It's time for a new book! And that means a new cover! I'm... not actually sure what to say about this one. At least Luke's actually got arms this time (mostly because he's copied from a promo shot from Return of the Jedi), but everything else is just sort of... there. Generic Han, generic Leia, a bunch of presumable Jedi waving two lightsabers at a star destroyer (that I'm pretty sure doesn't actually happen in this book), and on the spine we have C-3P0 and Chewie. Except Luke, everyone else is just sort of hanging out and not actually paying attention at all. Which is kind of funny since Luke spends a good portion of this book incapacitated and incapable of holding a lightsaber.
The New Republic is in crisis! The big cause is that Leia's had to take over, since Mon Mothma, the elected leader of the New Republic, is incapacitated by a horrible, inexplicable disease. Meanwhile, Luke's been put into a coma, which makes him a slightly less attentive teacher, and his most bestest awesomest student ever, Kyp Durron, has stolen the most powerful weapon in the universe, declared himself to be Darth Vader but moreso, and has set out to destroy the Empire. Meanwhile, Han and Lando squabble over dumb things and Wedge is consistently sent to do dumb tasks. How will the status quo be returned?
Old beyond his years, Kyp Durron sat hunched over the controls with dark eyes blazing, intent on his new target. With the might of the superweapon--as well as the powerful techniques his spectral mentor Exar Kun had taught him--Kyp would extinguish all threats against the New Republic.
So he's slouching in his chair as he thinks about how awesome he is. That's the second paragraph of the book. It seems like we might actually start with a good action scene, as he blazes into the Carida system (where Ambassador Furgan is based) in his Sun Crusher. Except that Carida, a stormtrooper training planet, mostly ignores him. Since, well, he's one teenager coming in on one shuttle-sized craft yelling something absurd about blowing up their star. Finally someone gets on the horn and tells him to land and immediately surrender, but when Kyp continues raising a stink, Furgan agrees to get on the line and talk to him.
It turns out that Kyp is here for his brother, Zeth, who he suddenly remembered halfway through last book. He wants Carida to find Zeth for him. Carida, on the other hand, has heard about the Sun Crusher but not its invulnerability, so they think it sounds like a totally rad idea to try to capture it. They call him up and tell him that Zeth is dead while they launch TIEs at him. Kyp angsts to himself about Zeth until he finally notices the TIEs (after they start shooting at him) and he decides, screw it, he's going to blow up Carida's star. The action scene is a farce, since we already know that the Sun Crusher can't be hurt by anything, so Kyp gets his supernova torpedo off without difficulty.
Carida, suddenly realizing that they've been really retarded about handling a ship that they knew from the get-go could annihilate their whole star system, and decide to actually look up Zeth now, since they apparently sent him a fake before. They ask Kyp to please not blow up the star, which isn't something that he can do any more.
He flies back, agreeing to pick up the comm tech he's been talking to as well as Zeth. Then the comm tech decides, screw sanity and living, he's evil, so he's going to be suicidally dumb, dammit. He tries to kill Zeth before they get on the Sun Crusher... for no apparent reason. Seriously, you'd think that he'd be fairly happy to have a stormtrooper that's on his side with him, and even if not, hitting him while in full view of Kyp is dumb, because Kyp can just hover out of reach. Kyp just hovers out of reach. Even Wookieepedia uses the word "inexplicable" in describing this.
Zeth isn't quite dead, though, so he shoots Mister Braindead and Kyp starts panicking, trying to figure out how to get Zeth aboard in the one minute they have left. He fails. Oh, the humanity. Poor Kyp. He accidentally killed his brother because every villain in the trilogy is completely ineffective.
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| Seriously? |
Well, that was dumb. Now Kyp has something more to feel bad about. I'm sure glad Zeth had such a prominent role in this book. He's dead, but he shows up again. It will be dumb, I promise.
Also I'd like to point out right here that Kyp Durron just pulled an Alderaan, and he NEVER GETS SHIT FOR IT.
Then we cut over the Luke's Jedi Temple. Leia's come to see him, because she has copious free time. This bit basically just confirms that, yes, Luke's down, and no, he's not technically dead, but there's a tacked-on bit at the end where Han decides to go after Kyp, because he's completely taken with Kyp and feels like he should go try to bring him back to the side of good.
Luke wakes up now. Not in his body, mind you. It's just the destruction of Carida; like with Alderaan, that makes everyone Force sensitive freak out, including Luke. He's a Force ghost now, too! Also he can't talk to anyone. That seems to be one part of being a ghost that he hasn't figured out. We get another confirmation that his body is alive, though.
Then Chewie! He's part of an assault team! The New Republic is finally getting around to attacking the Maw Installation, the hidden weapons development lab that Daala is supposed to be guarding but isn't, and Chewie is part of the team. Also so is Threepio. Why? Threepio wonders about exactly that and doesn't get a response. So I guess he's there because he's a movie character and movie characters have to do stuff.
What's more, this assault is being led by Wedge Antilles. Yes! Finally, Wedge is done with his odd jobs and back doing what he's good at. The book is looking up! Qwi Xux is also with him, but she's completely irrelevant. Off to attack the Maw Installation!
Well, forget about them for a while, bcause we're going to spend most of the next little bit looking at far less interesting things. Specifically, mostly, Terpfen. Remember Terpfen? He's the Mon Calamari who was surgically altered by the Empire to be completely unable to disobey them in anything, ever. Which is why he sabotaged Ackbar's ships and gave away baby Anakin's location.
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| Hello! |
Today, we're going to put the lie to that plotline. Terpfen has decided he feels bad about being a double-agent, and decides to go turn himself in to Leia. ...Really? He's capable of doing that? Then why wasn't he able to stop himself from killing hundreds of flute-building gargoyles? Why didn't he turn himself in sometime in the last, say, decade, and say "I know I'm a security risk"? He's supposed to be loyal to Ackbar, remember. Either he's capable of making his own decisions (barring a handful of exceptions) and just didn't because he's willingly an Imperial agent, or else he's just so dumb that when he was told he'd been unwillingly turned into a double agent, he believed it.
Anyway, he shoots some random people (stun only, but he still breaks some poor woman's arm), then grabs a B-wing and runs for orbit. X-wings try to stop him, but since he has a name and they don't, he gets away.
Then for one page we cut over to Leia agreeing with Han's decision to go after Kyp Durron, king of all cosmos, because Kyp is that important.
Yeah, it's ADHD viewpoint time again! Now we cut over to Lando flirting with Mara Jade. They're talking about Lando's latest hare-brained scheme: he's going to go back to Kessel and take over, using droids that are cool enough to not attract the attention of giant invisible vampire spiders. Mara would act as liaison to the Smuggler's Alliance. So Lando's basically getting into the cocaine business.
Over to Han. He's talking to the New Republic bigwigs, asking for them to let him go after Kyp. I'd like to bring out one bit that will be happily forgotten by KJA by the end of the book, but not by the reader:
"This slaughter must stop. It goes beyond even the Emperor's atrocities," the aging tactician, General Jan Dodonna, said. "The New Republic does not employ such barbarous tactics."
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| This is one of Star Wars' rad old dudes saying this. |
Han adds that this time, when he brings back Kyp, they should do a better job in destroying the Sun Crusher. Say, by not leaving it to a woman to decide how. (Don't get mad at me; it's just that in a KJA story the girls are all at least useless, if not worse.)
Then as Han is getting ready to go, Lando runs up and asks to come along. He's going to "help" with Kyp (he'll actually make it worse) on the condition that then Han will drop him off at Kessel. Because... if Lando lands there, they'll just immediately name him Baron-Administrator? Lando, Moruth Doole (remember him from book 1?) is still installed there, and you beat him up and threw him off the Falcon last time you visited.
Then we cut over to Luke, who's a ghost and thus can't actually affect the world of the living. Then Exar Kun's ghost shows up to taunt Luke, since, well, he's the closest thing we'll get to a competent villain this trilogy.
Luke glared at him. "You corrupted my students, Exar Kun. You caused the death of Gantoris. You turned Kyp Durron against me.."Kun laughed. "Perhaps it was your own failings as a teacher. Or their own delusions."
Clearly enjoying baiting and toying with Luke's dumb ass, Exar Kun goes on to tell Luke that the first couple centuries are the worst and that he's going to destroy Luke's body. He doesn't gain much from doing this, but, hell, he's a four thousand year old ghost who's messing with Luke and his Jedi apprentices for his own amusement. I can get behind that. This does bring out one dumb plot hole, though: Luke points out that Exar Kun can't do anything physical, and Exar Kun agrees. The same Exar Kun who burnt Gantoris to death from the inside out last book. Either KJA just forgot about that while trying to put together his ghost rulebook, or Exar Kun is badass enough to break the rules every so often.
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| I vote the latter. |
Then Leia's kids (remember that they were here? no? oh, well) wake Leia up, telling her that Luke's about to be hurt. Leia runs to where Luke's body is and finds Streen, the crazy guy from Bespin, about to cut Luke to pieces with a Force ice-storm-tornado. Maybe I was too hard on the other books? (No.) After an okay action scene (wow, it was actually completely shown), Leia and the other Jedi who happen by wake up Streen before he hurts Luke. Turns out that Exar Kun caught Streen in an illusion, and Streen thought he was fighting him. Geeze, he's been in all of maybe half a dozen scenes and he's killed Gantoris, corrupted Kyp Durron, ripped a Jedi Master's spirit from his body, and nearly killed Luke with his first attempt. For a ghost, this guy gets shit done.
We're going back to book 1 again; we're going to hear from Qwi's old boss for the first time since Daala told him he was dumb. I never mentioned his name then; he's Tol Sivron. Sivron is a straight-up bureaucrat, busily planning meetings and demanding reports all the time. Under his command, he has 123 stormtroopers (he counted) and one Death Star Prototype, which isn't capable of entering hyperspace, plus whatever miracle weapons his scientists may have cooked up. The only one that'll be important is the MCPS, which after some technobabble makes spaceships blow up.
Then someone stands up and yells, and Sivron chastises him, saying that it's not time for new business, even though what he's trying to tell them is that Wedge Antilles and a fleet of starships have just showed up to attack them. Sivron immediately makes a motion that the attack be deferred until next week's meeting (not really).
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| Gaze upon the face of evil: the bureaucrat (left) |
We cut over to Wedge, who orders the attack and then freaks out when he sees the Death Star Prototype busy not doing anything. Oh, well. Anyway, he orders the attack on the Maw Installation, and the MCPS system blows up one of his corvettes. Does he back off and panick at this new weapon? No, he has the other one destroy the emplacement before it can get off a second volley. How novel.
[random scientist] was deeply disappointed. "Now we'll never conduct a post-shot analysis," he said with a sigh. "It's going to be hard to compile a full report without actual data."
Okay, I laughed. The stormtroopers come up and tell Sivron that they've destroyed the main computer, and Sivron asks where that is in the emergency procedures manual. They consider a quick vote to retroactively approve it, then consult the manual again and discover their next step is supposed to be to destroy the base to wipe out their data and hopefully damage the attackers. After some back and forth about how to trigger the self-destruct without being there when it blows up, they all decide to flee on the Death Star Prototype. Heehee.
We cut over to Chewbacca, trying to join in the assault, but of course the battle's already over before he can get to the front, because writing one good action scene already has worn KJA out. It was a brief high, this book, but at least it had one.
We cut back to Sivron, who realizes that a) he can't actually fly the DSP, and b) he can't pick up the self-destruct-trigger guy like he promised. He calls up the poor sod to say "Whoops" while his Stormtrooper leader tries to figure out how to fly the thing. We don't hear if the research station blows up or not, but the DSP escapes.
Aaand we're back to Terpfen. Hooray. He's on Yavin IV. He spends a couple of pages feeling sorry for himself, and then runs up to Leia and tells her that her son Anakin is in grave danger of being kidnapped, because of him, since he was told he was a double-agent and gave Ambassador Furgan information on Anoth/Anakin.
The point of view changes from Terpfen to Leia, who suddenly (two books late) realizes what a retarded idea it is for her to have no idea of how to get to her son; the only ones who know are Luke (in a coma) Winter (on Anoth), and Ackbar (way far away and retired). Parent of the year, right here.
We briefly cut over to Lando and Han, who visit the burnt cinders of the Carida system. I'd like to take a moment to remind you all that when Kyp Durron, scourge of evil, blew this system up, it made every Force-sensitive person in the galaxy howl in pain. Remember Obi-Wan's slight unsteadiness after Alderaan when they were pretty close by? This must've been a much more heavily settled system to get that much more of a response from further off. Kyp killed countless people. Han decides that Kyp must have headed to the "Core Worlds" where the Imperial warlords are.
So, since the galaxy is ridiculously tiny in KJA's mind, they set a course for "the core worlds", and end up... right next to Kyp. Fancy that. Sheesh, it's not like there's thousands of stars there or anything. Kyp tries to intimidate Han, but Han Solo isn't scared of a scrawny prison rat and continues trying to talk to him even while Kyp is busy aiming a star-destroying torpedo at the Falcon... which would seem like overkill, if it weren't HAN SOLO on the other end.
Then we cut over to Luke, who's currently hanging out, haunting his body. He discovers that his nephew and niece can see him. He feels good about this. He doesn't give them any sort of message to pass on or anything. He just goes "hey, cool". After they leave--this isn't an interruption, Luke just didn't think of telling them anything--Exar Kun pops out of nowhere to tweak Luke a little more. Luke tries to put on a brave front, but Exar Kun points out that he can appear like anything in people's dreams... say, like Luke Skywalker. His students would listen to Luke, now wouldn't they? Where was this guy two books ago, when our villains were a druggie frog and a guy with a gun that couldn't shoot straight?
Suddenly! Exar Kun has called upon some of his monsters as a second attempt on Luke's body. Artoo and Jacen jump into the fray. To help fight them off, Luke decides to possess Jacen to give him some actual skill with a lightsaber so he can fight them.
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| Kid's eventual turn to the Dark Side making a whole lot more sense all of a sudden. |
Everyone else just stands around uselessly:
Cilghal, Tionne, and Dorsk 81 froze on the threshold of the turbolift, watching the impossible tableau. "We've got to help him!" Dorsk 81 said.
"How?" Tionne asked. "We have no weapons."
Cilghal assessed the furious battle. "Perhaps Jacen doesn't need our help."
These are some of the titular champions of the Force, if you can believe it.
Now, I looked this up. Jacen was born 9 ABY, and Champions of the Force takes place in 11 ABY. So these three adults, having received (at least theoretically) some Jedi training from Luke Skywalker, decide to stand there and let a two-year-old fight their battle for them. Remember that they can't see or hear Luke at this point.
When Jacen's killed off all but one of them, and the one that's left is down to just one head, they finally get off their keisters and help, at least. So there's that.
You know who's the worst possible follow-up to Exar Kun? Terpfen. We cut back to Leia and Terpfen. Leia's decided that she's going to keep him around at least until they can get Ackbar's help, because... I don't know. Terpfen keeps telling us he can't disobey his Imperial masters that he keeps disobeying, but he still gave them huge amounts of information. This time Ackbar doesn't give them a run-around, but gets right on the line when Leia asks for him, and Terpfen explains his whole deal again.
While they're doing exposition over there, it's time to check back in with Ambassador Furgan. He escaped the destruction of Carida on his warship that's on its way to Anoth now. They get to Anoth. It's "craggy". By Star Wars rules, that's the entire planetary environment. Furgan thinks that's appropriate for the future Emperor. He decides he's going to join in the assault in one of his MT-ATs.
We get a brief scene of Winter and the droids with Anakin... but it's really forgettable. Although it does have one of these:
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| I admit it, I'm a sucker for these things |
Then she sees the MT-ATs landing from orbit and turns on the automatic defenses.
All of Luke's Jedi trainees (literally half of them were never given a name, even now), and discuss what to do about all the crap Exar Kun is giving them. They freak out about how he must be listening in, then decide that if he is they can't do anything about it, then go through a super-compressed version of Exar Kun's story, ending on the fact that it took the whole Jedi Order four thousand years ago to kill him, and even then they couldn't finish his spirit. The Jedi trainees figure out that they're going to have to work together, or Exar Kun's going to burn/trick/whatever each of them to death in turn.
Then Exar Kun appears to Luke's ghost, and... wait, did KJA watch Return of the Jedi?
Luke answered. "They will defeat you anyway. Your imagined power is your weakness, Exar Kun."
"And your faith in your friends is yours!" Kun snapped back.
Oh, fuck you.
Well, let's go check on Han. Kyp starts out by reminding us that he had a very tragic backstory--parents killed, secret training from hidden masters, the whole nine yards. That's why he's dressed up as a bat to hunt down Gotham's criminal element destroying the Empire, and if Han was really his friend, he wouldn't try to stop him.
Lando, meanwhile, has looked up what happened in the first book in the trilogy and remembered that they have the control codes for the Sun Crusher. ...What!? The Sun Crusher can be remotely controlled for absolute certain and Daala didn't once think to try it, even after she'd had time to think? You've got to be shitting me.
Whatever. Han points out all the times he's been there for Kyp and puts his nose in why "if you were my friend" is a stupid fucking line, here. You go, Han. He keeps him busy long enough that Lando works his remote control magic. The Sun Crusher turns off.
Something very stupid happens then:
"You tricked me!" Kyp's voice screamed from the speaker panel. "You claimed to be my friend--and now you've betrayed me. It's just like Exar Kun said. Friends betray you. A Jedi has no time for friendship. You should all die."
Astonishingly, the power in the Sun Crusher surged back to life again, despite Lando's overrides. The lights came on in a blaze.
Anyway, once Kyp has overcome this new difficulty in about five seconds by virtue of just short of literally pulling a new power out of his ass, he shoots his destroy-a-star gun at Han, and then we cut away.
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Kyp seriously just used Force Turn The Ship Back On |
We cut over to Streen, guarding Luke's body. He talks for a couple pages of the whispers that Exar Kun has spoken in his dreams, without actually telling us what they were. Then... Exar Kun shows up. Streen turns on Luke's lightsaber, and Exar Kun tells him to cut Luke in two with it. Instead, Streen takes a menacing step towards Exar Kun.
Exar Kun takes a moment to remind us that ghosts are immune to lightsabers:
"If you think that weapon will have any effect on me," Kun said, "perhaps you should ask your friend Gantoris--or have you forgotten what happened to him when he defied me?"
A second Jedi trainee--the name-drop Kirana Ti from Courtship of Princess Leia--pops out of the shadows to tell Exar Kun he's a chicken if he runs off. This is apparently good enough to keep him from running, since he's actually Marty McFly.
We're setting up for something unbelievably dumb here, incidentally.
A loud crackle seared the air, and she stood holding another ignited lightsaber. A long amethyst-and-white blade extended from the handle, humming like an angry insect. She thrashed the lightsaber from side to side.
She tells Exar Kun that this was the lightsaber Gantoris made. Other Jedi pop out--Kam Solusar, Tionne, Cilghal, Dorsk 81, and... the nameless other six. Exar Kun tells them that even all together they're too weak to fight him, and orders Streen to kill all the others, as the condition for letting him live. Streen refuses.
Exar Kun changes tack--he asks how much they hate him, since that's Dark Side there. They say they don't. He starts taunting them, poking at how Dorsk 81 fears having no personality being different from his 80 previous clones, and how Tionne's only power is singing and she's rubbish anyway. They all draw in a circle around Exar Kun, who apparently cannot move vertically for some reason.
"The way to extinguish a shadow," Cilghal said in her calm and confident voice, "is to increase the light."
Kirana Ti stepped forward with the lightsaber that had been built by Gantoris. Streen met her with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber. The two stared into each other's eyes, nodded, and then struck with the brilliant luminous blades.
Exar Kun then blows up in a very protracted JRPG boss fashion. Because while ghosts are immune to lightsabers, they are not immune to two lightsabers. Fucking hell, really?
Yeah, Exar Kun was getting too competent, so KJA had to kill him off in a hurry. That's the reason he appeared to Streen for no reason, instead of lurking around like had been standing him in good stead, then hung around for the Jedi to very slowly set up their combo. He had a good run by this trilogy's standards, but that's the last we'll see of him.
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| You will be missed. |
And no kidding--it was by his power that Luke was prevented from returning to his body, and guess who just woke up?
Now that he's dead, we cut back over to Kyp. First, we get the power-up sequence from his point of view, but there's nothing new there, and then Exar Kun dies. And... suddenly Kyp Durron has a change of heart, cancels his torpedo firing sequence, and announces to Han that he surrenders. Because... I guess it was supposed to be all Exar Kun? Despite Kyp thinking about how he's going to kill the whole Empire back in book 1, before Exar Kun even woke up and starting marauding around, much less before Kyp met him? He may have killed ten billion people or more, but he's very sorry now.
Now we're back to Tol Sivron, who's idly cruising around with his Death Star. They've successfully navigated the black hole cluster known as the Maw, which is incredibly feared despite having caught precisely zero craft under any level of control in this trilogy. They note on their sensors that another craft has just entered the Maw, and they've only barely missed them. They're traveling along one of Daala's known safe paths, so naturally Tol Sivron immediately discards any thought for this one. What wacky hijinx will this comedy set-up cause? He then addresses his crew:
"Attention, everyone! Hurry with those repairs," he snapped into the intercom. His voice sounded like the commands of a deity as he spoke through all levels. "I want to destroy something as soon as possible." He switched off.
I have low standards, but that's a fun line. Why is it that KJA is at his best when writing minor alien characters, but can't do a decent Leia impression to save his life?
We cut over to Wedge, in the Maw Research Facility. Suddenly, a second set of explosions! (You didn't miss anything; there was no first that we got to see) Wedge and company rush into where the guy who was in charge of blowing up the installation is, and he tells Wedge that it's too late to stop the eventual complete destruction of the Maw because he destroyed everything that can cool the reactor core, so he surrenders, in hopes that that will get him out of there before that. Wedge accepts his surrender, then disables one of his corvettes to get an emergency cooling system in place so the base doesn't blow up. That's... actually pretty cool.
Okay, that's too much decent stuff. We cut over to Qwi Xux, who was mind-wiped at the end of last book and is now going through her room and looking confused at all the unfamiliar things. C-3P0 drops by, but he's useless. He tells us that he still doesn't know why he's here and that he can't help Qwi. She hangs around and complains about how she can't remember anything and how aghast she is at herself for designing superweapons for the Empire, since she suddenly is a completely different person now.
Then Admiral Daala shows up overhead, since one of her star destroyers got away from Kyp Durron's trap at the end of last book and she's come back. People try to pretend this a serious threat, since she's one of the few villains we've got left.
Speaking of villains, we go over to Furgan, who's invading Anakin's hellacious planet of Anoth with his giant spider-mechs, while Winter activates all the automated defense systems to repulse them. Somehow, that actually ends up lame in practice. The "automated defense systems" are called "FIDO"...one second please...
Ahem, the "Foreign Intruder Defense Organism", and it consists almost entirely of robotic tentacles.
FIDO smacks around a few MT-ATs, but since it's trying to use melee-reach weapons from an entrenched, immobile position and its targets all have lasers, it loses. What a great design. The survivors, since they did lose some of their number due to surprise, break in. Since I guess that was the only defense system they had.
We cut to orbit around Anoth. The ship that Furgan came in on gets spooked when Ackbar and Leia show up in a much more powerful cruiser, and they decide to... fly through Anoth. I'd forgotten that was important, so basically Anoth is a triple world; there's two big pieces that grind into each other and produce a lot of lightning that plays havoc with sensors. The part that Anakin and Winter are on orbits around this and is actually habitable. This ship is diving into the two middle parts, and is enjoying some success in escaping since the hero's capital ship is aiming to disable, not destroy, for fear that Anakin may already be aboard.
Two pages later, the enemy ship is hit by a giant lightning bolt and destroyed. Before anyone can start to worry that Anakin may have been killed, Leia tells them that she can still sense him in the Force so he must still be on Anoth.
We go to Winter versus stormtroopers. She leads a bunch of them into a room whose sole and explicit purpose is to kill people who set foot in it by having the walls and machinery turn into assassin droids. ...Wouldn't you have been better off designing more flexible defenses, instead of hoping that you could lead them here? Well, I suppose these are stormtroopers. They can't shoot straight and can't think and so Winter was in no danger whatsoever and her strategem could not fail. The walls of the room go back to being just walls afterward, which is a pity since if they'd been designed better Winter could have had a squad of assassin droids to help her. Since they're called assassin droids. Assassin droids that can't leave the room even when they're invaded. ...Eh.
Furgan, meanwhile, shoots Anakin's nanny droid and grabs Anakin. But because this was presented in a dumb order, he can't very well succeed in getting away from here with no spaceship of his own while Leia and Ackbar hang out overhead in an immensely powerful cruiser, as we readers already know. So there's not much real tension.
Aaaand then we go back to Han's Midlife Crisis Trilogy.
Han Solo longed to get closer to Kyp Durron in the Council chambers on Coruscant, wanting to comfort his young friend--but the armed New Republic guards surrounding Kyp made it impossible for anyone to approach.
Because everyone loves Kyp Durron, hero of the people. Kyp tries to garner more sympathy from the reader, and fails spectacularly, since he's not in any way a sympathetic character. Han tries to speak for Kyp.
Then Jan Dodonna goes for another ice burn on Han:
Aging General Jan Dodonna hauled himself to his feet. Ancient and weathered, like a piece of gnarled driftwood, the bearded general still seemed filled with energy. His eyes flashed at Han. "The prisoner may speak for himself, General Solo. He has certainly shown no reluctance to act for himself. Let him answer our questions now."
Why couldn't the book have been about this guy?
Anyway, Kyp says he has no excuse for his actions, despite them carrying the death penalty, so Han speaks up for him. He tries the Chewbacca Defense explaining that Kyp was possessed by a four-thousand year old ghost from Yavin IV. Uh. That's a novel defense, at least. He adds that since Kyp destroyed Daala's "fleet" of two star destroyers (only one, actually, but these characters don't know that) he's also done some good.
Then... inexplicably, the court decides to ship him off to Luke Skywalker to judge, instead of them. ...Sure. Whatever. I suppose that's the only way to even try to justify why your pet character will get off scot-free after massacring whole systems of fairly innocent people.
We cut back to the fate of Anakin. Leia and Ackbar and a huge team of soldiers land on Anoth, find Furgan, who's now completely alone since everyone he brought with him was killed by now (somehow, despite how badly the defenses were set out), and Furgan yells that if they don't let him go he's going to kill Anakin. While everyone is trying to figure out what to do, an unexpected figure sneaks up behind him and saves the day!
Suddenly Furgan cried out as he stumbled against the squarish, waddling power droid that had silently crept up behind him. The power droid gave out a small jolt of electricity, shocking Furgan.
The ambassador tripped and fell, still holding the child. The power droid shuffled out of the way with a squeal of something like terror.
I triple-checked to make sure I didn't change a single keystroke. That is straight from the book.
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| Yep. A Gonk Droid just saved the day. Where's his fucking medal?? |
However, Terpfen is feeling left out, and now that unathletic Furgan has no power base, spacecraft, soldiers, weapons, hostages, or anything and is recently electrocuted and outnumbered on a hostile and unfamiliar planet surrounded by soldiers after his life, Terpfen thinks he might have a chance to take him.
They have a brief, uninspired duel in the MT-ATs, just to give the spider walkers some point in being introduced, then Terpfen kills Furgan and tries to commit suicide to atone for his actions, or possibly to try to escape the book, but Ackbar stops him and tells him that he's going to force him to live through the second half of this book (we only just passed the halfway point).
Over to Yavin IV, where Han, Leia, their kids, and Kyp have all ended up here, and handily, Luke's just recovered from his coma, so he can pass sentence on Kyp.
Han could tell from Kyp's rigid posture and his set jaw that the young man was terrified at having to face the Jedi Master. Han felt cold, not wanting to be trapped between two people he counted among his dearest friends.
...Dearest... friends? Kyp? I know, I know: everybody loves Kyp. But, seriously, try to add up the time. There's only about three weeks' worth of material so far in the trilogy, unless everyone, including the villains, took a couple months' hiatus to smoke weed or something. There's usually something like Lando, who's been talking about his one-week's-time meeting since he went with Han to go stop Kyp. So let's be ridiculously generous and say that Han met Kyp... three months ago, and only two weeks of that were at Luke's Jedi Temple. Do you see Han bonding with this teenish inmate in two months when he's got a wife and three kids? Urg.
Anyway, Luke immediately forgives Kyp. I'm actually okay with that--the precedent was set in Return of the Jedi, with Vader/Anakin, and then we had Dark Side Luke in Dark Empire for even more sympathy for Kyp. I can believe he'd do that. What I don't see is why all the billions who who lost friends or family don't immediately start a frenzy. We're supposed to see Kyp sympathetically now, though, so I suppose that those people don't exist. And before you ask, no, at no point does anyone in a future book pop out of the woodwork to remind people that this kid is Hitler times one million.
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| Hey, you know how in Captain America 3, Tony Stark sides with The Man because of guilt due to not being able to save everyone from Ultron? Kyp Durron HAS MURDERED ENTIRE PLANETS. |
Let's see if Lando is doing anything more interesting. Han drops him off at Kessel, and Mara Jade meets him there in the Lady Luck--his personal craft that he had to abandon back in book 1 when he was looking for the Falcon and Han. It seems Moruth Doole, the last administrator, randomly decided to hole up in his office. And Lando didn't know that until he showed up and Mara Jade filled him in. Up until then his plan was to just fly into a planet ruled by someone who just tried to kill him the last time he was there, and hope that he could set up a very expensive enterprise based on nothing but having a million credits. And no security. Because a prison staffed by former criminals wouldn't steal from him. Lando and Mara are flirting here, too, but I just can't get over how dumb this plan was.
Briefly, we cut over to Mon Mothma's medical drama subplot. Forget about it already? Well, she's dying from something. No one knows what, and it can't be cured. Terpfen, for some odd reason, was told about this plot, even though there was no reason for him to know about it, so he tells us about how she's not sick; she was poisoned. Remember back in book 1? Ambassador Furgan threw a drink on her? That was poison juice. There's no cure. Also, someone mentions that that was "months" ago, which doesn't work with the times given elsewhere. I suspect a time-bending Imperial super-weapon at work. Since no Star Wars book could have continuity issues, and this is a KJA book. But this remains just a theory.
We cut over to Admiral Daala. She spends a couple pages thinking about her failures, how her fleet was destroyed, and how much she sucks. She thinks about how badly damaged her last star destroyer is. The words "helpless" and "failure" are used. Then she catches up to where Wedge's viewpoint was sixty pages ago and shows up at the Maw, and gets ready to engage them. On one side, we have Admiral Daala, with a badly shot-up star destroyer. On the other side, we have a small fleet under the command of General Wedge Antilles. Are you feeling menaced? I'm not.
We go over to Dagobah. Luke has taken Kyp here to throw him into the cave that Yoda had Luke go into during Empire Strikes Back, because KJA takes any excuse he can manage to rip off ESB. Kyp goes into the cave, and Exar Kun appears to him! Is this book about to take a turn for the better? Nah. Kyp refuses to fight, since right now I guess all fighting is Dark Side. Summaries won't do this part justice:
"I am glad," said the voice, which became clearer now, more maddeningly familiar. Not Exar Kun at all. It never had been.
The shadowy arms reached up to pull back the cowl, exposing a luminous face that clearly belonged to Kyp's brother, Zeth.
"I am dead," the image of Zeth said, "but only you can keep my memory strong. Thank you for freeing me, brother."
I promised you it'd be stupid when Zeth reappeared. Did we ever care about this guy? According to Luke, this proves that Kyp's a proper Jedi now or something.
And back to ADHD theater! We start out by joining Han, Lando, and Mara Jade, on Kessel. As you may recall, the first villain of the series, Moruth Doole, is cowering in a locked building here. It's not surprising, really; he's only just barely doing better than Daala so far, but unlike Daala he doesn't keep returning after this trilogy to keep losing. Naturally, our heroes are not even slightly worried about him; the big concern of the day is how to extricate him without doing too much damage to the facilities, since Lando wants to take over.
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| Did I mention that *this* is what Kessel looks like? Because it looks like a potato. |
We flash over to Doole's point of view. He takes some time to remind of the fact that he's a Rybet and as such he's required to be extremely frog-like whenever possible. He talks about his tadpoles and how they're so ungrateful that he's not feeding them too much, and one of the bigger ones (almost an adult) freed all his harem female Rybets so he hasn't had a chance to... ew. I suppose this is a fairly effective scene, but I'll just gloss over the bits that aren't actually important, if you don't mind. Freaky alien frog; of course KJA pours lots of love into his minor aliens.
Anyway, he watches the heroes outside, and notes that without Skynxnex, he's now the worst-named character in the series he doesn't know how to operate all the automatic defenses and thus he's unable to stop them from getting in because he's completely fucking useless. His one attempt at putting up a fight is to gather his (generally pre-sentient) young and give them blasters, with a brief description of the point-and-click interface involved. Of course they still get that wrong because for the toughest prison in the galaxy, Kessel is a real Mickey Mouse operation and no threat whatsoever:
"Get them!" Doole yelled. The larvae whirled at the sound of his voice and fired their blasters toward Doole himself. But he had already ducked behind a thick piece of wall plating. "Not at me!"
The young keep shooting at him, though, so he pulls a trap door lever and runs into the mines and is immediately caught and eaten by a giant invisible spice-laying spider down there. ...So, we've killed off Furgan and Doole, and Kyp and Exar Kun were dealt with before that. If you're keeping track, we're losing the most threatening villains first and now the only villains we have left for the last 100 pages of this trilogy are Daala (who's out of star destroyers to lose stupidly) and Tol Sivron (who has a Death Star, but ran from Wedge because Wedge auto-trumps Death Stars).
Speaking of Tol Sivron, he's up next. He's got the DSP and is coming up on Kessel. He notes that there's a lot of traffic in the area. This must be a Rebel base! Someone calls him on how he can be so sure:
Sivron shrugged. "We need to test this Death Star, right? We've got a handy target right here--so it might as well be a Rebel base."
I...I cannot find fault in this logic. His pilot sulks that the laser was never actually calibrated, and Sivron tells him he's dumb. It only needs to be accurate enough to hit a planet, after all... which is actually a good point. So they shoot, and manage to... miss.
They hit Kessel's moon instead, and Sivron shrugs and declares that good enough.
Okay, back to Mon Mothma, who's dying of poison. Poison nanomachines, in fact, which I think I forgot to mention before. Apparently feverish, she tells Leia that she's resigning, and so it's going to be up to Leia to lead the New Republic after this.
Then we cut over to Admiral Daala. Apparently the New Republic was very stingy with ships for General Antilles, so Wedge's two remaining corvettes and one larger ship are still somehow outgunned by Daala's one star destroyer, so they look around to see if there's any handy warships which neither of the previous military expeditions launched from the Maw Installation took. What do you know? There are. Five assault shuttles worth a squadron of starfighters apiece. Did neither Daala nor Tol Sivron really want them?
We finally find out why Threepio was here at all, though: the shuttles need a droid to be used (why?), so the reason he was brought along for no clear reason is because eventually they would find out that they needed him. It's that time-warp weapon! Or else KJA forgot to come up with a why again.
Then we skip back to Leia, who's chilling until Luke and Kyp drop by, and she takes a moment to remind the reader that Kyp has had a life at least as hard as Luke's. Turns out that they're here to finish "absolving" Kyp of his crimes; they want to borrow the Sun Crusher. Only to destroy it, they swear. That's why... Luke is asking his sister to give it back to Kyp so Kyp can do it, because giving a serial killer his weapon of choice back is never a bad idea.
We cut back to Kessel. The Millennium Falcon and a bunch of nameless Smuggler's Alliance ships scramble to take out the DSP, which has no support craft or weapons of any kind that aren't its misaligned superlaser. ...So it might take a while, but they're in no danger at all unless they fly directly in front of the superlaser. Meanwhile, Tol Sivron shuffles papers, makes memos, plans meetings, and submits things for review. Really. He's ready to try that superlaser-them-all plan, until his pilot suggests that they withdraw through the Maw and, when they're safe on the other side, discuss what to do next in committee. Sivron can't resist the allure of that.
As it flees, the Falcon latches on to a support beam, just like it did in... uh, well, Empire Strikes Back, again. They're going to ride out the trip, then go shoot the power core just like Lando did in Return of the Jedi. ...Not sure why that wasn't plan #1?
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| It's not like there's anything in the way |
And...wait a god damned minute. This is a prototype. Of Death Star 1. Which means that it still has an unshielded exhaust port, with one major difference: NO FUCKING TURBOLASERS OR TIE FIGHTERS CHASING YOU AROUND IT. Just park over top of it, and drop torpedoes until it goes boom you fucknuts!
Elsewhere, Kyp and Luke are in the Sun Crusher, riding it off to dump it in a black hole. Leia, somehow, has convinced the Council to let Kyp have the Sun Crusher back so he can destroy it. In a brief flashback, she tells Kyp that... she's staking her entire administration on this. If Kyp, say, goes back to doing what he had been doing, her leadership is going to last all of maybe a week before she gets impeached. She's just willing to risk this because everybody loves Kyp, I guess. To further cement how awesome Kyp is, Luke tells Kyp about his own experience in the Dagobah cave and how he failed, but Kyp succeeded.
Then they show up at Kessel, and note that the moon is missing. There's no moon--there's a space fleet! Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually, there is a fleet; it's Mara's Smuggler's Alliance. After getting a quick update on the situation (Han is stuck to the DSP by a giant magnet, and the DSP is in the black hole cluster known ast the Maw), Kyp and Luke decide to go after them. Into the Maw. Which is supposed to be scary. Even though it's been successfully navigated at least seven times so far this series, at a rough count, and never unsuccessfully attempted, including at least two trips by Kyp. So it's not much of a risk, really, but when they get into the research station at the heart of the Maw, they find... Admiral Daala versus Wedge!
Okay, that's enough of that "drama" nonsense.
It had taken some time to find an empty storeroom that could be converted into an appropriate conference chamber, and they had to forgo their hot beverages and morning pastries. But these were emergency times, Sivron admitted, and they had to make sacrifices in the name of the Empire.
"Thank you, Captain, for pointing out that loophole in our procedures," he said, flashing a pointy-toothed smile.
No joke, I love every single stupid thing about Sivron and his army of bureaucrats. They all decide to go back to the Maw Installation, and blow it up with the superlaser. Tol Sivron gets upset at how short the meeting was. We end the scene.
Briefly, we cut to a scene with Threepio helping fly those assault shuttles as part of what's supposed to be a humorous interlude, but it really isn't. Give me more Sivron if you actually want to be funny.
For some odd reason, the Sun Crusher lands on the Maw Installation so Wedge and Luke can talk face to face. Doing it over the radio would really be a more reasonable way to handle it if you ask me, since they don't need to physically exchange anything, or even just not coordinating things until Luke and Kyp have flown the Sun Crusher through the Daala's bridge, like we've known for two books the Sun Crusher can do. But eh. The main purpose is to let them know that the DSP is coming back, too! ...Just as soon as they form a committee to explore that as a working option, at any rate.
We briefly cut over to the Falcon. Han and Lando suit up to go plant demolitions on the super laser, since now that they're in the Maw, they'd rather not end up unable to escape because they don't know the route, but this way they can stop it shooting Chewie and Wedge with its superlaser while not stranding themselves. See, KJA? You can make up believable reasons if you try!
We cut to the interior of the DSP, with Sivron showing up at Daala's space battle and looking pissed at her for how she abandoned the installation in book one. He refuses to even try to hail her. This is the staunchest ally she has in the trilogy. Then he finds out about the Lando/Han sabotage mission and tries to look up the proper procedure in his book, before he gets frustrated and tells his stormtroopers to just do whatever the right thing is.
So they send out two troopers to have a brief knife-fight, but in the end our heroes manage to escape and set off one of their bombs anyway.
And it's over to Daala. She gets mad at Tol Sivron's lack of initiative and how he doesn't join the battle, and take a moment to remind us that although she should have the stronger force, on paper, the battle "isn't going well". Also, Wedge is back up to three corvettes. The actual number of corvettes he has tends to vary--two, and then one blows up and he has two, and then he has three... I'm hoping that I've missed a couple references there, and it's not a really lazy error.
Then we cut over to Kyp, who's... stolen the Sun Crusher.
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| So, uh, who's next in the line of succession after Leia? Ackbar? Wedge? Please say it's Wedge because it would be far less stupid than who eventually does become Chief of State later in the books. |
Someone should save themselves some trouble and just put a collar on the guy. Anyway, he's going to do something noble, namely, he's going to blow up the DSP with the Sun Crusher's anti-star weaponry. That seems like a bit of overkill, but... okaaay...
Back to Tol Sivron. As the sabotage bomb goes off, Tol Sivron makes a note to add a posthumous disciplinary note in the files of the poor stormtroopers who lost against Han, Lando, and Mara Jade. What a dick. The one bomb that they managed to plant didn't deal crippling damage, though; 20 minutes' work should get back the superlaser.
We cut to Luke's point of view as Daala's star destroyer cruises past the Maw Installation, low and fast on repeated passes to smash at it. She's so far completely wiped out the shields and the reactor that Wedge had to jury-rig is starting to fail and she's... she's... she's... downloading the weapons data off the main computer!? Daala finally used remote access overrides for something she would reasonably have had? Did someone replace Daala with an actually useful admiral this chapter? This is all reasonable! Just so we don't forget that this is Daala, though, she takes a moment to remind us that she was planning on obliterating the Rebels at first, instead of discovering she was doing nothing there and switching to this as a back-up.
The heroes manage to evacuate the Installation before it blows, but Daala uses the explosion to cover her exact route as she retreats. I... don't think we can call this a win for Daala, since she failed in her primary objective and had to run to save her life, but... she finally managed at least a draw against an armed enemy.
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| I think she's officially earned a conciliatory hug at this point. |
Cut to Tol Sivron's stormtroopers working to fix the DSP's reactor. They have inadequate radiation protection, so as one of them gets a lethal dose and dies on the spot, another tosses him aside and gets to work in his place.
The cold vacuum of space solidified the welds instantly. With a gurgling voice filled with fluid, the spacetrooper gasped into his helmet radio, "Mission accomplished."
Then the remaining troopers, with failing life-support systems and bodies already savaged by the fatal radiation, released their hold on the power core in unison. They drifted free, dropping toward the brilliant energy discharge like shooting stars.
Prose may have turned a bit purple by the last sentence, but that's some proper stone-cold villainy there. Pity it was only at the tail-end of the series, by someone who barely matters, and the only victims were nameless Imperial grunts... but not too bad. Not too bad at all.
We cut to Tol Sivron inside, who's upset that Daala destroyed the Maw Installation before he did. He suggests holding another meeting to discuss what to do now, and his stormtrooper commander yells at him, because, if they do that, Wedge's fleet will get away. So as a compromise they take a quick vote to shoot at them. The vote is a unanimous yes, because they all agree that this will look better on the report if it's a unified decision. I don't even know how I could exaggerate this scene if I tried, at this point.
Anyway, they take a pot-shot at Wedge, and knock out the abandoned corvette that he took apart to temporarily keep the Maw Installation together a few updates ago, since I guess they must've calibrated the laser offscreen at some point. They don't get off another shot before Kyp Durron pops by in the Sun Crusher. They tell him to surrender, but for some odd reason he shoots at them with a supernova torpedo instead.
Kyp blows up some of it, but discovers that the DSP isn't big enough for a chain reaction... since I guess now steel under no pressure at all qualifies as potential supernova substance. Oh, and now he's only got one torpedo left. Didn't he target the one actually pressurized/habitable bit where all the controls and people are (no)? How many did torpedoes have to start with? Why did we never discover that they weren't as infinite as lasers until just now? Could anyone make more, or was Kyp's idea of "let's blow up every star the Imperial warlords use" doomed to failure when he used up his probably six-ish shots and they still had a few thousand stars left? Anyway, everyone loves Kyp, so Han/Lando/Mara on the Falcon decide to help him out by flying at the DSP. I'd like to take a moment to break the narrative flow to remind you that this is also stupid and pointless, because the DSP has no hyperdrive and thus cannot possibly get away or even threaten anyone if it did, because it couldn't get anywhere.
So Kyp leads the DSP towards one of the black holes, and they try to shoot at a shuttle-sized ship and would have hit except for the black hole's gravity. ...It's that accurate now? Did they never take a chance in the last decade to calibrate it when it's this fast to align and it couldn't hit a planet the first time it was used? Whatever. Tol Sivron, who looked blankly at the controls and gave up a few chapters ago, kicks his stormtrooper leader off the helm and takes over himself now, just to minimize the risk for Kyp.
We cut over to Han, who's screaming uselessly for Kyp to come back and stop doing something so dangerous. The DSP fires again and... clips the Sun Crusher? That's what we're going with? Okay, whatever. The Sun Crusher is winged and apparently damaged, but we don't get more than an offhanded "looks like that" before the Sun Crusher and the DSP are pulled in too close to the gravity well and both destroyed. Han immediately begins mourning Kyp, but Mara Jade notices that the Sun Crusher launched a message cylinder and so she goes to pick it up and Han morosely says that now at least he'll be able to hear Kyp's last words.
Han has a flashback to how Kyp tossed out other message cylinders whenever he used the Sun Crusher, explaining what he had done and why... a flashback to something that was never shown in the book and could have helped to explain how Han found him by aiming his ship roughly at a third of the galaxy and landing next to him. We're not done with the Kyp Durron show, though!
Han could not question Kyp's sacrifice, though. Kyp had eliminated both the Death Star prototype and the Sun Crusher. He had bought the galaxy's freedom from terror at the cost of his life... one life for potentially billions.
That made sense, didn't it?
Didn't it?
Actually, considering all the stars Kyp blew up, I'd say it's more like billions of lives for potentially billions more, but I digress.
Anyway, they crack open the message cylinder, and it's not a message from Kyp Durron; it's Kyp himself. Yay?
Forget that plotline; we're actually done with Kyp now. Remember Cilghal? The Mon Calamari Jedi? Well, she's on Yavin IV still. And apparently Ackbar decided to give up on being retired, since he's here, too, and an admiral again. He's asking her to heal Mon Mothma's terminal case of Poison Nanomachines. Cilghal moans about how she can't, then decides that she might as well give it a go, and, bam, they're on Coruscant in the next sentence.
So she sits down next to Mon Mothma, wonders how to grab something as small as a virus with the Force, tells her self Size matters not, and starts yanking them all around. Individually.
Since that's going to take a bit, we cut to people watching the "operation", including Leia, Han, Qwi Xux, and Wedge. Wedge is in a nurse's outfit since the hospital said that they needed a bit of help, and, well, Wedge was handy. Time passes. An unknown time greater than nine hours later, Cilghal is done and hands the nanomachines to a random guard to be burnt, and announces that Mon Mothma will be okay now. ...This really should've been timed to have some level of distraction to raise tension, or at least some still-dangerous villain at large for the same reason, but KJA left it until the end, like an afterthought. Which this whole plotline really was. The sum and totality of its relevance is "Mon Mothma gives supreme power to Leia and then retires". It didn't even seem to give Leia much more workload, since she's just as capable of dropping everything and running across the galaxy afterwards as she was before.
And we cut to Admiral Daala. Her last star destroyer is more-or-less a wreck, since her grand plan for an escape last time involved flying into an exploding asteroid (I told you this would come up more), and her second-in-command tells her that they only have seven TIES left. Daala fails to recall how many she's supposed to have:
"Seven!" she cried. "Out of--" She gritted her teeth and shook her head so that her hair whirled like an inferno around her face. She drew a short, controlled breath and nodded. "Yes. Continue."
And then the chapter ends with the most hilarious summation of Daala's capabilities in any canon work:
The Star Destroyer Gorgon sailed on toward the Core Systems. Through persistence she could become victorious. One day.
And with that, we're really in wrapping-up territory; Lando keeps flirting with Mara to try to get her to sleep with him while they're working on his Kessel endeavour together, and she sighs in annoyance about how he never gives up.
A brief stop with Leia and Mon Mothma confirms that Leia's staying in charge.
Another drops us on flute-gargoyle-Ackbar-crash world, and their new cathedral-flute is played and it's all very meaningful.
...And then we cut over to Chewbacca and Threepio, trying to find Leia's kids. Who wandered off and got lost in that cathedral because no one was watching them. Again. Days after they managed to almost get eaten by an ogre for slipping away, only to be saved by feral accountants. I guess it's supposed to be funny, because it ends with Threepio lost as well instead of anyone finding the kids.
Ackbar is here, too, to show that the locals have no grudge against the guy who plowed a B-Wing into their biggest cultural landmark and killed hundreds of them (never forget). We also briefly see the blob race bit characters, showing up now... because they were in the trilogy before, I guess. No reason for them to be here.
Also, Wedge kisses Qwi.
Then we cut over to Luke, who says that his generally useless and nameless Jedi students qualify as Jedi Knights now, and discover how completely stupid Luke's plan for dealing with Dark Siders is:
There would be other students, new trainees who would come to his Jedi Academy. Luke had to face the fact that he might lose a few to the dark side--but the more defenders of the Force he could train, the stronger would be the legions of the light side.
And then the sun rises. It's symbolic!
So... what went wrong with this trilogy? Quite a bit. It feels like KJA lost half his outline and just sort of guessed. He made Kyp Durron. All sorts of things are introduced and then almost immediately forgotten about. Remember that Jedi-detector built into Artoo? It was used as part of a completely pointless subplot in book 1, and then never came up again. Ludicrous superweapons. The whole "Jedi Academy" that the series is supposed to be about and is named after takes up maybe one-quarter of the series, and probably less. Kyp Durron is around. Leia (throughout the series) and Luke (mostly in the last half) act like complete idiots. Han is going through a mid-life crisis and adopts Kyp Durron instead of buying a sports car or dying his hair. Other popular characters, like Wedge or Chewbacca, are given ridiculous, menial tasks through most of the series. Awful romance. Mood whiplash, and not in a good way. Poor pacing. Kyp Durron. The villains have awful, awful plans:
- Daala: What do I need to suicide run into to win?
- Moruth Doole: How can I hide from everything?
- Ambassador Furgan: Hey, let's antagonize the invincible, star-destroying superweapon
- Tol Sivron: Send me a memo and we'll discuss it on Friday
- Exar Kun: I'm dead and bored. Let's screw with Luke and the Jedi! (Okay, this one's pretty awesome.)
What went right? This is shorter. Some characters had good lines. Exar Kun is always fun. It... could be used to justify what eventually happened to the Solo kids in other works? Okay, I'm reaching. This just isn't very good.
But what sort of effect does this novel have in later works? Well first we'll have to get through Children of the Jedi which I am decidedly not looking forward to, and then we get back to Daala in Darksaber, and no, she didn't learn anything from this experience!
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