Ok, cover time: it's got Han and Luke looking 30-something and Leia looking about 17, but the rest is pretty good. Ominous cloaked figure in the upper right is appropriately Star Wars, then we've got a little ship in the upper left that I guess is supposed to be the Sun Crusher, even though there's that whole ice cream cone thing. Oh, well! The spine, however, shows Admiral Ackbar and a star destroyer getting cored by some unknown force. It's quite impressive, but all you can see of it in this pic is just a tiny corner of the star destroyer above Leia's shoulder. Imagine you can see something cool.
Just like all the action in Kevin J. Anderson's work, it happens just offscreen, to spare readers the shock of having something exciting happen and potentially excite them. We have such very delicate sensibilities, you know.
Remember how at the end of the last book I told you all the spoiler that Luke wouldn't manage to keep his students from the Dark Side? It really wasn't much of a spoiler. As soon as you open the cover, the teaser text describes the horribly mutilated corpse of one of Luke's students and Luke says to beware the Dark Side, so it's not much of a stretch. We aren't told who it is, but there's only three of his twelve students who were named in the last book: Kyp, Streen, and Gantoris, and of them, only Gantoris freaked out and said that going with Luke would doom him to a horrible death. So no points for guessing who this is.
As the book opens, Luke spends an ungodly amount of time telling us backstory we know if we've read the last book, then fills us in on a bunch of stuff we'd know if we'd ever seen Empire Strikes Back, and so... really, it's all kind of pointless. The prose turns as purple as the river in front of the Jedi Temple during all this.
Then Luke meets back up with Gantoris and Streen. It seems his first lesson for his students was "pair up, run out into the jungle, and survive there for a while." I suppose that would keep them out of his hair, but actual relevance of this escapes me, except to kick-start the plot. Speaking of kick-starting the plot, Streen and Gantoris have found another pyramid temple, out in the jungle. It's covered in PLOT, too. They can sense it through the Force, stressing this.
Incidentally, all the ruins on Yavin IV were built by an ancient now-dead species called Massassi. Luke takes a moment to reflect on the possibility of his students being seduced by the Dark Side and wonders if the Dark Side had anything to do with the Massassi all dying. Wha-? If you had basic safety issues, much less potential malevolent spirits wandering around, why did you pick here? it's a big galaxy out there! Whatever.
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| Incidentally, this is a Massassi. Luke's decision to set up camp here is made of good things. |
"Wedge!" Luke grinned and shouted. "Doesn't the New Republic have anything better for its generals to do? A delivery driver in space!"
Wedge Antilles stuffed his helmet under the padded orange sleeve of his flightsuit and extended a hand to Luke. Luke embraced Wedge in the greeting of two friends who had not seen each other in far too long.
"You've got to admit I'm qualified for the job," Wedge said. "Besides, I got tired of doing demolition work in the armpit of Imperial City, and before that I got tired of cleaning up wrecked spacecraft in orbit around Coruscant. I figured a delivery driver was better than a garbageman."
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| Pictured: Wedge Antilles in any other series in the setting. |
Wedge is mainly here for some foreshadowing: it seems Mon Mothma has been locking herself away more lately, leaving Leia to run the day-to-day affairs of the New Republic. People, for some inexplicable reason, are a little worried by this. He also mentions off-handedly that he's going to be escorting Qwi Xux for a while, since there's a worry that Admiral Daala might try to get her back, and Qwi is just that dumb that she might have trouble with Daala. Wedge alone, of course, is considered more than a match for Daala and her three star destroyers and possible other superweapons.
Since Leia's running the galaxy, let's cut over to her now. She's... not on Coruscant at all. Or with her twins. Admiral Ackbar is flying her out to Anoth to spend some time with her youngest child, Anakin. She's not allowed to know where Anoth is (???), so only Winter, who's currently on Anoth, and Admiral Ackbar know where to go to find her son. I'm sure this retarded security measure won't backfire in any way ever.
But that's for later. Right now Ackbar and Leia are landing on some stupid planet full of wind. Wind Planet has a native species that built a cathedral-sized flute that the wind plays, but they're in a snit because of the Emperor, so they haven't played it in a while. This is important because--oh, wait, for currently mysterious reasons, Ackbar is crashing. He ejects Leia before he hit the ground, but guess where he's about to smash into? That building-scale flute, yes. Ackbar manages to level the whole thing as he comes in. Oops.
Somewhere on Coruscant, Han is taking Kyp Durron skiing. Kyp is timid, then suddenly decides to take the dangerous slope. Luckily for Kyp, everyone loves Kyp:
Han began cursing the young man's recklessness, then experienced a sudden inner warmth as he realized he had expected little else from Kyp. Making the best of it, Han let out an answering whoop of his own and turned to follow.
Han's Midlife Crisis Trilogy continues.
Han suggests that Kyp take the rest of his life to relax and enjoy, since he deserves it after his sob story of a backstory, but Kyp declares that he has a score to settle with the Empire, and he will see that he does his duty and helps bring them down, and to to that he has to apply his awesome Jedi might to learning from Luke Skywalker so he can save the day. This chapter reads like a checklist in one of those "Mary Sue" tests you can find online.
Then a droid finds Han, and gives him a message from Mon Mothma about Leia's crash, adding that at least 350 of the locals are already confirmed dead from Ackbar running a spaceship into their largest cultural landmark. He goes and picks up the twins from where they were bothering C-3P0. Han's kids didn't merit a mention in the chapter up until now. It was all Kyp.
Han runs down to the Millennium Falcon, where Lando and Chewie were working on her. Han and Lando yell at each other for a minute, with Lando alledging that he always wondered if Han cheated in the game where he won the Falcon.
So naturally, before rushing off to save his wife, Han has to challenge Lando to a rematch sabaac game, with a higher randomization level and the Falcon as his stakes versus Lando's... nothing? Han just has to prove to himself he's still a young man, I guess? He manages to lose the Falcon this time, though, due to the fact that in this version of the game, the rules randomly change and screw him over.
Let's cut to someone dumber in hopes that you don't notice how absurd Han's actions are: Admiral Daala. She's posing on her bridge when someone comes up to tell her how her fleet fared against the Kessel fleet. If you'll remember, the Kessel fleet is a rag-tag assemblage of anything that can fly, manned by whoever Doole could pay well enough to pilot them. Bottom of the barrel stuff. Daala's troops are Imperial elite, who have trained and drilled together for over a decade. She managed to lose three squadrons and one of her three remaining star destroyers is so badly damaged she had to carefully baby it along with her flagship.
So out of four star destroyers that she started with, she's lost one, badly damaged another, suffered other damage to the remaining two, and lost dozens of TIE fighters, as well. Total damage the New Republic has suffered at her hands: zero. Not one ship, not one planet, not one single redshirt infantryman has suffered at the hands of Daala. Just a bunch of third party minor military dictators at Kessel, and she didn't even manage to take the planet. She proposes hunting down the New Republic with what she has left. Her bridge crew breaks into spontaneous cheers, possibly from severe brain damage.
They start their campaign of terror by... catching a random Correllian Corvette that surrenders immediately upon being fired upon. Since it's not even a warship. Good going, Daala. The captain volunteers his itinerary: he was taking supplies to Gantoris's people, the refugees that Wedge taxied off to a world that was a mess of a JPRG.
Then she lets them all go, since otherwise the ship would just be written off as an inexplicable loss, but if she lets them go people will learn about her and fear her. Or else they'll learn "hey, Daala usually doesn't actually kill you even if she manages to catch you". Off to kill a bunch of unarmed refugees! What a menace to galactic civilization. Maybe next she'll knock down elementary schoolers and steal their candy.
Back to the Jedi Academy that this series is ostensibly about. Luke mentions his twelve students, and then gives names and descriptions of half that many. This is why I, Jedi was workable--the Academy is so woefully under-developed that Stackpole was able to stick in his pet Jedi character here and a whole extra set of stuff for him to do without ever contradicting this bare-bones account.
Anyway, Luke sets up a Holocron of Jedi Master Vodo-Siosk Bassk, who tells them about Exar Kun, an ancient Dark Lord of the Sith who used to rule this very planet, and is in no way going to show up very shortly this series to mess with Luke's students.
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| Pictured: Someone who in no way is going to wreck Luke's shit. |
Reminder: Exar Kun was the Emperor of the 1st Galactic Sith Empire, the founder of the modern Sith Order, the origin of that whole "Wipe out the Jedi" plan - a man who almost caused the Jedi Order to collapse in warring sects.
And Luke put the Academy inside his fucking summer resort
Luke then goes all cult leader and starts worrying that his students will go and learn about the Force from people who aren't him, from things like Sith documents that differ slightly but importantly from all of his own (and entirely correct) teachings.
That night, Gantoris, the guy who knew coming here would inevitably get him killed by "the dark man" according to his prescient abilities, is feverishly working on making his own lightsaber as he jumps at shadows that he knows contain someone watching him. He makes it, then nods to himself, knowing that now Luke will have to treat him like a real Jedi.
He's always worked hard, and this will lead him to disaster. I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
Ackbar is standing around staring at a door made of "steelstone" (awful name) and feeling sorry for himself. If you remember, somehow he managed to crash his B-wing into a giant musical instrument and kill three hundred plus members of an alien race that was never mentioned before or since. He's somewhat down about this. His incredibly, superbly, awesomely loyal technician Terpfen shows up to tell us it wasn't a mechanical failure on the part of the B-Wing. So that means that either a character from the movies managed to be fallible and his incompetence caused the death of hundreds, or someone is lying to Ackbar. Certainly it couldn't be Terpfen, his ever-loyal sidekick that we've known since... one page ago.
Anyway, Ackbar is called in before the Senate. One Senator immediately suggests that Ackbar go back to Fluteland and lead the reparations team. Someone else points out that this is stupid, since he's the one who caused it. Ackbar resigns his commission over his horrible crime, and then flies off (all by himself again, mind you, so I guess he isn't too traumatized) in the spaceship most loyal Terpfen has provided for him.
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| The holes in his head are from totally-not-brainwashing Imperial torture |
I'm not sure my heart can stand the suspense of wondering if Ackbar truly caused the death of so many! We cut over to Terpfen, who immediately remembers how when he was tortured, they cut out bits of his brain so he can't disobey the Empire, and he sabotaged Ackba's craft. Fancy that. Anyway, he takes a B-wing out to report in person to his handler, who is Ambassador Furgan, from Carida. I always feel I have to remind everyone of the added cast in these books, since KJA just unloads tons of these guys, so this is the guy who threw a drink in Mon Mothma's face and insulted Leia a lot last book. This scene reminds us of more scenes that haven't happened yet but which we've probably already sussed out: Mon Mothma is mysteriously ill, and Terpfen has a secret plan to find out where Anakin, Leia's youngest son, is being held, presumably also via Ackbar, since Ackbar knows where Leia's son is... and Leia herself doesn't. Just because.
Luke takes his almost entirely male Jedi trainees to a hot spring, then tells them to strip and get in. They're going to be doing the Jedi exercise of "just floating there trying not to stare at each others' dongs". Luke starts tripping out and imagining he can see across the universe, maaaan.
Then, suddenly, a big lethal planet-fart of super-heated gases starts to well up from somewhere underground and it's going to kill everyone. Uh. Luke is very lucky that OSHA isn't in his universe, or his Academy would be shut down so fast. Luckily, everyone except Dorsk 81 (ol' "Mister Generic" from Darksaber, and oh yes, we'll be tackling that turd sooner or later) manages to use the power of "Force Save Me From Planet Farts" to keep themselves safe. Gantoris has to help Dorsk 81, so the peril is almost immediately neutralized.
Luke calls an end to the goofy exercise and tells everyone to call it a night. Gantoris decides to pull out a non sequitor and tell Luke that he's finally figured out that Luke is not the Dark Man who will kill him. Luke decides not to question this, even though there's only one reasonable assumption for why he now trusts Luke: he's figured out who the Dark Man is.
The next day, Gantoris pulls out his home-built lightsaber and challenges Luke to a duel. Luke tries to wiggle out of it, but Gantoris tells Luke that if Luke doesn't pull out his lightsaber and fight back, Gantoris will just cut him down unarmed. Yeah... Luke's great and recognizing who's currently under a Dark Side influence.
Luke outfights him, since, well, he's the Jedi Master. Luke asks how Gantoris knows how to make a lightsaber to begin with, since Luke hates the idea of other people teaching his Force Gospel.
The fiery-tempered man turned his face up, glaring with red-rimmed eyes. "You are not the only teacher of the Jedi way!"
Luke is currently being a complete idiot, though, so he doesn't question this even now. He just beats Gantoris and then tells him not to be so angry. Uh, Luke? He just threatened to kill you while you were unarmed. That's not just a little bit upset; that's full-on Sith.
We've spent way too long on the trilogy's ostensible plotline. Let's cut over to Kyp Durron, who's here to show us how awesome and cultured and well-informed he is, especially given that he grew up in an underground prison with no friends or family except one horrifically ugly Jedi he knew for five minutes.
He walks into the bay where the Sun Crusher is being held. The guards agree to let him in, even though he technically doesn't have authorization, since if he wanted to steal the Sun Crusher, he already could have done that. This somehow passes muster, and he sees some New Republic techs pull out a message cylinder, misidentify it as the supernova torpedoes it uses to destroy stars, and they all run around screaming in fear of it going off while Kyp laughs at how dumb well-trained specialists are in comparison to his mysteriously knowledgeable ass. Then we cut away and this scene never comes up again. Thank God. I'm not misrepresenting this:
"It's one of the supernova torpedoes!" an engineer said.The two mechanics carrying it suddenly froze. Someone sounded a squawking alarm. The guards inside the security field ran about looking for targets to shoot. The trapped engineers and mechanics screamed for the deadly security field to be dropped so they could evacuate. The three guards outside whirled and leveled their blaster rifles at Kyp, as if he had become a threat after all.He laughed. "It's only a message cylinder," he said. "Have them open it up--they'll see. It's where the log recorders are kept so vital data can be ejected if the Sun Crusher ever gets destroyed.
Wait, I thought this thing was supposed to be indestructible? Call me nuts, but something that would be powerful enough to wipe out the indestructible superweapon would probably be able to annihilate a message cylinder. Just a hunch.
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| Also, I'd like to point out that despite the fact that this thing can plow directly through a Star Destroyer, it has those cute little blasters on it that aren't indestructible, and destroying them does not in fact hamper it in any way shape or form. It's adorable. |
And off to Wedge. He's... mooning over Qwi Xux, as she gives a speech to the Senate. She insists that her Sun Crusher is too powerful for anyone to have, and the New Republic needs to destroy it. Someone reminds her that it's invulnerable, which she should have remembered since she made it, and she amends her idea to "disposing of it" where no one can get at it. There's a lot of useless talking to round out the chapter.
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| I'm just gonna pretend that Wedge is actually doing something like this. |
Let's cut over to Daala, busily working out her strike plan for attacking unarmed refugees just setting up camp on a new world all by themselves and undersupplied even for normal life. Guess what? She's about to do something stupid, and even the book points it out. Daala says that they're going to land a ground force to destroy them, instead of lasering them to death from orbit. She's been pointing out that her star destroyers can sterilize a planet since her first scene, probably half a dozen times over all, but she doesn't even want to do this single little village. Also, she's using a starship navigator to lead the attack, despite him pointing out that he's not trained for that and she has actual ground commanders. Really.
Anyway, everyone on the surface is killed, since they have no lethal weapons and they're a tiny camp of refugees. Daala's AT-ATs still manage to suffer minor damage, so I'm chocking this up as a loss for her, since the didn't have any reason to suffer even that.
Anakin (not Leia's kid, but the Darth Vader one) appears to Luke in a dream, and tells him that Obi-Wan was always lying to him and not to trust anything he ever said, and that he should actually study a bunch of Sith teachings to broaden his mind. It takes Luke way too long to manage to sort out that this is not, in fact, his father. Since he's completely dumb in this book. And then this scene never comes up again.
Gantoris is sitting by himself, muttering and not sleeping and generally attempting to be creepy without managing to do so. A man appears to him. Zoinks, Scoob, it's a ghost! Really, it is. The ghost tells Gantoris that all about the refugees that Daala just killed, since they were from Gantoris's homeworld. So Gantoris gets so upset that he turns on his lightsaber and attacks a ghost. This doesn't work very well, but sets up something very stupid in the next book, so remember the fact that the ghost is immune to lightsabers.
Artoo wakes up Luke. It's a message from Han. Han tells him that Kyp is coming to Yavin IV ASAP and he lost the Falcon to Lando. He seems to have forgotten that Leia was with Ackbar when the fish guy smashed the big instrument and so is potentially involved in a huge scandal and political mess. But whatever. As soon as he comes up, someone comes to get Luke, and it turns out that... Gantoris is dead! Something burnt him from the inside out. It's the teaser text scene! Luke tells everyone to beware the Dark Side, and forgets the whole incident. Seriously, he won't even mention this again next time we see him. Callous, Luke.
Let's check up on Ackbar. He decides to go visit Anakin (not Vader, the baby), on the planet Anoth. His ship was prepared by Terpfen, you see, so he feels like he can trust himself to go check up on his god-grandson without anyone finding out where the planet is by, say, tracking his spaceship. Winter gives him a meal. He eats and runs--seriously. He says he can't stay any longer or people will notice he didn't go straight to his ostensible destination. Then we cut to Terpfen feeling sorry for himself and then giving the information to Ambassador Furgan on where Anoth and Anakin are.
Viewpoint Change! Han is tearfully sending Kyp Durron off to Yavin IV, to get his Jedi training on. It seems that Han either mellowed out so much that he could immediately bond to a random kid he picked up from jail, or else Kyp Durron, hero of the galaxy, is just so awesome that Han immediately fell into a father figure role because... something. The Han we all know and love isn't completely gone, though, as his gift to Kyp is actually regifting a reflective cape that he got from Lando. Try to picture Han in that.
As you probably don't recall, Han managed to lose the Falcon to Lando by challenging him to a game of Sabaac where Lando's stakes were "fuck all", just so you knew Han had to lose because there was nothing there for him to possibly win. Now that Han's wondrous prodigy of Kyp is out of the picture, Lando comes up and offers to gives Han back the Falcon. The condition is: Han has to come with him to pick up his other ship, which they abandoned back on Kessel during the big chase scene there.
Han agrees, since otherwise he wouldn't be in this trilogy any more and he's one of our main characters. Since he's decided to continue being in the plot, Mara Jade shows up in what is seriously the very next paragraph and implied to be about a second later. She tells him about Daala. Daala has been trying to hire mercenaries and smugglers, but she can't because she already shot up the Kessel fleet which is made up of them, so as a group they don't trust her. In other words, Daala just tried implementing a new plan that she already screwed up for herself before she even thought of it. That's gotta be a record, even for her. Message delivered, Mara adds that now that she's showed up in the book, she's going to go join the other plotline at Luke's Jedi temple.
We cut over to Leia eating dinner, when she's summoned to go see Mon Mothma, leader of the New Republic. She's annoyed, until she gets in to see her and discovers that she's stepped into a medical drama and Mothma is currently all dying of something mysterious, and Dr. House is nowhere to be found. This is why Leia has been forced to take over more of the governances of the New Republic, and thus why the New Republic is currently in a rather ill-defined crisis.
Then we switch genre again, and Han is reading "The Little Lost Bantha Cub" to his children. I'm just going to transcribe the first two couplets:
After the sandstorm that drove him from homeThe little lost bantha cub wandered aloneSo he walked and he walked through the desert heat until noonWhen he found a Jawa sandcrawler upon a sandy dune
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| And you thought the Ewoks cartoon was annoyingly cutesy. |
Okay, back to pretending this is Star Wars. Kyp watches the final preparations for dropping the Sun Crusher into Yavin. This is absolutely not foreshadowing.
He saw the shape plunge into the upper atmosphere, plowing down on its unalterable course toward the planetary core. He imagined the Sun Crusher streaking deeper and deeper into the dense atmosphere. Scorching heat generated by atmospheric friction would throw off ripples and sonic booms as the Sun Crusher went down, down to the gas giant's diamond-thick core."Well," Wedge said, sounding cheerful, "we never have to worry about that thing again."
This is absolutely not foreshadowing and the Sun Crusher is clearly gone forever, despite being the only possible ship that is worthy of the glory that is Kyp Durron. Also, what the hell does "diamond-thick" mean besides that KJA read 2001 sometime?
Anyway, Luke greets Kyp as he comes down to the surface of Yavin IV. He's broken up by the fact that he lost one of his students almost immediately, as Gantoris was burned from the inside out by an evil Force ghost that just happened to be haunting the place that Luke decided to put his Academy and--no, wait. He doesn't even comment about it.
Back to Leia. As the de facto leader of the galaxy, mother of three and current caretaker of two, she's superhumanly busy. So busy that she's out at Mon Calamari, to go see Ackbar the retired admiral and now private citizen herself on personal business. What? Whatever. Anyway, she also happens to find a new Force sensitive person, since everything in this trilogy happens by complete coincidence to work for our heroes' benefit (see the whole of Jedi Academy for reference). This is Cilghal, a Mon Calamari girl.
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| Quite the looker. |
Anyway, Cilghal is our resident plot-moving-along device today. She's not only a future Jedi, she's one of the only ones who know where former-Admiral Ackbar has retired to. There's some stupid stuff along the way, but honestly none of it matters. Cilghal leads Leia to Ackbar, with nothing but the help of a giant psychic clam. I did not make up a single word of that. The rest is Cilghal giving a very protracted explanation of the state of affairs on Mon Calamari, which we don't care about.
Finally, Leia starts talking to Ackbar, and this is where the book takes a turn for pants-on-head retarded. It's been bad before, but this is seriously insane. Leia tells Ackbar about Mon Mothma's sudden attack of Horrible Death For No Reason Syndrome, and that she needs Ackbar to come back... to help her run the Republic. Because military leaders are totally going to be vitally involved with the civil side of affairs. And an admiral is going to a huge help in setting up a peacetime government to begin with. Unless the New Republic suffered a military coup while I wasn't looking, this justification is so stupid that I'm going to try hard to pretend I didn't just read it.
While this is all going on, Ackbar is pretending to do important work in seeing of Mon Calamari is about to blow up (seriously), but this doesn't seem like it's actually going to be a problem. Then they just so happen to stumble across a probe droid, which shoots at them for a moment and then blows itself up before they get into any proper peril. I know that's from Empire Strikes Back, but it really feels like everything else in this trilogy, too, cheating me out of action scenes. Even Gantoris died off-screen.
"This probe droid has been here for ten years or more, and that would have been a very old code, almost certainly obsolete," he said. "Even if the Imperials could still understand its message, who would be out there listening?"
That was Ackbar, incidentally. He's been too busy moping about killing flute-building-gargoyles to keep up on Daala, but no one bothers mentioning her to him, since, meh, it's Daala.
We cut over to Daala! And it turns out that even in the book Tarkin was just trolling Daala all along. Here's some of the "advice" she has on recordings of him:
"Liquidating a dozen small threats is easier than rooting out one well-established center of defiance,"
Yes that's why Tarkin championed the construction of a superweapon completely and utterly capable of wiping out one well-established center of defiance. She's going to lose in a bit thanks to listening to other advice of his, incidentally.
Now that we've established her idiocy, she gets the call from the probe droid that menaced Ackbar. Guess what code was in her most recent download? She decides to attack Mon Calamari with her three shot-up star destroyers.
So we cut over to Ackbar, Leia, and Cilghal. They notice the turbolasers in orbit, and rush to a handy command center so that they can watch the battle. Two star destroyers are shooting up random stuff that is nowhere near the shipyads, and all the ships that aren't protecting the shipyards are engaging them. Ackbar looks at all of this, asks about the ship that's currently under construction there (it has engines, but no crew/weapons/internal anything). He then orders all the defenses away from the shipyard, because he's sussed Daala's plan, since it's so obvious you can't really miss it. It also helps that Tarkin wrote about it and taught Daala about it, and coincidentally, Ackbar was Tarkin's slave and learned all his strategies. But he probably didn't need that. It just sped things up.
Her third star destroyer slides in from behind the moon, trying to attack the dock, but Ackbar pulls the half-built ship out of the docks and runs into her star destroyer, destroying it instantly.
Daala goes weak at the knees to discover that her awesome plan was seen through, so she runs away with her two not-yet-destroyed star destroyers. She seriously starts crying, too. Ladies and gentlemen: this is our villain.
So, to review here, Daala's military campaign:
vs. Han Solo in invincible superweapon: Lost
vs. rag-tag Kessel fleet: Lost
vs. undersupplied refugees with no lethal weapons: Draw, because they still hurt her.
vs. an unprotected, unarmed, uncrewed ship under construction: Lost
So not only can't she win, the quality of her opposition has been steadily decreasing, too.
Now it's the Kyp Durron show. Most authors believe things like having a serious antagonist makes the heroes look better in comparison because they struggle to overcome them. KJA believes fuck that; an antagonist who doesn't have any actual threat to present and keeps losing her support base and can't even keep composed is good enough.
We join Kyp Durron, friend of children everywhere, doing Jedi exercises like Luke did in Empire Strikes Back. I'm thinking that that is the only one of the original trilogy that KJA actually saw; he keeps stealing scenes and whatnot to use in his books, but they're all always from Empire Strikes Back. Since Kyp is a superlatively powerful Jedi, with more raw talent than Luke according to the last book, he's having an easy time of it while purposefully making it harder on himself by doing things like doing the whole thing on an incline instead of a flat surface. Luke comes by, and looks impressed at the stunning job Kyp is doing. He calls a halt on exercises for today, and Kyp gets upset. Stopping training?! How could Luke be so blind? He's holding Kyp back!
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| Whoa, joke paradox. |
That night, Kyp is sitting by himself, meditating on how glorious and handsome he is, when a Force ghost appears in his room! It's evil. I mean, we already know that, but it's black and cold and every other blandly evil adjective we can bring out to say that it's evil. Since Kyp Durron has had such a horrible backstory that has made everyone feel so sorry for him, he's so inured to horrors that even this doesn't faze him. The ghost offers to teach him things that Luke hasn't. Kyp refuses unless he can get the ghost's name.
"I was the greatest Dark Lord of the Sith. I am Exar Kun."
Exar Kun! Okay, I'm going to take a moment to give a little backstory here: Exar Kun was an ancient Jedi, who got one of the better "fall to the Dark Side" arcs in Star Wars, then hatched a fairly together scheme to create a Sith Empire. He tended to carry his scenes by virtue of being honestly pretty bad-ass even when others were trying to manipulate him. He came from the Tales of the Jedi comics, and if you get the chance and enjoy 90's era comics, they're well worth a read, if you ask me. One of the cooler things Exar Kun did, and which was perfect for comics, was play around with his lightsaber settings--extending the blade, making the first-ever two-sided lightsaber (long before Episode 1, too), and more.
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| And he was one hell of a snappy dresser, too! |
This Exar Kun isn't a patch on his old self, sadly, but it's kind of telling that even straight-up dead and having lost most of what made him cool, he's still going to be a better villain than Daala.
Okay, back to the review. We're going to cut away, I'm afraid. Han runs around in a tizzy for a page before telling us what's gotten him upset. He's got to go rescue Leia! If you remember, she was being menaced by Daala. I'm not sure why Han is even worried, since he kicked the crap out of her fleet single-handedly last book, or how he got word of the attack, but not the fact that she lasted five minutes before being defeated again, but whatever. He insists that Lando has to let him have the Falcon so he can go rescue her, since he's managed to lose that to Lando. Maybe that's what's going on: he's just trying to find an excuse to get the Falcon back. Lando refuses to just give it back, though, so they fly off together.
We cut over to... Qwi and Wedge. General Wedge Antilles, having tired of all his previous demeaning jobs, is on flute-building-gargoyle planet (I swear I thought this was a one-off mention when it came up at first), and here he's playing plumber, carting around pipes for the gargoyles. Yes, personally and by hand.
Okay, we've satisfied our random viewpoint hopping bit for now. Back to Han and Lando. They decide to play for the Falcon again... even though now it's Han who doesn't have a stake to offer beyond "what, you don't wanna? are you chicken? bawk, bawk". Amazingly, KJA realizes that this scene is entirely pointless if the Falcon doesn't change hands again, so Han wins.
Do you remember that other temple found at the beginning of the book? The one that had plot juice dripping off it? Well, it's actually come up again, finally. Kyp Durron, master of the universe, is off to explore it! ...Also Dorsk 81 is coming along, since Kyp needs a sidekick and there's no one ever who steals the spotlight less than mister no-personality himself.
Kyp gives his sob story background again, but this time... something new! He's suddenly remembered his brother that he for some reason neglected to mention before. I'm not sure why that didn't come up, so I guess this is just a lazy man's retcon when KJA finally started thinking about what would happen in book 3, and realized that Daala wasn't going to cut it as the villain, Kyp Durron needed more reason to be in the spotlight, and furthermore this is something new to angst over. In case you were slow on the uptake, there is a statue of Exar Kun in front of the Temple of Plot, as helpfully identified by Kyp Durron, who's never seen the man's face before, since the ghost is helpfully described as an absolutely black void. So he can't know. I mean, it's a reasonable guess, but it's presented as him knowing.
So Kyp literally walks across water to get up to the Temple of Plot. Dorsk 81, who I'm coming real close to just nick-naming "Dorks" gasps in amazement at Kyp's messianic imagery, but really it's just stepping stones. So for the second time this book, Kyp laughs at someone who should know better but doesn't because it makes Kyp look better in comparison if he's the one to point it all out.
That is seriously all Dorsk 81 is there for, since as soon as they get inside, he falls asleep so Kyp can talk to Exar Kun without any interruptions. You see, it's all about Kyp, not his sidekick. Kyp asks for Exar Kun's tutelage, so he can finish crushing the Empire that shot his parents and otherwise set up his Batman backstory.
At the moment, Chewie and Threepio are watching the twins, Jacen and Jaina. I say "watching", but actually they've taken them to Hologram Fun World--sorry--the "Holographic Zoo of Extinct Animals".
"Journey down the corridors of time! Travel the lanes of space! You will experience forgotten wonders from a time long ago and far, far away. You will see extinct creatures lost from our galaxy but recreated here--and now!"
So basically it's a museum, and not the cool dinosaur sort that might actually keep a preschooler's attention. So this was a bad idea on Threepio's part to start. It gets worse when he tries to get the kids to stand still and listen to a biology lecture on each animal. Y'know, I can't believe I have to stand up to declare that Threepio is being portrayed wrong, but... Threepio is being portrayed wrong. This is the same droid that immediately and thoroughly fascinated Endor's Ewoks with his storytelling, complete with cool sound effects. Threepio is fucking competent at his job, and just because he hates adventure doesn't make him useless at his intended function, which this is. But, of course, if he were actually any good, this whole subplot wouldn't kick off because he'd keep an eye on thrilled children, instead of them running off while I was ranting.
Sorry, did I miss that? They run off. They find a turbolift and hit the "1" button. Now, you may or may not know that Coruscant's got a seedy and thoroughly dangerous underbelly with feral monsters and feral accountants alike down here to menace kids. So naturally Jacen and Jaina step out of the lift and let it go back up without them.
Back up top, Chewie and Threepio are busy noticing that it's impossible to see through holograms, so Chewie throttles a random, passing Bothan, because he has anger issues. Nothing useful there.
We cut back to the kids, who have decided to act out "Little Lost Bantha Cub". Remember that from way back? I hope not, because KJA is horrible at poetry. The kids try asking a broken computer, a mute droid, and, finally, a slug on the wall (yes, really, and not a sentient one, either) to help them get back home. Amazingly, none of these are helpful.
Back over to Daala for a moment. As you doubtlessly could have guessed even if you didn't remember, she'd just lost. She tells us where she's fleeing to: the "Cauldron Nebula". That's where the book's "climax" will take place, by-the-by.
Then Han comes by and picks up Leia and Cilghal from the surface of Mon Calamari where they were in no danger at all from Daala's attack. Leia tries again to get a military admiral to come out of retirement to help run civilian affairs, reminding me of her retarded reason for being here after I'd tried to forget. Fuck. Ackbar refuses, probably because that wouldn't be his job anyway.
Back to Kyp Durron, great and glorious. He exposits to us a bit about Exar Kun's backstory, but I've already told you everything relevant that he mentions. Then Tionne starts singing about Nomi Sunrider, and Kyp explodes, saying that that's not how her story went at all. Everyone looks at him funny, because he couldn't know that unless he was a self-insert author character with omniscient setting knowledge. To prevent Anderson from having to justify his way out of this one, Mara Jade lands now and distracts Luke. Since Luke the wise Jedi Master apparently has the memory of a fruit fly, this works. That night, Kyp runs out and steals Mara Jade's ship that she came in on. Where did he learn to hot-wire spaceships? The kid was raised in a pitch-black underground tunnel in a prison!
Since we don't have enough plots going on, we cut over to Ambassador Furgan, the guy who threw a drink on Mon Mothma in the last book and picked on Leia for a while. He tells all his stormtroopers his cunning plan: they're going to go kidnap Anakin from his retarded droids-and-Winter-only planet, and then raise him to be the next Emperor. Also, he's going to be using a new weapon for this attack: MT-ATs.
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| So, like the AT-ATs, but with extra legs to trip up. And does it really need the upturned ass? |
Back to Qwi and Wedge. Wedge is finally done doing stupid jobs being a nice guy for now, and he's taking Qwi on a vacation to Ithor. They meet Momaw Nadon, the guy from "Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina" who killed the one Imperial guy and cloned him twice over. He's now got the two clones with him. They stand around quietly and creepily. They're supposed to be a touching reference to another work, but they come across as Stepford Wives, except underage boys. So I'm never going to mention them again.
Speaking of underage boys, let's see if something horrible has happened to Jacen and Jaina yet. An out-and-out ogre from Tolkien or other fantasy setting (it's even called such) catches them in a trap, and then refuses to help them get home, because it's going to eat them. So they pull the cage holding them apart with the Force and leg it. That was some short-lived peril.
We briefly cut back up to anger management, Wookiee-style, as Chewie smashes the controls for the holograms to turn them off. Then it's back to the kids, who just got captured by some raggedy humans, who finally don't mean to kill the kids. Their leader even feeds them and talks to them. Chewie and Threepio finally just give up (???) on finding the kids and go back home to Leia, who's already got her kids back because the king of the feral accountants (really--I didn't make that up before) dragged them back up to her. Leia offers to help his clan (who didn't even realize the Emperor they'd been fleeing from is dead), but he refuses.
"I still don't understand why you want to stay down in those murky lower levels," Han said.
[The king] swung one leg into the ventilation duct and looked around. "It's very simple," he said. "Up here I was just a file clerk--down there I am a king!"
So that's why he's also not telling his subjects that they can come back to living a normal live instead of squatting in squalor and hoping the ogre doesn't catch and eat them. He will never be heard from again. I checked Wookieepedia to be sure. This is his only appearance ever.
Today, we join Kyp Durron, the Chosen One, as he visits Endor on a sight-seeing tour to see Darth Vader's funeral pyre....uh...
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| HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?! |
He then makes sure to let us know that he's much more awesome than any movie canon character and then bizarrely chooses right now to tell us that his brother had black hair. Which isn't really surprising since Kyp does, too. He then declares himself Dark Lord of the Sith. Which would be more imposing if he actually looked the part, instead of being...
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| HOW? DOES? THIS? KEEP? HAPPENING???? |
Still, at least he's better off than Daala. Let's cut over to Daala and her latest retarded plan, shall we? She's finally gotten over her crying jag from losing a second star destroyer, and she and her two remaining star destroyers are hiding in the Cauldron Nebula. She outlines her new plan to wipe out the Rebellion: crash a star destroyer into Coruscant.
Turns out that today her plan will fall apart in the planning stage, without anyone pointing it out to her. Let's go over why: Coruscant has planetary shielding. We know it has planetary shielding because of, say, Zahn's trilogy which mentions planetary shielding pretty regularly. We also know about it because of Empire Strikes Back, KJA's favorite movie, where even the ragtag rebellion was capable of putting a super-powerful shield over their Hoth base, and Darth Vader decided to land ground forces rather than bash through it with a super star destroyer. Coruscant's shielding is probably more powerful still. So we can know from the get-go that if she tried to smash a star destroyer into Coruscant, it wouldn't wipe out a continent like she's claiming but would instead smear itself across the very well-established-previously shields like a bug on a windscreen, even assuming that her two star destroyers weren't destroyed en route, which isn't beyond the pale given how strongly Coruscant is defended.
Even more cringe-inducing is the fact that this didn't even need to be a plot hole. Daala was sitting on top of a hidden weapons development laboratory for over a decade. One off-handed mention of "a device that will briefly disrupt an enemy's shield" and we're golden. But no, KJA just hoped we wouldn't notice, instead. So after kind hands wipe the drool from Daala's chin, check the straps on her safety helmet, and lead her from the room, we cut away. The final line here is her reminding herself to watch Tarkin's tapes for more advice, which as I've previously established is all him BSing her.
Cilghal, the plot cure-all Mon Calamari that Leia found, comes to Yavin IV to get Jedi training from Luke. Luke just sort of stares at her blankly, because he's too torn up about Kyp abandoning him to take notice of promising new students, because everyone loves Kyp Durron. Then after she finally gets a little response from him, he goes to check his Holocron, which is a recording device for old Jedi wisdom, to see about Exar Kun and how he was defeated. The Holocron talks around what happens to Exar Kun, but won't give him a straight answer about what actually happened to the guy. When Luke presses too hard, it blows up. (Hey, kids, go buy Tales of the Jedi.)
Mara Jade finally realizes what a crap instructor Luke is, and demands transport off his cult temple planet. But Kyp stole her spaceship! Who would volunteer to transport her now? We immediately cut to Lando rushing in to Han's home to ask to borrow the Falcon to go pick her up, because before Zahn came back and paired up Luke and Mara Jade, KJA was really heavily pushing for Lando/Mara. Han says okay, but only if he's driving. So the two of them fly a heap of junk to pick up Mara, because that will favorably impress her for Lando.
On the way, Lando and Han start squabbling. Again. Lando wants to reprogram the kitchen to not just make Han's favorite grease dishes, and Han points out that he already helped Lando scrub out the Falcon's interior so it would look presentable, so Lando's already used up all his "muck around with Han's ship" credit that he's got.
Surprise! This ends in the third card game for the Falcon this book! It's changed hands both previous time--want to bet it will again?
Mara had ignored Lando for most of the journey to Coruscant. She had rebuffed his attempts to prepare dinner, find musical selections for her, and engage in conversation. Now as she watched them playing cards to settle a dispute over the ownership of the Falcon, she scowled as if they were no more than two little boys scuffling in a child's amusement pen.
Lando took the pack of glittering metallic cards so that the crystalline faces showed and then held them toward Mara. "My lady, would you care to cut the cards?"
"No," she said, "I would not."
Thank you, Mara.
Since even KJA is starting to realize this is a stupid subplot, both Lando and Han agree that this is going to be their last match ever on this topic, no takebacks, pinky-swear.
Han loses. Then Lando gives the Falcon back to Han on the condition that he gets to make something decent for Mara to eat. The chapter ends with her seeming positively impressed by this whole stunt, just in case you missed that KJA is pressing for Lando/Mara and thought the quote above was a more reasonable rendition of her.
Let's cut back to Wedge and Qwi Xux enjoying their vacation. Not content with making awful match-maker with Lando and Mara, he's got Wedge pining over a blue girl with hedgehog hair.
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| Basically she's a gender-swapped Sonic the Hedgehog |
Since Qwi is fundamentally even more retarded than Daala, though, she manages to get herself in trouble as soon as Wedge looks away for a bit, as someone pops out of the shadows to erase her memory. Since I guess that's something else Kyp learned by simple virtue of wanting to do it. He didn't want anyone else to ever be able to build a Sun Crusher, see. Don't ask how he knew to find her or where Wedge was or any inconvenient questions like that. Kyp wanted something, so the universe immediately arranged it.
Kyp is going to continue being the author's favorite, though. He flies back to Yavin IV now. He stands on the Jedi Temple and USES FORCE on Yavin to get the Sun Crusher out. It's stated that he doesn't actually yank it out--he just hits the controls to fly it out. Um... if it's that easy to fly out of Yavin, it's easy to guess that someone would've gone and gotten it anyway, so that wasn't a good choice of where to put it. Who came up with this plan? Oh, right, Leia and Qwi. Never mind. Anyway, Kyp now has a ship worthy of his glory. It's not silly-looking at all. Shut up.
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| Pictured: KJA's idea of the coolest thing ever. Also, of course someone made a mini of it for the X-Wing Miniatures Game, because in a game about dogfighting, a completely indestructible ship capable of blowing up stars is totally acceptable. |
Anyway, Luke finally notices something's been up, and wanders on up to the landing pad by himself to see what's going on, and sees Kyp with his new spaceship. They yell their attempts at Jedi philosophy at each other, until finally Luke gets bored and pulls his lightsaber out first. Sure, it's bad to attack unarmed people, but Kyp could be worse than Darth Vader! Then the ghost of Exar Kun pops up and makes his lightsaber useless. Because ghosts are immune to lightsabers. Luke then faints.
We revisit Admiral Daala, as she's finishing preparations for her stupid attack on Coruscant. But first! Kyp comes by and shoots a couple of nearby stars with his Sun Crusher supernova torpedoes, and these stars are going to supernova and hit Daala (outside their system) in a few minutes. Completely ignoring speed-of-light and real-world astronomy. KJA accidentally did something classic Star Wars!
But Kyp realizes that it's still going to take a couple of minutes, and Daala's getting ready to leave before then. He doesn't want the New Republic to get credit for the kill, so he gets on the radio to taunt her. She immediately launches TIEs and tells her star destroyers to go capture him and the Sun Crusher.
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| Pictured: The last time Daala tried this strategy. |
Before Kyp can fly through more command decks, the stars blow up and Kyp nods in satisfaction. Well, we'll certainly never see her again.
Then briefly Luke's other students find Luke's unconscious body and discover that they can't wake him up. How will they fare in this darkest hour???
That's the end of Dark Apprentice; tune in next time for the start of the third book of the trilogy: Champions of the Force!
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