Heresy Sandwich: Meaningless Reviews in a Galaxy even Further Away
Before the prequels, before Jar Jar, long before Rey and Kylo Ren, George Lucas kept the nerds satisfied by keeping the story of Luke and Leia and Han going in the pages of books and comics, all of which was negated when Disney purchased the franchise in 2012. This is a meaningless review of one of these stories, itself part of a larger run comprised of nineteen novels. For a full explanation of this review and series, click here. All previous installments can be found here.
In this installment, our heroes do a lot of running around…
We’re almost done. Number eighteen, the second to last in the entire series, Greg Keyes makes his third entry in the series with The Final Prophecy, published in the fall of 2003.
One of the unwritten rules of the expanded universe was that the writers were obligated to mention some scenery, person, or event from the movies at least once. At least I think it was unwritten, although I wouldn’t be shocked if it was in fact inscribed above the doors of the big conference rooms at Skywalker Ranch and was in fact the central religious tenet of Lucas’s merchandising cult. Ostensibly, this was meant to tie the universe together, to thread the continuity between the types of media. That makes sense, right?
What it actually does to the story is to make the universe smaller. The movies were, and still are, primarily the story of the Skywalker family. That means that all the events of the movies relate in some way (usually directly) to the Skywalkers.
To reference the events of the movies makes a certain amount of sense if the characters doing the referencing are directly related to the Skywalkers. The issue is when the events mentioned are references by characters that have almost nothing to do with the family, or when plot points from the movies are referenced or redone in such a way that it sucks secondary characters into the dipshit mythos of the Skywalker clan.
The result of all of this is that seemingly every single person in the galaxy, regardless of their station, age, or location is aware of the smallest details of the family Skywalker, and may in fact be related to them in increasingly bizarre ways.
Additionally, and as a corollary, all the characters that appeared on screen, regardless of their actual screen time, were given elaborate, important, and often unintentionally hilarious backstories. Instead of expanding the universe, it makes it seem smaller, because now instead of a galaxy full of hundreds of thousands of planets and trillions and trillions of people, it turns out that every asshole that graced the screen for a second was secretly one of the major players in the universe.
All of this was destroyed, of course, when Disney bought the rights and nuked the Expanded Universe. It’s the thing I miss the least.
In this installment, that tendency plays out as Tahiri makes a pilgrimage to (where else do Jedi go when they’re feeling blue) Degobah, and Jaina somehow manages to bring up Luke’s love of bombing helpless womprats as a boy. It’s annoying.
Tweet length plot breakdown:
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Important Characters: As always, asterisks denote characters I’ve discussed before. I didn’t include the links to the Star Wars wiki this time, sue me.
The Galactic Alliance
Wedge Antilles*
Gilad Pellaeon*
Han & Leia Solo*
The Jedi
Jaina Solo*
Tahiri Veila*
Corran Horn*
The Yuuzhan Vong
Nen Yim:* The heretical shaper in charge of saving the Yuuzhan Vong from the innovations of their enemies, Nen Yim’s finally making some progress in this one.
Harrar:* The mysterious priest that has shown up several times. At this point, it’s unclear what Harrar believes in or who he represents exactly.
Nom Anor:* Still working his folk hero schtick as the prophet Yu’Shaa, and pretty successfully, too — he’s now pretty much the leader of the entire Yuuzhan Vong underclasses.
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Developments:
In book time, the war has been going on for four years, which means that by this point, all the characters have been thoroughly calloused, displaying the terse, squinting, robotic execution of duty that comes across from accounts of army vets in WW2. Everyone’s a hardass, basically. Wedge allows an entire part of his battle group to die, or at least doesn’t fly to their rescue, because they didn’t follow his orders. It’s notably grimy, in a series that has been very, very grimy thus far, as indicated by the gross color palette used in the cover.
It’s also kind of a twist — The good guys in this universe never, ever, ever fail to fly to their comrades’ defense.
The prophecy, presumably the final one, is actually delivered in the very beginning of the book, and it comes from Nom Anor, who’s totally cobbling together rumors in order to prop up his base, which is flagging.
[Puts on dipshit pundit hat, hunches over computer like Gollum]
“Nom Anor is clearly Donald trump here — unless he’s Steve Bannon — unless, no wait, let me think, Nom Anor is Paul Ryan!”
[Smirks in a self-satisfied manner]
Supreme Overlord Shimrra refers to Nom Anor as “The most unworthy and perverse of all my servants,” which is a categorization I sometimes think housecats would use to describe us.
Earlier in the series, Jacen had made a crack about how the Yuuzhan Vong were losing so many warriors that it was going to eliminate aggressiveness from the gene pool, a sort of victory by natural selection.
It seemed like a throwaway line at the time. In this one though, the aliens finally start to show some tactics beyond “Throw a wall of bodies at the problem,” so I guess it wasn’t. They’ve also added some new technology, including special creatures that devour the transceivers that make the communication between planets possible, essentially isolating the New Republic worlds and fleets from each other.
By this point in the series, we’ve seen several kinds of heresy manifest and take shape amongst the Yuuzhan Vong. There is the heresy expressed by Nom Anor and his ragtag group of misfit Yuuzhan Vong in which the Jedi are revered as the true gods of the alien race.
There is also the heresy of Nen Yim and her late master Mezhan Kwaad, which is the understanding that the knowledge of the Yuuzhan Vong is not perfect and is in fact full of holes.
In this one, we are gifted with yet another form of heresy. It turns out (and it was mentioned briefly in one of the books way earlier in the series) that there was a coup of sorts that installed Shimrra as the Supreme Overlord and set the Yuuzhan Vong on a path of invasion. Well, followers of the old Supreme Overlord still exist, and one of them is apparently Harrar.
All three of these heresies finally link up in this one, and the three Yuuzhan Vong tag along with Tahiri and Corran Horn on a mission to the living planet Zonama Sekot. You can think of the Jedi as the bread of the sandwich, and then the various heresies as meat — or tofu, if that’s your thing — and veggies, and maybe some kind of spread, you probably don’t want a dry sandwich.
Things between Tahiri and Nen Yim are pretty awkward on the trip , as Nen Yim was responsible for torturing Tahiri and reshaping her earlier in the series.
Elsewhere, the imperial forces under Pellaeon are now working in the larger command structure of the Galactic Alliance, but unfortunately, they are unable to communicate with the other fleets. Han is chosen to be a courier between the battle groups and finds himself a huge fan amongst one of the imperial officers. In fact, this gentleman is so smitten that he bails from command of his capital ship (one of the big ones) to personally escort Han around, which is very cute.
Nom Anor, who has been working in exile and against Shimrra for three books, mobilizing much of the underclasses in the process, says, basically, fuck it, and manages to sabotage the living world Zonama Sekot, for which his reputation is restored and he is rewarded with a promotion in Shimrra’s court. He finally made it!
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Cliches in a Galaxy far, far away:
Killing two birds with one stone becomes killing three targets with a single thud bug, which is weird, because they definitely have birds in this universe. Hell, you could have subbed in the name of a totally made up, fake ass animal and it would’ve been better.
The obscure If wishes were fishes we’d all swim in riches is mangled into if a wish was a dha’eh, the Maw Luur would be choked. So uh, maybe you shouldn’t just sub in a totally made up, fake ass animal name into your idioms after all.
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The Jar Jar Binks award for the worst addition to the galaxy: For clear lapses in George’s judgement
The ship the Jedi and the heretics are traveling on is a Sekotan ship, which means that it was grown, not built, which is similar to the Yuuzhan Vong process, minus all the weird pain worshipping stuff and miniaturized black holes.
Unfortunately, the ship looks like this:
[squints]
Did Kirby swallow a Cessna?
I have another entry in this category this week. Admittedly, this has nothing to do with the Final Prophecy, but I cannot, and will not, remain silent.
Entertainment Weekly released some teaser photos of some of the new creatures in The Last Jedi, which will be released in December. Apparently nothing was learned from the Ikrit thing, and so one of them looks like this:
I’ll grant that it’s cute. It better not have a single goddamn line of dialogue.
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Recommendation: So here we are, at the end stages. Most of the Galactic Alliance’s advantages are nullified in this one, meaning the last battle is gonna be a fair fight, more or less, which is pretty standard stuff for a series like this.
Read it.
This has been Meaningless Reviews in a Galaxy Even Further away, in which I read through the entirety of The New Jedi Order and write about it.
