Let’s Catch Up On the Star Wars Cinematic Universe

Everybody wants to be Marvel. Universal wants to be Marvel. Sony wants to be Marvel. DC really, really wants to be Marvel. Disney, who owns Marvel, now wants Star Wars to be Marvel as well. In doing so, however, they’re hoping we forget that Star Wars was already Marvel before even Marvel was Marvel. The “cinematic universe” may be Hollywood’s newest favorite con game, but the concept has existed for decades, and Star Wars has utilized it almost since its inception. Forget about “canon” and all that meaningless promotional jargon, and let’s use the remaining two months before The Force Awakens hits theaters to catch up on the cinematic story presented so far, because it’s not like you have anything better to do.

The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones

 

Anyone who’s never seen a Star Wars movie would do themselves a major disservice by watching them in George Lucas’s preferred chronological order rather than starting with the original trilogy. But since no such person exists, we’ll assume anyone reading this has already seen those movies and is less interested in a thrilling cinematic experience than in a grueling slog through the gutters of continuity. And what more appropriate place to begin!

Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume One

Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of such cartoons as Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, lent his unique style to the Star Wars universe in 2003 when Lucasfilm hired him to create a series of 20 three-minute animated shorts to chronicle the events between Episodes II and III. Notable for introducing such characters as Asajj Ventress and General Lou Grievous, the first two seasons were edited into a 69-minute feature. Unfortunately, that DVD is now out of print, but if you can watch only one hyper-stylized children’s cartoon about the Clone Wars, this is the one to go with. Or you could do something cool and read the new Twilight book instead.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Animated Movie and TV Series

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, not to be confused with Star Wars: Clone Wars, followed in the footsteps of its spiritual predecessor by telling anthology stories about various characters during the Clone Wars. It focused most frequently on Anakin Skywalker’s newly introduced apprentice, kid-appeal-girl-power-Rule-34 character Ahsoka Tano. The Clone Wars ran for 121 episodes across six seasons, preceded by a theatrically released animated film that was actually four separate episodes glued together and therefore sucked.

For no discernible reason, the show’s episodes (now available on Netflix) were produced and aired wildly out of chronological order, leaping back and forth across the Clone Wars timeline. The correct narrative sequence is as follows:

Season 2, Episode 16
Season 1, Episode 16
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 animated movie)
Season 3, Episodes 1 and 3
Season 1, Episodes 1–15 and 17–21
Season 2, Episodes 1–3, 17–19, 4–14, and 20–22
Season 3, Episodes 5–7, 2, 4, and 8
Season 1, Episode 22
Season 3, Episodes 9–11
Season 2, Episode 15
Season 3, Episodes 12–22
Season 4, Episodes 1–22
Season 5, Episodes 2–13, 1, 14–20
Season 6, Episodes 1–13

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Legacy

 

The Clone Wars Legacy is a series of eight unfinished episodes intended to air in future seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars before it was canceled following Disney’s acquisition of the franchise. Existing only as rough story reel animatics, the following episodes were released on StarWars.com as the official continuation of the Clone Wars storyline: “A Death on Utapau,” “In Search of the Crystal,” “Crystal Crisis,” “The Big Bang,” “The Bad Batch,” “A Distant Echo,” “On the Wings of Keeradaks,” and “Unfinished Business.”

Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume Two

The third season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars cartoon consisted of five 12-minute episodes depicting the events immediately leading into Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Like the first two seasons, it was also edited into an hour-long film, which is now also out of print!

Revenge of the Sith

According to the commercial prophecy, the dark side will be doing something dark.

Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO

A kickass 1985 cartoon that, along with a Marvel comic series, a Dark Horse comic series, and various children’s storybooks, chronicled the adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO in between Episodes III and IV. Tragically, Lucasfilm has only released a handful of select episodes on DVD, cobbled together into Frankenstein features with no plot or pacing. Worst of all, they don’t even include the opening theme.

 

Star Wars: Rebels Shorts

Currently airing on Disney XD, the cartoon series Star Wars: Rebels was preceded by four animated shorts that introduced and established several of the show’s main characters. In chronological order, the shorts are “The Machine in the Ghost,” “Art Attack,” “Entanglement,” and “Property of Ezra Bridger.”

Star Wars: Rebels TV Series

 

Set five years before Episode IV, Rebels tells the story of the formative days of the Rebel Alliance through a new cast of characters, including Jedi Knight Freddie Prinze, Jr. Despite the timeframe difference, it features multiple returning characters from The Clone Wars, as well as much of the same creative team. Following the aforementioned shorts, Rebels kicked off in 2014 with the TV movie Spark of Rebellion, which led into the show’s first season. Season two, which premiered in October 2015, was preceded by a second film, The Siege of Lothal. 

 

A New Hope

 

The Star Wars Holiday Special

 

The most infamous entry on this list, the Holiday Special was a feature-length made-for-TV variety show that aired the year after the original Star Wars was released in theaters. Featuring musical numbers performed by both Bea Arthur and Princess Leia, Harvey Korman cosplaying as a four-armed Julia Child, the first appearance of Boba Fett, and Chewbacca’s father watching softcore porn, this is the most highly respected film ever released in the Star Wars canon. For some baffling reason it has never been officially released on home video, but if you’re a true fan you won’t let that stop you.

 

The Empire Strikes Back

 

“Empire committed the cardinal sin of not actually ending. Which at the time I was appalled by and I still think it was a terrible idea. . . . I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play variations.”

~ Joss Whedon, television auteur/professional feminist

 

Ewoks

 

The sister show to Droids, Ewoks aired for 35 episodes over two seasons and at long last revealed the highly anticipated back story to all the memorable Ewok characters in Return of the Jedi. Follow along on their mystical adventures as they battle a witch, run afoul of swamp hillbillies, befriend giants, and learn sorcery from their tribe’s elderly shaman. Oh and in the series finale the Galactic Empire shows up to build a Death Star or something but who’d be interested in that?

 

The Ewok Movies

Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, released in 1984 and 1985 respectively, are a duo of made-for-TV movies that tell the surprisingly dark story of the Towani family, whose spaceship crashes on the Forest Moon of Endor. It’s like Swiss Family Robinson in space, except a lot more depressing. I don’t even remember if these movies are actually any good, but the second one co-stars the guy from the Liberty Mutual diabetes commercials, so that probably makes them worth a trip to your local Blockbuster. Oh . . . wait, no.

 

Return of the Jedi

At last, the long-awaited conclusion to the saga of the Ewoks. Also features a brief cameo appearance by Luke Starkiller or somebody like that.

Some Common Complaints About 'BioShock Infinite' (and Why They’re Wrong)

BioShock Infinite, as I’ve said before, is one of my favorite games of all time. It is also a game rife with problems. How can we reconcile this discrepancy? Despite the game’s critical and financial success, it’s no trick to find the same handful of criticisms repeated over and over again, blown up out of all proportion, and left to stew in some concoctive regurgitant of gaming journalism. And some of them are even true!

Those that are less so often feel like they’re coming from the wrong place to begin with. Take for instance the complaint that you can’t interact with most of the game’s non-player characters, despite the token dialogue they occasionally offer you. What were people expecting on this front? BioShock Infinite never advertised itself as an RPG. When I play Halo, I’m neither surprised nor upset that Master Chief can’t have a conversation with any of the nameless Space Marines standing around in Sergeant Johnson’s briefing rooms.

The first BioShock was not only completely devoid of dialogue trees, but the protagonist was also mute. If anything, someone looking for their player character to be more interactive with the game world should praise Infinite for delivering an FPS protagonist with extensive scripted dialogue and a personality more defined than “player surrogate.” If I wanted to know the life story of every generic NPC standing on the street corner I’d play a BioWare game.

Moreover, parts of the game that do offer greater interactivity are often met with indifference or derision. When the player has the option to play a guitar he or she might come across, it’s ridiculed as pretentious, annoying, too on-the-nose. The ability to buy food from vendors on the boardwalk bears no consideration, nor does Elizabeth plucking a rose and wearing it in her hair while you explore the next area.

It’s even possible to trigger a scripted dialogue sequence with some NPCs just by walking up to them, but because BioShock Infinite is a shooter without selectable dialogue options—just like almost every other mainstream shooter—it supposedly fails to establish an immersive game world. I’m all for integrating RPG mechanics into shooters, but why blame the game for lacking something its genre, developer, franchise, and marketing all suggested it wouldn’t have?

This same frustration extends to things as mundane as not being able to free two men in Shantytown from their imprisonment in a pair of stocks. You have a gun and a hook-hand, so why can’t you get them out? Terrible game design! I would guess that the reason is probably because it isn’t feasible to code every possible action the player could take that isn’t connected to the main plot or its side quests. You also can’t shoot the lock off a door, break open a vending machine, or escape Columbia by constructing a parachute and leaping over the side of the city. Should the specific action of freeing these specific prisoners have been coded into the game? I don’t care, but the game is full of people in jails, and it wouldn’t have hurt to be able to help some of them. Really, though, it’s just an example used by critics to illustrate their discontent with the game’s interactivity, a complaint that is due more to the limitations of video games in general than to any shortcoming unique to BioShock Infinite.

That said, it’s true that the game didn’t completely live up to its pre-release marketing hype. Elizabeth’s unscripted tears can do little more than spawn turrets, weapons, ammo, health, and, more rarely, environmental hazards. It’s a great help, but not exactly a highlight of the gameplay. Furthermore, this is a far cry from the wide variety of tactics and applications the tears were talked up to have while the game was in development. I gladly would have waited through another year of development if Irrational Games had been able to implement her powers to the full extent they discussed in the demos, creating doorways to escape from combat and forcing the player to use Elizabeth’s ability more tactically by giving it a recharge timer.

One demo showed Elizabeth being accosted by a homeless man begging for food, and I wish the developers had been able to make the environment come to life and interact with the player in little ways like this. I’m just as disappointed that the final game doesn’t allow you to interfere with the actions of the Vox mob, and it’s completely fair to feel a little cheated that these advertised aspects of gameplay didn’t make the final cut.

Elizabeth mourns a victim of the Vox Populi uprising in a scene altered in the final game.

 

But only a little. The fact is that few games fully incorporate everything their overambitious developers want to include. It’s disappointing, certainly, and arguably even slightly dishonest not to admit which advertised features didn’t make the cut, but it’s hardly a game-breaking flaw. Would BioShock Infinite be more fun if Elizabeth could summon a freight train from another universe to run over enemies? Yes, definitely. Does the lack of this ability impair the gameplay in any way? No more than the absence of any kind of tears in the first BioShock impaired that game.

Speaking of absence, what about the puzzling critiques of the game’s civilian AI during combat sequences? If you’ve played the game, you may have noticed how anyone who doesn’t want to kill you hightails it off the map when the bullets start flying. Apparently this was a confusing programming choice that needed to be singled out for censure. Did it really, though? These aren’t enemy types, they’re just civilian NPCs. When the fighting starts, they run away to avoid being shot, set on fire, blown up, or pecked to death by crows. Is this really such an unusual game mechanic? It makes more sense than programming them to run around haphazardly in the middle of a firefight.

Certain criticisms of the characters ring similarly hollow. Critics often compare Infinite’s dramatis personae to that of the original BioShock, and end up looking down their noses at Columbia’s villains for not writing any poetry about rabbits. While it’s true that the first game’s supporting characters did tend to be more flamboyant and memorable than those in Infinite, it was because they had to be. The main character of BioShock, Jack, has almost no personality or character of his own. He is intentionally left as a blank slate, a pawn of the game’s allegorical meta-commentary on video games. BioShock is more about the city, the madmen who live there, and what they represent than it is the story of any one character.

This is not the case in BioShock Infinite. Booker DeWitt is no stand-in for the player; he is a fully fleshed out and realized character with a detailed past. The player may control his actions, but his identity is his own. Some will argue that comparisons between BioShock and BioShock Infinite are fair game because they both take place in decaying dystopian societies, but this isn’t an apt criterion.

The heart of BioShock Infinite is the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth. While the game is packed to the brim with big ideas—perhaps even bigger ideas than filled its predecessor—the narrative is blatantly character-focused. Jeremiah Fink and Daisy Fitzroy, while interesting characters in their own right, are no Sander Cohen or Dr. Steinman, and Zachary Comstock is certainly no Andrew Ryan—but they don’t need to be, and it’s a mistake to expect something old from a game that’s so obviously doing something new. BioShock Infinite is Booker’s story from beginning to end. Which type of narrative is better is a matter of opinion; that they are intended to be different is not.
 

The relationship between Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth is the heart of BioShock Infinite.

Regarding combat, some will assert that the game provides few opportunities for strategy more complex than shooting enemies in the face until they die, and that your variety of vigor powers doesn’t come into play at all. This is not entirely accurate, however. On lower difficulty levels, it’s true that the different vigors function as little more than fun ways to switch up your method of execution.

On hard difficulty or 1999 Mode, however, the tactical advantages of different vigors against different enemy types do come into play. The best way to stop a rampaging Handyman in his tracks is with Murder of Crows, for instance, and the massive battle at the end of the game is nigh-unwinnable unless you’re able to chain lightning between Motorized Patriots with an upgraded Shock Jockey. Possession in particular becomes invaluable when used tactically to clear rooms full of enemies without engaging them yourself.

But by and large, BioShock Infinite’s combat is not the high point of the game. While the vigors are fun, the weapons are mostly interchangeable and offer no interesting upgrades. The ability to carry only two weapons at a time discourages the player from experimenting with different combinations once they’ve secured something as powerful as the Hand Cannon or paired the shotgun with the vigor Undertow.

This raises the question, however: is combat really one of the main draws of a BioShock game? The answer is almost certainly no. At their most basic level, the games are shooters, but thematically, philosophically, contextually, they’re much more than that, and fans of the series expect much more than that from them. Was the combat in the original BioShock particularly revolutionary? Not really; while perhaps more complex than Infinite’s, it was a pretty standard strategic FPS in a survival-horror environment, plus the ability to shoot magic from your hands. The basic shooter portion of its gameplay may not be particularly inspired, but with its implementation of sky-lines and tears, BioShock Infinite has really only evolved and streamlined the combat mechanics of its predecessors.
 

A Motorized Patriot, part of the game’s “Heavy Hitter” class of enemies.

Perhaps BioShock Infinite’s most hyped advancement was the AI for Elizabeth. And for the most part, her AI is extremely impressive. She almost never behaves in ways that break game immersion or that make her a burden to the player. In a strange catch-22, however, her coding sometimes calls attention to the fact that she’s not calling attention to the fact that she’s a video game companion. While assertions that she is a weak character couldn’t be further from the truth, Elizabeth’s inability to be detected by enemy AI is a bit of a programming oversight.

I suspect this was done to prevent her from inadvertently sabotaging the player’s attempts to use stealth or drawing in a hoard of enemies the player wasn’t yet prepared to face, but it does sometimes detract from the experience. Given the alternative, however, it’s a fair tradeoff. More distracting is when she is occasionally hit by stray enemy fire but has no reaction because she isn’t coded to register hits. I’m glad that you don’t have to protect Elizabeth on the battlefield, but there must have been a way to make her invincible without having her shrug off direct missile strikes to the face.

Despite my objections, however, certain analyses hit the mark more often than not. Columbia’s vigors, for example, are not very smoothly integrated into the game. They made sense in Rapture (well, as much sense as magical sea slugs can ever be expected to make), a society guided by the virtue of selfishness and the unending quest for self-improvement. In a society based around religious fervor, racial supremacy, and good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, however, they just don’t feel like an organic part of the world. But it’s a BioShock game so they had to be there.

Other points stretch from a lack of world-building in the voxophones to the tedious boss battle with Lady Comstock. And why couldn’t we look into the past through any of the scripted tears we encounter? We can hear people talking, but that’s functionally no different from a voxophone. This is such an obvious trick, it’s amazing no one at Irrational thought to put it in the game.

It bears considering, however, that many, if not most, of these and other commonly cited issues don’t appear or affect the game until the final third or so of its length. The point at which the characters start hopping through parallel universes is also the point at which both story and gameplay suffer the most.

Once you enter a world where every faction is trying to kill you, both the previous enemy types and your erstwhile allies, the interactivity issues mentioned above are finally noticeable. Elizabeth becomes less chatty, non-hostile NPCs become less commonplace, and for some reason it seems like the environment itself becomes less organic. You’ll be walking down long, elaborate corridors that, although beautifully rendered, feel like they should be brimming with lootable items or at least stuff that you can knock over or interact with in some way. But it’s all just scenery, and the result is a sense of hollowness and sterility incongruous with the gorgeous graphic design.

I understand it wouldn’t have been feasible for Elizabeth to maintain long-running conversations with you during gameplay, including combat, as she did in the E3 demo, but I also don’t see why she had to shut up completely. In Battleship Bay, she skips stones on the lake, comments on the city’s quantum engineering, and delights in a gift of cotton candy from a vendor. By the time she’s abducted by Songbird and taken to Comstock House, it’s rare to hear her talk outside of combat or cutscenes, and that’s a shame.

So it’s not as if the game is without its flaws. But just because they become more apparent as the narrative enters its home stretch, they don’t retroactively apply to the gaming experience prior to that point. For each disappointing or inconsistent element of gameplay, there are a dozen positive accomplishments to balance it out, and everything that follows the final battle on Comstock’s flagship is as strong as everything that preceded your first journey through the tear. Oh but I guess none of that matters because parts of the magic flying city seem more like a combat arena in a videogame than a place where people would realistically live.

Therein lies the real problem with this flavor of criticism. Instead of evaluating the game for what it is, it condemns it for what it is not. Such points, while cogent, frequently come off as so pedantic, so nitpicky, that they brush aside all the good the game achieves, everything special, memorable, or unique, because it fails to be either the same game as its precursor or a perfect simulacrum of reality. In the Internet age of undeserved negativity and thoughtless criticality, it’s disheartening to see BioShock Infinite, a game that tries so hard and offers so much, be so easily dismissed just because it isn’t perfect.

“The problem with BioShock Infinite,” one critic summarized, “is it’s a game that wants to blow your mind rather than encouraging you to use it.” Ignoring how trite an analysis that is, why can’t it do both? How many people, upon completing the game, immediately started looking for answers, looking to discuss their experience, looking to understand? And yet the game didn’t make them think? Are all of the clues, the foreshadowing, the thematic structure and repetition, the allegory and symbolism, the social and historical commentary so simplistic and obvious as to preclude any consideration from the player? Maybe BioShock Infinite isn’t the greatest game ever made; it has plenty of faults to criticize. But so does the greatest game ever made, whatever it might be—and that doesn’t stop it from being the greatest.

It’s Sneak King, by the way.

Days of Labour Pains

Labor Pains

Author: John Jackson Miller

Medium: Short story

Publication Date: April 2008 on StarWars.com (republished on Unbound Worlds)

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

This first-person story, a rarity for Star Wars fiction, is an excerpt from the memoirs of Marn Hierogryph, narrated by the Gryph himself. Gryph and Zayne run a con on two art collectors on the planet Ralltiir: a gullible Muun and his “father,” a morbidly obese Rodian in a hoverchair.

I love these guys. Someone should have given them their own series.

There’s some weird moral obfuscation where Zayne objects to this swindle (the alleged “art” they are trying to pawn off is just junk they stole from Camper’s workshop) but Gryph convinces him to come around because the fact that their marks are buying what they think is stolen art makes it okay to rob them. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.

This story is completely inconsequential fluff but it’s funny. 3/5 Death Stars.

 

Knights of the Old Republic #13–15: Days of Fear

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Dustin Weaver (issues 13 and 15), Brian Ching (issue 14)

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: January – April 2007

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

We meet up with our less-than-intrepid heroes on the planet Ralltiir, where we left them at the end of the preceding short story. Zayne spars with Jarael outside the The Last Resort to test the vambraces she’s given him. Gauntlets laced with phrikite, a lightsaber-resistant ore, the vambraces prove to be fully functional when Jarael steals Zayne’s lightsaber and attempts to cut off his hands while he screams for her to stop. No means no, kids.

[Continuity Note: Phrik, the alloy produced from phrikite, dates back to the mid-‘90s EU, originating in the videogame Star Wars: Dark Forces, where it was used to construct the robotic dark troopers. One of several lightsaber-proof substances in the EU, phrik eventually fell largely out of use among Star Wars authors in favor of cortosis. Of course, cortosis ore was introduced as a very brittle material that caused lightsaber blades to temporarily short out instead of being outright energy-resistant armor. As is the nature of the EU, in most of its appearances, including the KotOR games, cortosis was written to function more like the previously created and underused phrik.]

Flush with cash from Gryph’s bank account on Telerath, Jarael and Camper prepare to take the The Last Resort and go back into hiding from their mysterious pasts. Zayne is forlorn about Jarael leaving with no apparent reluctance. She tries to make up for her indifference by saying she’s glad she didn’t kill him when she had the chance. For some reason that doesn’t do the trick though.

“’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
– some stupid guy

The The Last Resort makes orbit, where they find the Republic fleet massing in preparation to meet the Mandalorian invasion. Jarael says she hopes Zayne and Gryph will be able to sneak past without getting caught. Camper tells her to mind her own business. Meanwhile, in the ship’s hold, a cargo container pops open and out steps assassin droid HK-24.

[Continuity Note: HK-24 is, of course, meant to be a precursor to HK-47, a companion character in both KotOR games. Although the games established that HK-47 was personally constructed by the Sith Lord Darth Revan, later sources introduced a whole line of HK-series assassin droids mass produced by Czerka Corporation. The first was HK-01, a prototype model who was retconned to be the instigator of the Great Droid Revolution mentioned by Arca Jeth in Tales of the Jedi. So we’re left with a Darth Vader-building-C-3PO situation where apparently instead of designing some kind of unique robot from his own imagination, Revan just opted to buff the specs of some manufacturer’s product line. Isn’t continuity great?]

HK-24 shoots poor Elbee and overwhelms Camper and Jarael, but they are saved when Rohlan Dyre steps out of a different cargo container and shoots HK- in the head. I guess he’s just been hiding in this box since the end of Flashpoint, presumably surviving on space cockroaches and his own urine.

Meanwhile, Gryph secures a new ship by hiring the galaxy’s worst starship thief, a Trandoshan named Slyssk, who is also the most twee Star Wars character since that dog dressed as an AT-AT.

 So kawaii!

Slyssk decides to hold out for more money than Gryph had hired him for so Zayne uses the Force to endanger his life by collapsing a giant pylon on him. Gryph pretends to save him by pushing him out of the way, causing Slyssk to name Gryph his “grakhowsk” and swear a life debt to him. Our heroes!

The original crew of the Little Bivoli, the stolen ship, shows up looking for their craft. Zayne, Gryph, and Slyssk escape under a hail of blasterfire, realizing once they are aboard the Little Bivoli that it is a military provisioning ship. They make it to orbit and run smack into the Republic fleet, where they are hailed by newly promoted Admiral Saul Karath’s warship Courageous and ordered to fall into formation. Flying as inconspicuously as possible, the Little Bivoli tags along with the fleet as it makes the hyperspace jump to the planet Serroco.

Gryph puts a chef hat on Slyssk and they quickly gain a reputation among the Republic soldiers for having the best food in camp. Zayne disguises himself by wearing goggles and goes to work as a dishwasher, in which capacity he makes the acquaintance of the fleet’s most talented pilot and the first recruitable party member in KotOR, Lieutenant Carth Onasi:

Carth strikes up a conversation with Zayne about Serroco’s native intelligent species, the Stereb, when they see one picking through the trash for leftovers. Carth is moved by Zayne’s kindness in offering the alien a free meal and tells him about the practical jokes he used to play on the dimwitted aliens back when he was stationed on the planet’s orbital watchstation. Using the Republic’s communications network, he would broadcast tornado warnings and send the Stereb scurrying for shelter below ground. He used to think it was great fun, until he went down to the planet and met its people in person.

Zayne wonders if the Republic is endangering the Stereb by placing their military encampments right next to the natives’ stone cities, but Carth explains that Republic command ordered them here against Saul Karath’s better judgment. Zayne wanders off by himself and unknowingly falls into a trance, in which the Force grants him a vision of the future: the Mandalorians will destroy Serroco in one day. “I see what they’re doing,” he hears Mandalore say. “I see a defense without honor. Let them see what such a defense deserves. Let them burn.”

He runs to tell Gryph to pack up and take off immediately, then stows away on Carth Onasi’s ship to warn Admiral Karath aboard the Courageous. Carth catches him but Zayne reveals that he is a Jedi, leading Carth to trust his clams of precognition and agree to take him to the admiral. Meanwhile, Gryph and Slyssk talk about how they should probably get the frak out of there, then nonchalantly continue serving breakfast because I guess they’re stupid or something.

Carth takes Zayne before Admiral Karath, who immediately recognizes him as the Jedi killer of Taris and, he believes, a Mandalorian spy. As Zayne is put in handcuffs, he tries to explain that the admiral has to move the Republic forces away from the Stereb cities to avoid insulting the Mandalorians’ sense of honor. He suggests they call his good friend Squint for a character reference, but the fact that he doesn’t even know his friend’s real name puts the kibosh on that.

Just as the Republic expected, the Mandalorian fleet suddenly arrives in the system, but for some reason they don’t advance and hold position outside their enemies’ weapons range. Zayne continues to plead with Admiral Karath, who ignores him, and the Mandalorians fire a spread of nuclear missiles. To the surprise of everyone but Zayne, however, the missiles avoid the fleet entirely and head for the planet.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have served seconds . . .” Gryph muses, looking up from his pile of gold-pressed latinum, and then the entire planet is consumed in mushroom clouds. Across the galaxy, various characters sense Serroco’s death through the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Oh hi Malak and Revan.

“The people! The people!” screams Zayne. Morvis, Saul Karath’s second in command, reports that Serroco’s human settlements have sustained heavy damage, while the Stereb cities have been completely wiped away. Only eight Republic ships managed to escape the planet’s surface. Zayne, still reeling from the mass deaths, asks if the Little Bivoli was among the survivors. Carth calls up its burning hull on the monitor and is like NOPE.

Admiral Karath vows that he will personally hand Zayne over to the Jedi Masters from Taris, then has him locked in the brig. That night, Carth Onasi stops by and tells Zayne he had decided to prank the Stereb for old times’ sake and called in tornado warnings to seventeen of their cities. The Republic has yet to hear from any survivors, but given the depth of the planet’s catacombs, Carth believes that some Stereb have a good chance of making it.

He wasn’t sure if he should trust Zayne’s vision, but says he hopes someone would play the same joke on his family if the situation arose. (This is a reference to how Carth will eventually lose his wife and son when Saul Karath bombs their homeworld during the next war.) “Hang in there, Zayne,” says Carth, and closes the door.

Meditations

So this story is really good but before we get into that let’s talk about the massive, gaping continuity error! The Mandalorians’ destruction of Serroco originated in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. “I heard about Dxun. Everyone has. I heard about Serroco, and I sure as hell know about Malachor V. What makes you think you’ve got the right to interrogate me on anything? You’ve got plenty of lives to answer for—all you Jedi do,” party member Atton Rand Paul tells the player character. The implication here is clear: the Jedi were somehow responsible for Serroco’s destruction.

Except the event as depicted in the comic has nothing to do with the Jedi whatsoever. The Mandalorians were provoked not by the Jedi, but by the Republic command’s decision to use the Stereb cities as shields.

KotOR II also establishes that the player character was present on Serroco during its destruction. Days of Fear just barely covers its ass regarding this, giving Carth a brief line about rogue Jedi rumored to be investigating the front. Galactic Republic Defense Ministry Daily Brief #KD0092, the in-universe news supplement included with Knights of the Old Republic issue #24, also makes reference to a lone Jedi escaping the planet’s destruction. So they remembered that your character from the game was supposed to be there, but not that you were supposed to have somehow played a role in the bombing. Whoops!

Minor continuity hiccups aside, though, this is a pretty good little installment in the series. Unlike in Flashpoint, half the cast doesn’t get much to do, since Jarael, Camper, and Rohlan are missing from much of the story. I would still rank it above that earlier arc, however. This series’ original characters are great but I’ve always regretted how underutilized the characters from the actual KotOR games were, so having Carth show up here and actually be a pretty cool guy instead of the paranoid whiner most people remember from the game was a nice little surprise. The entire sequence from Zayne’s vision of the future to the moment that vision comes true is the most intense in the series so far.

Although we don’t know Serroco and its people that well, we spend just enough time there to appreciate the shock and pain its destruction causes in our characters, Jedi and Republic alike. One of the nice things about having a cast this large is how you can use them to jump across the galaxy just for a moment and get a snapshot of what’s happening in the part of the story you’re not seeing at the moment. Revan and Malak “The Revanchist and Alek” only show up for a single panel but it’s one of the highlights of the issue. It’s cool seeing how everything fits together, how Zayne slots into the parts of this war we’ve only heard about, and the parts we’ve yet to see.

5/5 Death Stars.

Next: All My Nights Are Full of Anger

The Brothers Del and Dob Moomo

Knights of the Old Republic #11–12: Reunion

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching (issue 11), Harvey Tolibao (issue 12)

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: December 2006 – January 2007

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

The gang arrives on Telerath, the Inner Rim’s most luxurious banking planet-cum-pleasure resort, to scam 100,000 credits out of Gryph’s frozen bank account. Posing as Baron Hyro Margryph and Chantique, Camper and Jarael meet with a banker named Arvan to spin their cockamamie yarn about the bank confusing the baron’s name with that of wanted criminal Marn Hierogryph.

Their meeting is interrupted when a pair of Ithorian bounty hunters leap out of the bushes and abscond with the banker. Hearing the commotion over Jarael’s hidden earpiece, Zayne and Gryph run out of the The Last Resort to see what’s going on. Camper randomly goes catatonic so Zayne is left to pursue the kidnappers by himself. He ends up coming face to face with them and realizes that the banker being abducted is, in fact, his father. “Hi, Dad. Umm . . . how’s it going?” he asks. Then somehow by the next page the Ithorians have made it back to their ship with Arvan while Zayne has lost them completely. Did they forget to write a transitional scene here?

The Ithorians, idiot brothers Del and Dob Moomo, have Raana Tey on speakerphone and she’s bitching them out for kidnapping Zayne’s father when all she hired them to do was report on his activities. Now that her trap for Zayne on Telerath has been prematurely sprung, she tells the Moomos she will rendezvous with them in a few days and eliminate Arvan herself.

The brothers start arguing and throwing things at one another, prompting one of them (it does not matter which) to go to a bar. Gryph tracks him down there and scams him into thinking Zayne will turn himself over to him if he releases his father. Zayne follows this Moomo back to his ship, the Moomo Williwaw, where the Moomo brothers start punching each other again.

While they’re distracted, Zayne sneaks in and frees his father, who tells him that he and Zayne’s mother never believed that Zayne actually killed his classmates. He then adds that if Zayne did do it, he must have had a good reason. Goddammit, Zayne’s dad.

Arvan completes Camper’s transaction, which means that Gryph can finally pay Zayne for all the work he’s done since being promoted to henchman. Zayne asks his dad to transfer his first paycheck to his dead friend’s sister on Taris, aka that blonde he had a crush on in the first book. Now that he knows the Jedi Covenant has stooped to targeting his family, Zayne has his dad put in a transfer request to the bank of the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine, the one place Zayne knows his parents will be safe.

The greatest criminal minds of our time.

Meditations

This story is twice as long as the previous one and I described it in half the space. I’m pretty sure Arvan Carrick doesn’t even appear in the series again after this so I’m not sure why we needed to spend two issues on one of the Jedi Covenant’s many backup plans. They’re leaving no stone unturned in their quest to catch Zayne, I got it. Just humor my attention span with more videogame references please.

The art duties on this story are again split between Brian Ching and Some Other Guy. The other guy’s style isn’t the worst ever but it’s still noticeably and distractingly worse than Ching’s, which I’m not even that crazy about to begin with. There’s this weird thing that he does at least twice where he’ll have a close-up of a character’s face in one panel, then adorn it with an illustration of their disembodied hand, because it’s vitally important that we see both their facial expression and how many fingers they’re holding up at the same time. It’s peculiar and I don’t care for it.

Having the perpetually befuddled Camper impersonate a baron provides a fun little character moment at the beginning of the story, but there’s not really a lot going on here. Fortunately, this arc also introduces the Moomo brothers, who are great fun in a developmentally arrested, physically abusive sort of way. Nearly all Ithorians in the EU are depicted as peaceful nature-lovers, and Gryph explains that they maintain that reputation by kicking out violent knuckleheads like the Moomos.

They’re fun characters but the rest of this just feels like filler. I’m sorry but I don’t care about Zayne’s father. I just don’t.

2/5 Death Stars.

Next: Days of Labour Pains

Of Councils, Butler Droids, and Giant Blue Faces

Knights of the Old Republic #9: Flashpoint Interlude: Homecoming

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: October 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

After Zayne Carrick’s escape from Taris, the Jedi Masters stationed there were recalled to Coruscant. On their way to meet with the Jedi High Council, Lucien Draay, Q’Anilia, Raana Tey, Xamar, and Feln stop by Lucien’s family estate to see his mother, but Lucien is turned away at the door by his family’s droid butler.

The Jedi Council of this time consists of NPCs from the KotOR games, including Vrook Lamar and Vandar Tokare, both of whom we’ve previously met, as well as Atris and Zez-Kai Ell. When the “Jedi Covenant,” as they call themselves, arrives at the Jedi Temple, the council is already in session with Alek’s mysterious Master, a hooded man whose face is never visible.

Master Vrook (played by Ed Asner) and Atris lecture him for nosing around the Mandalorian invasion against their wishes and getting many of his followers captured on Suurja. The unnamed Jedi passes Lucien and the others on his way out, reminding them of his warning about the coming war back on Taris. “The truth is written in blood!” he cries flamboyantly.

Master Vrook will brook no more backtalk today, so when Lucien suggests that the Jedi make the hunt for Zayne Carrick their priority, he puts his foot down. “If we’re going to have a Jedi Council at all, then somebody, somewhere, is going to do what it tells them!” he snarls, suggesting that the council’s existence is relatively new. Too bad Shadows and Light already jumped the gun and had a Jedi Council calling the shots 30 years before this.

Despite their protestations, the five Taris Masters are reassigned to separate positions and dismissed from the Council Chamber. They go back out to their car and Lucien tells them that the Jedi Council can eff off, they’re the Jedi Covenant and they do what they want.

“A Sith Lord could walk right in front of the council and they’d lecture him about neutrality!” Raana Tey complains (emphasis mine). Feln, a Feeorin, says that among his people there is no nobler cause than to retake conquered territory like Alek’s Master is doing, and asks what the Basic (English) word for that concept is. “Revanchism,” Lucien answers.

Hmmm . . .

Lucien gets a text from his butler droid and they head back to his mom’s house.

A series of flashbacks throughout the comic reveals Lucien’s back story, starting with his early childhood. His mother, Krynda, was a half-human, half-Miraluka Jedi seer obsessed with clairvoyance. Her husband and sister, both Jedi, were killed in the Great Sith War, after which Krynda, terrified that the Sith would one day rise again, devoted her time to training seers without the Jedi Council’s supervision. Since Lucien was born without the gift of Force prophecy, he was always a disappointment to her.

Krynda founded the Covenant, a secret fanatical cabal within the Jedi Order. She devoted all her time and energy to training Q’Anilia, Raana Tey, Xamar, and Feln, her greatest group of students, while Lucien was left to learn rudimentary Force skills from his mother’s assistant, Haazen, a former Padawan who flunked out of Hogwarts when he lost his arm, eye, and both legs during the war. Haazen convinced Krynda to allow Lucien to formally enter the Jedi Order so he could serve as her apprentices’ manager and protector.

Lucien returns to his house in the present day, where Haazen berates him for taking it upon himself to murder the Taris Padawans after he had been explicitly instructed to bring them to the Draay estate for further investigation. Because of him, the Jedi Covenant has just barely escaped exposure. Then Haazen kicks him out and slams the door in his face.

It’s really cool seeing this series beginning to reveal how deeply its roots are sunk into the previous lore of this era. This issue is filled with organic references to both the KotOR games and Tales of the Jedi, with Krynda Draay even name-dropping good old Master Vodo. Short but sweet.

3.5/5 Death Stars.

Next: The Brothers Del and Dob Moomo

The Mandalorian Wars Begin!

Knights of the Old Republic #7–8, 10: Flashpoint

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Dustin Weaver

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: July – November 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 – 3,963 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

The crew of the The Last Resort (seriously, why didn’t they just name it Last Resort? Everyone’s going to put “the” in front of it anyway) set down on the planet Vanquo, posing as refugees from the Mandalorian invasion. Using Zayne’s lightsaber, Jarael disguises herself as a Jedi and cons the occupants of a mining outpost into thinking the Mandalorian fleet is attacking the planet. They run for their lives, leaving their food stores to be plundered by Zayne and his friends. Zayne, Gryph, Camper, and Elbee begin loading supplies onto the ship while Jarael plays with Zayne’s saber (bow chicka wow wow). They are suddenly interrupted when the Mandalorians decide to invade the planet for real.

And just like that, the Mandalorian Wars have begun!

Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Separated from the group, Jarael is immediately captured by the invading horde, while Zayne and the others hightail it back to the ship. They are pursued by a detachment of Mandalorians commanded by Rohlan Dyre, who beats them to the The Last Resort and takes off in it without them or the rest of his men. Just, like, for a ride I guess. With Zayne, Gryph, and Camper clinging to Elbee, the taciturn droid grabs hold of the ship’s loading ramp and everyone manages to get inside before the ramp closes.

Camper promptly beats up the Mandalorian carjacker with Jarael’s lightning-stick and sets course for Mandalorian space, following the tracer signal from Jarael’s bracelet. Gryph suggests that the Mandalorians might just really like expensive jewelry. Rohlan explains that, since his people think Jarael is a Jedi, they are taking her to their scientific research station for studying captured Jedi on the planet Flashpoint, a world so close to its star that its day is only an hour long and no life can survive outside a small shielded zone.

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Their jump to Mandalorian space is observed by Captain Saul Karath of the Republic warship Courageous. A secondary villain from the first KotOR game, Karath is still a loyal Republic soldier at this time, and upon identifying Zayne’s ship as belonging to the killer of the Jedi students on Taris, he decides Zayne must have been a Mandalorian agent all along and vows to hunt him down and bring him to justice. Doesn’t he have anything better to do, what with the invasion and all?

Zayne asks if Rohlan is some kind of deserter, but Camper tells him that such a concept doesn’t even exist for Mandalorians. Rohlan tells them that he was the only one of his people to question their leader’s tactics in this war and his motivation for starting it. He has repeatedly run off to search for answers, only to be caught and sent back to the front to die in glorious battle. Failing to convince Zayne and Camper to give Jarael up for dead, he resolves to help them infiltrate Flashpoint in the hope of finding answers there.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the “big bad” in this period of galactic history, the supreme commander of the Mandalorian forces and architect behind the burgeoning conflict, Mandalore the Ultimate. Despite wearing the mask of the Mandalore we previously met in The Sith War, this character was established in an RPG sourcebook as not being the same Mandalorian who took up the mask at the end of that story. I’m not sure why.

Don’t act like you’re not impressed.

Mandalore is chilling with his bro Cassus Fett, talking strategy and shooting the shit. He’s like “Oh hey btw, did you send our bud Rohlan on another suicide mission yet?” and Cassus is like “Yeah but he ran away again lol.” To which Mandalore the Ultimate replies, “For his sake, he’d better hope he’s dead!” Which doesn’t make much sense, but he’s drunk so whatever.

On Flashpoint, Jarael is dragged into the Waiting Room of Doom, where all the captured Jedi just sit around completely unfettered until they’re brought in to be experimented on by the sadistic Mandalorian scientist Dr. Mengele Demagol. There are like a dozen Jedi and only a handful of guards, so I guess they all just forgot how to use the Force or something.

Soon after Jarael gets smacked in the face with a blaster rifle and thrown into the room, Squint, the Jedi who saved Zayne’s life on Taris at the beginning of the series, is dragged out of Demagol’s laboratory and deposited on the floor near her. Almost all his hair has fallen out from Demagol’s experiments, which is important. Jarael tries to explain to him how she’s not supposed to be there, but Demagol comes in and selects her for his next experiment. Sensing that Jarael is not a Jedi, Squint volunteers himself to go back under the knife in her place. Despite talking about how long he’s waited for fresh Jedi to study, Demagol agrees to have Squint taken back to his lab for some reason, even though he just finished with him thirty seconds ago.

The The Last Resort arrives on Flashpoint, with Rohlan convincing the Mandalorians to let him land by pretending that Zayne is a Jedi Knight he captured while Gryph and Camper hide in Han Solo’s secret smuggling compartment. Rohlan marches Zayne into the station just as Squint is dragged back out.

Jarael cradles the bleeding Jedi in her arms and they have some kind of moment I guess, then Demagol starts creepily running his hands through her hair and notices her pointed elf ears, not a baseline trait of her species. He excitedly orders that she be taken to his laboratory at once, but Rohlan comes in with Zayne and says “No do this guy first” and Demagol inexplicably goes “Yeah okay.”

Almost paradise.

Once the three of them are alone in Demagol’s lab, Rohlan clonks the mad scientist over the head with a femur that was just lying on the floor for some reason. Bone is apparently harder than Mandalorian armor, because Demagol instantly goes down. Zayne puts on his armor and helmet and they stash him in the closet, then walk out of the lab loudly discussing how it’s too bad that Zayne died so quickly. Jarael knocks the disguised Zayne to the floor and begins strangling him, but stops when she hears Zayne telepathically say her name, which means that she has the Force now I guess.

Rohlan and Zayne go outside just as the station’s guards receive a hologram transmission from Gryph, posing as an admiral aboard the Republic cruiser Glomkettle (his mother’s name). Since Flashpoint was once a Republic research station, he claims that when its former inhabitants were driven out by the Mandalorians, they left behind a series of booby-traps that he is now going to activate. Zayne uses telekinesis to surreptitiously plant mining charges around the compound, which Gryph then detonates from aboard the The Last Resort.

Fearing that Flashpoint’s shield is going to fail, leaving them to be cooked by the sun’s heat and radiation, the Mandalorians abandon the planet. Zayne runs back into the station on the pretext of saving his research and Rohlan goes after him, bidding the retreating warriors to tell Mandalore that he died nobly for their cause.

With the Mandalorians gone, Zayne outfits all the Jedi with spacesuits from the The Last Resort so they can breathe outside of the station. Rohlan drags an unconscious Demagol over to the Jedi so they can take him back to Coruscant as a prisoner, explaining that he had to knock him out again while putting his armor and mask back on him.

Zayne thanks Rohlan for all his help but tells him he should go with the Jedi. They’re going to blow up Flashpoint Station, so Mandalore will think he’s dead and he can get those answers he was looking for from Demagol. Rohlan stares across the courtyard at Jarael for a moment, then admits that Zayne’s right and boards the Jedi’s ship.

Zayne and Squint take a moment to catch up. Zayne tells him how the war has now broken out for real, and Squint invites him to come with them and be a part of his Master’s plan to defeat the Mandalorians. Zayne says no thanks.

Squint goes over to say goodbye to Jarael, because every guy in this story is obsessed with her. He tells her that Squint isn’t even his real name, and next time they meet she should call him Alek. Then he thanks her for giving him this sweet red spacesuit with an opaque red helmet, which coincidentally is what the figure in Zayne’s Masters’ prophecy of doom was wearing. Hmm, now who do we know from this era who’s a bald Jedi involved with the return of the Sith who dresses in red and whose name sounds something like “Alek”?

Could it be this guy?

Anyway, then Zayne, Jarael, Gryph, Camper, and Elbee get on the The Last Resort and Squint and the other Jedi get on their ship and they go their separate ways, but at the last second Rohlan jumps off the Jedi ship and sneaks back aboard the The Last Resort without anyone noticing, THE END.

Meditations

Flashpoint is one of the high points of this series. Maybe even the the high point, I won’t be sure until I’ve read all of it. It’s pretty good, though. It’s amazing what a difference Dustin Weaver’s art makes; it’s a perfect match for the tone and content of this series and I’m not looking forward to settling for less in the next arc.

For a long time the Mandalorian Wars were not that fleshed-out. Unlike most major galactic conflicts, which were created to serve as a setting for telling stories, the Mandalorian Wars were introduced as back story to a different war. Mostly we just heard about them from characters who were there, so it’s gratifying to see these events actually taking place on the page. Even though those who’ve already played Knights of the Old Republic know how all this is going to end, it’s still cool to see how the galaxy moves to that point.

Unlike Commencement, which started to drag after a while of essentially the same thing happening over and over while Zayne tried incompetently to clear his name, Flashpoint, being a mere three issues long, boasts much more condensed and therefore exciting storytelling. It produces a major shift for the galaxy as a whole with the advent of the true Mandalorian Wars while also providing a trajectory shift for Zayne’s story by introducing him and his crew of misfits into this macro conflict.

At the same time it deftly weaves in the introductions of important new characters like Demagol, Rohlan Dyre, Mandalore the Ultimate, and Saul Karath, as well as reintroducing Squint and setting him down his own path, while his mysterious Master’s machinations continue in the background. A pretty solid little comic, all in all.

4.5/5 Death Stars.

Next: Of Councils, Butler Droids, and Giant Blue Faces

Intrigue in the Old Republic

Knights of the Old Republic #0: Crossroads

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: March 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

Sadly (or not), we won’t be seeing any more of Nomi Sunrider, Sylvar, Master Thon, or the Twi’lek Jedi Tott Doneeta. Even little Vima, who was established in reference books as becoming the greatest Jedi Master of her era and eventually training the Jedi Exile, the player character from Knights of the Old Republic II, will never appear again. Del Rey had plans to publish a Nomi-and-Vima novel called Mandorla, but it was canceled because they can’t ever try anything different, ever, so here we are.

Enter our new protagonist, Zayne Carrick, a Padawan stationed at the Jedi training facility on Taris during the Mandalorian Wars, the next major conflict as we progress through the Old Sith Wars (the Cleansing of the Nine Houses doesn’t count because nobody knows what the hell it is).

Zayne attempts to arrest a Snivvian conman called “the Gryph,” but instead ends up falling off a skyscraper because he is incompetent. He is saved by a passing Jedi Knight on a speeder who has been sent to look for him by Zayne’s teacher, Master Lucien. The Jedi, a dark-haired man called Squint, explains that he and several other Jedi, including their Master, are passing through Taris on their way to join the war, something the Jedi Council does not approve of. Squint offers some vague foreshadowing about darkness and destiny and then departs.

Meanwhile, the five head instructors of the Taris academy, including Lucien, have gathered to grab a group selfie with Squint’s Master before he heads out. One of them, Q’anilia, suddenly has a Force vision of bad things happening in the future and the Jedi Masters resolve to do something about it.

All of this is just unnecessary foreshadowing for the next arc, hurray!

2/5 Death Stars.

Knights of the Old Republic #1–6: Commencement

Author: John Jackson Miller

Artist: Brian Ching

Medium: Comic

Publication Date: March 2006

Timeline Placement: 3,964 BBY

Series: Knights of the Old Republic

Another day, another bungled attempt by Zayne to apprehend Marn “The Gryph” Hierogryph. Zayne gets drenched in sewage and ends up crashing through a window of a restaurant, interrupting the celebratory banquet for his class of Jedi initiates that he forgot he was supposed to be at. Having recently completed the Jedi Trials, Zayne and his friends will soon be informed by their Masters whether or not they have been approved for Knighthood.

Zayne confides in his friend Shad Jelavan that he’s confident he’s the only one who won’t be promoted. Shad helpfully suggests that Zayne failed on purpose so he could stay on Taris and continue nursing his crush on Shad’s sister, Shel, who is awkwardly standing right there.

After the banquet, Zayne is left behind to compensate the restaurant manager for the damage he caused. Master Lucien has also stiffed Zayne with the bill for the entire meal, leaving his hapless apprentice penniless. Suddenly, Zayne spots Marn Hierogryph wandering around outside. He immediately pulls a dine-and-dash on the beleaguered manager.

Now penniful once again, Zayne seizes Gryph with the Force and handcuffs him to his speeder, taking him back to the Jedi academy as a prisoner. Why was this so difficult an arrest for him to pull off before? I guess it was destiny or something. They arrive late to the commencement ceremony and Zayne leaves Gryph handcuffed in the garage while he rushes in to catch the end of his friends’ graduation. Instead, he finds their newly murdered corpses cooling at their Masters’ feet.

“You’re late, young one,” Lucien chides.

The Jedi Masters—Xamar, Raana Tey, Lucien Drey, Q’Anilia, and Feln—pursue Zayne through the academy, back to the garage. Zayne jumps on his speeder and takes off with Gryph, who is so confused he pronounces the word “help” as “HAAALLLLPPP!!!” The Masters follow on their own speeders, but lose their quarry when Zayne and Gryph jump down the garbage chute of a college cafeteria.

After they put on the freshman fifteen, Zayne explains to Gryph what the hell is going on. Gryph wisely decides to ditch the clueless Padawan, but reconsiders when he discovers that the Jedi have framed him as Zayne’s accomplice. Realizing they have to get off the planet, Gryph takes Zayne to meet with a discombobulated inventor named Camper, but when they arrive at the junkyard where he lives, they are attacked by his bodyguard, Jarael.

Camper and Jarael are Arkanians, the same alien species as Master Arca Jeth from Tales of the Jedi, despite the fact that they look nothing like him. This discrepancy will be explained in a future comic, but that story arc is so bad I wonder if John Jackson Miller didn’t write it solely to justify having Jarael look like a sexy albino elf babe while Master Arca looks like death. I mean, no one ever bothers explaining why Gryph looks nothing like a regular Snivvian.

Nope, not seeing it.

Zayne tries to explain that he was set up but the Jedi suddenly arrive with the Constable of Taris. Gryph and Zayne take cover in the Arkanians’ junk-house, which they are surprised to discover is actually a ship, the The Last Resort (why is The part of its name?). The The Last Resort takes off from beneath a pile of garbage and heads for space, where they go into hiding in the system’s asteroid belt.

Zayne, Jarael, and Gryph bicker for a few pages while Camper sits alone muttering to himself because he is crazy. Camper passes out and Jarael tends to him while Gryph goes off to take a nap. Later, Zayne sneaks away to contact his Jedi instructors on Dantooine while no one’s looking, piloting the ship out of the asteroid field to send a clear transmission.

The phone is answered by Master Vandar Tokare, a Yoda-type alien and an NPC from the original KotOR game. Despite his vaunted Jedi insight, Vandar just goose steps along and tells Zayne how disappointed he is in him for murdering his classmates. Zayne argues that he’s such a terrible Jedi he never could have overcome all his friends, and Vandar has to admit that that’s true. Then Jarael hits him with a stick for endangering everyone’s lives on this pointless phone call.

Zayne decides that they have to crack the case themselves so they take the The Last Resort to the last place all the Jedi Masters and Padawans were together before the day of the massacre: the Taris system’s rogue moon. Lucien and his buds dropped off their apprentices there for their final test before being knighted. Wearing spacesuits with opaque helmets, they had to use their Force senses to navigate their way across the moon while avoiding the constant bombardment of debris from the asteroid field. The Taris Masters, meanwhile, drank lemonade and worked on their tans while waiting for them beneath a giant deflector shield. Seriously no one could have figured out that they were a bunch of psychopaths before the mass murder? Really?

Zayne and Jarael go down to the moon and recover the remains of T1-LB, the Jedi’s labor droid who had mysteriously fallen off a cliff during the Padawans’ trial. Zayne uses his physics degree and one semester of detective class to deduce that Elbee didn’t fall, but was in fact telekinetically thrown. As they attempt to salvage him, Lucien shows up with the cops again. This whole story is one long chase scene.

Zayne whispers to Jarael to get close to him, like he has some kind of plan to get them out of this, but I guess he just wanted to cop a feel through her spacesuit or something because they just sit there and then the The Last Resort shows up and saves them by shooting at the cops’ spacecar.

One quick getaway later, Camper has rebuilt Elbee and added a hologram emitter to his head so they can see the droid’s final memories before his death. While the Padawans stumbled around dodging death from space, Xamar, Raana Tey, Q’Anilia, and Feln entered a meditation trance while Lucien awkwardly just stood around because he didn’t properly allocate his skill points to achieve the Jedi Consular class.

The four Jedi experienced a shared vision of their own deaths, with the Sith rising once again and the galaxy in flames. The center of the vision was the person who appeared to be responsible for everything: a masked figure wearing a red spacesuit identical to the ones currently worn by their apprentices. Logically, they decided that the only possible recourse is to murder all of their surrogate children in the off chance one of them becomes the Sith in the mass-produced spacesuit probably owned by trillions across the galaxy. Lucien then noticed Elbee watching them and Force-pushed him off a cliff.

Elbee is so distraught over witnessing his own death that he immediately deletes the recording from his memory, conveniently destroying the evidence that could have cleared Zayne’s name and wrapped up this series a couple dozen issues earlier. The The Last Resort is then captured by bounty hunter Valius Ying and his crew, looking to collect the price on Zayne’s head. Gryph leaves Zayne with him because he’s a scoundrel, but later Zayne mind-tricks the guards and sneaks away in the dead of night, but Jarael shows up and says that he’s screwing them over by hanging around and inviting the wrath of Jedi who can’t tell one spacesuit from another. Zayne decides he can’t continue to endanger his newfound friends and agrees to peacefully return to Taris in Ying’s custody.

Ying brings Zayne before the Jedi Masters, hoping to get his money and be on his way. For some reason Lucien explains their entire evil plan and the circumstances behind it, then murders Ying for having learned too much. Before he can strike down Zayne, however, someone wearing the same red spacesuit and helmet from the Jedi’s vision crashes through the window. The Jedi are thrown into chaos, giving Jarael time to take off her helmet and rocketpack away with Zayne. You would think this incident might teach the Jedi that there are more than five of that same model of spacesuit in the galaxy, but NOPE!

Back aboard the The Last Resort, Jarael explains that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave Zayne behind to try his luck with the psychotic Jedi. No one had ever sacrificed themselves for her before, and she didn’t want him getting a big head over it. Gryph then offers Zayne a job in his criminal empire, which doesn’t exist. Zayne agrees, but only if Gryph stops calling him “intern.” Cue studio audience laughter, freeze frame, producer credits.

Meditations

Let’s not beat around the bush, John Jackson Miller’s Knights of the Old Republic is a pretty good Star Wars comic overall, so there’s only so much here to snark about. Commencement isn’t the greatest story arc, but it’s a decent introduction to the new cast and setting. My biggest problem with it (besides the unfathomly horrific art in issue 5, excepting the intentional stylization of the prophecy sequence) is how structurally repetitive it gets after a while. Every scene seems like it ends with the Jedi and the cops randomly showing up, only for Zayne and his friends to somehow slip through their fingers yet again. The whole book really is, like I’ve said, one long chase scene. And Jeff Goldblum isn’t even in it!

There’s also the issue of the Jedi becoming an unrepentant cabal of murderers based on an extremely vague and unspecific vision of the future. Literally anyone could go to Space Kmart and get that same spacesuit, let’s use a little reasoning here, guys. Admittedly, this is only the first arc of the series; maybe later revelations about the Masters’ history and the true subject of their prophecy will justify their single-minded certainty (spoiler: no).

Travel Foreman’s pencils in issue 5 are just terrible. Everyone looks like some horrible nightmare doppelgänger of themselves. It’s just bizarre how randomly awful everything looks for one sixth of the story. Brian Ching’s art is much better, but I’m not really a fan of his style either. Everyone is always scowling and hunched over with claws for fingers. Unfortunately, he’s the primary artist of the whole series. They should have just gotten Dustin Weaver to illustrate everything.

There’s also a montage at the end of the book showing the state of the broader galaxy after Zayne’s escape from Taris. Several of the Jedi who left to fight in the war, including Squint from issue 0, have been taken prisoner by the Mandalorians. This news report is watched by a cloaked figure sitting in a chair. You would expect this guy’s identity to be revealed at some point in the future, but I’ve read this series before and there are multiple characters who wear cloaks and I still have no idea who this was supposed to be.

Whatever, 4/5 Death Stars.

Next: The Mandalorian Wars Begin!