#and go down is good for rae battle of jakku end of empire angst

[gallirae]

for a really dark gallirae mood today’s suggestion is “the elf knight” by steeleye span

[lazybarbarians]

Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End by Chuck Wendig

Ragnell: So over the past two weeks we finished up the Aftermath trilogy with Empire’s End and now we are totally up to date on the state of the Star Wars universe one-year post-RotJ as pertains to everyone but Luke Skywalker.

And Ezra Bridger, and Kanan Jarrus, and Ahsoka Tano or really any of the animated-verse Jedi or Sith and any of the EU Jedi or Sith like Mara Jade who still might exist in some way.

But for the soldiers and scoundrels and surviving Imperials we have a status quo for about 29 years. We also know what happens to the core characters from the first Aftermath book which is honestly (and impressively, considering how little patience I have for original SW characters) what we read this thing for anyway. (As usual, I pretty much spoil everything in this recap below.)

So we open with several threads going on. Gallius Rax is flashing back to his Tuesdays with Palpatine excerpts, and gathering the pathetic remnants of the Imperial Navy on Jakku. Because Palpatine had a big secret project there, of which Gallius was an integral part. So integral that Palpatine appoints Gallius Rax as The Contingency which we can immediately tell will be a great pain in the ass to the whole galaxy.

Norra and Company are hunting down Mercurial Swift, so they can track down Rae Sloane. Temmin is annoyed he’s always stuck on getaway driver duty. The bounties on Jas from her old bosses are mounting. Sinjir is still having his career regrets, which are worsened by the fact that without Luke Skywalker around to point out sensible things like “I don’t think that’s good for the soul”, Sinjir basically still has to do the same job only for Norra. And Norra has entered Terminator Revenge mode, which is basically what has her asking Sinjir to do the same job and limiting Temmin to getaway driver duty. This is generally what everyone has to work past the entire story. They find out Rae Sloane is on Jakku and follow.

Surprise surprise, the pathetic in comparison to its former glory but still a really really lot of ships remnants of the Imperial Navy are there. This leads the good guys to split up, with Norra and Jas taking an escape pod to the surface because Norra’s in revenge mode (followed by Mr. Bones because Temmin is worried about his mother) and Temmin and Sinjir to go back to Chandrila to get embroiled in the political plot.

Kalinara: I actually thought Norra in revenge mode was one of the weaker parts of the story, unfortunately. It’s understandable that she’d be conflicted and angry, but there were points where she just seemed cartoonishly irrational. Norra was my favorite in the previous books, but I wasn’t as big a fan of her here.

R: Mon Mothma is facing a election challenge from the appropriately named Senator Wartol, a hardline warhawk who accuses her of weakness that led to the Liberation Day attack last book. Long story short, her challenger is a corrupt asshole who has criminal ties and uses them to rig a vote to actually PREVENT attacking Jakku so that he can say he voted for it but she’s a shit Chancellor for not even being able to put this together. Sinjir teams up with the Organa-Solo family and his ex-boyfriend Conder to resolve this. He does so well that Mon Mothma offers him a job as her aide, which resolves his career path crisis, enables him to skip the Jakku attack and settle down happily with Conder.

K:: How’s that for one of the first, explicitly gay characters in Star Wars? He and his boyfriend both get to live, AND get a happy ending to boot!

R: Temmin spends his time pestering Wedge Antilles to put him on a ship and send him to Jakku. Wedge, after last book’s mini-rebellion, isn’t even allowed to go himself and is stuck being an expeditor in the hangers. After several guilt-trips, Wedge finally relents and puts together the same group of outcasts from last book to sneak, unauthorized, into the battle and lets the 16 year old join them because Wedge Antilles has spent way too much time with Luke, Leia, and Han over the last 5 years.

Temmin’s been wanting to go back to Jakku, of course, because that’s where his mother, his droid and his.. Jas have been. Both Jas and Norra got captured by Niima the Hutt, who is horrible even as Hutts go. Norra was on some work-detail where Mr Bones the droid broke her out. Jas got to pull ever-increasing acts of badassery to avoid being taken in for her bounty, steal Swift’s ship AND steal Swift’s crew.

Also in Niima’s area, Rae Sloane and Brentin Wexley, who convince her to lead them to the Imperial Secret Squirrel place where they are promptly captured and forced to witness a ridiculous speech by Gallius Rax. Sloane undergoes some of her own career angst while Brentin actually manages to get them both free. They proceed to try to fuck up Gallius Rax’s mysterious plan, and go into the Imperial Secret Squirrel place.

While in there, Norra catches up to them and they all find out that due to an overly emphatic chess metaphor Gallius Rax has activated a weapon in the core of Jakku that will destroy the whole planet and both fleets. He’s also sent the Huxes off with a bunch of children to outside the Galaxy to meet other ships with imperials and children, and the Eclipse, so that Palpatine can continue to vex the Galaxy from beyond the grave. On the bright side he kills Tashu, who was actually such a dick I was hoping they’d save him for the Jedi to kill in a later story.

Norra, Brentin, and Rae have a great deal of emotional interaction about trust and distrust, and a rather kickass three-against-one fight with Gallius in between trying to shut down the weapon. Brentin gets through all the defenses but stops to save Norra and gets killed. Rae actually turns down the weapon while Norra, feeling that her trust of Sloane was justified, drags her husband’s body out for burial. Rae then boards a ship with the Huxes and a bunch of feral brainwashed proto-Stormtroopers for the Eclipse, because she is not actually finished being evil yet.

K:: I was surprised by how much I liked Brentin, in particular, in this book. He was more plot point than character last time (even if he was a helpful juxtaposition against all those “no, Kylo is BRAINWASHED!” justifications), but here, we got to see more of who he is as a man. I was rather disappointed they killed him off. I might have liked the novelty of Norra and Brentin going through an amiable divorce.

Sloane was pretty great too. And for all of my complaints about Norra previously, she and Sloane had such a great dynamic once they finally met up. And I’m thrilled at the idea that we might see her again.

R: Wartol is arrested because he tries to kill Mon Mothma, but really only manages to destroy her office and kill the advisor who hadn’t been fleshed out until this book so we could feel bad about her. Mas Amedda manages to escape Coruscant and sign a surrender treaty. Leia attends the signing, during labor (because kid, you are gonna have to wait until galactic peace gawddammit) and thus manages to freak out her husband, attain galactic peace AND have a baby. Nothing in this book manages to excuse Kylo Ren’s horrible horrible crimes, and in fact knowing what’s coming you kind of cringe at one scene. Wedge Antilles and the Wexleys all go to the new pilot academy. Jas sets up shop with the crew she stole from Swift, and grieves Jom who went to Jakku to find her and was killed in the battle. Sinjir settles down with his new career and Conder.

K: Seriously. I didn’t see anything that remotely indicated any “mind control from birth” or whatever nonsense. It isn’t even clear that Snoke EXISTS at this point in time. Any passage that could even be remotely stretched to mean some kind of fetus communication actually has a clear explanation in the text itself.

R: Actually, every character that we might have speculated would BE Snoke was specifically killed off

For the rest of the Galaxy, Chewbacca finds his son. Lando Calrissian regains his rightful place as Baron Administrator of Cloud City (which I believe is a 4-point Freehold if you’re tracking SW characters with White Wolf rules). Jar Jar Binks makes a friend and lives out the rest of his days entertaining orphans and avoiding politics. Coruscant ends up run by Mas Amedda anyway, but technically part of the New Republic. The Sith-worshipping Acolyte group from the Interludes was revealed to be sponsored by Tashu and dedicates itself to causing shit across the Galaxy and will almost certainly factor into the Jedi storyline. A charismatic leader, Brin, forms the Church of the Force which we already know factors into the Jedi storyline. It’s revealed that there are facilities known as Observatories, set up by Palpatine, that have been receiving data from outside the known galaxy all over the galaxy and not just on Jakku and that’s probably going to come into play somewhere too. The crazy pirate who found a Super Star Destroyer Dreadnought last book has cobbled together a functioning society of pirates around the ship. The residents of Tattooine have decided to just raise their own damned Hutt, Borgo, from childhood so they can have one who’s more compassionate than Jabba was. Luke is stated to be looking for old Jedi stuff.

That was a long recap, but one of the most tantalizing aspects of this trilogy is finding out just what the status quo in the Galaxy was after they finally wiped the bloated corpse of the Empire’s bureaucracy off of the map and got their new government underway. In general, it’s pretty satisfying. You follow your six Republic heroes, with some of the named characters from the movies as supporting cast, and your two main Imperials and their support, and get kind of a view of the rest of the universe. In a couple of places, these interludes tie into the main climax but others are just epilogues for the locations in the movies or tantalizing threads for when we find out what Luke has been up to.

K: I admit, that’s what I’m waiting for most. This was a fun side trek, but where is my favorite character, damnit?

R: I’m hoping we get another trilogy explaining this after The Last Jedi premieres. Or it’s the focus of the next animated series. Ezra seems custom-made to work as a foil for Luke, and Ahsoka was written out in a way that places her in safe-keeping until after RotJ.

One thing I found myself thinking from this last book, though, is that I feel better about The Force Awakens. I know a few OT fans who were very upset about everything Luke and Leia lost in the prelude to that movie and during it. I know a couple I saw who commented that they didn’t think Luke’s actions in RotJ were even that big an effect, since the Death Star was destroyed anyway. The view of the galaxy as seen in this trilogy, PARTICULARLY Jakku as compared to what we saw in the movie, changes that. You get the impression that even though there are still darksiders active, that a remnant of the Empire has left to regroup, that there’s still corruption and pirates and bullies and innocent people languishing in extreme poverty and hardship… that there’s still been a lasting improvement directly attributable to the actions of the heroes in the movies and the heroes in these books. Jakku at Rey’s time is actually a less horrible place than seen in this book. Many of the locations from the movies show people taking action and spreading hope. The remains of the Empire are the Emperor’s last middle finger to the Galaxy, and even after thirty years of gaining strength are still not the relentless, overwhelming presence in everyone’s life they were in Rogue One. The Galaxy was not instantly fixed, and much of the progress was wiped away, but there’s still a lot to hold onto. They came a long way between RotJ and TFA.

There’s really only one disappointment about this book. Tashu’s death. I joked above, but in the first book of this trilogy his main role is torturing a captive Wedge Antilles. The fallout from this is more realistic than you usually see in action-adventure fiction, where Wedge is still recovering throughout the second book both physically and emotionally. They’re unclear on whether he’s still using a cane this book or not, but either way it’s a long-term lingering impairment. He gets to staredown and work a little on his rage at Sloane last book, but he is never shown confronting Tashu. He’s never in the same room as the villain who put him through all of that. Tashu also never has a greater impact on any other main characters either from just this trilogy or the movies, meaning this villain was specific to one major hero and had a huge impact on that hero’s life and role in a story that covers at least half a year. Tashu isn’t saved for a later book or confrontation, he gets offed by Gallius and that’s a bit of a bummer.