Prisoner of Bogan

Dawn of the Jedi: Prisoner of Bogan

Author: John Ostrander

Artist: Jan Duursema

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: November 2012 – May 2013

Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY

Series: Dawn of the Jedi

It’s been two months since the concurrent events of Force Storm and Into the Void, and Predor Skal’nas, evil Rakatan overlord, is starting to wonder why he hasn’t heard anything from his brainwashed human slave, Xesh, and the Rakatan spies sent to Tython. Since we learn at the end of this story that Skal’nas had psychically programmed Xesh to murder his master and everyone on their ship, you’d think he might suspect that has something to do with why they haven’t called him back.

Another of Skal’nas’s slaves, an albino alien chick named Trill, reveals that she and Xesh were childhood BFF’s before they were forced to fight to the death and Xesh refused to kill her, thereby betraying her? I don’t get it. But Trill claims this former bond of theirs will allow her to track him so her boss sends her to join the plot.

Meanwhile, Xesh is hanging out on Bogan, the Evil Moon of Tython, with nothing to do but watch the Good Moon, Ashla, pass overhead every month. There is only one other prisoner on Bogan: an insane Je’daii named Daegen Lok, who was teased in both Force Storm and Into the Void and is finally about to make his debut and pull this series back from the brink of failure. He attacks Xesh for some reason, even though he wants his help. Xesh is about to kill him (which would put a real damper on his plans, I suspect) but Lok reveals that, like the three Je’daii Journeyers in Force Storm and Lanoree Brock in Into the Void, he too had a vision of Xesh’s arrival on Tython. Xesh is intrigued and the two agree to team up to escape their imprisonment.

Back on Tython, the Three Caballeros—Sek’nos Rath, Tasha Ryo, and Shae Koda—are being despondent about Xesh’s exile and how the Je’daii Council ignored their visions, just as they did Daegen Lok’s seven years ago (twist!). A minor character from Into the Void, Master Tave, tells them to grow up and quit their bitching, then sends them on various trivial assignments.

Elsewhere, we are introduced to General Rajivari, so far the only Je’daii Master we’ve met who dresses identically to the Jedi in the prequels. His character originated in BioWare’s aesthetically derivative MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, where he was named as one of the founding members of the Jedi Order. I assume he’s included here by way of apology for the lore inconsistencies in the previous volume, because he does dick-all in this book. (Also revealed in TOR is that Ravioli eventually went insane and was killed trying to destroy all of the Jedi, so at least there’s a happy ending to his character arc.)

Master Rajivari, the dullest first Jedi imaginable.

Daegen Lok takes Xesh to a crashed starfighter that he’s managed to mostly repair. Lok reveals that, seven years ago, he and his best friend, Hawk Ryo, ventured into the Chasm, a seemingly bottomless abyss on Tython rumored to drive insane any Je’daii who travels too far into its depths. In the Chasm, Lok had a vision of Xesh (although he believes it to be himself) leading an army and holding a “sword of flame,” which from what Xesh has told him he now believes to be Xesh’s Forcesaber. The Je’daii Council declared Lok mad and exiled him to Bogan until he recanted his vision, which he refused to do.

Lok asks Xesh if he can build more Forcesabers, but he’s unable to do so without a specific type of crystal. As luck would have it, Krev Coeur, the convenient crystal planet, is nearby. Xesh generates Force lightning to recharge the starfighter’s depleted power cells and they jet off to take their revenge.

At the Forge, Tython’s weapons manufacturing temple, the Je’daii are studying Xesh’s Forcesaber, which is basically a lightsaber that will only work if you use the dark side, and trying to figure out how to turn it on. Being Je’daii, practitioners of harmonic balance, they mostly fail. They give it to Shae to try, since she was the only one able to activate it before, but I guess she’s not on her period anymore so she can’t do it. Hawk Ryo walks in and turns it on without a problem, revealing that he was once exiled to the Evil Moon of Bogan and learned to master his own dark side there.

While Shae and Sek’nos dick around with that, Tasha Ryo, the most boring character from the first arc, gets the much more interesting task of investigating the alien remains recovered from Xesh’s ship. Unable to find anything in the Je’daii archives, she is taken by librarian Ters Sendon to an underground chamber and series of passageways that predate even the Je’daii’s 10,000-year-old library.

Here, Master Sendon shows her a floating crystal shaped like a Tho Yor. Tasha touches it and for the first time in Je’daii history the crystal comes to life, emitting a small hologram of a dude that looks like DC’s Darkseid after joining a monastic cult. The figure introduces itself as Master A’nang, last of the Tython Kwa, and offers to answer any questions they might have. Why this millennia-old recording speaks English (or “Basic,” as I guess it’s called in Star Wars) and uses the same name for Tython that the Je’daii use is conveniently not addressed.

A’nang reveals that his people, the Kwa, once traveled throughout the galaxy from their homeworld of Dathomir using technology called “Infinity Gates.” They settled on many worlds, spreading civilization and advanced technology to the more primitive races of the galaxy. Having read Into the Void, we know that not long ago there was a huge kerfuffle with some nut searching for a Gree hypergate beneath a ruined city. So why did ancient Tython need to be settled by both the Kwa and the Gree using nearly identical technology? Storytelling 101: Keep it simple, stupid.

Master A’nang prepares to lead a group of Kwa through an Infinity Gate.

Tasha shows Master A’nang an alien skull from the crashed ship. After flipping out and retreating inside his holocron, which is basically a flash drive you can access only by talking to Clippit the Microsoft Office Assistant, A’nang’s holographic avatar eventually explains how the Kwa unwittingly unleashed the Rakata on the galaxy. One of their Infinity Gates took them to the Rakatan homeworld, Lehon, where the Kwa tried to uplift the Rakata as they had other species. The Rakata repaid them by using their technology to take over the galaxy. The Kwa destroyed all their Infinity Gates and retreated back to Dathomir, powerless to stop the Rakata’s bloody conquest. So basically the whole history of Star Wars happened because of Seerow’s Kindness.

Meanwhile, Master Ravioli convinces the Je’daii Council to reexamine their stance on Daegen Lok’s vision in light of the dead Rakatan scouting party. A group of Je’daii that includes Shae, Sek’nos, and Hawk Ryo goes to Bogan to retrieve Lok and Xesh, only to find that they have escaped. They battle terentas, alchemically engineered creatures bred by the Je’daii to sniff out bombs. Because giant monsters with huge fangs and talons are ideally designed for that task. Presumably the terentas have some connection to the Jedi-hunting terentatek monsters from Knights of the Old Republic, but we’ll always be left wondering.

The Je’daii find a giant statue that Lok carved of himself holding a Forcesaber. Hawk Ryo, having perhaps tired of being Mr. Boring McBland, admits that he shared Lok’s vision when the two of them ventured into the Chasm seven years ago. Afterward, he refused to back up his BFF and let the council think Lok was insane. He also randomly goes crazy and tries to strangle the blonde chick he’s ostensibly in love with who looks kind of like Jane Krakowski. Hawk Ryo is awesome now!

With the Je’daii on their trail, Xesh and Lok crash their ship on Krev Coeur, where Xesh builds a new Forcesaber for each of them. Half of the Je’daii team, including Sek’nos and some others who are probably supposed to be important but aren’t, arrives on the planet and tries to take the darksiders into custody. Daegen Lok uses a “Mind Twist” to convince one of them she is on fire and then beats the crap out of another in a sword fight, while Xesh and Sek’nos duel and Sek’nos falls off a cliff.

Their pursuers defeated, Xesh and Lok steal a ship and head to Nox, the poisoned planet with the domed cities from Into the Void, to complete the next phase of Lok’s plan: gathering an army. Unbeknownst to them, Trill has finally tracked Xesh to the Tython system and happens to be flying by at the exact moment Sek’nos falls to his death, and he is saved by landing on her ship. I guess it was the will of the Force or something.

Lok explains to the reader that he was the Je’daii hero responsible for ending the Despot War twelve years ago when he seduced the evil Queen Hadiya and then murdered her in her bed. During the time he spent as her lover, he got to know all the generals and crime lords who supported her, and even though they hate his guts now, he’s convinced he can use their influence to build an army to fight off the coming Rakata invasion. Or . . . to fight the Je’daii in order to convince them that they have to fight the Rakata. I’m not completely clear on what his plan is. But it turns out to not matter anyway because his clandestine meeting with these retired war criminals is interrupted by the other Je’daii!

Daegen Lok and Queen Hadiya in an act of true love, I mean murder.

While Hawk Ryo and Daegen Lok duel one another, Shae pursues Xesh, outraged at him for betraying her trust by breaking out of jail and allegedly killing Sek’nos Rath. Their fight is prematurely aborted by an attack from a dianoga, the one-eyed tentacle monster from the trash compactor scene in Star Wars: A New Hope. The one in the movie lived in like six inches of water but this one is the size of a freaking house for some reason. It rises out of a nearby river and, true to tentacle monster form, grabs Shae and carries her off while completely ignoring Xesh.

Xesh dives into the water after her and kills the monster by stopping its heart with the Force. My bad, its hearts, because I guess it needs several. He brings Shae back to the surface but she isn’t breathing, so he gives her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and totally cops a feel out of frame. After reviving her, Xesh says, “You are my prisoner. You will not resist.” (Man, how many relationships have I started with that line?) He then carries her off into the night.

Elsewhere, Hawk chases Lok to the edge of a chasm. Lok claims that they were like brothers and Hawk should stand with him because they shared the same vision. Hawk denies this, even though he just admitted it was true a little while ago. Lok escapes by flinging himself into the abyss. Hawk tells the blonde Je’daii that Lok used a mind trick to make him think that Lok was there when he wasn’t, but I have no idea if that’s supposed to be the explanation for how he survives falling to his death or if Hawk is lying to make himself look better. It never comes up again though so I guess it doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Trill nurses Sek’nos back to health and offers to help him get back to his friends. Trill, who is flying a ship of a presumably alien design, shares her name with a letter in the stupid Star Wars fake alphabet, Aurebesh, and has that same letter tattooed on her face. Sek’nos draws no connection between her and Xesh, who recently arrived in an alien ship, shares his name with a letter in the stupid Star Wars fake alphabet, and has that letter tattooed on his face. He’s too busy staring at the incongruous cleavage window in her otherwise modest outfit.

Xesh and Daegen Lok, with Shae as their hostage, flee to the planet Shikaakwa to meet with Hawk Ryo’s crime boss brother, Volnos “Ox” Ryo, who is also the father of Tasha Ryo, who has once again forgotten that she is supposed to be a main character. Volnos was the one who vouched for Lok with Queen Hadiya in order to get him close enough to kill her. Lok still plans to raise an army to make himself the leader of the Je’daii, even though his plan for raising that army already kind of fell through spectacularly. Actually maybe the Je’daii didn’t even arrest all those retired war criminals he was meeting with. The plan could still be on, I don’t know.

Trill, Sek’nos, Hawk, and Jane Krakowski arrive on Shikaakwa and rendezvous outside Ryo Fortress. They are attacked by another giant dianoga, because apparently those are super-common now, but Trill shoots it in the eye, killing it like a low-level boss in a Metroid game. They then make their way into the fortress, where Volnos decides he is going to kill Xesh and Lok and makes a veiled rape threat against Shae, who Lok has put into a mind-control trance. Before we can get to that, though, the invading Je’daii attack!

Lok collapses the ceiling with the Force and he and Xesh run off with Shae again. I wish this comic had a dramatis personae so her identity could be upgraded from simply “Love Interest” to the more prestigious “Damsel in Distress.” Xesh tells Sek’nos he’s glad he didn’t actually kill him on Krev Coeur, but Sek’nos can’t take a compliment and talks trash about Xesh being Lok’s minion, so Xesh blasts him unconscious with Force lightning. There are a lot of panels of Hawk and Lok screaming at one another and then Lok cuts off his friend’s foot. Somehow this, but none of the other crazy stuff he’s done since Shae was kidnapped, is enough to break Lok’s concentration and Shae is released from her trance. She picks up Hawk’s fallen Forcesaber and duels Lok.

“Lok removes Ryo’s leg.” (Caption courtesy of Wookieepedia.)

 Xesh goes to help his newfound friend but Shae argues that Lok is just using him to gain power and he has the power to choose not to be a slave. For some reason this prompts Lok, for the first time in the story, to claim that he is Xesh’s master at the most inopportune moment possible. Xesh turns on Lok and says he is done being a slave. Lok reaches into his mind to try to turn his greatest fear against him, but Xesh is such an emo douche that the darkness inside his brain overwhelms Lok, rendering him temporarily insensate. Xesh goes for the killing blow but Shae tells him there has been enough killing, and for some reason that’s enough to stop this clearly deranged maniac. Sek’nos comes up to them and Shae calls him “Big, Red Geejaw.” I don’t know what that means.

A week later, Daegen Lok has been returned to Bogan, but he warns the Je’daii that the Rakata are coming and can only be stopped by embracing the dark side. Hawk Ryo confesses to the Je’daii Masters that he shared Lok’s vision of the shadow army and the sword of flame in the Chasm seven years earlier, but adds that in the vision he also saw Xesh (I guess he’s their last hope or something). Trill joins the Je’daii in preparing for war, a stranger to Xesh because of his brainwashing. This volume ends with her sneaking off to report to Predor Skal’nas, who orders his Rakata to prepare their fleet for the invasion. TO BE CONTINUED PREMATURELY CONCLUDED BECAUSE THE SERIES GOT FUCKING CANCELED!

Meditations

There’s a lot to poke fun at here but mostly because there’s a ton of stuff packed into these five issues. Overall, this is a marked improvement from the previous volume. Most of the characters get more stuff to do (except poor Tasha), including a few like Hawk Ryo who had been one-note or uninteresting until now. Sadly there’s next to no Rakata action in this volume, but it’s made up for by the wacky antics of Daegen Lok, the best new character and probably the overall best character we’ve met so far. Unlike almost everyone else in this story, Lok is a vibrant, entertaining character with comprehensible goals that, while ridiculous, he takes tangible steps to realize. As the titular prisoner of Bogan, he drives pretty much all the action that takes place, and does so in an amusingly eccentric and flamboyant way, such as picking up a human skull off the ground and using it in an impromptu ventriloquist act for no reason.

Xesh is somewhat more interesting as a protagonist now that he’s gotten over his “just kill everyone” phase, but he still has the personality of cornstarch and is blander than a color episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Shae’s characterization doesn’t fare much better, and here the solution is so obvious it’s actually painful that no one on the creative team thought of it: Shae should have been Lanoree Brock.

Not only would this cut out an extraneous redhead from a comparatively small cast, but it would also be advantageous to the roles of both characters: the “hot girl who redeems the brooding antihero through the power of love” character would become more interesting than “not interesting at all,” and the “cool, kickass female lead who only gets to do stuff in one book and then never shows up again” character would get to show up again. It also would have generated some real cross-promotional synergy instead of the Dawn of the Jedi spinoff novel having nothing to do with the plot of the Dawn of the Jedi comics. Plus it would explain why Lanoree saw Xesh in a vision when the only other characters to do so eventually ended up meeting him. You have failed me for the last time, Dark Horse.

Plot-wise, Prisoner of Bogan is fairly straightforward (the Je’daii chase Daegan Lok while he tries to recruit an army to fight the Rakata), but there’s a lot of information packed in there, mostly because Prisoner takes after the previous volume in having a crap-ton of exposition. Last time they gave us the back story of the previous 10,000 years of Je’daii history, this time it was the history of the Despot War and A’nang’s Kindness. This setting and its accompanying lore is not uninteresting, but at times it can get a bit disconcerting to be bombarded with so much fictional history that is a) only tangentially related to the actual plot and b) more interesting than the current story being told. It’s like A Song of Ice and Fire that way.

Like Into the Void, this book also contains an excessive amount of planet-hopping. It’s like John Ostrander said, “Okay, I planned out this whole setting with these eleven completely unique and distinctive planets and I’m going to show off every last one of them, goddammit!” The Je’daii are doing Je’daii stuff on Tython, now let’s visit the Evil Moon of Bogan, now we have to get crystals from Krev Coeur, now we need something from the domed cities on Nox, but then we have to meet someone on Shikaakwa, and meanwhile that one chick what thought she was on fire is in a hospital on Kalimahr! I don’t blame the writer for this, because having a very limited time to not only establish this setting but also sell readers on it must have been a bitch, but it’s something that stuck out to me and made the story feel busier than it needed to be.

Pretty good overall though, which I’m sure will only make the aborted finale all the more disappointing.

3.5/5 Death Stars.

Force Storm

Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm

Author: John Ostrander

Artist: Jan Duursema

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: February 15 – June 20, 2012

Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY (with flashbacks to 36,453 BBY)

Series: Dawn of the Jedi

Okay, let’s start again, for real this time. How does this true beginning kick us off on our journey through the EU?

“Our story begins a long, long time ago, on planets far, far away . . . ten thousand years before our time.”

Oh it’s kind of just a lame ripoff of the opening text in the movies, except much dorkier. “Planets” has a more scientific connotation, if you’re waxing poetical just use “worlds.” Also I’m not sure how I feel about beginning a story already set 25,793 years before the movies by immediately flashing back to 36,453 years before the movies. And what is with these oddly specific dates? I remember when Yoda saying he was 900 meant that he was literally born exactly 900 years before the moment he said it. Stop trying for historical realism, Star Wars!

Through eleven pages of exposition, we learn that 10,000 years ago, several planets throughout the galaxy had these giant space pyramids (which mysteriously appeared a thousand years before that, but thankfully we’re spared any more stacking back story) called “Tho Yor.” After sitting there doing nothing for a long-ass time, one day they randomly sent out a telepathic summons to everyone on each planet who was sensitive to the Force and they all piled into the pyramids, which then blasted off into outer space.

Sure, let’s just climb aboard. What’s the worst that could happen?

[Continuity Note: Among the planets visited by the Tho Yor is Dathomir, which is already populated by witches despite earlier continuity pegging their origin at 600 BBY, more than a 35,000-year discrepancy. Furthermore, the witches are all human, but at this point in history humans should still be confined to Coruscant until the Rakata, an evil alien race from the Knights of the Old Republic video game who ruled the galaxy in ancient times, spread them across the stars as a slave species (according to Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology, anyway, although that actually contradicts the game it was referencing). But you can’t have an EU story without rancor monsters and rancors come from Dathomir and the Dathomir witches are one of the EU’s most popular inventions apparently so what are you going to do!

[The Tho Yor also recruit several Twi’leks, the tentacle-headed aliens from Return of the Jedi whose females became a nerd sex icon after one of them appeared as the dancing slave of a slug. But according to The Old Republic, BioWare’s Star Wars MMO, Twi’leks were a genetically engineered race created thousands of years later by the Rakatan Mother Machine. I don’t know what the point of that retcon was, but they did it, and Dawn of the Jedi got it wrong.

[I’m also pretty sure that having Wookiees this early is a continuity error as well, as earlier continuity had them evolve from banthas brought to the planet Kashyyyk by Neimoidian space traders, and the Neimoidians evolved from Duros, and the Duros shouldn’t even have spaceflight yet. Also I don’t think this is at all how evolution works.]

The monoliths from 2001 take all these wacky aliens to the planet Tython at the center of the galaxy and dump them there. Fortunately, the Tython system improbably boasts eleven planets capable of sustaining life, several of which have multiple moons capable of sustaining life, so these dudes have a lot of space to move around in. They spend the next few thousand years studying the Force and fighting dinosaurs. Eventually they figure out that they have to maintain a balance between the light and darkness within themselves or the planet will be out of balance and start killing them even more than it already does when they’re being eaten by giant birds. Anyone who breaks that balance and falls to the dark side is exiled to Tython’s dark moon of Bogan. The light moon, Ashla, is presumably for people who fall to the light side and just spend their time going around not being dicks to people.

Flash-forward to modern times and cut to everyone’s favorite insignificant planet that keeps showing up over and over and over again because people remember it from the first Star Wars movie: Tatooine. Only this Tatooine is awesome because instead of being the desert wasteland from the movies it’s a lush tropical paradise covered in oceans.

[Continuity Note: Finally, some good continuity: if you engage in a long dialogue tree with the Tusken Raiders in the first Knights of the Old Republic game, you can learn that Tatooine used to have thriving rainforests and seas before it was bombed to shit by the Rakata, resulting in the desolate hellhole we see in the films.]

When we find it, the planet is in the middle of being enslaved by the Rakata. The Rakata employ specially trained slaves called “Force Hounds” to seek out planets strong in the Force (which is apparently just every important planet from the movies and EU); Tatooine was found by a human named Xesh, who kind of looks like an emo Zach Braff.

Predor Skal’nas, a high-ranking Rakatan muckety-muck on their capital planet of Byss (another awesome continuity connection to something that won’t be important again until much later), has heard rumors of a Force-strong planet in the Deep Core, but his own Force Hound, Trill, is unable to locate it because of all the black holes and gravity anomalies at the center of the galaxy. Xesh has a reputation for being the best at what he does, however, and promises that he will find this planet and Predor Skal’nas will feast on its bones. Uh-oh, all those characters I don’t know or care about are in trouble! Their planet’s bones are about to be eaten! Let’s meet some of them now!

We get a trio of unimportant scenes to introduce the personalities of our three main Je’daii characters: Tasha Ryo, a female Twi’lek torn between family and duty who’s also the niece of that Hawk Ryo guy from “Eruption”; Sek’nos Rath, a happy-go-lucky male Sith [Continuity Note: At this point in history, the word “Sith” refers to an alien species rather than the cabal of evil Force-users seen in the prequels. Long story.] who never wears a shirt and makes all the ladies swoon despite his creepy face tentacles; and Shae Koda, one of those anachronistic Dathomir witches and the first of many hot red-haired, green-eyed ladies in the Star Wars EU (I’m not sure how that recessive combination became such a sex obsession in nerd culture, but it’s going to get pretty ridiculous by the time we’re through). Each of these three has a vision of Xesh and sets out to meet their destiny. Shae is accompanied by her pet rancor, Butch, whom she mutated by experimental alchemy to be able to fly, like any responsible pet-owner would do. So does the ASPCA exist in Star Wars, or . . . ?

Just three sexy twenty-somethings off on an adventure.

Meanwhile, we catch up with our old friend Hawk Ryo, who is just as bland and uninteresting as he was in “Eruption,” only now that he’s illustrated we can see he has a black little soul patch on his chin and now I kind of hate him. He senses the Rakata aboard Xesh’s ship as it enters the system and sends a warning to the Je’daii Temple Masters, then sets out to investigate. The Rakatan ship mysteriously crashes on Tython, however, and everyone aboard is killed, save of course for Xesh. Shae, Sek’nos, and Tasha brave the perils of wild Tython to arrive at the crash site where they are confronted by Xesh. He makes short work of their swords with his “Forcesaber,” which is a lightsaber that can only be activated when its user taps into the dark side and was invented by the author so he could have lightsabers in a time period where there aren’t supposed to be lightsabers.

They fight for a while and eventually Xesh flees deeper into the Tython wilderness, the imbalance in the Force caused by his darkness and the deaths of all the Rakata resulting in the titular Force storm and the three musketeers turning on one another as they’re forced to confront their inner demons or something. They get over it though. Meanwhile Xesh almost gets eaten by spiders but then he doesn’t. The Je’daii catch up with him again but then they’re all attacked by the sandworms from Dune. The Je’daii save Xesh’s life and he repays them by hightailing it out of there. He watches their battle from the top of a cliff and predicts that Shae will sacrifice the others to the monster in order to escape, but he is taken aback when she refuses to abandon her friends and is ready to sacrifice herself to save them. Enraptured by her heroism and cleavage, Xesh rushes back to save her and kills the sandworm by stabbing it in the eye. Hawk Ryo and some Je’daii Masters with dumb names finally show up, and the one who looks like Morpheus from The Matrix sacrifices himself to end the Force storm by getting struck by lightning. He doesn’t even die though so it’s not much of a sacrifice.

The dissipation of the storm weakens Xesh for some reason and Shae subdues him with his own Forcesaber, being the only Je’daii able to activate the weapon because of her female emotionality. Xesh surrenders and tells her that when they devour his body, he wants her to eat his heart. She’s like, “Um, we don’t really do that here,” which is maybe the mildest possible underreaction to that request.

After the Je’daii take Xesh back to their temple and heal his wounds, Tasha, who has done nothing for the whole story, decides to make herself useful and mind-meld with the stranger, who conveniently has amnesia and can’t remember how his ship crashed. She sees a panel of the Rakatan fleet surrounding the Star Forge from Knights of the Old Republic and that Xesh was brainwashed as a child to be evil. She and her friends beg the Je’daii Masters, and I feel like a fool every time I have to type that term, to let them try to help Xesh find balance in the Force, but the masters are like “lol eff that” and just ship him off to the evil moon prison. TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Meditations

I enjoyed this comic, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s due to the comic itself and to what extent to the continuity porn. I mean I am a KOTOR fan from way back; throw in some Rakata, some Selkath, the Star Forge, and a verdant Tatooine and it’ll do a lot to distract from how much I don’t really care about these characters or what’s going on. Hawk Ryo and his friends whose names I can’t even remember aren’t really interesting at all. The younger characters are a little better. I like how Tasha just seems really incompetent at being a Jedi, I mean Je’daii, but then at the beginning of the book she effortlessly defends her father from assassins, so I don’t know what to make of her. Sek’nos Rath isn’t that memorable in and of himself, but the decision for him to be a Sith and yet just a normal dude was kind of clever, we’ll see if it goes anywhere. Shae is just the Love Interest. I guess Xesh is supposed to be the main protagonist but he has no personality and I don’t care. So far my favorite character is Butch the flying rancor, hopefully the rest of the series will just be her eating people with visual callbacks to KOTOR in the background.

“Never open the box. Opening the box would be horribly bad.”

The prose is pretty basic, just like in the preceding short story by the same author. None of the heroes really have an interesting way of speaking or any particularly snappy or memorable lines. The Rakata are a lot more fun and I hope we get to see more of their weirdo cannibal society in future issues. The artwork is really good but there are a lot of panels where people are just upside down or sideways or flying through the air for some reason. It’s a little disorienting and I don’t get it. Also there is a TON of lightning splashed all over this book. Remember the first time you saw Return of the Jedi and were blown away when the Emperor just conjures lightning out of nowhere? Prepare to never be amazed by it again, because now everyone does it all the time, even the sandworms! The overuse of this power is actually a common problem throughout the EU, but we’re just starting off and already it’s everywhere. Maybe it’s just really fun to draw or something, I don’t know.

All in all I was entertained, and the ending left me ready to move on to the next story arc. Dawn of the Jedi doesn’t have an incredibly distinctive visual style, especially the way characters dress, but for the most part it does manage to avoid the aesthetic of the prequel films, which has overtaken almost every other era of Star Wars storytelling. The setting is interesting and has a lot of potential, even though I don’t buy the whole “balance” idea and it just harkens back to the worst aspects of Beast Machines/Mass Effect 3. For being ambitious and mostly competently told, if nothing else, I give this one a decent if unspectacular grade! What more could a Star Wars story ask for?

3/5 Death Stars.

The Adventures of Lanoree Brock

Eruption

 

Author: John Ostrander 

Medium: Short story 

Publication Date: April 30, 2013 in Star Wars Insider #141

Timeline Placement: 25,793 Years Before the Battle of Yavin (BBY), as seen in Episode IV 

 

This is it, the earliest EU story published before the Disney reboot and thus the first on our timeline. We take our first steps into the huge world of this galaxy far, far away with this opening line: “Hawk Ryo drifted in and out the shadows, a shadow himself.” 

 

How weak is that? 

 

I mean John Ostrander founded this era with the Dawn of the Jedi comics, so you’d think if he was going to write a story even further back he’d at least try to make sure this moronic undertaking of ours started out with some pizzazz. “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed” this ain’t. 

 

In this story, we follow Lanoree Brock and Hawk Ryo, two Je’daii Rangers, which apparently are like prototypical Jedi Knights, except they use real swords and carry guns and draw equally from both the light and dark sides of the Force. Sounds like some fedora tabletop gamer’s overpowered fantasy character class. The Je’daii have been sent by the Je’daii Council, because that just had to be a thing, to resolve some boring mining dispute on some moon of a planet I don’t care about. Apparently Hawk Ryo’s brother is a terrorist who kidnapped the daughter of the mining president to disrupt his plans to marry her to the son of the union boss or something, I don’t know, but there’s some kind of social commentary on labor unrest in there somewhere. Anyway, Hawk kills some people, finds the girl bound and gagged, and rescues her, but—twist ending!—after she’s saved she refuses to marry the guy anyway! You go, girl! 

 

Basically I don’t care about any of this, although I do like the character of Lanoree Brock because she seems just as bored with this plot as I am and terrorizes innocent people by repeatedly firing a gun over their heads when they annoy her. Shortly afterward, she channels Jorah Mormont and forces an assassin to drink the poisoned wine he tried to serve her. “Eruption” really doesn’t have a lot of meat to it, either in plot or character development, but given the little page-time she has, Lanoree stands out as the only interesting part of this story. I’m now slightly more excited to get to the first novel on our timeline, Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void, which is all about her. 

 

I’d like to say more about this, since it’s the earliest point on the Star Wars timeline, but there’s nothing more to say. 

 

2/5 Death Stars. Don’t waste your time.

 

The Adventures of Lanoree Brock, Je'daii Ranger

Author: Tim Lebbon
Medium: Vignette
Publication Date: April 25, 2013 on Kindle Daily Post
Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY

This story is written in the form of an entry made by Lanoree Brock in her ship’s log between chapters two and three of the subsequent item on our timeline, Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void. Actually, calling it a story isn’t even accurate; it’s just a few paragraphs of Lanoree recapping the first two chapters of a book we haven’t even read yet, but in vague terms to avoid spoilers. Basically all she says is that she’s been sent on a mission and it’s serious shit, with a little bit of forced characterization and back story thrown in. It’s like a teaser trailer for the book, except even worse than that sounds.

1/5 Death Stars. Completely pointless.

 

Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void

Author: Tim Lebbon
Medium: Novel
Publication Date: May 7, 2013
Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY (with flashbacks to 25,802 BBY)
Series: Dawn of the Jedi

When we last saw Lanoree Brock at the end of “Eruption,” she had been summoned back to Tython by the Je’daii Masters for a mysterious mission. That mission, it turns out, is to hunt down and neutralize her long lost younger brother, Dalien Brock, who has been believed dead for the past nine years. The main story line of the book is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to the events of nine years ago, when Lanoree and her brother traveled across Tython to begin their Je’daii training and Dal ultimately disappeared. He has recently resurfaced as the leader of a cult known as the Stargazers, whose mission is to escape the Tythan system and rediscover the original planets from which the Tho Yor took their ancestors. To accomplish this, Dalien is seeking a device called a hypergate, rumored to be buried on Tython beneath the ruins of a city built by an ancient and mysterious alien race known as the Gree. If he’s not stopped, Dalien Brock’s mad quest could destroy the entire star system . . . somehow.

The book describes Lanoree as a 25-year-old hottie with auburn hair and gray eyes. Not quite a match for the green-eyed redhead trope, but close enough for government work. It’s difficult to tell from the only two pictures we have of her, but given that the text describes Dalien Brock as a swarthy bro, Lanoree is apparently our first non-white protagonist (enjoy that while it lasts!). There are also a noticeably high number of female secondary and minor characters, including the Stargazers’ financial backer, Kara, a morbidly obese hoverchair-bound woman with artificially elongated arms. If nothing else, Into the Void really racks up points on the diversity scale.

The Adventures of Lanoree Brock, Racially Ambiguous Samurai Mage

Following a tip from her mentor, Master Dam-Powl, Lanoree first travels to the sixth planet in the system, Kalimahr, to find a Twi’lek rogue named Tre Sana. We know he’s a rogue because he’s described as such in the dramatis personae. On her way to meet him, however, she notices a Stargazer spy taking pictures of her. She confronts him, which results in him machine-gunning a bunch of innocent bystanders for no reason and then blowing himself up. Lanoree is then taken into police custody for questioning, where she mind-tricks the police captain into telling her that a woman called Kara, played by Kenneth McMillan, is funding the Stargazers. When she meets Tre Sana, this is the only information he has for her, making his character completely pointless and redundant. He sticks around for the rest of the book anyway. I guess Lanoree’s party needed a rogue.

Tre Sana’s brain has been alchemically altered by Dam-Powl to render his thoughts unreadable to telepathic Force-users, allowing him to serve as her underworld contact. (This Chekov’s gun never impacts the plot in any significant way.) In return for feeding information to the Je’daii, Tre has been promised a new identity and a fresh start at life so he can escape from all the terrible things he’s done in the past. (We’re never told what those terrible things are.) Lanoree frequently has to remind herself not to let her guard down around Tre, because he is a dangerous man with the proven capacity for great evil. (The most evil thing he does in the book is shove a guy out of the way so he can use a payphone.) Tre Sana’s whole character is a violation of the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell.

I hate this character more than life itself.

I think the author intended him to be pitiable, but really he just comes across as pitiful. He has no agency of his own; almost everything he does is something he’s forced to do by another character. The only exceptions are shooting Kara with a tranquilizer dart when they interview her at her apartment, and rescuing Lanoree toward the end of the book, because she’d been too competent up to that point. Even when he rescues her a second time by pushing her out of the way of gunfire, the text suggests that he might have just tripped and accidentally bumped into her. He’s afraid of heights, he’s always twitching or looking pale, he spends the final act of the book throwing up and passing out from breathing poisoned atmosphere, he’s constantly being outsmarted and put down by Lanoree. Presumably he’s supposed to fill the niche of the “Han Solo-type” character but he’s just pathetic and no fun to read about at all.

After Tre renders Kara unconscious in retaliation for being unhelpful, Lanoree ransacks her apartment and discovers the diary of Osamael Or, a legendary archaeologist believed to have been lost forever in the ruins of the Old City millennia ago. From this she learns that to operate the hypergate, Dalien needs to acquire a Gree device powered by dark matter. This is bad news, because “exposing dark matter to normal matter would be cataclysmic. It would create a black hole, swallowing Tython in a heartbeat. The rest of the system too.” Which is not at all what dark matter actually does. That actually sounds more like how the sci-fi trope of antimatter typically works. Dark matter does sound sexier, though.

A Gree, one of about a dozen technologically advanced ancient alien races that dominated the galaxy in the distant past.

Lanoree tracks her brother to Nox, the third planet from the sun, a poisonous wasteland whose inhabitants can only survive inside cities covered by transparent domes. In a secret weapons development station beneath one of the cities, Dalien’s scientists complete their work on the hypergate activation device, and are then gunned down by the Stargazers for their trouble. Strangely, although Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm makes a point of showing everyone carrying guns that fire actual bullets because blasters haven’t been invented yet, blasters are as common in Into the Void as they will be during the timeframe of the movies (although in the book they’re called “laser blasters,” which sounds like what they’d be called by an eight-year-old or George Lucas).

Lanoree and Tre are captured and Dalien reveals that he’s instigated a civil war on the planet by sending an assassin to commit a number of high-profile murders in another domed city using a Je’daii sword. Je’daii are hated on Nox due to their kicking its ass in the Despot War twelve years earlier, so evidence of a Je’daii working with one of the domes quickly pits the others against it. The domes’ armies roll out to meet one another and thousands of civilians are killed in this sham war Dal has instigated solely to facilitate his escape. He can’t bring himself to kill his sister, however, instead leaving one of his henchmen to finish the job while he and the rest of his crew escape amidst the chaos they’ve sown.

Lanoree makes quick work of her would-be murderer and she and Tre resume the chase, leaving Nox to burn behind them. They follow a tracking device Lanoree slipped onto her brother to Sunspot, the first planet in the system. Dal charges the Gree device in one of the planet’s mines using a rare element called marionium, which is mainly found in mushroom power-ups. Lanoree is captured again, but this time her brother is done fooling around and personally shoots her in the chest.

She’s able to use the Force to drain the blast of most of its power, however, which is a pretty cool trick but seems less effective than just deflecting it with your hand. Tre Sana and Ironholgs, Lanoree’s useless droid, carry her back to her ship, where she’s able to use some weird alchemical Force technique to heal herself. They then race back to Tython to stop Dal from activating the hypergate. They all end up down in the ruins of the Old City, the place where Dalien faked his death nine years earlier. The remaining Stargazers are killed off by ancient Gree traps or Lanoree’s sword, but Tre Sana is incapacitated by being shot in the neck. Lanoree leaves him to bleed to death (although he tragically doesn’t) and ventures on alone to confront her brother just as he’s about to open the hypergate. She makes one last plea to save him by using the Force to implant his mind with memories of their happy childhood together and the love she feels for him, but this only enrages him and she is forced to strike him down. Lanoree then spends a long time sitting beside her brother’s corpse, staring at the Gree device and wrestling with the temptation to turn it on and see what happens . . .

The book actually goes on for a few more pages but this would have been the perfect place to stop so fuck that denouement.

Meditations

Into the Void isn’t anywhere near terrible but I was slightly disappointed nonetheless. I’ve already gone over what a sickeningly ineffectual character Tre Sana is, and since he’s the secondary protagonist it’s kind of unfortunate that he sucks so much. Dalien Brock is an interesting villain, a Force-sensitive who hates the Force. He views its manipulation of his destiny as a violation and is violently repulsed whenever a character telepathically touches his mind. He’s a little reminiscent of Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II, except instead of being an awesome and complex character he is just a dick. The vast of majority of his page-time is during the flashback portions of the book, when Dal is a petulant 14-year-old. He’s just a douchebag to his sister the whole time, then randomly murders some guy for no reason, fakes his death, and disappears. Then we meet up with him again nine years later and he’s grown up to be a genocidal psychopath. Of course.

What makes this especially disappointing is that he and his Stargazers actually have a point. All the inhabitants of the Tythan system are descended from people who were basically abducted from their homes by aliens and marooned here as part of a science fair project. They’re curious to know where they come from and what their lives could be like out there among the stars. That’s a legitimate viewpoint and one that could create some interesting tension with the Je’daii, who are content to just stay on Tython and meditate on the Force. So naturally they’re all fanatical murderers. At one point one of the Stargazers tells Lanoree that Dalien is the kindest man he’s ever met. Um, no, dude, he’s clearly a homicidal lunatic. I wouldn’t mind a contrast between the Stargazers’ goals and the extreme methods they use to achieve them, but it’s hard to have a realistically layered conflict with ambiguous morality when the one side that makes sense is just crazy people.

Fortunately, Lanoree still remains an enjoyable character, although she apparently no longer carries the gun she had in “Eruption,” which could have come in handy a few times in this book. She’s quick-witted, competent, and unflappable. Despite all the terrible things she sees and experiences on her mission, she never loses her way or gets overwhelmed; she just sucks it up and keeps going. She’s actually kind of an unapologetic bitch a lot of the time, which is a refreshing take for a female lead in a story like this. Tre Sana even calls her a bitch in the text, which might be a first for Star Wars.

The only thing that felt strange for her character was her affinity for arcane alchemical experiments. She uses the Force to grow a living organism out of a sample of her DNA. It looks like a shapeless blob of flesh with an eye on it, and she’s somehow able to use this semi-conscious creature to heal herself after Dal shoots her. This whole subplot is weird and unsettling and feels out of place, especially since she doesn’t grow or change at all as a result of it. Instead of realizing, “Hey, this is kind of weird and creepy, maybe I should knock this shit off,” she thinks it’s awesome and resolves to grow more brainless flesh sacks in the future.

Other than that, though, Lanoree Brock is a strong protagonist and it’s disappointing that she’ll never appear in another Star Wars work ever, ever again. Near the end of the book, she returns to Tython as the Force storm from Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm rages. She experiences a vision just like characters from that comic will, and I briefly hoped that she would appear in future arcs of the comic. But alas, it was not to be.

3/5 Death Stars.

Escape from Vancouver

Ben: I'm mildly disconcerted at how Stephen King seems to revel in the incessant physical torture of this twelve year-old child.

Ben: Er, Not-Stephen-King. Jonas Freedemayer or whatever his stupid pseudonym is.

Ben: Amused that this description is nonspecific enough that you even need to ask.

Ben: THE TALISMAN.

Ben: Replace "child abuse" with "underage sadomasochism" and we'll be in agreement.

Ben: PETRELLI! OH MY GOD!!!

Ben: I don't see the wind-in-the-keyglass insignia anywhere on the jacket of this book. Am I even supposed to be reading this?

Ben: You shit, how are we supposed to bond over our shared experiences if you weren't even forced to endure the experience.

Ben: How magnanimous of you.

Ben: Ignominuous? I don't know what either of these words mean.

Ben: Later, I'm still jetlagged from flying back from Vancouver. Being Judas Friedlander is exhausting.

Two Good Questions

Ben: Why did Stephen King even bother writing THE TALISMAN under a pseudonym if he’s just going to give himself away by writing yet another love letter to NAMBLA?

Me: Who is this?

The Origins of the Sith

At some point we have to talk about the history of the Sith and how irreparably screwed it is, so we might as well get it out of the way now.

Although Star Wars fans had long known that Darth Vader held the sinister-sounding title Dark Lord of the Sith, just what a “Sith” was went largely unaddressed until Tales of the Jedi started its run in 1993. This comic series, initially set 4,000 years before the movies, revealed that, even further back in history, a group of Jedi had fallen to the dark side and made war on their fellow Knights. These Dark Jedi were eventually defeated and exiled from the Republic. After wandering in space, they came at last upon the Sith, an alien race who, although primitive, was strong in the dark side of the Force. The Sith worshipped the exiles as gods, and the former Jedi became their masters: the Lords of the Sith, or Sith Lords. The Sith Lords used their alchemical prowess to interbreed with the Sith people, founding an empire ruled by those with the strongest Jedi blood.

These are the basic details that most books agree on, but discrepancies arose as more sources attempted to flesh out this back story. Tales of the Jedi Companion (1996), a West End Games roleplaying sourcebook, set the Jedi schism at 5,000 years BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin, as seen in Star Wars Episode IV), one millennium prior to the first Tales of the Jedi story arc.

A month before the Companion’s publication, however, which means they were likely being written at the same time, Dark Horse Comics released The Golden Age of the Sith #0, which was itself set in 5,000 BBY and placed the birth of the Sith in the even more distant past. This issue also contributed to the mythology that the Great Schism that birthed the Sith was the first of its kind and lasted for 100 years.

The ancient Sith/a boy band

Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson were in contact with George Lucas while working on Tales of the Jedi and asked him numerous questions about his vision of that time period. Apparently he had no problem with the Sith-as-alien-species concept since that story made it to print, despite Lucas personally vetoing a similar idea in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire just a few years earlier. Lucas must have either forgotten or changed his mind, however, because while writing The Phantom Menace he came up with a completely different back story for the Sith.

According to the Episode I novelization (1999), Lucas now envisioned the Sith as coming into existence a mere 2,000 years before the movies, when a single Jedi fell to the dark side and seduced 50 followers to his cause. Almost immediately, these first Sith turned on one another in their hunger for power and destroyed themselves. The sole survivor was Darth Bane, the Sith Lord who instituted the practice of never allowing more than two Sith at a time, as seen in the movies. The fix for this was fairly easy: the EU adapted by suggesting that Lucas’s first Sith Lord had merely reinvented the Sith long after the magocratic empire from Tales of the Jedi had become extinct. It’s a bit of a cheat, but that’s basically what a retcon is.

After this minor debacle, the First Great Schism was finally established as taking place in the early days of the Old Republic, making the Sith (the evil magician kind, not the even older alien kind) almost as old as the Jedi themselves. This was made explicit in Star Wars: The Essential Chronology (2000), Star Wars Gamer #5 (2001) and Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Characters (2002), as well as implied in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003). KotOR’s take on the tale didn’t quite align with the going version, however.

One sub-quest in the game introduces the player to the ghost of Ajunta Pall, the very first Dark Lord of the Sith. Pall claims that he was among the first Jedi to turn to the dark side, but since he was also one of the exiles who discovered the Sith, he must have been well over 100 years old to have lived through the whole schism. There is some precedent in the EU for that kind of longevity among Force-users, but I think BioWare just forgot how long the schism was supposed to last.

More interesting than this possible goof, however, is how Pall describes the war itself. According to him, when the Dark Jedi were first discovered by their Jedi Masters, they fled to the Sith worlds to hide and build their power. There they turned on one another and eventually collapsed some kind of fortress upon themselves. In a really cool story hook that no other source ever picked up on, disappointingly, he also strongly hints that he and the other Dark Jedi harnessed the power of the Rakatan Star Forge during their rebellion. Pall’s version of events almost seems like a combination of Tales of the Jedi’s and The Phantom Menace’s back stories for the Sith, and it was never properly recontextualized in the broader canon.

But at least the timeline seemed to stay the same. “Ancient? Has it been so long that you use the word ‘ancient’?” Pall’s ghost asks the player mournfully. With KotOR set over 21,000 years after the Great Schism, Ajunta Pall would have been ancient indeed. That changed, however, with the publication of Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology (2005). This reference book introduced a completely new timeline for the history of the Sith and established the chronology of events that the EU would follow until its dissolution in 2014.

The First Great Schism remained in the early days of the Republic, but it now had nothing to do with the Sith. Instead, it spawned a completely different group of Dark Jedi, the Legions of Lettow, who were quickly defeated and then forgotten. Ajunta Pall and his fellow future Sith Lords now originated in the Second Great Schism of 7,000 to 6,900 BBY, a previously unexplored time period known as the Hundred-Year Darkness.

As far as I know, Lucasfilm has never explained their rationale for this retcon. There remained lingering contradictions in the back story of the ancient Sith (we’ll deal with those as they come up), but their origin wasn’t one of them. The only possible reason I can think of for moving the founding of the Sith Empire 18,000 years down the line is a throwaway piece of dialogue in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004) about ancient Sith weaponry.

The Sith Lords in The Golden Age of the Sith and The Fall of the Sith Empire used only magic swords, which implied that their ancestors had been exiled before the lightsaber came into popular usage, and the primitive state of lightsaber technology in those same stories seemed to confirm that. Kevin J. Anderson couldn’t even be consistent with his own story, however, and multiple flashbacks in Tales of the Jedi depicted modern-looking lightsabers in ancient times. Then in Knights of the Old Republic II, one of your party members offhandedly mentions that an historical Dark Lord of the Sith named Tulak Hord was a renowned lightsaber duelist.

By moving the formation of the Sith to 6,900 BBY, Lucasfilm was able to leapfrog all these anachronistic lightsaber appearances. Instead of just, you know, admitting that they were just mistakes. So as the canon stands now, the Sith Empire did have access to lightsaber technology, they just eschewed it in favor of cumbersome metal swords for no reason. And sure enough, stories published after this retcon but set during the Tales of the Jedi timeframe depicted ancient Sith wielding boring red lightsabers, further diluting the uniqueness of this era and homogenizing the EU. Ajunta Pall himself, despite being noted for carrying a sword in his initial appearance, has been depicted wielding a lightsaber in at least two subsequent texts.

Man, I sure am getting sick of Star Wars.