The Force Leashed

Interlude at Darkknell

Authors: Timothy Zahn and Michael A. Stackpole

Medium: Novella

Publication date: December 1999 in Tales from the New Republic

Timeline placement: c. 2 BBY

 

In this four-part story, Corellian Senator Garm Bel Iblis teams up with Corellian Security Force officer Hal Horn (son of Jedi Knight Nejaa Halcyon of Jedi Trial fame) to, what else, steal the Death Star plans, or something. The fallout from this escapade provides Armand Isard's daughter Ysanne with the means to betray him and have him killed so she can take his place as Director of Imperial Intelligence.

 

It's a pretty good story, 4/5 Death Stars, stamp of recommendation. But instead let's talk about the continuity cluster-kriff of which this story is the center, as that's the main reason people remember it nowadays. 

 

Interlude at Darkknell is fraught with bizarre continuity references, especially for a story that came out this late (we're talking post-Phantom Menace here). The Rebel Alliance formally exists at this point, having been formed by the union of forces led by Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Garm Bel Iblis. But Bel Iblis's internal monologue refers to the Empire as being "newly established," and characters talk about the Republic as if it was only recently overthrown. So you think maybe Zahn and Stackpole wrote this story with the intention of it being set way earlier than its official timeline placement of 0 BBY (we'll get to that, too). This was before The Force Unleashed gave a hard date to the Corellian Treaty and the founding of the Rebellion, so maybe they were working off the assumption that the Rebels had been around for a long time before A New Hope, like the Droids cartoon did.

 

Except there are also references that put Interlude shortly before ANH, like the Rebels learning about the existence of the Death Star. More definitively, Hal Horn explicitly says that his son, Corran, is 18. So it must take place close to ANH regardless of its weird comments about the Empire's age.

 

But wait, there's more! The Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook (1996) was the original source of Bel Iblis's backstory. It states: "Shortly after declaring himself Emperor, Palpatine had Bel Iblis, his wife, and his two children rounded up and arrested. Bel Iblis was forced to watch Imperial soldiers execute his family, but he managed to escape (although he still refuses to discuss how he accomplished this)." That may be the source of Interlude's confusion over how far into the reign of the Empire it takes place, but for some reason Zahn kept those timeline references but completely changed the circumstances of Bel Iblis's family's death. It still takes place on Anchoron, as stated in Dark Force Rising Sourcebook ("It is commonly believed that Bel Iblis died on Anchoron, but the Empire failed. It did take everything else from the Senator—his family, his profession, and his contacts with mainstream Corellian society. It forced Bel Iblis to become a rebel."), but rather than being arrested and executed in front of him, Bel Iblis's family now dies in a bombing intended to assassinate the Senator before he could make a public speech endorsing the Rebellion. Why?

 

But wait, there's more! The MacGuffin of this story is a datapack (consisting of eight datacards) pertaining to "Tarkin's project." Its exact contents are never revealed, but one could infer that these are the "stolen data tapes" containing the technical readouts of the Death Star. That would contradict about a billion other stories revealing how the Rebels obtained the plans, though, so thankfully The Essential Chronology (2000) clarified that the datapack in Interlude at Darkknell actually contained the location of the Death Star's construction site: the planet Despayre in the Horuz system. This tracks with the story itself, which mentions that that was where the information was stolen from.

 

But wait, there's more! Not satisfied with this tidy resolution, the novel Death Star (2007) blundered its way onto the scene. I generally like its two authors, Michael Reaves and Steve Perry; they're good writers and usually do quality work. But for whatever reason, it seems like they got it into their heads that a novel about the Death Star should clean up all the infamous continuity issues surrounding the theft of the Death Star plans. Unfortunately, they knew about the discrepancies, but apparently were completely ignorant of the work that had already gone into resolving them. In this case, Death Star tries to combine the Darkknell datapack with the technical plans stolen by Kyle Katarn on Danuta in Dark Forces and Soldier for the Empire, claiming that they traveled from Danuta through Darkknell on their way to Rebel hands. 

 

But wait, there's more! Happily for us, Death Star's unforced error was soon completely undermined by The Force Unleashed (2008), which added the final layer of continuity negligence to this bafflingly contentious story. That video game finally showed the formal founding of the Rebellion in 2 BBY, maintaining accurate continuity by including the presence of resistance forces from Corellia, Alderaan, and Chandrila. But it also went completely off the rails by making the central figure behind the Corellian Treaty a heretofore unmentioned OC called Starkiller, and the entire alliance a stupidly counter-productive scheme by the Emperor. More relevant to Darkknell, the Rebel leaders are captured by the Empire and taken to the Death Star itself. The Essential Reader's Companion (2012) officially placed Interlude at Darkknell at 0 BBY, despite referencing the blatant contradiction of Garm Bel Iblis already knowing about the Death Star two years earlier!

 

The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide (2008) had already offered some resolution to this issue, however. In its recounting of Bel Iblis's backstory, it puts the death of his family on Anchoron before the events of The Force Unleashed, moving Interlude at Darkknell at least two years back on the timeline (but no more than three years, because Armand Isard is still alive in Agent of the Empire). The obvious solution, really. Of course, this means that Hal Horn forgot his son's age, but what father hasn't?

 

So despite The Essential Reader's Companion's dating for Interlude at Darkknell, resolving the continuity discrepancy with The Force Unleashed is really no great trick at all. Much more problematic is what TFU does to Bail Organa, who is caught red-handed fomenting Rebellion, arrested by the Empire, taken to the top-secret Death Star project, and threatened with execution by the Emperor himself, only to somehow go back to being a full-time Senator and public figure for a further two years until he gets blowed up on Alderaan. Who's writing this schlock, Christopher Nolan's dad?