The End: Meaningless Reviews in a Galaxy Even Further Away
In the years before cinematic universes, billion dollar box offices, and the complete and utter takeover of nerd culture, the story of Star Wars was continued past the events of the movies primarily through a bunch of dog eared paperback novels of varying quality. This is a review of one of those novels, the last in a series of nineteen(!), detailing the further adventures of Han, Leia, Luke twenty-five years after the events of A New Hope. For the full rationale behind this series, click here. All other installments can be found here.
In this installment, we’ve got space Armageddon, forced cameos, and some real winking dialogue….
So it’s come to this, a little less than a year after I started these reviews and after several long breaks. Number nineteen in the series, the closing act of The New Jedi Order is James Luceno’s The Unifying Force, published in late 2003.
The Unifying Force was the culmination of a story six years in the making. This was an endeavor that entailed so many disparate pieces of lore and involved so many authors (and was directed towards fans that were so obnoxious that they would send death threats about things they didn’t like) that it became essential for one of the authors at Skywalker Ranch to compile a digest of characters, events, and places for the sake of continuity. This digest swelled to well over 500 pages over the course of the series, which is longer than all but two of the novels it described.
The author who was stuck with this largely thankless task was James Luceno, who had written the Agents of Chaos duology near the beginning of the series. I am a big dumb nerd and so I read all the acknowledgements throughout the series, and nearly every one of the authors shouted out Luceno’s digest. This leads me to two conclusions: Either all of the authors really used and enjoyed the digest as a valuable resource or they all hated having to use it and resented the corporate structure imposed upon them, which happily is a problem that no longer affects Lucasfilm since being acquired by Disney, right?
Anyways, Luceno’s work on the digest gave him a much fuller perspective than most of the people on the project, and so when it came time to write the final book, Luceno was approached and ask to tie the whole thing together on the theory that this perspective was invaluable when you’re trying to tie the whole thing together.
This produced mixed results.
I created a Twitter account specifically for this review series, which I made to force myself to write more concise descriptions of the novels. This is the last transmission from the account, describing the last book. Let us now bask in the last transmission, which I believe is suitably sober, mature, and clearheaded in its description:
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Important Characters: It’s the last of these reviews, so I’m not going to include the links to the star wars wiki, or spend too much time describing any of these characters. Go back to the beginning of the reviews if you want more information. Get off my lawn.
It’s the last story, so everyone’s in this, obviously. Here are the characters that matter:
The Jedi:
Luke Skywalker
Jacen Solo: Not the worst anymore, but now annoyingly woke.
Jaina Solo — In this installment, Jaina goes from being one of the most capable of all the characters to one of the least, and in the manner of Leia and Padme (at the time this was written, the only major cinematic female characters in the entire galaxy) conveniently loses all of her badass traits when it’s time for Luceno to raise the stakes. Like Danni in an earlier installment, the female characters lose their power and become damsels when it’s deemed useful to the plot.
The Yuuzhan Vong
Supreme Overlord Shimrra: The dude with the eyes like mood rings on the cover up there.
Onimi: Shimrra’s pet/jester.
Nom Anor: My favorite character has come a long way in the series, starting out as an agent of chaos and then morphing into a hapless bureaucrat, before becoming an exile and eventually the shit stirring leader of the underclass known as “The Prophet,” and finally back to the Supreme Overlord’s Court with an act of Sabotage against the living planet Zonama Sekot. Anor in this one is caught between his allegiances. It’s good stuff.
Nas Choka: The relatively new Warmaster of the Yuuzhan Vong, Nas Choka displays less of the fanaticism of his predecessor, whose main tactical goal appeared to be “Kill Jacen Solo,” admittedly a very understandable strategy, as Jacen is a twerp.
The Galactic Alliance
Traest Kre’fey: The genocidal admiral of the Galactic Alliance, who, without irony, states about the Yuuzhan Vong, “There is no more dangerous species than one who views killing as cleansing.”
Living Planets:
Zonama Sekot: It’s the only living planet in the galaxy. Very neat.
Those are the characters that matter, but in the manner of all science fiction and fantasy sagas, most of the characters that saw the most growth or had the best character arcs are shorted as a result of needing to tie up the big threads. In that spirit, here are the best minor characters that totally get shafted by the demands of the plot:
Kyp Durron: All-Galaxy shithead for the first eleven novels of the series, Kyp becomes a full on adult and a valuable ally of Luke’s later on before dropping out of the narrative almost entirely. I guess he’s a Jedi Master now? And he’s a close but boring ally of Luke’s?
Corran Horn: The Jedi who got scapegoated for the early military disasters of The New Republic, Corran went into exile and returned…exactly the same as before? He’s in this thing, but as a completely expressionless creature.
Jag Fel: Jaina’s boyfriend gets all of two scenes in this, and it’s him just being all emo about Jaina. Boooooo. Boooooo, I say.
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Developments:
- I am reasonably certain that every book in the entire series featured, at some point, (i) Han Solo in a grungy bar, or (ii) Han Solo at a grungy spaceport. This book is no exception — we’re treated, once again, to Han arriving just before the shit goes down. The writers of the series specifically wanted to flesh out Han’s character, and to some extent they did, especially in the early going. But I also get the feeling that part of “Flesh out his character” meant “Have him act out his first scene in A New Hope, over and over again.”
- Someone calls The Millennium Falcon “A storyboard for the whole war.” Hmmm, a storyboard for the war, you say? Like some kind of…compendium, maybe? Some kind of roadmap that shows where the story went? Hmmm, very interesting, James. Remember, War is Hell, and so is writing compendiums.
- Luceno spends some time playing around with overt Arthurian imagery, casting a ghostly Vergere as the Lady of the Lake and waving a lightsaber around, and positioning Anakin Solo’s lightsaber as Excalibur, only instead of being a sword in the stone, Anakin’s lightsaber is merely pushed into the trunk of a really, really big tree, which is kind of stupid because the blade will cut through wood if it’s turned on, so it just really doesn’t seem as difficult as removing a sword from a stone.
- Shimrra’s surname is “Jamaane” which makes me think of Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords every time I read it. He’s supposed to be a massive, terrifying presence, and yet all I could think of was the Supreme Overlord singing about business time.
- Speaking of Shimrra, things are going poorly for him in the middle part of this one. He’s facing a revolt from the underclass, a living planet that may hold the key to defeating his armadas has jumped into Coruscant’s orbit, and the Galactic Alliance is closing in. In the face of all this adversity, Shimrra demonstrates one of the classic rules of being mad online. He starts laughing. He’s not mad, you see, he finds all of this funny.
- SPOILER ALERT: Shimrra’s court jester, the deformed Onimi, actually has Force powers. He got them by grafting Yammosk cells (the war brains of the Yuuzhan Vong) to his brains. If you’re keeping track, this means that Brains + Telepathic Brains = Force powers(?). I’ll concede it’s kind of dumb, but then again, the apparent way the Jedi get their force powers is magic space bacteria + physical body = force powers, so maybe it isn’t that dumb.
- Luceno has a really fun time in this one calling back to A New Hope. The Yuuzhan Vong refer explicitly to Zonama Sekot as a “Death Star,” and someone on the Galactic Alliance re-uses the “That’s no moon” line from that movie to describe it in orbit around Coruscant. Is this annoying? Kind of, yes.
- Everyone’s favorite space badass who secretly kind of sucks is in this thing. Last time we saw him, Boba Fett was getting owned by a feeble-ass Han Solo and swallowed by a gigantic venus flytrap looking thing:
Well, turns out he survived that encounter, and to make up for this embarrassing episode, the writers of the Expanded Universe spent the next twenty years writing increasingly ludicrous parts for Boba to ensure no one ever questioned his bona fides ever again. In this one, Fett and his merry band of Mandalorians show up on a space station and lay absolute waste to the Yuuzhan Vong. Fett’s taking literal scalps in this thing. It’s admittedly metal as hell.
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Cliches in a Galaxy far, far away:
This is a Luceno Joint, so you better believe there’s some repurposed idioms in this thing.
In fact, he wastes no time in rolling out the first one, It isn’t over until the Hutt Squeals, a perfectly charmless update of the already charmless It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
At some point in this thing someone uses the swear Son of a Blaster, which is painfully stupid. Son of a gun is already one of our worst idioms, and Luceno made it worse.
Luceno also manages to work the phrase We’re not so different, you and I into the work. This isn’t a repurposed idiom so much as an outright cliche, and normally I would allow it to pass unremarked, but most cliches don’t get their own youtube compilation of people using the line, so:
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The Jar Jar Binks Award for worst new addition to the galaxy:
Look, just because it’s the apocalyptic final confrontation between the forces of good and evil as foretold long ago and everyone is really busy doesn’t mean that there isn’t still time for some dumb bullshit. There’s always time for some dumb bullshit — it’s the expanded universe, baby!
In this one we have a Yuuzhan Vong creature called a Lumpen, which allows the Aliens to keep records of people’s credentials, sort of like having an ID badge that you scan in order to open the door at work. Unlike your ID card, the Lumpen stores your identity inside its digestive track until someone squeezes on it hard enough for it to poop out your credentials in their hand, which they then have to sift through to certify that you are who you claim to be.
I’m not kidding, there’s literally a scene where one of the Yuuzhan Vong guards squeezes all of the poop out of this thing in anger. I just…I’m just so happy that they took the time to throw that in there. It’s comforting to know that the writers were so dedicated to their task.
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Death Star Watch:
If it’s Star Wars, planets must be destroyed. I’m sorry, those are the rules
Zonama Sekot jumps from hyperspace into the orbit of Yuuzhan Vong occupied Coruscant, causing one of the moons of the planet to slingshot out of orbit, which isn’t technically a destruction of the planet, but no one cares what you think anyways.
Death Star Watch for The Unifying Force: .5
Death Star Watch for The New Jedi Order: 8.5
This translates to a little bit less than one planet destroyed every other book over the course of the series, which sounds pretty impressive until you realize that Force Awakens destroyed like six of the fuckers in one go.
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Special End of Series Bonus Material!
Here are the best five books in the series, from highest amount of enjoyment to lowest:
- Traitor
- Edge of Victory I: Conquest
- Destiny’s Way
- Star By Star
- Balance Point
And here are the bottom five, the ones I would not wish on anyone, ranked from least bad to worst:
15. Dark Tide I: Onslaught
16. Force Heretic III: Reunion
17. Vector Prime
[300 spots after Vector Prime]
318. Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream
[An additional 300 spots after Rebel Dream]
619. Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand (This is the one with knee blades)
The other nine books fall somewhere in between those two ends, and I would also mention that the last two books I listed here are secretly great if you’re in a bad mood and want to read some garbage, in the classic manner of comfort food.
Here are the five best scenes from the series, in descending order:
5. Droma reads Han Solo’s fortune: In the back half of Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial, there is a brief pause in the action, and there is a delightful scene where Han’s friend Droma reads his fortune in what passes as the cards for poker in the universe (think a combination of Tarot and normal playing cards). It’s spooky and rather bleak without being heavy handed, and I’m kind of a sucker for scenes in books with Tarot readings — Shout out to Moonglow and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — in the first place.
4. Anakin Solo’s epiphany on Yavin 4: Occurring towards the end of Edge of Victory I, The young Solo is working on rebuilding his lightsaber in darkness when he has a feeling about the true nature of the Force. It’s extremely well written and described in such a way that it would have made a triumphant scene in a movie, had Lucasfilm decided to adapt the series instead of jettisoning it of the airlock.
3. The battle of Ebaq 9: The entire plot of Destiny’s Way revolves around Admiral Ackbar’s cunning trap, and the resultant space battle was well worth the buildup.
2. Anakin Solo’s last stand: Exactly halfway through Star by Star, the middle book in the series, the young Solo, to that point the only person who had any idea of what they were doing in the war, is brought down, but not before literally going nova. It’s tragic and stunning and still rousing. Nice work, but still not the best scene, or even the best last stand.
- Ganner Rhysode’s last stand: The prettyboy saves Jacen Solo’s life in Traitor by defending a portion of what is left of the old Galactic Senate Building. It is:
A. Bigger in scale than Anakin’s
B. Somehow triumphant even in failure
C. So good that it makes me want to run through a goddamn brick wall (all apologies to Drew Magary).
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Final Thoughts: It’s been a fun time! Give this one a read through if you really want the details of how it all turns out! The space battle is quite good in this one.
This was Meaningless Reviews in a Galaxy Even Further Away, in which I read through the entirety of The New Jedi Order and wrote about it.
