT-1300 freighter Kierra (inhabited by an overly feminine droid intelligence also named Kierra), gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to Uber thespian-turned-murderer Adalric Brandl back to his home planet for an awkward family reunion.

 

Patricia Jackson's dark, almost gothic saga of Adalric Cessius Brandl and his tortured relationship with his son, Jaalib, is one of the highlights of the Adventure Journal's original fiction. It's weird and sad and confusing and completely unique as far as Star Wars literature goes. I'm still not sure if it's even actually good, but I've been thinking about it, on and off, for 25 years.

 

Jackson writes dialogue in a heightened, theatrical style, evoking Brandl's history as a dramatic actor. Brandl himself gets a slew of juicy, overwrought lines to deliver as he broods over his damned soul, but there's a disconnected, almost dream-like quality to the way every character speaks; the things they say don't quite follow naturally from what they're responding to.

 

This feeling of disconnection extends beyond the characters to the story itself and its place in Star Wars canon. "Adalric Brandl is a Jedi Knight," Ross deduces of his mysterious passenger. Quite a leap, you think, given that this story is set only a few years before A New Hope, when the Jedi are extinct and the Force is disregarded as "hokey religion." Plus Brandl is clearly a psychotic murderer who uses the Force to kill.

 

Prior to the prequel trilogy and the subsequent proliferation of Sith in the Expanded Universe, dark-side Force-users were typically termed "Dark Jedi." Here, though, Brandl is repeatedly referred to in both dialogue and narration as a Jedi Knight. Ross could have said "Adalric Brandl is a Force-user" or, more specifically, "Adalric Brandl is an Imperial Inquisitor." But instead, he's a Jedi—or what passes for a Jedi in this dark-mirror vision of Star Wars. I'm not sure what to make of that. Maybe for the author it was just a term of convenience, but there's something subtly unsettling about it: more sense of broken or missing connections, of performance rather than life.

 

Brandl's lightsaber blade is white, a color that represents purity, but also a color that contains all other colors. What did the author mean by this? Maybe absolutely nothing, but the fact that I'm even asking the question says a lot. 4.5/5 Death Stars.

 

"I live my life in a whirlwind!" 

  

NB: Adalric Brandl's wife is a redhead so take a shot.