A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 95: Heir to the Empire Pt. 3 (Ch. 23 - 32)

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

A flailing republic. A re-emerging imperial armada. A dark jedi, eager to corrupt the next generation of force users. All of it pales in comparison to the most pressing crisis of of the year 9 ABY: The most awkward and stressful dinner party of all time. Step aside Luke and Mara. Take a pause, Han Solo. Leia, we'll come back to you and your Wookiee drama in a second. Admiral who? Coudln't care less. Because right now--and forever--it's Karrde time baby. Next time: TBD, we'll announce on socials! Show Notes Hosted by Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) Featuring Alicia Acampora (@ali_west), Austin Walker (@austin_walker), and Natalie Watson (@nataliewatson) Produced by Ricardo Contreras (@a_cado_appears) Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover art by Xeecee (@xeeceevevo)

Let us return once more to a more civilized age in Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakeney, joined by Aliaqampora and Austin Walker. We are, as always, supported by you, our listeners, via patreon.com slash civilized. So head over there if you'd like to support the show and get access to all our Q&A and special edition episodes. We are wrapping up book one of the Air to the Empire Trilogy. confusingly also called Air to the Empire with chapters 23 to the end

of this first book. If you miss the start of the series, we're doing this kind of hold things down while Natalie's availability has been a little bit dodgy before we continue with our viewing of Rebel season three, but it seemed like a really good opportunity

to dig into the Timothy Zon trilogy that holds a special place, a very big place in the heart of a lot of Star Wars fans of a certain vintage, a vintage of which I am increasingly and acutely aware. So last week we left off with Leah hiding out on Kashik somewhat unsuccessfully because that Grand Admiral Thrawn, he's just ahead of everyone. No sooner people have an idea than Grand Admiral Thrawn just intuits and deduces using

his knowledge of art, what they are up to. So Leia's been hiding in Kashik, suspecting that the imperial, the weird alien imperial commandos that have been stalking her are already there. Big revelations to come there. We were in the middle of the dinner party from Hal. Right. Which Luke Skywalker had left unceremoniously via a prison break

and an escape from smuggler, talent cards forest retreat he had just taken off in a skip ray blast boat with the enigmatic and mysterious enigmatic and mysterious nemesis

Mara Jade in hot pursuit while Lando and Han were there for dinner but we're now also in hiding because Grand Admiral Thrawn had chosen that moment of all moments to swing by and say what's up to Talancard.

And that's where things pick up this week. Pretty straightforward from here. We'll just, we'll do a very broad overview. And then we will get into it. So Luke's escape is going to fizzle real quick. And it's going to turn into a cross-country track where he and Mara Jade are going to be forced to depend on each other for survival. And he's going to learn a little bit about what her whole deal has been. Rob, I wrote down the note.

Please give us, quote, two characters who hate each other need to survive in the wilderness by working together and evading a third worst foe. This is more Star Wars than Star Wars to be. As like the foundation of my Star Warsness being writing Star Wars fan fiction, this is Star Wars to me. I have been Timothy's Odd Girlie my entire life.

I just did not know. Yeah. And if you check out various fan fiction archives People have used this and many other moments As points of departure for like I think the Luke and Mara thing should have gone down like this I bet

Lots of ways it could have gone down different So There's a four There's an inn on the planet Mirker But there's only one bed Yeah of course Better act like you're married And the Imperials will think you're out

So things like Things of that nature begin to depart from this moment. So Luke and Mara have to have to go cross country to both get out of the woods, but also there's a wrinkle if they just show up and hey, I'm Luke Skywalker. And Grand Emerald Throne will realize

that Talen Card was full of shit. And it's been hiding, hiding Luke. So Card is kind of forced to take sides here and work with Lando and Han who were there on the planet initially just coming to negotiate for ships and trying to get him to do some freight hauling for them. But it rapidly turns into a sort of impromptu rescue mission to extract Luke from out under the nose of the Imperials. Meanwhile, the wookies apparently got a little tired of guarding Leia and naturally the moment their guard is down, the no-grie commandos show up and attempt to kidnap Leia.

It fails like usual, but there's a wrinkle, one of whom gets a good sniff of Leia and realizes they know this, all Nogre know this scent. by God That's Darth Vader's scent Yep She's Lady Vader The heir to Darth Vader Who's a very big deal For the Nogre

Suddenly I remember I remember that thing that I said last week Which I'd forgotten about Until now Which was originally Zahn wanted to call These little freaks the Sith Because Vader was the dark lord of The Sith

And they were the Sith That he lorded over And so like it's okay yeah I get it right right there are Vader's little creatures okay yeah I mean you do need a thing to lord over don't you and what's better than a little guy because what we've come to understand with the lord of the Sith thing in contemporary canon is it doesn't mean shit it means Lord over nothing yeah Lord over literally nothing especially if you're number two in

the line if you're the second you don't have shit my man you don't have have there's no you got a castle and a lava plan to be saddened title yeah okay i'm the sith master yeah but you hey you're a sith lord you're a sith lord yeah so like really like i'm only like i'm only like a little half stop above you because like i'm not a sith lord you're the sith lord i'm just the sith master he has inquisitors to lord over that's what you know those really cool guys that we saw for season and a half it seems like oh he definitely respected them you definitely they were definitely valued employees. Well, don't worry.

We're going to get like a rerun on them here too in a moment, aren't we, in a sense? In a little bit, yeah. So Leah is going to realize that the, the Nogri have sort of an affinity for her. And she's going to, at the end of that adventure, begin using that to set up a, a meet. She wants to now meet, like, who are you, folks? What's your whole deal? because it sounds like you're actually like legitimately

just trying to serve the empire who you think is the good guy but Leah knows they ain't the good guy something about this stinks you know what else stinks things at the sluice van's shipyards where the Imperials it all comes together

what Thron had mine for that cloaking shield and why he wanted the mole miners as he attempts to basically loot a new republic shipyard where they've got a ton of half empty warships being

pressed into cargo hauling duty to replenish the empire's thin ranks of warships and the plan works pretty well up to a point that point being that well he's executing this whole plan with Landau Calrissian's stolen

mole miners and Landau's there and has them all on remote commands and so The plan kind of fizzles spectacularly at that point. And so things end with Thrawn having been somewhat thwarted, but knowing that it doesn't matter. He's still got all the cards. He's still on track to defeat the Republic, except for the wild card. Who might be coming into a ship of his own soon?

He, but yeah, it ends with Thron being like, oh, we're going to pay, we're going to pay card back. I am I am super mad I can't believe I figured out that Luke Skywalker is on that planet and then I didn't stick around that planet to make sure Luke Skywalker wasn't gonna come fuck my shit up and then he came

and fucked my shit up yeah damn it but there's no room for the New Republic to celebrate because you know that really bad vibe provisional counsel we met earlier in the book well

they arrested Admiral Akbar for treason. So that's where things kind of kind of end is that the new republic appears to be about two weeks away from its own reign of terror and Han and the gang are headed back to Correscent

to try and put the treason toothpaste back in the tube. So let's get into the end of Talon Card shitty dinner party. and Luke and Mara's track across Mirker. Please.

Not good. Doesn't go well. Telecard is so baby girl. Yeah. He's been promoted to me now. The way this whole situation goes. It's such a mess. I don't want to jump ahead, but like, I mean, we've said, you know,

Luke and Mara get away. They end up having to hook up. They don't have to hook up. They have to work together. Hook up or die. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Say link and build. You know, whether or not they hook up, we'll see.

You know, Throne comes and goes. Han and Lando quickly find out that Luke was there at all. And at the edge of all of this, card is still like, but you guys? guys are still staying for dinner, right? Multiple times. Funny. And Han's like, fine.

I'm just going to go back to the ship for a little bit. He's like, but you're not going to leave, right? Like, yeah, we're not going to leave. We'll come back to dinner. It makes tactical sense for us to come back to dinner, I guess. So, okay, I'll get dinner set back up for you guys then.

They, Thron lambs. and so like basically things things are gone to hell at the start because like basically thrown is on his way down when Luke takes off in the shut in in the skip ray and Luke realizes real fast he doesn't know how to fly a skip ray he's like I do not like how this thing feels it's like a it's like a bus but a fire plane also a bus and so Mara despite being two minutes behind him immediately just closes the distance and is like basically a on top of his ship.

And he attempts something called like the Coyagrin drop kick. And immediately crash. Me playing Forth to Horizon. Yo, check this shit out. Crash, tumble, break, fall. We don't even get a description of what the maneuver is. We just know he like cranks it to a turn, like jams the engines. And then immediately just like run straight to the ground.

Absolutely fool. And so Thron lands and he's like, hey, that was crazy. Like what was up with that? And cards, card comes up with, I guess the best excuse you can come up with, but it just doesn't sound good.

Oh yeah, no, it's a small thing, you know, smuggler life. One of my employees stole a bunch of stuff and someone else went after him to, to catch him.

So, you know, just an internal manner, nothing to see here. And Thron's like, I would love to help. Hey guys, let's send one of these shuttles full of stormtroopers out to the crash site and just make sure we can get Captain Cards stolen goods back and maybe help his employee who might need help. You know that I owe you one. Why wouldn't I do this for you?

It's so good. The thing is, I really regret that we couldn't have, like, Zahn has the discipline not to treat himself to the fan fiction impulse here, which is. two parallel dinner parties, the card has to like Routes between. Oh, the dream. That would have been so good. Like just a Fraser episode basically, but it's Star Wars. A hundred percent. Just like Please. Frasier, do you ever think about how they should do a version of Fraser where he lives in Vichy, France and has to like, has to like deal with both the resistance and the occupying Nazis? I think that would be good. I think he would, I think I would love to see the farce that emerges from

that. Sorry, that's where I got from this. Yeah. Yeah, this is what we deserve. It should be like no, no, you make sure to serve good imperial food. Exactly. Oh, damn it. Oh, no.

They swapped the hors d'oeuvres. They were delivered to the wrong dining rooms. Thrawn being like, is this some kind of joke? It's little cupcakes with Rebel Alliance, like shields on them. Yeah, our bar, our chef is a real prankster. You understand.

He felt a commander such as yourself would share his sense of whimsy. Aha! Oh, we hate the rebellion so much. We just want to devour it. We actually found these. We liberated them from a rebel bakery ship. And they came just like this and we thought, why send good food to the trash bin?

God. So. I need it. I need this. Someone please write this. thank you so and then yes that whole scene where he gets caught

it begins with so he entrust Lando and Han to Ghent the slicer, the hackers just a kid the guy who they came here for basically to begin with they wanted this hacker right to like create a VPN for Zoom

and that was that's all this started because we want we want VPNs uh and they're like that's an imperial grand admiral and so they start interesting detail

no one knows his name they don't car won't say his name but Houghton is like well when we get back to Corrassant we'll have to like dedicate some research time to this like research cycle so finding this out which we thought we'd accounted for all these guys literally exactly we know right that somewhere

in the system and then later I want to say Leia has a similar feeling or a similar note that's like when we get back to Corrassant we can do the research, which is a fun echo of one of our favorite things from Andor, which is the fucking internet doesn't exist. No one has data terminals in their ships that they can access all the information that exists back at the core data center on Khorasan. I forget what the second one was. It might have been a ship. It might have been something like that. We can do that

work later, but we can't do it from here. Oh, it's the Nogri. She wants to learn about the no gree. And she can't just like dial that shit up on the Lady Luck. You know, she used to go back to the library, which is a really fun Star Warsy thing. So immediately they're like, well, Card, you wouldn't lie knew us because we know you're working with the empire. And Card's like, not really. He just showed up. It's super annoying.

Anyway, though, you guys want to finish that dinner? We had to take the dinner down because otherwise Grand Admiral Throne would have known that I was entertaining and he would have found that suspicious. So you guys can just wait a few minutes We'll have the dinner set back up And they're like fine Set up the dinner We'll have dinner

And that's when they go investigate While he's like supervising again This is pure Fraser crane Now now you must You must put the centerpiece back Exactly as it was They sneak off to the shed Where they realized like someone

was being kept prisoner And that's where Han comes across A little R2D2 chats shaped skid mark on the ground and cards like oh you guys seem to have gotten lost uh but dinner is almost ready and then lando shows up when so hans like more curious now about this whole prisoner and card like too cute by half still like that information costs money i'm not going to share that with you and that's when lando shows up in full like super sleuth mode yeah maybe we don't need to

buy it and he hands him the little watch battery that lives in Luke's wrist. Hey, Han, does it look familiar to you? And Han's like, kind of. Like, I don't pay that close attention, my man. This is real like, there's like the, the Batman like detective versus being a superhero activation thing where they get in and they're like, okay, let's scope the place out. And they both go into the separate things and like they're looking around. And the fact that Lando could be like, yeah, that's the manufacturer of Luke's hand. It's great. I love it.

I love this take on Lando so much because, like, Lando is the dude who had an entire bugout plan for all of Cloud City. Right. Prepared under the nose of Darth Vader. Right. Like that Lando's hand is forced before we ever meet him in the movie. And he's arranged this entire thing to try and get out of this as best he can without completely dooming Han and his friends.

But he has to pretend like it's a betrayal. Lando is the planner. Han is the improviser, right? Like that's the sort of divide we get here. And, you know, to his credit, it's like, Han understand something's wrong here. I'm telling Han is like, you know, completely wool pulled over his eyes here.

But Lando is the one who's going to put together the watch battery and the shape of the, of the, whatever, the space where R2 is just spinning over and over again in circles. But the, again, all-time reaction all-time reaction on card what do you want me to say

Luke Skywalker was a prisoner here fine consider it said consider it's said it's incredible like the most caught somebody has ever been

because it's so improbable that he's just like completely throwing in the towel at this point like yep like these guys basically know it's Luke fuck it like and then he's kind of petulant about the entire thing

I mean completely because well I guess on the other hand, you think there's a little bit of this, that card kind of enjoys getting all the stuff out on the table with these two, because the alternative would have been coming out on the table with Thron. And so here he's at least like, all right, well, it's at least the two guys who I wish were my boys. And now we can all be, we can all have a little secret together. You know, after a night like that, I feel like he really just wanted to let it go. Like,

I can't keep lying like this. This is getting out of hand. Exactly. And they have their whole little. They're Tiff, but then he's like, so dinner? So dinner? Though we are going to do dinner still. This scene also has, since Austin called it out, I like heard it. A very great Han Soloism of when he's like, you can join the conversation anytime card. Like a gun in his face.

I was like, yep, that's, that is a Han solo line. Yes, yes. I really like Zon's Han a lot. Like I think he has him down pretty well I've read plenty of books that don't get Han right in that way And when it's wrong And he comes across like Spider-Man quippy It's brutal, you know

So It's Hans just got that little bit of like He's had one drink too many at the party But that is why he can just like Attack things head on in a way that like I'm just gonna say it I'm just gonna say it and it tends to do good things.

Yep. I also love this moment where, where, you know, he explains that that Mara is the one who led them to Luke to begin with and that she wants to kill Luke and it's hard has to be. Hans like, why does she want to kill Luke?

And it's, card shook his head. I don't know. You don't know anything, do you, man? Well, and also, when they're like, oh, yeah, so what? Lou just fell out of the sky on you. And cards like, yes, yes, this is, he's so pissed that this is all falling the fuck apart. Because he does realize now here, he says, we stumbled across him and he's like, no, Mara led us to him.

And now it is clear in his head, now that he plays it back. Yeah. Nothing about it was random. Yeah. like we went straight to this guy and it fucked up my whole life right right because if he doesn't find luke none of this shit is happening it's not a big deal maybe han and and uh lando have to be hidden for a moment when throng comes down but thron's not investigating anything special here right no so no and it's this this entire luke thing and his flub with the well when the search was

going like yeah yeah it rattles him it makes it clear that like thron can't fully trust him and he's starting to get the measure of Thron as well as like this might not be somebody you can comfortably because the other part of this is you know before Thrawn really gets a sense things are off he's like I want to talk about acquiring warships yeah and cards like we're a smuggling operation

we don't really I don't know how to get warships for you that's not really my bag and Thron's like you'll make it your business. And just real clear, like, oh, Thron's going to, your independence is at an end, basically. And that's the vibe he's beginning to pick up here. The Thron's not going to be a,

even though I think in a lot of ways Thron and Carter are kind of mirroring each other, like just two guys who just like love to know things and have the full picture that other people don't have. There is a bit of, card just kind of wants to know secrets so that he can be like oh man it's so much fun having all the galaxy's information he's a gossip yeah and then getting to share it with your boys yeah like now like han and lander are going to think you're so cool for like knowing all this stuff and and like he wants an angle sometimes right it's clear he's like it's good for him to have information so he can play off of it and and you know provide you know jobs for his crew and stuff like that yeah but the ambitions are just wildly different you know, which is, to some degree, it's also like it feels like hard, both card and Thron, another way they mirror each other, they're both filling a power vacuum left by the

previous, you know, high roller in that position. And it feels like, kind of, both of them have a focus on information and also a focus on, like, doing something instead of doing nothing, right? So, like, Jabba was willing to just, like, lean back and have a party with all of his wealth and stuff, whereas it feels like, card might not have big aspirations for, like, changing the world, but he does want to have a number of backup bases he can retreat to. He does want to make sure his people are well supplied. He wants to promote this up-and-coming smuggler Mara. Like, he's, he's, like, hands-on in a way that Jabba isn't. And Thrawn is very similar in terms of like, I want to make sure my plan works and my plan is, is like moving throughout the empire.

It's not building one place and then that's my center of power. It's going out and doing these runs and touching a bunch of places and building, you know, building momentum towards growth. I think that's an interesting parallel between both of them, too, right? They're building organizations after the previous organizations fell apart, you know? and throughout this whole next sequence for card really like he begins having these premonitions of doom that he starts to realize that he'd let himself feel permanent about a thing which is funny because like in some ways so much of the sign that han was past it now was that he wasn't really out in the world he wasn't living by the skin of his teeth uh he'd gone respectable he'd gotten kind of lazy

and comfortable and wasn't really out there uh you know living that smuggler life fully. And I think here, like, Card kind of realizes he had stopped doing that too. Like, he had also fallen into this sort of the trap of complacency, the trap of comfort, the trap of success, that he had everything he wanted. He had let himself build a secret base. But, like, is it that secret? Like, how long can it be secret? He's built himself a mastermind layer on this, on this planet. And he mostly just liked having his little, house in the woods with his dogs that like who could blame him it's great he keeps having these moments of realizing like oh no like i had a home didn't realize it right but i did they're not even

running like particularly bad contraband we talked about this last time like he somehow gets to be the smuggler with the golden heart and seems to mean it you know like we he's not running guns to, you know, nationalists somewhere. He's not running, he hasn't said the word spice, but once, you know, like, what are you doing? And all we know is he's running food to, you know, libertarians, which like, yeah, go for it, but, you know, people should, yeah, I'm fine with that. It's very funny. Yeah, and his, like, his, like, willingness to deal with card or his, like, lack of faith in the growing rebellion or New Republic is never like question in a way that

like makes like it it mars him or you know it makes you feel less about him because like he seems like you can be right right yeah the book doesn't take them seriously so many of these things where it's like yeah me as a reader doesn't feel particularly good about the New Republic either so like the thought that card is like playing both sides is a virtue for him almost like and it's funny because like you know we go back to this stuff in the last the last section where he basically was like listen the new republic right now as its stance probably wins this but i don't know how long it takes and if the skywalkers get pushed out the picture maybe they don't win and even if they do win maybe it's messy and maybe it doesn't look at all like

the new republic maybe it looks like something else i'm going to sit on my cool planet And the empire is still huge. Right. Like he's like, we still like, the entire business model is that there's two factions at war that have to trade between them, but they can't like trade out in the open. So like the whole notion of you need to pick aside, no, the smuggler, this is, this is, one, it's not good for business that there's this war. But two, it's not their fault.

There's this war. Three, the whole thing is they have to work on both sides of the street. That's the whole thing. And there's a, there's a great bit in, it was actually in the, like the summer preview of Outlaw, so I don't mind spoiling it. But there's a, you come back from doing this heist where you get these, these kind of pearls, these kind of like blue pearls. And you return to your fixer who set this up, Donka, who's this great, I love Donka so much. She's a, um, Moncal, like, she's like a Moncal auntie who is your, who is one of your primary, like, job fixers early on in the game. and you walk into the room

to hand her the magic pearls or whatever they're not magic, but the blue pearls and there's an imperial officer there and it's like she wants her cut and Donka isn't going to cut her out. You could decide fuck her and go and get put on the wanted list or whatever but there's a real sense like

we don't have the power to not engage with the Imperials it doesn't matter how the war went like they have a spaceship in orbit they'll kill us so like we got to invite them to dinner okay And I really love that stuff here with Card, especially because, again, we can't get this perspective from Han Orlando anymore, right? They can't be our, they can be scoundrels, but they can't be smugglers anymore in the same way.

And I think having that perspective, but they can talk to Card like peers and talk shop and understand his perspective and try to play that game still in a way that's really fun. So just good, kind of a good structural storytelling by putting the characters together who get put together here. And there's a bit of, maybe there is something that our reader for the audiobook version is on to, which is that there is a certain romantic hero aspect to Card because there's this moment later he was talking to his, you know, other aide to camp, Aves. And he's explained, he sort of reflects on the fact that Aves, understands. They were his guests. Solo and Calaisian were his guests, and we couldn't possibly. We could not possibly play this any differently than we did because one could not be a

bad host. And that begins to sound like, I am telling God. Exactly. 100%. You expect me to turn my guests over to the Empire. Word would get out. We could never have another dinner party again. Someone pointed out in a Discord I'm in that to them, that audio sounded like a Hondo, Anaka.

And I didn't even think about Hondo, but Hondo is cut from that cloth. He's doing that bit. I wish all Hondo appearances in all Star Wars things had been Talon Card instead. A hundred percent. But then shit would work out. And we would already like, it would become the Hondo. show. Well, not that it didn't already. But for me, I hear this SNL sketch, the Antonio Banderas, how do you say, ah, yes, show. Like, that to me is that, that, that take on talent

card. But he's reflecting on, like, that we were bound here by, he doesn't want to take sides, but there's a certain definition of honor that he adheres to very, very closely, which is that once someone comes and sits at your table, they're under your protection. You can't do what Lando did, which is offer hospitality and your false pretenses and then sell someone out. No one's going to work with you after

that. Yeah. But the other thing that I think emerges in that conversation with Aves that I think is very funny, this is where Carr is beginning to think like we're going to have to mount a rescue mission. We're going to have to shoot it out with the Imperials because, you know, they're here on the planet. We're going to

shoot it, shoot it out with them. And yes, Aves, like, do you think we can find some people willing to, to go on this mission? And Aves is like,

oh, yeah, boss. Like, everyone wants to go on this mission because that's Luke fucking Skywalker out there. And, and I like that this little injection of politics here within the smuggler camp. Yeah, yeah, we don't take sides.

We're all smugglers. That's Luke Skywalker. Yeah. The guy who, the guy who like brought down Java's operation and liberated, the whole. criminal class from working for a malevolent slug. And so everyone's like, yeah, yeah, here are the rebellion, whatever.

But like, we all owe him one. So we will go fight for Luke, which is also, if the word had gotten out, the talent had sold out Luke, that's another dimension of the problem that he's dealing with. That, like, Mar is a real outlier in his camp for being someone who's like, I hate Luke Skywalker. No one is going, no one else in the, in, in, in, in, in Cards Camp really is here for that. Right. You know, I really, it really suggests that maybe those people and Mara have different

backgrounds and different priorities, uh, that, that, you know, when they, when Luke, you know, uh, hit the people he hit, uh, it was good for some people and not for others. And for basically everyone else flying with cars. it ruled, actually. You know, and even the, they don't even bring up the, the empire stuff, but, you know, like, it's like the empire were friends to the smugglers, you know? So, good, you know, that there's- Yeah, you can buy off an imperial officer where you turn around and shoot you if he had to.

Exactly. That's just how it would be. Yep. Well, and also, like, you might just be on a planet. It gets blown up. Right. That's not a good feeling. That's not good for business.

So, like, there's elements, there's elements that in play as well. So, like, when he's like, do you think we mount a rescue mission? Everyone's like, oh, yeah, hell yeah, we'll take on an imperial, we'll take on an imperial rifle company with our handguns. We're fine with that. And so, well, good thing because fucking Thron has sent three units of stormtroopers, a point that Zon, again, who's like, I'm going to take this shit seriously. is like, that's a lot of stormtroopers, and stormtroopers are expensive and rare. It goes out of his way to explain that, like, Pelion, Pelion is like, really, you got us on stormtroopers?

Like, we don't have that many stormtroopers. We really need to keep our stormtroopers. They're hard to train up. They're pretty far down the tech tree. We lost a bunch of them in a stupid battle on Endor. Like, we just don't have that many left. And that's such a fun take on the grunt unit. And it's fun to think about the empire as having supplanted them as the, you know,

forced to have supplemented them with just like regular guys who don't have body armor and don't have rifles and don't have, like, the training that a stormtrooper has. Now, later, we'll also see a super special stormtrooper, which raises some questions about, again, what they have in their reserves and what they're willing to pull out. But I'll let that slide, you know. Yeah, I do dig that there's this notion that these were the best troops in the empire. It's just that on the Death Star, they're not trying to win. But you see them at Hoth, they clean house pretty pretty effectively. The rebels get rinsed at Hoth. I never really thought about that.

If I had to put my best Stormtroopers somewhere, it would be on Hoth and not on the Death Star. the ones you put on the Death Star are not the ones you expect to have to shoot anything because the Death Star is the thing that shoots things. Yeah. Yeah. Should never put that many Stormtroopers on the Death Star. Yeah, what were they doing?

Looking good. Looking good. Yeah. Like, you know, like... Security. You know, you got to have somebody check passes and escort things and... Yes, yeah.

Keep people off of floors that they're not supposed to be on. Yeah. Let's, yeah. what they should have done. Yell, blast him. That's right. The other part of that conversation, so, that is so astonishing when Thrawn's like, Carter's lying to us, let's put a bunch of stormtroopers on the planet,

is that he's basically figured out once again what's going on. He tells, he tells Pellion Carter's lying to us. Like, none of that, the two pilots never reported in. Like, none of this story really makes sense. and then did you notice how cards slipped up on the Skywalker search thing? What are those two things put together

indicate to you? And Pellion's like, come on. Yeah. And then Thron's like, yeah, probably not. Maybe. Maybe. And then Pellion makes a fatal mistake, I think. He reminds, he reminds

Thron what time it is. He's like, well, if we're going to stick around here to see how the Skywalker search goes, we're going to have to push back the timeline on Slows Van. And Thrones like, oh, no, we couldn't possibly do that. Not for Luke Skywalker, not for anyone. And I'm like, I think for Luke Skywalker, yes. I think you, I think, I do think you change your plan based on what he's lost to Luke yet.

He doesn't know. He doesn't understand plot armor. He's a new guy. Yes, he's the new guy. What could one Jenna? Now I know, now is the entire theory of the war that our Jedi died and therefore, before we lost instantly. Yes.

But is Luke really that? Is Luke really as good as Emperor Palpatine? Could Luke really like turn a battle by himself? Come on. There's a bit of this like this is a thing that like, this is a position where like he and Mara mirror each other a little bit. They don't get what the big deal is.

And to an extent it's also an attempt to answer like what is heroic about Luke Skywalker beyond the fact that he's the hero of the story that becomes these the chosen one to get these Jedi powers, Like what makes him special? What makes him a heroic character? Thron can't, he's like, he's a Jedi, but like there's nothing that special about him. He's not a decisive military asset.

He doesn't know what happened on the second Death Star. And no one does, really, right? Yeah, exactly. And even the getting the kill shot in the Death Star mission, like Thron is an admiral, right? One of your pilots puts the bomb on target. good job to that pilot. That's not his plan. You know what I mean?

He didn't do something super special. He was at Hoth. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. We won at Hoth. Exactly. Yeah. You know, like he and his friends tried to fight Vader at Cloud City.

Guess what? Hans Solo got frozen into a block of stone and Luke almost fell to his death and probably should have. You know, like there's not, there's no wins. Like, it's one big win that he was a small part of happened to pull the trigger. He doesn't know about turn off your targeting computer. You know what I mean? He doesn't know about any of that shit.

All he knows is there was a weakness in the Death Star, a stupid idea to begin with. And he explored, he was the person who was the, he was the period on the end of the sentence that other people wrote that then blew up the Death Star. Good for him. Great. Love to have a poster boy. You know, propaganda value very high. Who cares? You know, well, unfortunately.

I mean, is Luke even on his radar without Cybath anyway? Like, it's not like... Doesn't seem like it. You're right. If he didn't have the... We have this Jedi plan and I have to give the Jedi a toy so he keeps doing my jobs. Like, there's nothing that Luke is adding. Or that, like, to weave him into anything.

That's been one of the most interesting, like, clear possible dangers that Thrawn has completely underestimated. He keeps telling the story about how they're going to deal with Sabiof as like, they're going to give him the fucking Skywalker's and then he'll disappear. And there's no idea in his head that

they could both turn evil. Joy and Sabiof and come get him. You know? All right. So, yeah, because after they leave Merker, they go and they do a test run of the new cloaking device. And it's going to be this complicated plan. Because the cloaking device is

complete cloak, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. When something's cloaked, it can't talk to anyone. It's like a submarine. Submarine rules are in fact. And so Pallion, who again, increasingly I'm like, is this flipped? Should Pallion be in management?

And actually, like, Thrawn to be the better like staff guy, like doing this stuff? Because Pallion's like, hang on. Isn't this basically exactly why you want a Jedi around? Yeah. And I remember 13 chapters ago when you showed that this guy could talk to people across the galaxy magically? Wouldn't that let us fix the one problem with this plan?

Yeah. Don't suspect them kids. Like, no, absolutely not. And he's like, we've got a stopwatch here. What do I need a telepathic commander for? And it's like the degree to which this is flipped. Yeah. Right?

That's it. Well, and Pellion's like, but Thron, you know, he doesn't care about power. And Thron's like, everyone cares about power, Pellion, which is interesting, because Pellion might not. That's the, like, Pellion, like, Thron's making these universal assumptions that, like, when someone gets a taste of power, like, they're just going to want more and more. Which might be true about Sabiof, though, there's a definition of what power constitutes. But he's talking to a guy who appears to be, rather than the wrong, like, cause, appears to be pretty self-effacing within that cause.

um but like thron can't quite conceive it that way and so the the degree to which this is all gotten flipped where it's like we are now we're now personally at war with the skywalker organa solos basically so that we can get a pacifier into the mouth of this twisted old man did i made a cornerstone of my military project and then just started immediately resenting yeah it's kind of a mistake I feel like this was a, this was a, you know, sometimes you get problems with egos in the locker room, you know, and there are a lot of ways you can play with that. There are a lot of ways you can kind of like just appease them through the season and then hope that they chill out over the break. You can try to like send them to the desert together or they get over their shit. And I think that Theron is doing none of the attempts of anything.

He's just like, it's the worst possible outcome, which is Sabayath and Thron and every game staring at the other person and being like, well, if something went wrong, was that motherfucker over there. That's why we lost. And it's brutal. It's not even a problem in the locker room. It's the manager deciding, I fucking hate this guy on my team. But I'm not going to trade him off of my team. Or kill him.

As Pelion's like, we could just kill him. Like, we should just, if he's a danger to us, we just kill him. Run up on him with a solemnary around his shoulders. And at that point, he's just an old man. Right. We got the stuff in the mountain. Well, we don't want to. We want the mountain with all the cool toys in it, right?

But they got the mountain with all the cool toys in it. Just kill him. You don't need this guy. That's the whole theory. The whole theory is we don't really need this guy. We get to build an army that doesn't need a Jedi going like, you can do it. You do it for the emperor. Do it for the skip.

You're extremely mad right now. Exactly. No, you're going to miss hit. Hit instead. Hit instead of missing. It's. There is a degree to which Thron is like, I can be the coach

and I can be the GM and I'm also the star player and it's like this is too many hats dude and like the ego of one is is stumbling is stumbling headlong into the other but yes this is like the degree to which this is already weird because from my point of view

Pelion is like pretty much right this seems like this is a weapon that has one devastating weakness once someone goes inside it they're gone like they can They don't know what's happening outside And you can't talk to them That's why you have Jedi

And Thrones like we're not gonna use A cloaking shield that way Because Sabiot will feel important And I don't want him to feel important Even though he's the cornerstone to my plan But yeah Then he won't be causing us any problems As soon as we whip a bunch of force sensitive

trainees at him To just like I don't know distract himself What What problems could three or four or five Dark Jedi get up to I can't I don't care So there, I mean, there is something else here that Thron doesn't understand, which is not just, is not just Sabayath's desire for power in a certain way. It's not just Luke has the special boy juice that makes him the hero and you have to deal with that. You have to account for that. It is also simply that the force exists and the force is going to put him in your way. And not in a I've chosen to do this way, but in the,

the concurrence of life, the unbelievable, unpredictable, hard to arrive at, there is no reason Luke Skywalker should show up at Louis Vann. Maybe he's on Merker. That's the name of the planet, right? Merker. Awesome. Cool. Then guess what?

He's not going to come fuck up our shit while we're doing this. He wouldn't be in both places. He couldn't be in both places. He doesn't understand that the force is a plot-driven, magical energy. that will put the hero in the climax of the book of your life. I'm sorry to tell you, you are not the protagonist of this one. It's that guy over there, and he's going to show up, come hell or high water, even if two days ago he was in a jungle with a woman putting a gun to his back

in a way that's vaguely psychosexual, you know, he's just going to show up. So there is, like... He thinks, I think a bit like Mara, that the Jedi are just, like, the force is their power source. But there's nothing like inherent to a jet, like take away the, take away the force. Yep. No Jedi. It doesn't like it, like there's nothing special about this person, which coming out of the original trilogy, it is kind of a question. It's like, what are these folks without, without the force?

Oh, I got so mad at something the other day that this is reminding me of. Can I get mad for a second about a Star Wars thing? Let me see you're going to find the exact headline here. This is from, this is from, I mean, it's screen rant. Of course, it's screen rant. The headline here from screen rant is, no, Luke Skywalker did not use force choke in return of the Jedi. And there's a lot to be mad here about it. For context, this is about the scene.

With gammering guards, right? With the garrang guards, exactly. Start clutching up their throats. When he walks in. in all black looking like he's Darth Vader and they go to apprehend him and they go and they're like put their hands in their throats and choke to death.

You know that scene. I'll link it here for you for reference. And the thing that first made me mad about this is he didn't use force choke. We colloquially talk about force choke

because we play video games like Knights of the Old Republic and like a tabletop game where when you reach level seven in Sith or whatever, you get the force choke ability. Darth Vader does not have force choke. Luke does not have force jump or force heel. Now, like, even this book sometimes gets towards that, where there are, like, there are certain Jedi techniques,

but they're not, it is not, he has access to a, he has access to the force. He can, he can utilize the force in a bunch of different ways. And I know this sounds pedantic, but there is such a huge difference between I can, I can choke someone with the force. and I have level three force choke. Two, this shit is why no one... The idea that Luke could never have force choked someone because it would have been evil

is such a misunderstanding of what the stakes of Return of the Jedi are. The entire purpose of that film is to make you wonder until the very end, oh, my God, have the terrible contexts of his life pushed poor farm boy Luke towards the dark side, as his desire to want to save his friends in the galaxy made him susceptible to the lore of the power of the dark side. Look at how easily he dealt with those Gomorian guards.

Look at how powerful he seems in the face of Jabba. Look at his cool, weird new lightsaber. We've never seen a green lightsaber before. What could that mean? All of the stakes of that film are, will he give into his desire for power? instead of his desire to save his father and to save his friends even at the cost of his own life. Of course he choked the Gaborian guards.

That's what the movie's about. And it's from there that we get people saying shit like the Luke of Last Jedi could have, you know, that Luke would never have swung at Kylo Ren in the flashbacks of da-da-da-da-da-da, like bracketing all of the Roshamanness of that situation. it's it's so funny that people want to protect this idea like like the way that people want to protect atticus finch a few years ago it's like no but he's our perfect hero like he could never do a bad oh the set of watchman thing the set of watchman thing yeah exactly what it's insane to me anyway this article tries to argue that he that he mind tricks them into thinking they're choking which is sort of like saying yeah exactly it's sort of like we weren't drowning them we were just

waterboarding. With canon and legends, both confirming that Luke did not use force choke. It does seem odd that the Gammerian guards would grab their necks in pain as though they were being forced choked. It's weird that that thing we see happen in the movie didn't happen, but anyway. The thing that they go to for Canon, by the way, is the Return of the Jedi's novelizations. Not the film. Not the film that we watched. The novelization. The novelization. Not the film. We talk about the novelization. The novelization. Anyway.

Anyway. Anyway. I, like, I just like, they put him in a black's well-towered suit. I know. He has to put on. There's no.

Like, there's no. I know. I know. You're right. It shows up looking like Darth Vader. Like, that's the whole point is he appears in the dark with the Vader. silhouette. And it's fun to, like, why do you watch movies if it's not to, like, feel

tension about that? Like, I, you know, I, like, but it's also a piece of, it's so of a piece of like, boy, we don't want any sort of ambiguity left in any of these characters. So, got to have, like, Han didn't shoot first. And then also, there's no way Luke would, like, choke Java's gammering guards. And it's like, is it possible that like putting hands on someone who that someone is might change morally how that action reads to us? Where like Luke has to come across as like he's stepping into the belly of the beast facing down a scary gangster.

Is it possible that in that context, it's okay to let those gamerian guards like, like just feel that pressure. It doesn't kill them. He just, he's just like, I'm coming through. No, we don't, we can't have any of that. Anyway, apologies. So, I got to this because of thinking that if Thron did understand what Jedi, you explaining Thron thinks about the Jedi is having a power source called the Force that they

can activate and use special abilities with. And like, he's that guy. He does believe that. That is what he thinks. He does not understand. For all his talk about cultural understanding, he don't understand the Jedi. at all, which is interesting. They don't make enough art.

If only the genie made more art. Oh, my God. That's the last detail. So Pallion's like, we could just delay the sluice van operation. And Thron's like, no. My art indicates they have a biannual cycle, and they will be at their most sluggish. And Pallion's like, there might be other people who are like working the radios at this thing. It's a new republic ship here.

And Thron's like, no. Nope, it'll be a slew-e-see operation. It's going to be so sluggish. It doesn't matter who else is there. That's something else interesting about him. What he's saying is not like, oh, there will be more sui-see than not. What he's saying is the commanders will be slu-ewee-see. And so their ideology and their cultural, you know, their cultural, like, predilections will overturn whatever micro-decision gets made.

right so you might have a human or moncal captain along the road somewhere but the whole thing is a sluisi operation and so it will take on sluisi characteristics right that is we are in that eugenicist world but we're also in the technocrats world who believes the commander or the the operations lead will be the one who kind of like filters down the entire character of a culture or a project or a process or something like that right, which is... And we're going to see it get blown the hell up because it turns out other people are in play and have agency in this situation. And Pallion immediately is like, I just, this doesn't fully make sense to me. I feel like we could delay this.

I'm like, is this only going to work? Oh, so the whole plan comes down to we got to do it on their sleepy day. They get a sleepy day once every two years and the plan doesn't work if they're not sleepy. What are you doing? Why is that our plan? But it also seems so very much like

you have a special source of knowledge, that gives you power and you overvalue the like the where that knowledge came from a bit like the Jedi in some ways in the in the prequel trilogy where it's like forces and talking to us use your fucking eyes are there another clue like you can you just look around and just see what's happening no no forces for silent it's super weird and there's a bit of like thrones like look I didn't study all this dog shit's loose the art with the fucking like flame figures just so we could say we could do it on a Tuesday just as easily as we could do it last Saturday. Like no. I looked at tons of dog shits

Luisi art to say that we have to go on this day and you're not telling we're delaying by a day because otherwise then what's the point of me like what's the point of me studying all this art? And so I think there's a bit of that as well where it's like God there's a

actually it's a Gilroy movie but nobody nobody's ever seen it it kind of bombed uh duplicity I've not seen it an espionage romcom with um Clive Owen and Julia Roberts and it is about two X

like government spies who reconnect as corporate spies but there's a point where there's this entire Rue Goldberg plan that they have to do like one one company has ceded spy shit into the tech infrastructure

of the other company and they're like, we have to deliver the material to the machines we've turned against the other company and someone eventually is like if we have the material couldn't we just take it out of the building

and like run it across town and then we just have the info we don't need to use the like the photocopier that we tricked to being a fax machine we don't have to do that and everyone's like well no because we got to you we have to use the we have to use the photocopier that's a secret

fax machine to our to our fax machine we have to do it because otherwise what was the point and and there's a bit of that with thron where it's like I have this whole awesome plan and all this awesome secret info and if we don't if we don't do it then you're not letting me do my little throne thing mm-hmm he didn't find a culture where plans don't work out what is he reading about or even like the thing that's emerging is that like it's really interesting that he is not we aren't finding out about an emergent like rebellion culture through thron right like all this conversation about how he doesn't understand luke skywalker like why wasn't he ever like you know what happened to uh job of the hut right that's kind of a big deal and this card guy it's kind

of recent. Like, you know, the, it's not as if the Luke Skywalker crumbs aren't there. But they don't get taught in like art history 101. So, you know, that's not going to pick up on those. Not yet. Again, my suspicion is we're going to come out of this book and he's going to be like, I'm going to learn everything there is to know about the Skywalker's. If Luke had ever done like art therapy, he would be fucked. He'd be toast. Exactly. So, uh, But he might still be toast because he's out there with the dangerous and mysterious Mara Jade. So he comes to in his ship and he's like, I need to get out of here. But then he's like, I can't just like, she might be, her, her ship is crashed nearby.

I can't just leave her. I've checked she's okay. It's the only reason I'm doing this. He peers into the ship and he sees, he sees that red gold hair. He's like, I just need to get a look. I just need to go around and just make sure she's all right. and she's been waiting for him with the gun and those green eyes

and he's captured oh yeah and we are we are off to the races because yes in short order like the empire's gonna come scope out the crash site you know she's like we gotta get to cover and while he's in cover he has this thought

that like she might just kill me maybe I should surrender these stormtroopers rather than rather than like just let her kill me out here in these woods and yes Austin, as you alluded to, in a, I hope this doesn't awaken anything moment for Luke Skywalker. She embraces him and jams the gun under his jaw.

Under his jaw. And then whispers in his ear, don't even, whatever your thing about doing, don't try it. Just, just holding each other there behind a log, scoping out what the empire is doing. While she is making clear that like, as soon as I can't, it's over for you. I can't wait to kill you. Yeah. There's a lot of walking through the woods

with the gun brushing across his back. There's a lot of barely saving each other's lives as the various Vornsker attacks, of which there are many, occur. Pinned to the ground by the Vornsker as the only, the person I hate most,

in the world saves me, uh, love that for, for Mara. Um, really fun, constant, you know, uh, lots of Mara, uh, holding Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and revealing that she knows what the fuck she's doing with a lightsaber, even if she isn't a Jedi. It's good. Lots of watching him sleep at night. Oh my God. Sleep at night. I forgot she doesn't sleep. She takes pills to not sleep. But she's like just staring at him being like, what is it with this guy? I hate him so much.

How can he be so calm and peaceful and perhaps attractive? Why isn't he more scared of me? Maybe it's too damn. That part cracks me up. Maybe there's green eyes. God. I also love how many times Zahn is like, Mars, I show the anger and perhaps something else.

Maybe something else. I really love the recurring bit where she's like, well, I don't need the droids. And Lucy, now wait a second. Yes, you do need the drug. Yes, we do need R2. R2 is a special little droid. Art2 can talk to the X-week as their best friends.

And she's like, oh, yeah, are they? How, how, I'm sorry, I'm doing my red, gold hair out of, out of my eyes. How many, how many milliseconds does it take for them to communicate? He's like, they're 30, 35. She's like, hmm, that is best friend status, I guess. I did run those numbers. It's so funny. It's great because, like, also, look, Mara J's lived the kind of life.

She's always got to have an extraction plan. She's got to be ready to just, like, go at a moment's notice. So when she started working for cards, she was like, I'm going to go out and I'm doing chemical tests and all these leaves to see which ones I can eat. I'm going to learn all about the planet Mirker. She just flew in lines back and forth above the forest to learn the, the layout of the forest girl we got maps

girl pack a map with you and Star Wars I'm actually I'm actually not sure they do quite honest sure sure sure but but she is like but so she's done all this right to like learn what's up

and then Luke starts noticing things like oh so like the Wrenskirts are an eternal but like cards Wrenskirts are pretty active during the day and she's like damn he's so observant he's noticing all the sorts of things about the world. Damn.

Only I would have noticed something like that, but maybe he's more, maybe he's more thoughtful than maybe he's not just a hymbo. And then the thing that he's noticed is that they have tails, they have giant poison whip tails? Giant whip tails. Damn, and only I would notice that. Fuck. So we get a lot, we get a lot of her like, oh, I just hate you, but like, I'm going to figure out

What makes Luke Skywalker tick? The image of her popping amphetamines and just like glowering over his sleeping, but peaceful, innocent face. He is so little boycoded. He is like, all right, time for bed. Like, he is constantly, and like sometimes he's faking it to like watch and see what happens. But he's so calm. He is so, he is so the hero of his own. story and knows it and like is just ready to take a little nap whenever you're thinking a little

now. There is a point I think right before one of the voice credits acts where they just had an argument about like the plan three PO proposes via card that like right you do a roll sweep because the role swap because the the imperials don't know who is who right they just know the name jade they know that that that that card has an agent named jade pursuing the target and so Luke could be Jade and Mara could be the target who stole from him, you know? But there's a point where she's like, so you're going to help me set up the, and he's already back to sleep. And she's like, forget it.

And then she tells our two, like, you're going to help me, like, set this place up. And there are little moments like that where it is like, hmm, is this just turning into friendly bickering? Like, it's not quite as some of the heat is dying down. But in the wake of one of those attacks, we finally, we finally get the story of Mara Jade. Right after Luke rescues her, uh, from a, from a, from a Warrensker, in a way that annoys the shit out of her. Yeah. Yeah. Because he didn't just, this, the section to just really sell, because we're talking a lot about another, again, I know there are people who don't read along, which is fine.

Um, uh, this is, I believe where he's, he's going to sleep. Um, uh. Okay, I'm just going to read, this is what her internal, because we're getting her internal monologue, kind of for the first time, really deep here. She paused, tube in hand, and frowned at Skywalker, at his closed eyes and calm, apparently totally unwarried face, which seems strange, because if anyone had ever, if anyone ever had reason to be worried, it was he, stripped of all his vaunted Jedi powers by a planet full of a salimary, trapped in a forest on a world whose name and location he didn't even know

with her, the Imperials, and the Vorksner's, lining up for their privilege of killing him. He should be by rights, be wide-eyed with pumping adrenaline by now. Maybe he was just faking it, hoping she would lower her guard. It was probably something she would try under reverse circumstances. But then, maybe there was more to him than met the eye, more than just a family name, a political position, and a bag of Jedi tricks. her mouth tightened and she ran her fingers along the side of the lightsaber hanging from her belt yes of course there was more there whatever had happened at the end at that terrible confused life-destroying end it hadn't been his Jedi tricks that had saved him it had been something else something she would make sure to find out from him before his own end came it's not quite modest ripper material but it ain't it's sorry the next line is her is her popper pills is her taking a stem pill so she doesn't have to sleep alley it's extremely normal for girls

to sit around and try to think about what's special about some guy while slowly caressing the one piece of him that she can touch he's light saver it's normal there's nothing weird about that yes and she definitely still wants to kill him yes for sure it's so good after he rescues her he has this moment of like, one, he thinks that would thaw her out. And she's like, it immediately comes up with guns. Like put down the lightsaber, you're back to being prisoners. And he responds with like, you're unbelievable. And again, the like the fear steadily draining out of him and beginning to get kind of

annoyed. But he finally asks, like, what did I do? Like, what did I actually do? And because he, he's looking at her. pondering her strange contradictions of this mysterious woman and I'm like I'm not sure

the contradictions are that deep but you are very young and she is very pretty she is described like an Italian sports car so I do understand you're like what what is her deal I can't I can't make her out but she finally

is like you destroyed my life and if for nothing else you deserve to die and then she does a little drive-by on Owen and Brew Lars you came off a 10th-rate planet and a sixth-rate farm and you just destroyed my life

Why'd you bring them into it? Maybe they were good at farming. Their farms sucked. Damn. The farm sucked. It was better, they were better at farming than tattooing is at being a like habitable planet, but it still sucked.

And, and that's when he's like, well, how? And she's like, you don't even know who I am, do you? He's like, well, if I saw you, I bet, I bet, I was like, no, I don't know who you are. There was at no point he was even like, oh, it's you, but I'm going to pretend. I don't know. Like, you know, girl. Which now, having had all this material, there's also a bit of, you didn't even notice me. I mean, literally, Rob, oh, right, she said sardonically, the great omniscient Jedi.

See all, hear all, know all, understand all. No. We didn't actually meet But I was there if you'd bother to notice me I was a dancer at Jabba the Hutz Palace The day you came for solo And then Luke's thought is So that was it

She worked for Jabba And when he'd killed Jabba He'd ruined her life No You idiot Flashing back to Han Solo Now never cross a stripper Lou

ask Landau why so Han said never cross a stripper well let me make you a drink it's very exotic we get a long conversation getting sleepy there friend I'll tell you about it when you're older Luke but so yeah she's like no I want I wasn't fucking dancer

He's like, no, no, no, you weren't. He's like, no, you know, like all the lightsaber stuff, you, you know, your expert marksman, your, your ace pilot. My dad hired you to kidnap me. Your dad fucking sucked. Oh, wait, yeah, no, he doesn't say that. He says, Vader sent you to her. Yes, yes, yes. And she says, Vader, she all but spat the name.

Don't make me laugh. Vader was a fool and skating on the edge of trees along with it. My master sent me to Jabba's to kill you, not recruit you. Her master, that could only mean one thing. The emperor. And then she tells him, yeah, he's like, what went wrong? And she was like, Jabba won't let me on the sail barge. Yeah?

Jaba just said no. He just said, no. And I was like, let me go. Jabba's like, oh, no. No, you stay here. But I really, really want to dance. It's a really nice day out. I want to get so sunned.

Wouldn't I look better with the tan, Java? Come on. I want to see him get eaten by the big monster. Well, like, the fucked up thing is this is the vision we saw. If she had been there, he fucking dies. Which also brings us back, too. Oh, I'm sorry I came out of nowhere and destroyed. your life.

Maybe at the Empire hadn't massacred my fucking family in the five minutes as I was away from home. I would still be on that moisture farm. Like, and also her plan, she was going to kill him and all his friends for nothing. Just because it was just, she was going to stand there and laugh. Well, a dozen people went into the Sarlack. And he's the asshole. No, she tells two very different stories very quickly, back to back. about why she might do this.

The first is that she is one of the most important people in the galaxy. She has one of the best titles in the world. She's the emperor's hand. She served him all over the galaxy, doing jobs the imperial fleet and stormtroopers couldn't handle. She exposed traitors to him, brought down his enemies, helped him keep the kind of control over the mindless bureaucracies that he needed. She had, quote, prestige and power and respect. the name emperor's hand

was what she was known as in his inner court and then one page later he's like well what why didn't she just go back to the empire after all that shit happened and she goes who would I go to they didn't know me

none of them did not the emperor not as the emperor's hand anyway I was a shadow working outside the normal lines of command and protocol there were no records kept of my activities those few I formally introduced that I was formally introduced to thought of me as a

court-hanging froth, a minor bit of mobile decoration kept around the palace to amuse the emperor. A page ago, you said you had prestige and power. So wait, so wait. People thought you're the emperor's stripper? I wasn't. I wasn't the stripper.

No. Two different stories of your life. She was such an important person, but only the highest echelons. Right. Only the true ones. Her existence was so secret that everyone who knew how important she was was dead. But she could go anywhere in the galaxy.

Now, the thing is, we do know people like this, don't we? This is Assange Ventris. This is the Inquisitors in some ways. I mean, the Inquisitors are more part of the bureaucracy of the empire, at least. But, like, it is every Sith assassin. It's Savage. It's like, that's what she is. Vader should have been on fucking on watch.

He was going to get replaced. Yeah, when I was reading this, I was immediately like, oh, are we going to figure out that Thron and Mara know each other because they're both the like secret operative just on two different sides of the coin. Right. And it's either like they interacted with each other and, you know, couldn't meet up again after. Right.

Why doesn't she just go work with Thron? Right. Yeah, exactly. And then like, or, you know, the emperor kept those things separate and, you know, it's just a lost pot or whatever. But then I was like, there's really a like. Like, you know, even if they aren't meaning to do it, like, I feel like the Clone Wars people are really doing, like, I really liked Thron and Mara, so that's what I'm, that's the dynamics

I'm going to have with Duku and Ventress, because it sure does feel like an echo or a rhyme in a little bit. You're not wrong. Duku and Thrawn have a lot in common in presentation and in their, they're sort of posture, their cadences, a lot of that stuff. You can imagine, in fact, this book's performance of Thrawn is a little Duku-ish in places. You know, he has that sense of proprietary, you know, education and the sort of like luster that comes with status and all of that stuff that Duku does.

So yeah, yeah, I think you're right, Hallie, like, there is a blueprint quality to these folks. here for sure it's great i you know it's we're laughing up a storm i'm having the time of my fucking right it's what and also luke being like he just see what to know you totally would have assassinated me and all my friends it's so funny for what it's worth i just want you to know i just want you to know you really nailed it if jolly brought you on the sail barge we'd have all died so you should know that like it's not on you were you were you were the best emperor's hand you could be, which I think gets us back to. And it culminates towards so as they begin making their way through the jungle, you know, they have to team up now and

really work together to get out of this jam. They have to do the roll swap thing. They have to be taken prisoner by the Imperial Scouts. Luke has to hide his face by getting itchy. He has to get some poison ivy all over his face so that he's welts up and looks like a weird like looks real shitty I can't imagine it works I can't imagine anyone because someone immediately is like hey what happened to your face and he's like

oh plants and it's like okay so what do you normally look like then are you hiding what you normally look like no okay well well the imperial officers immediately like yeah let's see what happens when the swelling comes out like yeah puts your cuffs on this motherfucker too

well not even that they're like go to the doctor right now I'll talk to you afterwards It's like, you know, this is a non-issue. We have doctors. Oh, it's funny. Oh. But like, so they're taken prisoner at this point, like, cards people are, as he's being marched into the center of the city on Merker, he realizes like, oh, another prison isn't brought in. It's Han.

And it's cards guys bringing this, this, bring Han in. their weapons are taken off them taken custody by the imperial's and it's cool how the scene plays out is like the whole imperial convoy has to go into a kill zone and this is the place for the ambush and Luke realizes don't do it like way to beat and we get a cool moment of like everyone just has to delete

Lando has to be like even though it makes no tactical sense we're going to trust Luke's plan here and let him cook even though it looks like his plan is going to lead to certain death for everyone involved in this rescue attempt but what Lucas figured out

is what they're heading towards is this big central like concrete archway over like the central plaza of the city and the stormtroopers when they're in attack are going to post up there and like defend it with their armored vehicles and all that and that's when he's going to get him He's going to bring the whole arch down on him.

And that's what he does. He, R2 launches the saber at him. He cuts the supports, locks the lightsaber on, throws it through the other supports, kills all the stormtroopers in our vehicles that they're on left in like 30 seconds of combat. Which brings us back to the, so what's a Jedi in this world? What's special about Luke Skywalker? Yeah. And it does seem to be the answer here a little bit, is a little bit like, it's a bit like, I think the, the thing that hit me is, like, in Zanz's construction of this, or at least the way he mentions Luke, Luke is still an ace pilot before he starts leaning into the force.

Right. It's like, he can be a little bit better through the guidance of the force. And there's a puzzle piece that fits in the other way, too. key to the itchiness moment. He covers his face with poison ivy to get his face all itchy. And then he starts to do the force meditation, the Jedi meditation against itchiness. And the force part of it doesn't work, but he finds that he's less itchy before than he was before he started doing it. Because it turns out that like the Jedi are just martial artists.

The Jedi are just trained monks and meditation and focus. and physical training also have benefits. So the combination of Rob, he's already an ace pilot. He's already someone who has those instincts or whatever. And also, he has been undergoing training for years in martial arts and in combat. Can he steer the lightsaber through the air? No.

No. Can he throw it like a ninja star to cut a bridge in half? Yes. Yes, he can. Yes. You know, good job building a thing they can cut a bridge in half. I mean, this is so funny because when I was a kid, I'd misread somewhere, or I'd read somewhere, I didn't misread it, I read it on the internet.

That was like, well, only a Jedi or someone with the force can really use a lightsaber because they're light, which means there's no weight to it. And you need the force to, like, hold the lightsaber the right way and, like, account for the fact that there's no weight to the blade. Someone without the force would just cut their own arms off because they just wouldn't have a good control over it. It's like moving a flashlight around. It'd be very easy to hurt yourself with it.

And that's not true, like, canonically, right? Like, we've seen many people use a lightsaber reserve or a sword who don't have direct access to the force in the way that the Jedi do. But in some ways, it kind of wraps back around here to be like, you know, this is why that's the case. You need – the lightsaber is scary. People in the world get to be dangerous, even if they don't have access to the force. even if they don't have level three force choke and level three you know uh lightsaber throw the world is more interesting when these tools are still dangerous uh and when these people

are still dangerous even without their little backpack of force energy because that's not what it's about you know um so one of those things that for years i thought was right and was mad about when i first learned i was wrong about it and i've totally come the opposite direction now like of course hans solo could use a lightsaber push come to shove he wouldn't be as good at it uh as Luke would be. But of course, someone who doesn't have, someone who trains their whole life to be a sword fighter could use a lightsaber in this world. That's part of what makes the world interesting, not a limitation of the Jedi being cool, you know? Which I think some people want that. Some people want the setting to be, only Jedi can use this thing because it's the Jedi

power. It's part of the extension of who they are, you know? And I think that also that way you start getting toward is something a little creepier about the Jedi than necessarily you want them to be right like if if Luke is like nobody without the force right then what inherent heroism is there to what he does and also at that point like to what degree when if Jedi are winning fights like to what degree they're just like basically murdering people because they have like unstoppable force powers and like but here you see like no he's still he's still trained at all this it's just the force makes him like a little bit better at some of it and then gives him some abilities outside of that, but really it comes from within.

It comes from sort of a discipline. The other thing that I think emerges across the truck with Mara is that, and what she's starting to key onto, is that, like, he's curious and he's, you know, kind. Is those are kind of the two things that define him as he sort of goes through the movies is that, like, he is fundamentally a kid from the middle of nowhere who's always kind of impressed by, like, look at all that there is out in this, out in this galaxy. and tries to engage with it as a decent person. And even when it's that given a lot of cause to,

I think that's sort of the thing that emerges here is that you take away, here in this adventure, you sort of strip a lot of this away from Luke. And there are still qualities here that emerge as like, oh yeah, this is still a hero in the story and it doesn't require the magic powers.

And so that is the answer, you know, Mar coming into this is like, the only way any of this happened is because basically he cheated. He was chosen by destiny and he had all these force powers and there's nothing he's just some asshole

who everyone thinks amazing but basically like the force anointed him to just like be allowed to do all this stuff and there's nothing inherently valuable about Luke and over the course of this track is like

okay they're grudgingly there may be some qualities here there's something about this farm boy you know there just is car immediately is converted like card is this close to being like starting to like recite the thing that the guardian of wills is reciting

I am one with the forest the forest is with me he sees the aftermath of this battle and he's like where do I sign up shit yeah which is like part of the thing to connect us back to

Sabia, part of the sort of small-mindedness of Thrawn is like, do you not understand what one of these motherfuckers could really build if they wanted to be public about how powerful they can be, you know, and like what the, what force training and Jedi training could be? Do you not, you've no vision for a future in which a, someone is capable of using the force and also being, uh, having the thirst of power that you have. I mean, he does to some degree. It's like why he wants to keep Sabayyath from having the taste of that power. But he doesn't seem to understand that sending Luke and Leia to the sky and two fresh twins could result in the rise of a terror, unlike any of ever seen before.

You're like, the emperor, the emperor couldn't out and out use the force. You know what I mean? He wasn't out here showing people force lightning, you know? But if people saw force lightning, we'd like how Talon sees this moment, you know? Damn, okay. I didn't know you could do all that. It is, it's great. So he realizes that like Luke Skywalker is that guy.

Yeah. And you can't, you can't really deny it. And also the other thing you can't deny, time is up on Merker. It's, it's time to go. There's, he flirts with some ideas. Maybe we can recover. He has this desperate, like maybe we can trick solo to send us a warship to like, you know, we can steal that.

He'll think he'll be sending us a van, basically, but we're going to steal it for Thron and be like, sorry about all the... And he's like, that's not going to work. That's not going to fucking worry. And he still wants the ship. He still wants the van to help him move. But he doesn't want... He's not going to try to flip it to try to keep his reputation score high with

Thron. Just an incredible, like, chapter to chapter transfer again with going back to Thron, where we get card being like, yeah, I could probably get him one of those ships as an apology, immediate next page, thrown in the space above this planet, planning on stealing every one of those ships. Yep.

Card just does not have it. He just died. And the other things he's like, I'm going to kill the shit out of the card. Like, he's like, what, the stormtroopers are two hours late reporting? Death to Card. Everyone's got to go. I do, I do want to just really zero in on this moment where Card does ask Han for the spaceship. It is an insane ask after all the shit that we just talked about. They're like,

are you going to stick for dinner? Hey, sorry, your boy got lost in the jungle with the woman who wants to kill him. Thron was here. All that stuff, right? Cardwatched as they got into the air speeder. One other thing, he said as they strapped in, obviously we were going to have to pull out of here before the Imperials figure out what happened. That means a lot of lifting capacity if we're going to do it quickly. You wouldn't happen to have any surplus cargo or stripped-down military ships lying around I could have, would you? Solo gave him a strange look.

We don't have enough cargo capacity for the New Republic's normal business, he said. I think I might have mentioned that to you. Well, then alone, perhaps. Okay, a little Honda-ish. You know, a stripped-down Mont-Calumari Star Cruiser would do nicely. A stripped-down Mon Calamari Star Cruiser? what are you talking about that's an insane

that's their main battleship that's the thing that you use that's the famous one that's the one that looks like it's all blobby and cool and big you have one of those but he's getting evicted he has to move

it's just a wild ass I thought you were my friend it's what's wild is Han isn't even like well maybe if you agree to do some shipping for us with it. Han is like,

I will ask if we can get you Amon Kalimari Star Cruiser. All right. See if you can like get your shit off this planet or whatever. Fine. It's great. The degree to which card, card's the man who had everything.

Oh yeah. Except friends. And the degree to which it was like, it's coming over for dinner. It'll be great. And then like, hey, do you know how to play poker? Is that just like curious?

Do you know how to play poker? Because I hear some people are getting together at poker night who's coming. Well, it depends. You know, or if you're going to come, maybe then you could bring a friend or two and then I could tell some of the people

you're coming and then they'd want to come. I mean, not that they wouldn't come for me. I just haven't asked anybody. You're the first one I asked, you know. And then like literally like 20 pages later, can you help me move? Like, listen,

things got a little out of hand. If you think about it, like you were part of this whole situation, too. So, like, yes, I am the one who started the fire that burned the house down, but, like, you kind of owe me one, too. So you guys can come back and just, like, help me get this all cleaned up

and then we'll be square. Yeah, I'll buy pizza. And then I'll buy you dinner. Yes, we can go out afterwards. I know this little place. Yeah, really, really cool. I'm the guy who knows things. Like, so you know it'll be good.

Yeah. Hey, do you remember that time I didn't kill you? He does play that card. He does play that card. He does. I got a cap saying card. Well, that's why he was written this way. Yep.

But yes, the... This book, by the way, was originally the title that he submitted. Didn't either you look this up? No. The title that he submitted was Wildcard. He wanted to name this book Wildcard. And they were like, no, we already published a thing called, wild cards, which is, I believe that is the, it is the, it is the, it is the George R. Martin

edited, like, superhero series, uh, and Bantam was already publishing wild cards. Um, and so then he was like, fine, can, can we do the emperor's hand? And they were like, no. And he was like, what about warlord's gambit? And they were like, no. And eventually he said, all these are bad times. They're all bad. Eventually they got to air the empire.

But Wild Card makes the most sense, though, because we're reading it the first time, Card is the standout character. Oh, for sure. It doesn't recast it. I always thought, like, well, like, Zond really loves this OC. But the fact that he wanted to just name the fucking book after, which is wild. It's like, we're giving you the license to work in Star Wars. Great.

I'm going to make a story about this cool smuggler I thought of. Dream a little bigger, darling. Like, you talk about the whole thing, the whole future of the galaxy, not just your little guy. It's like. oh that's good two cool smugglers the smuggler and the smuggler's assistant with a mysterious past

that's who the story is about and he was like what about Luke and Honolet I don't know what the fuck he's doing he's like I should rebuild the Jedi order or something you know what's wild

talent card isn't on the cover of this book no neither is Mara Jade right Marjade only appears in the cover of a third book card never gets a cover

card never gets a cover No. Talancard? Talancard is never on the cover of any book as far as I know. Maybe a comic book, but not a comic. I'm sure. I mean, I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure a comic book. I'm sure he had a comic, but like, they didn't let him on any, come on.

Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. I just found the, I just found the Czech language cover, which I don't know how he'd missed this before. Great. This is remarkable. Oh, my fucking Lord. this is great I love this somebody described the other

covered of somebody and they'd never seen Star Wars before What happened to Chewbacca over there What the fuck happened to Chewaka? Oh no I am losing My mind Oh my God

Wait, Natalie just deliver terrible news Oh no live on air live on air oh there's some peace oh man that's a bummer

James Earl Jones just died unfortunately oh what a loss man that's a lot to process yeah that's a lot to process shoutouts to James Earl Jones voice of Darley

Vader, yeah, who I hope will not get done dirty by the future of Star Wars production and just replacing him with digital voices. Yeah, they will probably do that. But yeah, it's, with something to start by often in the show is how often his performance as Vader continually like adds depth and like shades in interesting parts of that character. And always did from the start. I think, you know, it is hard to say with something as all so successful as Star Wars that it succeeds in the back of so many different things that any one puzzle piece of it is so important that the whole thing rests on it. You could start making a case for Jones's performance as Vader in throughout the original trilogy. There's a reason why Darth Vader is

an all-time villain and an all-time character, and so much of it is in Jones's vocal performance that is one of the most iconic characters of the last, of popular fiction, right? Yeah. So to say nothing of like his life outside of Star Wars and his incredible sets of roles over truly a remarkable career. So, yeah, ripped to a real one. Truly depressing news. Sorry to bring it to you

If you're finding out from us Though I don't know that our schedule makes that seem Like you'll heard by now We are finding out now Like this sort of happen in the middle of our show So we are very bummed To see that Well

Should we get to the final little bit here That we have I guess there's two bits left That we have not covered Yeah well the last thing Just again for that that fan fiction material So Han and Luke are like leaving Leaving Mirker

and Han's immediate assumption about what was going on with Luke and Mara is like, so you guys seem to be hitting it off. I think he says those exact words. Like, Rob is not exaggerating at all. Uh-huh. Just the brief window

because they barely say a word to each other in the whole like battle, except for when she's like, what we're going to do, do it. But beyond that, like just observing them Han's like so

sup yeah and Luke is like he could sense Han casting around for a way to ask the next question decided to save him the trouble she wants to kill me he told the other any idea why Luke opened his mouth and

to his own surprise closed it again there wasn't any particular reason not to tell Han what he knew about Mara's past certainly no reason he could think of and yet somehow he felt a strangely compelling reluctance to do so. It's something personal, he said at last. Han threw him an odd look.

Something personal? How personal can a death mark get? It's not a death mark, Luke insisted. It's something, well, personal. Han gazed at him a moment longer than turned back to his piloting. Oh, he said, what do you think Han thinks Luke means here? told that boy not to cross a stripper because he says she wants to kill me

and he's like I won't but it's not it's not a death mark it's not someone there's no way you can't not think crazy as girlfriend that exactly what I'm like when did he have time when he's been on Khorisat the whole time when did he run into Talon Cards crew

You know, like, it's really, definitely doesn't have that kind of talent. Right. Was she on Dagaba? Was it while I was in Carbonite? When did he? Oh, that's true. That's what he must be thinking. He's like, well, Shadowsby Empire hasn't been written yet.

So maybe he was having wild sex with this cool redhead during that time that I was a rock. Then he ghosted her, but that doesn't seem Luke life. Doesn't seem like Luke. That'd be really weird for Luke. But he did, I guess, kind of ghost all of us to do with a Jedi training. That's not Yoda is it? But I don't think that he thinks about other people a lot At all

He's probably just like He's probably just like oh yeah That okay sure I don't know I feel like it is again a very Like Harrison Ford like spin the chair Back toward the front of the ship Oh Yeah exactly

Fine don't tell me Yeah Yeah there is It's just a very funny bit that immediately, like, the assumption is like, oh, damn, like, Luke Moose fast. Came out of the chorus with a girlfriend. Yeah.

And then, like, yeah, Luke's like, no, it's, I don't want to tell anyone about this. This is, don't want to talk to people about Mario Jade. It's good for Luke to have a little secret for his life. Yeah. I want him to have a little impersonal life. Because he doesn't really, you know, he's a lip for others type of guy.

Yeah. you know he really needs some excitement like he's going across the world just because like some old man said his voice like hate come through this is the other thing is like so true it is again like there is so little good going on for that guy at this moment where it's like you got to go hang out with an evil septuagenarian and that's his big adventure that's the galaxy set him up for he's like oh thank god yeah i can go hang out with this weird old guy who, like, has just been living underground the last 30 years, but now he wants to train me. So I'm going to go back to school with this guy, I don't know.

You know, I'm not, I'm no fan of, of, you know, compulsory heterosexuality here, but I do think that one of the reasons you want to have, like, a bad relationship sometimes is so that you don't join a cult instead, you know? That, like, it's better to have a weird X than it is to have joined Sabayath on planet Jerker or whatever the fuck you know planet jerk off i you know like uh because that's what's happening right like i want luke when he has to make a decision about whether to hang out the old guy or go back to the galaxy i want him to at least have in his mind now what was up with that lady with the red gold hair and the green eyes like that's just a little something on the weight on the other side

of it all you know well and there's a little bit of like the only person who doesn't seem to like he's a Jedi or public war hero, which is a little bit of this, the only person in the story, it's like, go fuck yourself. And there's a bit of him that's like, yes. Ooh, I needed that. Different than what he describes

is like, Monmothma's like, hey, could you do like just a Jedi vibe check on this place and then fuck off and not bother us again? Like, you tell us there's dark side energy here, right? Okay, great. No dark side. Don't need your opinion.

I just need the dark side. veto up or down. This is the thing of like... See you never. You know, I've been a long proponent of someone, of being someone who says that like, I don't need my partners to listen to the podcasts I make, to pay attention to the stuff I write. I need, I often need a partner to be someone who like doesn't give a fuck about what the rest of my life is.

You know, I'm not trying to, I need someone who's going to keep it real with me and is not going to be like, well, your professional portfolio, no, shut up. want you to think about who I am. Luke needs that. Luke and Luke especially. You know, I make podcasts. Luke blew up the death star.

How are you supposed to date someone who's like, well, he blew up the death star, you know? I have to go restart the Jedi order. Jedi suck. Right. Right. He needs that. Yes. Yes.

You know, if you think about it, the two Jedi am at, kind of sucked. Like, yeah, I love Ben and all that, but like that certain point of view, shit. Get something to my skin. Yeah. Yeah, good shit, good shit. There has to be like a little bit of like good boyness in here too, right? Where it's like, well, I already ruined her life. Like it's not a good idea to tell my like, like, you know, I keep saying rebellion.

I should keep saying Republic. My Republic friends don't need to know that I was in the woods with an ex-imperial. And as much as I love Han Solo, he sure does go to those meetings. Oh, he's telling Leia. Oh, yeah, immediately. It doesn't come up, but, like, the new Republic might want to meet Mara J. Oh, yeah. In ways that would not go well for Mara J.

Yeah. We don't, like, there's a bit of, like, dude, that girl could have committed, like, war crimes. Like, she could have been part of some real bad shit. Yeah. And he's like, I don't want to, that's a different chapter of her last. What do you think the emperor did with that hand? It wasn't nice things.

you know for okay that's that's the last thing I want to bring up with her where he's like why don't you go back to the empire and she's like what empire the old empire's dead and has contempt for this new thing and there is a little bit of what do you think what do you think the good empire was and we'll just put a pin in that right because there's this bit of like my empire rule this new empire sucks and it's like they're kind of the same but it does seem like they might actually be better than like the one that palpatine was running because like it doesn't seem like a planet's blown up lately. So already you're like billions of lives ahead. But yeah, so there's a bit of that too. A quick jaunt over to Kishik. Didn't go well. Didn't work out.

It is creepy. This moment does get me. Leo wakes up in the middle night and gropes for her phone basically and feels a critter grab her arm. Yeah. I mean, it's a tough maneuver to beat, which is just like a group of killers is in your town,

and they're just going to wait until you stop having guards, and then they're going to get you. Like, yeah, that would work. That would work. Yeah. Yeah, it's creepy. This whole section of them, like, trying to, like, jump her in the house at night is creepy. She gets one of them with a lightsaber, though. She cuts one of them in half.

In fucking half. A lot of things get cut in half in this book. Lightaber should do. Yeah. Lightaber is not a, uh, oh yeah, we'll take that one, prison. Uh-uh. Um. But speaking of taking prisoners.

Melarouche. Weird moment where in the middle of the fight in the night, he just, one of them just goes quiet, right? And like, steps back and he's like, whoa. It puts her in like an MMA lock. where it like grabs her arms, locks her legs, and then does a little sniffer thing because we learn in a minute

their sniffers are so powerful that it's like you get suction cupped to the wall is how strong they are. But the minute gets that like little suction cup action going the things like, oh holy shit and then lets her go.

And I think in that point he says the little phrase, Malayouche, and Chewy bursts in the door And she has to make a snap decision She's like, don't kill him Don't kill him And so Chewy just concusses the shit out of it

Yeah, yeah And then they escape We get a really funny moment of They debate like how they want to escape And all this other stuff And the wookies end up crawling Like climbing Underneath the branches of the city

And like fast crawling In a way that she describes as creepy which is very funny well because she thought they would like use the claws as like hand holds and like slowly hand over hand but what she doesn't realize is

it gives them traction and they just skitter which is kind of cool I do I do kind of love this detail is a wild visual image in my mind looking like an 824 horror scene you know skittering across the damn vines

I couldn't really follow where Leia is here? She's like tied to Chewbacca? Maybe. I will say there's a... I think she is... I think she's baby Bjorned. Okay. Right, right. Her face is in his chest.

Yes. Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, and there's a weird moment where she like ties the lightsaber to a vine and throws it back at the pursuing hover cart of other no-gree and like cuts them in half with their kind of That's the ship in half with it. Zahn loves a big swinging pendulum thing.

Absolutely. Who doesn't? And eventually, before they leave, Leia is like, we have to go talk to the one who lived. At the police station. I want to see this wiki police station. She goes into the interrogation room. It's like her story, but like it's all like wooden shit.

Like wooded handled her story. The Noghry brings out the guitar. He's like, I used to play this song every now and then. brings me back it's there's a lot of paragraphs devoted to him smelling her and then and then he reveals the thing that you've already said that that he didn't know that she was Vader's daughter that she was part that she was Vader's kin that she was Lady Vader

that she was Molly what was it Mallory Malariyush, mal ariush. That's what I've been saying. I haven't listened to the audio book portion of this. I think that's right. Malarish, which is, I don't, did we ever get a direct translation of what that means? Not yet. We might find out eventually. Yeah. And they lay out a story, which is there was a fight between the empire and the rebellion. Well, there were two great starships that met in space above their world. And there was a fight. And when the battle was over, the fight had destroyed the planet of the Nogri, had not destroyed it, like Alderan, but destroyed it, like, ruined it.

It's sort of like in the movie Heat, where they're like, just like, were Val Kilmer's just, like, blazing away. But, like, there's people in the backdrop who are just getting, like, nailed by, like, machine gunfire. Yes. And that's kind of what the rebellion she thinks might have been doing is like, we went. Which I love. Very interesting.

Blasted the shit out of the planet. You know, we'll see that it's long term if that's right or not. But the way that it comes across. is that like, oh, yeah, you know, we didn't mean to destroy the planet that was nearby the space battle we were having, but we did do that. And there's just really fun exchange where, where, was it, Kabarak is the name of this, Nogri, is like, you know, Vader didn't think it was an accident. And, and Leah's like, well, then, you know, come on. Like, Vader was wrong about this. The emperor, it's like constantly took slaves and, like, you're,

you basically, you know, or ended up working for the emperor for, for, for why. Like, you know, we were here to try to liberate people. And, and he's like, you didn't show up to liberate us. We were just a simple people. We were just living our lives. And, uh, and then y'all, you know,

y'all came and killed us, basically. Um, there's this, this bit that's like, only he came to our aid when we were so, when we so desperately needed it. In his memory, we serve his designated air, the man to whom the Lord Vader long ago entrusted us. I find it difficult to believe the emperor ever really cared about you, Leia told him bluntly. That's not the sort of man he was.

All he cared about was obtaining your service against us. Only he came to our aid, Kabarak repeated. And Leia's like, but we didn't know. We didn't know that you needed help. And she makes a deal, which is, all right, fine, I remember, I am the Mali Arush. You got to remember that I am Lord Vader's heir, the true heir. Can we meet a month from now in space? Where is it again?

It's not above their planet? It's above their planet, yeah. Sure. So that's the deal she makes with him. And she has to be completely alone. Yep. I love her getting called Lady Vader. It's really funny.

Well, especially because she has no relationship. Like, she's kind of pointedly, Luke's like, what do I do with this legacy? And she's like, I'm Leah Organa. Yeah. Like, not really, don't really want to engage with this, but you have to lean into this now. And you know who, she was a princess. She was a lady, right?

There is a sort of through line of aristocratic power and prestige and posture that she is familiar with in a way, which is kind of interesting. Maybe Leia just needs her own little group of little killers running around, getting stuff done. I don't know. Maybe they don't have to kill. Maybe they can just do recon for her, you know? You're telling me that the Republic doesn't have anybody that they need to kidnap sometimes? We know they do. Lay's should find out about this Sabayath guy and just send these guys after him.

Just send the little Nogri-A-R-A-Has. Just ninja his ass. Yeah. You know? Give them some of Salamiari. It's awesome. Look, I love that they're kind of cat-like with big sniffers. I just, I love that there's a whole, like, they're cat ninjas.

they want to give you a good sniff and bond with you and then maybe they could be your ninjas. To this day I still feel like we've been I've never seen a picture of a no gree that feels like what is being described in this book so I need to

if someone has like a good example of something that feels like it looks like the way the needle teeth is a big but like the needle teeth and the big sniffer is kind of tough to I agree it's hard to draw. Yeah. Because she's talking about like she sees his big soft

sniffer muzzle but then the big nightmarish needle teeth and it's like those are two hard things to square yeah what exactly is the inheritance process

of the not keeping Darth Vader's smell because bloodlines whatever bloodlines are powerful in Star Wars but of recognizing it five years after he died

maybe they keep like he was like now I'm going to be now I'm going to be gone for a little while so I'm going to give you my cape and it's like to smell strongly of me oh that's very sweet so your people will always remember

RIP James Earl Jones never forgotten here or on the no gree planet who they're like now children everyone come up to this cape get a big sniff but Darth Fader would never be like

oh I have to make sure this culture knows my scent in case my children come here one day and I don't want them to get hurt. So like what's the like what's happening? Maybe their sniffers are just that good.

Their sniffers are like crazy good. Did you not see the paragraph describing the big sniffer? This is true. Huge nostrils like whoa, whoa. But then like supple skin around nostrils. Delicate folds. I do want, I'm very curious to learn more about what Vader's relationship to them is and stuff,

because partly because this is a Vader that predates our Anakin, right? And so any time that we get to learn more about who Vader was in private, you know, away from the emperor or away from the camera of the Star Wars trilogy, that's like a rare bit of access into like who he actually was, what was really going on in his mind. And so, but also there's some fun. overlap there, which is like, we know, we know our Anakin loved his voice. Anakin loved his clone troopers. He like, those are his guys, you know? And so if we get a little of that here with the

no-greed, that would be really fun. Well, and there's a weird thing, like, it's tough to say. Like, is there a bit of, you can easily imagine a planet full of people who's like whole lives been maimed by war and like just devastated? Like, is there, you can imagine, like, much the way we see him like retreating to Mustafa as a place where he like he can be himself like is that what happens with the no grade like is he is there a planet where he is like justly revered or you know again they were turned into imperial death commandos they're sort of just like instrumentalized right he did not from what we're just tricking we don't know what the percentages are here right like did he say oh wow it sucks that there's only 10,000 of you left alive you're all being drafted into my

personal kill squads or is he trying to to rebuild the planet they were from, or what really happened there to begin? We just truly don't know what the deal is. And you have to imagine, we are not going to leave this trilogy being like, what Vader was good all along in the way that don't seem likely. It don't seem likely. You know, he found it in the end. That's the whole story.

But, but yeah, we'll see. Darth Vader should have been at the catboy clubs. Wow, so true. This all would have been different. His whole life should have been, would have been different, yeah. Uh, I also do like, just the, just the one thing that, uh, uh, Kabarik mentions is that Lay asks, like, so Thron, or she doesn't know his name, but like, your new master. Yeah.

How are things going with that? And the answer is immediately like, well, not good. Mm-hmm. Things are not great. And so there's immediately a sense that, like, we love Vader. Right. We're serving the guy entrusted us to, but like, already. doesn't hit the same

which doesn't feel quite the same thing Vader and Thrawn had some sort of relationship if he entrusted the no gree to them or to Thron right yeah so so back to Thron's big plan going to the sluice van shipyards our introduction to this is

Wedge Antilles being stuck on an escort mission and just getting mightily bored basically like flying cover at what has turned into a giant traffic jam in space. Like they're frantically converting tons of New Republic warships into

cargo haulers. There's a huge backlog. There's it's chaos. There's a description of he's bickering with this frigate captain, Captain Affion, and Wedge kind of reflects on the fact that like if he'd taken promotions or I'd

be a fighter pilot. I love this stuff. The stuff is really fun. Well, in this process like the New Republic is so overstretched, that like this frigate is supposed to have a crew of about a thousand people but it has been stripped down

for cargo service or is in the process of that and so Afghans trying to run it with a crew of 15 that's how bad things are is like it is beyond skeleton crew so you know wedges out there

and begins to get a sense that like when that when that like that cloaking equipped freighter comes in immediately is like this doesn't this doesn't fit with the overall vibe of this traffic jam. You know, everyone kind of goes on alert, but who is there to go on alert?

The place is barely defended, and it's just like a parking lot for ships. And I do love the whole, the whole way this fight unfolds where everyone's just trying to figure out, what the hell are we dealing with? It's just a long phase of like, it's not clear, like the Empire shows up with everything they got, tons of Star Destroyers, you know, stuff like bottling up the system, but nobody's sure what this little freighter did. and what and what you know

what its cloaking shield shield was concealing and it's not until Wedge gets shot at by a star cruiser that he realizes like something ain't right until the plan is just to be clear that ship that had been

it had been cloaked but not cloaked not invisible cloaked like hiding elements of the interior was closed what's in its ship bay or stocking bay was cloaked for instance but people still saw the ship right um and so everyone thought it's just a regular ship with no cargo because it's reporting no cargo the visual

display is no cargo but but scans also indicate there's it's a heavy ship it's heavier than it should be for it to have no cargo um but what it's doing is launching the mole miners to go connect to the undermanned ships they're serving as the logistical backbone of the New Republic to then take over those ships by crashing into them, mining into them effectively, or they're not even mining into them, right? Because what's happening is they're connecting, but they're doing space welding. They're like welding themselves a little entryway point for little teams of stormtroopers to go in and take over these ships, basically.

Making sure it's all clear in my head. Yep. And then also, sometimes they have more than just regular stormtroopers. Maybe a zero-g storm. A space trooper. It looks almost like a robot. And Luke is like, what the fuck is that? Because, by the way, Luke is here.

Because not just wedge is here. But Han was like, we are not going back. Bro of all time. Han is like, we're not going back to Corrasson, kid. we're going to go to the truck stop we're going to go to like we're going to go to like reno we got to get you to somewhere not the home base because you're going to get there the truck stop thing is so this is is truck stop he's like this is going to be the fun part totally yeah because it's like we're going to sheets it really is that it really is we're going to sheets that maybe

it'll have a howard johnson across the street that we can stay at like we got to get lando fixed up get him in some back to tank we need you to not have to to deal with Corrassant shit yet. We got to get you just like chill a little bit. Like to the point because he's like, when we go home, we are going to be put to work. I am going to be busy. So I am going to go get myself a Phillyise. Yes. And of course, like, like he's free. We're going to get some scratch offs, Luke. Like. And then adorably like, if I could get car to ship. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It's So, and then, of course. I can't believe he's actually

He's trying to get the shit. I love Han Solo. Han Solo is one of the boys. Hans Solo, you know? He's, yeah. Because the thing is like, Han Solo doesn't give a fuck about the New Republic for real, for real.

Like, he does. Not really. He leaves Leia. His girlfriend, yeah, his wife has a job she's passionate about. He's here to support. He knows the score. One chip for a week isn't going to be

the thing that breaks the new republic. And if it does, then the new republic needed more help than that. know what I mean, you know. And he's desperate to get people to help him do the shipping stuff. Right. Also, he could be like, well, now that you have that ship, what if you move around a little cargo for us?

Don't give it back. Just hold on to it, but there's just some cargo over there. It's desperate for his. 100%. I can, babe, I solved the cargo problem we're having. I got, I got this one smuggler his ship. He's very important. Of course, now he has to hide from an Imperial Grand Avenue.

There is one condition. He asked us over for dinner. He wants to know if you have any allergies. Very funny image of card being like, I have a spare bedroom. Get as drink as you want. Image of the Falcon towing Luke's X-wing because it's still damaged.

And then suddenly realizing, oh, my God, we're surrounded by Star Destroyers. and you just like dump the X-wings somewhere in space because they can't maneuver with it in like behind them as a ship that's being towed. We're just going to have to come back for this later. I thought for sure they were going to blow up this fucking X-wing, which would have been sad given that we know that R2

and the X-wing are besties, you know? So, and yeah, there's a fight, big fight. Also, Thron seeing the Million Falcon and the X-Wing being like, are you fucking kidding me? Pallion, did you see that, Pallion? I did see it, sir. It's great. When it's over?

When we're done here, it's over for card. Which the funny thing is, it almost feels like is less incriminating if the Falcon and the X-Wing show up here. But I guess,

no, them showing up right after the Storm Trooper Garrison on Mirker goes silent is like, okay, these people all been off the tape off the board.

And now they're all here in my, And getting worse than that, they're like trying to figure out how they're going to deal. Once they figure out like the ships are being hijacked by these boarding parties, you know, how are we going to do any, how are we going to stop this? They've gone everywhere. They've scattered. This place is a parking lot full of ships.

There's no way we can start hunting down these ships. And that's when it occurs to them. Lando. Now, can just send these things. Sorry, we have to talk about Luke's plan first. First, because it's Luke, it's again, Luke is a little boy. Luke does not have the tactical or strategic scale in mind because he's like, isn't there any way we can get on board them ourselves? Landers said the mole miners were two-man ships. The Imperals can't have possibly packed more than four or five stormtroopers in each one of them. I could take them. And like, for there's 50 ships, we're not going to, what are you talking about? You've been in the woods for a week. You're going to take on...

That, too. Right, totally. There's four or five. Let's say there's four. Let's say, Luke, there's four. So there's 50 ships. What's 50 times four? 200.

So you're going to kill 200 stormtroopers by yourself. How long is that going to take? We're going to ferry you from mole miner to mole miner? What are you talking about? Thankfully, we have a backup plan. We can just send the mole miners into overdrive. and basically have them burn through the entire ship

and vented to space and that's not good for the stormtroopers. It's a pretty grisly, but it's kind of a miserable plan. Yeah, it's, you know, they framed this as a victory for the Republic. But it bricks the ships. Bricks the ships,

and they didn't have ships to brick. They need these ships. That's the whole thing. So, it's like, Thron is very frustrated because he wanted to come out of this with like 50 new warships they just stole. But the flip side is

this is like Pearl Harbor on steroids except you had to do it to yourself. You would scuttle your entire fleet to prevent it being stolen. It's a problem. Which puts us on equal footing, you know? I have a plan that Thrawn should have considered.

He should have found the Star Forge, which would have just printed him a fleet, I think. Yeah. I bet Sabayath knows about that. He should just ask Sabayath. Do you know of any ancient dark Jedi technology that would have let me print 3D print a fleet? No?

He'd be unstoppable. Sabiof being like, so I can, I gotta move the ring over to this spot. And then like, but then only a smaller at the top. It's not working. It's not. Wait, no, now just got to go back and start.

Back and start. All right, all right. Take the little one and move it out to the middle one. Okay. He would just have his little townspeople do it, even if they got zapped to death. Electrocuting them as they fail. Yeah. Exactly.

Do it again. One of the towns people stuck in the room because you went to the fog room soon. To the other puzzle room. Lost to me. Oh, well. So I'm being like, you're doing it wrong. it's quite simple if you just oh wait

I thought I had it Pellion seeing the solution and just like feeling unable to speak God so one of the detail I love here before everything blows up

there's a point where Wedge is complaining to someone about his orders like a Republic's dispatch officer and Wedge is like these orders suck this whole army's gone to hell in a hand basket it. This is, this is bullshit. And the guy's like, yeah, well, listen, between you and me, it's, you know, you're going to be glad you're not, you're not going to be on Corrissant because like stuff's about to go off there. And Wedge is like, Faley is launching a coup.

And the guy's like, what? No, that, oh, you're an Ackbarist. I see what's going on here. Oh, well, your beloved Admiral Ackbar, you know these fucked up orders that you hate and how this army's gone now? That's all Ackbar's office, buddy. That's, and by the way, because the vibe has been, Akbar to shore up his declining political position was like, I will gift the fleet over to cargo hauling operations so that I can ride to the rescue of this logistical bottleneck we've hit,

we've gotten ourselves into. And so like to an extent he did kind of set them up for exactly this kind of disaster. But just this implication, like, there's a cadre of people in military who were like, Borskfalia is a friend

of the common man, unlike that elitist Admiral Akbar. So, you know, that's the troops, the troops love. The troops love the shifty bougham. uh well what's up with akbar what's what's wrong what happened to akbar certainly he couldn't have done anything wrong well we'll just see about that because we arrested his ass for treason

which is like mamma what is going wrong yeah why treason that was like when when i was like oh i'm nearing the end of the book all of these ships got destroyed i was like oh this whole plan as fuck now because they don't have those ships and like Han Solo is going to get you know interrogated like why would you why would you destroy our most reasonable resource and then like this evil guy could you know take advantage of that but then it's like oh no we're arresting akbar was like a very fun twist that is zero one zero to a hundred and that's the end of the book Huh? What? I turned a page and saw the Star Wars Legends novels timeline. I was like, huh? No, wait. Did I miss a page? Yeah, I was reading the ebook, and it was like, there's so many more pages after the end of that in a, um...

Previews and promo material. The start of the next book is right there, you know, so, yeah. Right. I was like, oh, there's another 30 pages left. This isn't going to get crazy. I mean, it seems like kind of a climax, but my goodness. And then it's like, Eggberg is arrested the end of the story. Sure. Okay. And Hans, like, we didn't set up this whole government just so this, this jumped up Bothan could, could tear it down. It's like, okay, if you say so, that's not only what I was, I don't really care so much

about that. I mean, I'm hoping you figure it out. Okay, Gumbie. Like, Han hates them. I know. Yeah, but I know it's Star Wars and you keep doing that

but like why make it so low sound like a white supremacist in his moment? He does it a lot. It's very funny. It's very weird. This book was

you know, 1991 and we're still dealing with all this leftist infighting. Thrawn is coming to power and the new republic can't come together. I will say there is something very kind of funny about this book coming out in the 90s where

Western leftism is just at a nadir in the public imagination right like we're we are about to see the we're in the middle of actually I'd say like the the de-tethering between the Democrats and organized labor right we are we have not seen a resurgence of anything like socialist left ideas inside of any sort of like party apparatus in America. And so, like, there's not a lot of ideological construction of what the new republic is here, right? Like, we know the empire is an authoritarian empire. But we don't really have, you know, we kind of have a weird neoliberal new republic in the sense that the one policy position that we see enacted is the idea that, like, Like, we could treat smugglers like small businessmen and give them a subsidy to become truckers.

That's kind of the only New Republic policy that we see. And like the idea that, like, they want to bring in, you know, different planets that have good big marketplaces as cornerstones of the new, of the New Republic, right? That's kind of all we get. Sending survey teams out to find malls. That's literally what happens. Like, that is literally what they want to. it from Bipfash or whatever, right? Or from Bimisari. Yeah, Bimsaari. Yeah, exactly. So kind of funny, like, that there is a moment in the public consciousness, you know, I don't know what Zahn's

background in political reading or political writing is, but like, there's just nothing here in terms of what the ideological differences are between Akbar and failure, except that the personal, the personality differences between the two of them. So I guess I'm curious to see it. I'll just say this. So a few years after this, he writes a book called the, he writes a series called The Conqueror's Trilogy. Real good space, military sci-fi action shit.

But this was like genuinely a moment, like, again, I was a little kid when I was reading this, but there's a moment where like this young sign of this like imperial family with the, with this great empire has to meet some people who are like, They have some key info. They are key assets for this like off the books operation. He's to go meet the A team, right?

And they're all former like Imperial Commandos and Imperial Fighter pilots and all this stuff. The Empire in this in this world, not the Star Wars Empire. Yeah, this is the Conqueror. And he meets one of them who's like this disillusioned like ex-fighter commander. You know, he's hiding out in this on this planet effectively.

And this kid shows up and they get a, you know, You got to join up with us. You got to help us out. You know, because basically in so many words, because we're the good guys at this, right? Like, you need this. And the guy's like, are you sure you're the good guys? Because to everyone else in this galaxy,

you look like an empire. And he was like, but you don't feel like an empire because you're at the center of it. No one ever thinks they're an empire. And then at this point, he's like, he says like, you know, the English didn't think they were an empire at their height. You know, a lot of Roman citizens.

And then he's like, and Americans didn't think they were an empire. And I'm reading it like, wait, is America empire? Like midnight? I'm like, wait, wait, like, this book, they're like, oh, yeah, everyone knows. No, everyone knows about the American empire. And I'm like, but you mean like, that was it happened to America.

That must have to happen. No, no, they're talking about like right now. So I think Zahn is very, very keenly aware of like this sort of neoliberal triumphalous moment and like how, but. like it doesn't come through in the Star Wars necessarily, but I do think when he does sort tip his hand, there is kind of an awareness of like, there is no, there is no clear alternative being positioned here. And like I'm not, I am not saying this is not Austin saying this book is bad because it's not the right type of communist for me. In fact, it's actually saying the other

thing, which is like, it's kind of appropriate to the time that the ascendant heroes of of Return of the Jedi then did not have at their fingertips any sort of alternative ideology other than we can support small businesses like there is something on the nose about it and the fact there's nothing holding this together except like people respect Mamma

and they respected Akbar and like Leah but basically it's a multi-racial like military alliance to resist a like human supremacist fascist government and now that fascist government isn't declined

and it's like well what's here and we don't know but it just doesn't seem like they have really raced ahead on standing up a government that's going to be

like responsive to the galaxy it is like the military command council of the rebellion is now just governing the galaxy and it's not going well and there's a reason

that the smugglers keep being like we just don't take you seriously yeah so So we'll see, we'll see where that takes off in the next book. And readers have to wait a year between this first book and the next one. So, yeah, wild.

Yeah, I was, when I finished this book, I was wondering with the like production process of that is, right? Or to like sit down and like, I'm going to write a trilogy of novels and not just a. I mean, I guess contracts go like that all the time, but. Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh, I've read a little bit about like just his, like, in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition, he talks a little bit about how randomly this came together. He's kind of tapped out of nowhere by Bantam to, like, they reached out to his agent because they've been pitching this idea to Lucas for a while. But yeah, this whole notion of, and I do wonder, they committed to the trilogy or did they like see how it went over and then they like finished it off. I've, I thought I didn't, because it debuted very strongly. That was the thing. was like Bannon was like, holy shit, people want more Star Wars, which in retrospect feels like it shouldn't have been news, but it was a powerful moment. This sort of launches a new era of the EU where they're like, damn, people really love these books. I wanted to say that it was

planned as a trilogy, but then I was like, wait, is that a thing that I actually know is true? And I don't actually know that I know that that's true. So, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. But yeah, So I didn't, sorry, I was, I was, like, focused on, we had to change schedule. So I haven't thought about, like, what the next section of, like, Dark Force Rising is going to be. And also, like, I'm not entirely sure I schedule for the next couple weeks. So, like, we'll get back to this, but we have to have a off the, out of pod meeting to discuss, like, what the next leg of this looks like and what the coming weeks looks like. So we're going to leave it here at the end of era of the empire. We do know one thing, which is the next Patreon episode, we'll be a Q&A about this book.

And so people should write in with their questions. A more civilized age at gmail.com. There it is. Love it. So yeah, we will, we're going to meet. We're going to figure out our schedule. And then we will, you know, we'll post updates about what the next readings or viewings are going to be. We will continue with the Air to the Empire Trilogy.

We just need to sort out what are the next, you know, a few weeks of the show. going to look like and then how are you going to break up dark force rising because these books keep getting longer is the thing this is a short one but there's also more table setting so I have to look and see how they break down but this felt about the right cadence for this so yeah it's worked out quite well and overall like I hope you all had fun reading reading the book is a blast I'm excited to read the rest absolutely and look if you can't if you're just like I need something tied me over what do I do well it can do what lots of EU fans did back in the day, which was go to fan fiction websites and just see what's up. Just see what's up.

Hey, like, into the theater of the mind. What else could have had in Namirker during the scenes we didn't see? Who can say? So true. Now you have me wondering if there is just, no, now see, this is, this is so funny. Air of the Empire comes out May 1st, 1991, Dark Force Rising comes out May 1st, 1992, but right before Dark Force Rising came out, Brian Daly's The Han Solo Adventures came out. The machine was starting. Wait, the ones on the corporate sector? This is, this is, I believe this, or maybe it was this a, was this a re-print, a reprint of the earlier ones? Yes, this is a reprint of the earlier Han Solo adventures. So they were like we have to get everything we have back in print we have to fucking yes there was

published as a compendium read splinter of the mind's eye who worthless fucks it's so funny it's so one where like luke gets this close to getting some real action from leah and it's like look people just didn't know at the time we didn't people didn't know uh utini dot com has y-o-u-t i and i Y-O-U-T-I-N-I, like the sound the Java's make, has a release order for all of the Star Wars books from the Legends days. And it is very funny to be like, you can see them turn on the machine after the Thron trilogy hits. Because it goes from being one book a year to being like, nah, dude, we need Jedi search to hit in February, we need courtship of Princess Leyen to hit in April, we need Lando Calarizzi Adventures to hit in June, we need Dark Apprentice to hit in June, we need a new. Champions of the Force to hit in September. It's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Those first three years, you're only getting one real book a year. But then, arguably, you only got one. You still only got one real book a year. Yeah, yeah. The degree to which people were like, wow, I can't wait to read more Star Wars. And it was like, well, Timothy Zahn's not going to be back with us for a decade. And so you better watch this machine just start lumbering in some really wild directions. That's true.

And one of the directions immediately is like, I'll bet Luke opening a Jedi school will be really awesome. That'll be rich with narrative possibility. Well, we get some insight on maybe Yvonne was like, maybe he just needs to go on some other adventures. Maybe one day we'll get to talk about that academy. Yeah. With that, we've reached the end of another episode of a more civilized age. Our show is produced by Ricardo Contreras and supported by our listeners at patreon.com. slash civilized.

Coming soon, yeah, we're going to have the Patreon Q&A where we discuss all this. Remember that we are, it's a naive reading of the rest of the series. So like if you like me are filled with cursed knowledge, just check that out of the door and ask stuff confined to heir to the empire. Beyond that, we will release some info once we figured out of schedule about what's coming up next. But that will do it for today. Until next time, please rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice and just stare deeply at Luke Skywalker while he sleeps and just try to figure out like what's his deal? What makes him tick? Could there be more of the meets the eye who can say?

But I definitely want to kill him and I'm going to think about that in my moment of death. I want you to squeeze this lightsaber as hard as you can. Thank you. Oh!