The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom
Author: Alexander Freed
Medium: Short story
Publication Date: October 2012 in Star Wars Insider #137
Timeline Placement: 3,640 BBY
The Galactic War has begun!
If you want to see that, though, you’ll have to play eight campaigns and four expansions
before Disney and EA terminate their licensing agreement and the last
living remnant of the Expanded Universe is swept from human memory.
“The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom” is a pretty decent short
story about Colonel Jace Malcom, the Republic soldier who looks exactly
like a Jango Fett clonetrooper. We first met him forty years ago (in
both Star Wars time and our time, seemingly) in Return
and last saw him when he was fighting Darth Malgus and got his face
blowed up. This time around he’s in an advising position to Sergeant
Shanra Immel and her squad as they attempt to drive the Sith Empire off
of the planet Kalandis Seven by destroying one of their spaceports.
As they are preparing to bomb the port with the fatalistic knowledge
that the Empire will just have another one built by tomorrow, a
planetary command ship descends from orbit on a refueling run. Malcom
orders his team to continue their mission while he attempts to capture
the ship so they can use its navicomputer to find every Imperial base on
the planet.
Malcom sneaks aboard the ship just before it lifts off again. He
takes out the guards and makes his way to the bridge, where he finds a
masked Sith Lord in charge of the vessel. Malcom bum-rushes her and gets
a face full of Force lightning but manages to shoot the Sith to death
with his rifle. The rest of the bridge crew flies into a panic and
Malcom thinks he’s won the day only to realize that the ship’s
self-destruct sequence has been activated.
As the ship careens out of control Malcom falls through the window
but is saved by a Republic starfighter sent by Sergeant Immel. Immel
tells him that the spaceport has been destroyed and jokes that she’ll
buy him some shitty liquor to celebrate his failure, but Malcom tells
her that he’s been recalled to Coruscant and none of them will ever see
him again.
A Jedi Knight arrives on the planet to pick up Malcom, explaining
that the Supreme Chancellor has a more important assignment for him back
in the Core Worlds. “The troops down there won’t last long, now,”
Malcom tells him. “They don’t have the training to hold the place.
They’ll be overrun within the month. Casualties’ll be heavy.”
He looks over the list of his former squadmates one last time then
deletes them from his contacts and begins preparing himself for his next
mission.
I don’t think I mentioned it for The Lost Suns, but Alexander Freed’s writing was the best part of that comic as well as Blood of the Empire.
He manages to inject odd bits of characterization and captivating
worldbuilding and narrative hooks into stories that otherwise weren’t
that worth telling. “The Last Battle” is likewise pretty good despite
how brief and perfunctory it is. None of the secondary characters are
memorable in and of themselves but they provide some interesting
characterization for Malcom, who until this point we’ve only seen as an
unnamed and mostly mute participant in some animated trailers and also
maybe as a quest-giver in a videogame. I can’t say I’m at all interested
in ever seeing him again, but the quick moment of conflict between
emotion and duty at the very end justifies this story’s existence, which
is more than most of these TOR shorts have. 3.5/5 Death Stars.
 |
| What’s wrong with your faaaaaaace? |
The Old Republic: Annihilation
Author: Drew Karpyshyn
Medium: Novel
Publication Date: November 2012
Timeline Placement: c. 3,640 BBY (with flashbacks to 3,667–3,666 BBY)
Series: The Old Republic
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades.
Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first
expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the
second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail
of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the
eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and
within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a
psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their
mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their
surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being
contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers―they
discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass
understanding―but it’s the surprises that came across the border with
them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another
that change everything.
[Continuity Note: There’s a weird chronology flub right off the bat here. In a rare bit of inter-textual TOR-era continuity, Annihilation is more or less a sequel to The Lost Suns, which clearly dates itself as occurring ten years after the Treaty of Coruscant, setting it in 3,643 BBY. Annihilation
itself contains numerous references that place it forty years after the
beginning of the Great War in 3,681. There is also more than one
mention of the events of The Lost Suns taking place two or “almost two” years earlier. So taking the text at face value, Annihilation should be set in 3,641 BBY. However, according to the official timeline, it takes place during the following year.
[Author Drew Karpyshyn originated the 3,640 BBY date in a tweet, and it was later confirmed in The Essential Reader’s Companion,
a reference book written by current Lucasfilm Story Group member Pablo
Hidalgo. However, in the same tweet Karpyshyn also says that Theron Shan
is thirty years old.
[The flashbacks in Annihilation establish that Theron was born the year after the Battle of Alderaan. According to The Journal of Master Gnost-Dural, the Battle of Alderaan took place four years after the Battle of Bothawui, the timeline video
for which is dated at eighteen years before the Treaty of Coruscant.
The Treaty of Coruscant is cited by multiple sources, including The Essential Reader’s Companion and The Old Republic Encyclopedia,
as occurring in 3,653 BBY. Tracing this convoluted chain of dates
backward, we can peg Theron Shan’s birth year as 3,666 BBY, making him
twenty-six at the time of Annihilation if indeed it takes place in 3,640 BBY.
[Basically this has been a long-winded way of mathematically proving
that the dates in Karpyshyn’s tweet are unreliable. Going by the actual
text of the novel, Annihilation must take place in 3,641 BBY
(making Theron only twenty-five during its events, too old to lie to
himself and call it honor), regardless of what the official timeline
says. Also remember how multiple stories were written under the mistaken
assumption that the Treaty of Coruscant took place thirty years before
the game rather than ten. The chronology of the TOR tie-ins is just a mess all around.]
Annihilation picks up in the aftermath of the base game of The Old Republic but
before the expansions: the Sith Emperor is dead, Darth Malgus is dead,
Imperial Intelligence has been disbanded, the war is back on and the
Republic is winning. I feel so sorry for anyone trying to get a
comprehensible story by reading along with Del Rey’s novel timeline or
even just the TOR series. “There was a whole novel about Malgus, then he died between books? We never see the Sith Emperor again after Revan? What the hell is happening? Did I miss something here?”
We spend the first fifty pages of the book watching Theron Shan dick
around playing guardian angel and trying to save Teff’ith, the Twi’lek
woman he sort of befriended in The Lost Suns, from a gangland
hit without her knowing he was there. In the process he inadvertently
sabotages a Republic Strategic Information Service (SIS) operation,
leading his boss to consign him to desk duty as punishment. He’s soon
back in the field, however, when Jace Malcom, the newly appointed
Supreme Commander of the Republic armed forces, personally requests him
for a special assignment based on the strength of an analytics report
Theron wrote while on probation.
Seeing Theron’s last name, Jace asks Theron’s boss, the Director of
SIS, if Theron is related to Jedi Grand Master Satele Shan. The Director
informs him that Satele is Theron’s mother, leading Jace to remember
the time he boned Satele twenty-six years ago and realize that he must
be Theron’s dad.
It’s around this point that we’re introduced to Master Gnost-Dural, the Kel Dor Jedi who narrated the Old Republic Timeline videos and is voiced by the inestimable Lance Henriksen.
He is also the second best character in the book. The best character is
Davidge, the Sith Empire’s Minister of Logistics, who appears in two
scenes and tries in vain to explain the value of spreadsheets to the
Dark Council. He’s like “Guys, we’re way overbudget for the month, we
seriously need to cut back on spending” and the Sith are like “But the
power of the dark side!” and blow up a planet.
It turns out that Gnost-Dural’s former Padawan, a Falleen
named Kana Tarrid, attempted to infiltrate the Sith much like Ulic
Qel-Droma did way back when, but she fell to the dark side and became
Darth Malgus’s apprentice, taking the name Darth Karrid. Now she
controls the Ascendant Spear, the most powerful ship in the Sith fleet and the last surviving superweapon developed by Darth Mekhis in The Lost Suns.
Though Darth Karrid is a creepy lizard broad, we’re forced to endure
several male characters musing about how turned-on she would make them
if only half of her face wasn’t covered in mechanical appliances and USB
ports that she uses to control the Ascendant Spear by jacking into it like a Na’vi.
 |
| The birth of Darth Karrid. |
Destroying the Spear is the goal of Operation End Game, the
secret mission for which Jace Malcom has recruited both Theron and
Gnost-Dural. Theron, Gnost-Dural, Jace Malcom, and Theron’s boss have a Long Halloween-esque
strategy meeting where they hammer out their plan to take down the
Gotham mob by stealing a black cipher, a very rare Sith encryption
device. Drew Karpyshyn has such a poor grasp of character voice that the
dialogue of all four men in this scene is indistinguishable and could
be spoken by any of them. After the party breaks up Jace invites Theron
over to his place to get wasted, then tells him, “Surprise, you have a
father, and it’s me!” But Theron is just like “I hate you, Dad!” and
storms out.
Theron gets in touch with Teff’ith and she promises to use her
underworld contacts to get him and Gnost-Dural onto the Sith world of
Ziost if he stops stalking her and saving her life all the time. They
arrive on the planet and rendezvous with the ZLF, the Ziost Liberation
Front, who give them the supplies they need to make their theft of the
black cipher look like a failed assassination attempt on the Minister of
Logistics so the Sith don’t realize the cipher is missing and change
the codes.
While Gnost-Dural takes out the guards and plants the diversionary
bomb, Theron infiltrates the minister’s office. He is unable to crack
the minister’s safe before a security detail arrives, however, and
resigns himself to dying in his own explosion. But just then
Gnost-Dural, having realized that Theron wasn’t going to make it to the
rendezvous in time, shows up and saves the day. They get the cipher and
jump off the roof of the building just as everything explodes.
After they return from Ziost, Theron gets a note from his mom to come
visit so he sneaks around back and climbs up the side of her house to
break in through a window, where he finds Satele Shan waiting for him
like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Theron is like “Mom, why
didn’t you ever tell me that Jace Malcom was my father, even though you
abandoned me as an infant and have never in my life acknowledged me as
your son?” Satele tells him that the horrors of war had turned Jace’s
heart to the dark side and she didn’t want to expose Theron to that
environment. Does she not realize that falling to the dark side is
exclusively a Force thing or is this scene just dumb? The decision is
left up to you, the reader.
Using the black cipher, Jace Malcom learns about an impending attack
on the planet Duro, but decides to let it play out so as not to tip off
the Imperials and risk losing a chance to destroy the Ascendant Spear.
Oh no, I guess he really was on the dark side all along. This strategic
pragmatism doesn’t sit right with an amoral, cold-hearted intelligence
operative like Theron Shan, however, so he and Gnost-Dural decide to
take matters into their own hands.
Teff’ith uses her underworld contacts to help them infiltrate the space station where the Spear is docked for shore leave, because even fascist wizards need some R&R.
Theron sends Teff’ith to Coruscant to tell his mother about their plan,
which involves somehow tricking Darth Karrid into sending the Spear
to Duro so the Republic can somehow both destroy it and save the planet
at the same time. Meanwhile Gnost-Dural infiltrates the Spear
and confronts his former Padawan. Because of the cybernetic Force bond
required to control the ship, however, Darth Karrid has allowed her
lightsaber skills to atrophy, so Gnost-Dural faces off against her two
apprentices instead.
 |
| If only the J. J. Abrams Star Trek films were as sterile and sexless as the original series. |
It was at this point in the novel that I became aware of something
odd. When Master Gnost-Dural stepped into the lion’s den, armed only
with some undefined plan to save a planet through trickery, there was
actual tension in the scene. As he faced off against three Sith Lords,
deep in heart of a ship powered by the dark side, with a platoon of Sith
soldiers cutting their way into the room, I found myself caring whether
or not Gnost-Dural would survive the encounter. I’m not sure if this
was due to how the character was written or just because I’d been
imagining all his lines spoken in Lance Henriksen’s voice, but it was so
shocking to experience an actual emotion while reading this book that I
thought it was worth mentioning.
Let’s be honest, though, it was probably because of Lance Henriksen.
Anyway the Sith troopers break down the door and shoot Gnost-Dural
with fifty thousand stun blasts and he is captured. Darth Karrid strips
all his clothes off for some reason and straps him to The Machine from The Princess Bride, where he is tortured with the ultimate suffering.
Elsewhere, Theron has also managed to infiltrate the Ascendant Spear and
is hard at work hacking its motherboard so he can bypass its firewalls
and plant viruses in its mainframe, or some other computer lingo. It’s
really hot in the room he’s working from, though, so he strips down to
his boxers, then has to abandon his clothes and run around the ship in
his underwear when the Sith discover him.
Gnost-Dural pretends to break under torture and says that he was sent to prevent Karrid from taking the Spear
to Duro, where the Republic is lying in wait to ambush the Sith fleet
that is lying in wait to ambush the planet. Karrid falls for this
deception immediately and takes the Spear to Duro, where she
discovers Jace Malcom and Satele Shan, having been tipped off by
Teff’ith, commanding a Republic fleet that is making short work of the
Imperial forces. The Republic ships are no match for the speed and
firepower of the Ascendant Spear, but Theron’s viruses have sabotaged enough of the Spear‘s systems to buy time.
Theron frees Gnost-Dural from the ultimate suffering and together,
both men wearing only their underwear, they defeat Darth Karrid’s
apprentices and the Sith soldiers in what is the second least erotic
fanservice I’ve ever read. Karrid herself is ensconced in an impregnable
crystal shell from which she controls all of the Spear‘s
systems, but for some reason she decides to exit her command pod, flail
around and scream inarticulately, then go back into the pod and get back
to work. As the pod closes behind her, however, Theron tosses in a
grenade and she explodes.
Theron and Gnost-Dural escape, Jace Malcom blows up the Ascendant Spear,
and as our heroes are brought aboard the Republic flagship, Teff’ith
wryly observes, “You know you both naked, right?” Everybody laugh. Roll
on snare drum. Curtains.
Meditations
Annihilation may be Drew Karpyshyn’s best Star Wars novel,
simply by virtue of being merely mediocre instead of offensively
terrible (yup, that includes the Darth Bane books—get mad, nerds). The
same issues with his writing that existed in The Old Republic: Revan persist in this book, along with a few new ones, but at no point in Annihilation
does he ruin any beloved characters in the service of trashing someone
else’s much better story. Insert joke about how maybe Drew Karpyshyn
should have written The Last Jedi.
I talked at length before about how flavorless and simplistic
Karpyshyn’s writing style is, so I won’t dwell on it at length here,
save to say that this is a book utterly without nuance or subtext.
Writing simply is by no means an inherently bad thing of course; Ernest
Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of literature used simple, minimalist prose
to great effect, relying on the gravity of what he left unspoken to
belie the straightforwardness of his language. With Karpyshyn’s writing,
however, there is nothing below the waterline. What you see is what you
get, and what you get is unsophisticated, uncomplicated, and
unmemorable. Over the course of this novel’s 334 pages, Theron Shan
learned nothing about himself (except who his father was, something that
had no impact on his character or the plot) and I didn’t learn anything
about him either; he just did some things, some stuff blew up, and then
it was over.
What stuck out to me when reading Annihilation wasn’t so
much the writing style itself as odd stylistic choices that the author
made. A basic rule of thumb when writing dialogue, for example, is that
there is seldom a need to use any dialogue tags other than “said” or
“asked.” In cases where you want to show emphasis, you can opt for a
punchier choice—”demanded,” “exclaimed,” “shouted,” “lied,” etc.—but
it’s best to use these sparingly. These words call attention to
themselves, and in the vast majority of circumstances where dialogue
tags are appropriate, their only purpose is to tell the reader which
character is speaking, not to distract from what’s being said.
Karpyshyn loves dialogue tags, however. The more varied tags he can
use, the happier he is. Here are all the dialogue tags he uses across
pages 184 and 185, during a simple conversation between Theron and
Satele Shan:
she replied
Theron said
he added
she chided
Theron joked
she continued
Theron answered
she warned
she added
Theron shot back
he continued
she said
Theron replied
she said
Theron said
she told him
It’s incredibly distracting and lends to the unpolished, juvenile
aesthetic of the text. It’s the kind of thing where you read it and
you’re like “Oh yeah, I used to write like this . . . in assignments for
my high school creative writing class.”
Karpyshyn also has a weird habit of putting paragraph breaks in the
middle of a character’s dialogue. There’s nothing strictly wrong with
how he does it, it’s formatted and punctuated correctly and all that,
but it’s a very unusual and unnecessary stylistic choice that just
confuses the reader about who’s speaking. There are no hard and fast
rules in literature for when to begin a new paragraph, but when it comes
to dialogue, unless they are denoting a point of special emphasis or a
single character is speaking uninterrupted for an unusual length of
time, like a protagonist in an Ayn Rand novel, an author will typically
have a character begin and finish talking within a single paragraph.
None of the book’s characters deliver any lengthy monologues, but
Karpyshyn will frequently break a single character’s dialogue into two
or more paragraphs for seemingly no reason, tricking you into thinking
that a new character has started talking.
Also he reuses the unusual turn of phrase “infernal machine,” which he previously used in Revan in an unrelated context. Maybe he just really enjoyed that Indiana Jones game.
I have to give credit where credit is due, however, and remark on how
relieved I was that the book never introduces any romantic tension
between Theron and Teff’ith. I kept waiting for that shoe to drop every
time she’d leave and then reenter the story and it never did. In fact
the book’s epilogue establishes that they see one another as brother and
sister. Not that that’s stopped Star Wars before, but the last thing this story needed was a flat, undeveloped romance between two flat, undeveloped characters.
Overall, Annihilation is no Revan. While it doesn’t
make much of a case for its own existence, it also doesn’t outright
refute it with every turn of the page. Plus Master Gnost-Dural was a
pretty enjoyable character, fuck my better judgment.
I really want to give it a 3/5 for all the things it didn’t do wrong,
but it still didn’t do all that much right. 2.5/5 Death Stars. Mostly
harmless.
One thing that bothered me though was how they never explain that the reason it’s called Annihilation is because that’s the hypnotically implanted trigger word to induce the science expedition to immediately commit suicide.
The Search for Oricon
“The Search for Oricon” is a story told in the format of a log entry
by Jonas Balkar, a Republic SIS recruiter. I almost didn’t bother
including it in this project because its format is so atypical of these TOR
shorts it’s debatable if it should even be considered a short story,
but it has the faintest suggestion of a plot so I threw it in for
inclusivity’s sake.
In the aftermath of the events of TOR‘s eight class stories,
SIS is hunting for the Dread Masters, a cadre of six Sith Lords so
skilled at Battle Meditation that they are able to destroy entire
Republic fleets by infecting the crew’s minds with irresistible terror
or something. With the Sith Emperor dead, the Dread Masters have gone
rogue and formed their own splinter faction, the Dread Host. Balkar
describes his experience with a young man he recruited to help track
them down.
The unnamed recruit passes all of SIS’s psychological evaluations and
field tests and is deemed a perfect candidate to go undercover in the
Dread Host and discover the location of Oricon, the lunar headquarters
of the Dread Masters. Balkar is uneasy about giving his own
recommendation because of how young the recruit is, but he does his duty
and moves on to his next assignment.
Months later, the recruit returns aboard a stolen Dread Host ship,
his mission a success, except that he has gone insane in the process of
it. SIS calls in Balkar, hoping a familiar face will convince him to be
more forthcoming, but by the time Balkar arrives the recruit has hacked
apart all of his handlers and guards. The only time the kid speaks is to
ask if Balkar is proud of him. He chases Balkar around the hangar while
Balkar shoots him to death. Balkar checks the ship’s navicomputer and
obtains the coordinates for Oricon, though he pities whoever the
Republic decides to send there. To see that story be sure to download Star Wars: The Old Republic and its first digital expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, today!
This is one of the more decent TOR online short stories that
we’ve read so far, but there still isn’t that much to talk about. The
scene in the hangar, when Balkar arrives to find the kid just standing
there smiling despite being riddled with blaster holes and surrounded by
dismembered corpses is mildly creepy and does a good job of setting a
specific tone for the Dread Masters story in the MMO that I’m sure it
doesn’t live up to. Most of these shorts have been told in third-person,
but Jonas Balkar’s first-person narration through his log entry was a
good choice for this pseudo-horror story, as it allows us to share
secondhand in Balkar’s low-key empathy for his recruit without the
author having to waste his or her word count trying to drum up empathy
from scratch.
For real though these are just way too short to have any strong
feelings about. 2.5/5 Death Stars. Email me on this webzone if you know
who the author is.
