A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - AMCA 94 - Heir to the Empire 2 (Ch. 11-22)

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Our coverage continues on Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, deeper into Thrawn's devious web of manipulation and galactic dominance. How do our trio of heroes fare, divided across the galaxy, facing down their own unique conflicts? Well, uhhh unfortunately kinda sauceless! And don't even get us started on the dinner plans!! Or, well, we do get started and talk about it at length--that's podcasting, baby!! And for those at home who hoped we'd listen to the audio books for more context: you're in luck! Did we fix our pronounciation of names as a result? Sure didn't!! Oh, and we also chat a little bit about Star Wars: Outlaws!   NEXT TIME: Heir to the Empire Chapters 23-32 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) A More Civilized Age is an ad-free, listener supported podcast. If you like what we do, you can support us over at www.patreon.com/civilized to hear Q&As and more. Remember to send your questions into amorecivilizedage AT gmail DOT com.  

Let us return once more to a more civilized age, a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakeney, joined by Aliaqompora, and Austin Walker. We are, as always, supported by you are 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 episodes and our reactions to the late and somewhat lamented acolyte. we are continuing our trip through air to the empire today with chapters 11 through 22 of the eponymous first book in the series if you miss the start of the series we are doing this to hold on the fort while natalie is temporarily unavailable for our continuing viewing of rebels season three and this week we've got chaos at niklaan desperate to hide from the empire's deadly no gree assassins han and leah have run to their old friend the wily lando calyrian in hopes he might be might know someone good with computers so that Leah can receive top secret emails from the New Republic while she is in hiding. Meanwhile, lone Jedi Luke Skywalker also heads to Niklaan, having had a sinister vision in the darkside cave on Dagobah,

suspecting that Lando might know something about the garage door opener that is Luke's only clue to the secret of the cave. But the brilliant Grand Admiral Thrawn has staged a raid at Neklan in hopes of stealing Lando's mole miners to advance the empire's dark schemes. And from there, Han's big idea for keeping Leia safe explodes on takeoff in the wake of Thron's raid on the Klan, we get a scene where Neklan basically figures out everything that is happening, every single thought our heroes have had. He just deduces it. He knows that Han and Leah have split up. Han and Lando are trying to lay a false trail aboard the Falcon while Leah is fleeing with

Chewbacca to Kashik. Likewise, he knows from Sabayoff that Luke is on. on his way to Joe Mark, the planet where Sabayov has tried to set up a Potemkin Jedi exile to trick the galaxy and thinking he's been there the whole time. And so Thron sets a trap to capture or kill the Jedi before Sabiof can get hold of him. The story forks from there. Lay goes to Kashik only discover that she is not safe there, or at least strongly suspect she's not safe there. She sees a no-gray assassin hiding in the window. Han and Lando have a small adventure as they go looking for Talancard, the smuggling kingpin who has come closest to

replacing Jabba, according to rumor. And Luke is bushwhacked by Thron, narrowly escapes only to end up stranded dead in space, and is rescued by none other than Talancard, who is about to have a spectacular series, a spectacular series of run of bad luck. Yep. A farce ensues as Card tries to figure out. what to do with his sudden Skywalker problem and the fact that his second in command, Marjade has a solution. We should just

kill him. Please let me kill him. Then Han and Lando show up for dinner. And then dinner is interrupted by the arrival of Grand Admiral Thrawn, who has started to spec a card of treachery. In all of that chaos, naturally, Luke

makes his escape. It turns out a tool shed is not the best place to just leave a Jedi. And so Luke makes his escape, and at the end of this segment, he is escaping in a spaceship pursued by his new nemesis, Mara. It's very funny how all this loops back around, just everybody in their same place at the same time. Star Wars, the Force is going to put everybody on the same planet, you know? So, first of all, like, because I think Zahn as a sci-fi writer, just he likes sci-fi shit, right? He likes, like, goofy shit that can happen in this universe. What do we think of Niklon?

Do you want to describe what, like, Lando's new, you thought Bespin was wild? What do you think of this? Loves to build a mining depot in the hell zone. Previously, it was a city that didn't have the ground. Now it is a city that is, let me see if I have this right, effectively too close to the sun to live. And so it has like a big shield protecting it. it and also to get ships there you have to like get flown in behind a giant shield ship so they've yeah he's got big flying umbrellas right they're big umbrell ships into the planet yes but the city's not

protected by shield what's protects it it the city is a big dreadnought battleship oh right carried on the backs of a fleet of 8080s walking in sync with the planetary rotation so the sun never shines on it and it is safe to carry out its mining operation yeah it's great why not um well and i mean rob to your point uh of like you know zan really likes this idea of like the high concept logistical nightmare city or the the the really like the science fiction logistics can can be a place for storytelling we kind of get a lot of that throughout this um maybe one our recurring conversations in all of our Star Wars coverage is like how fast is it to get from point to point B in this galaxy? And you can tell that Zon really wants there to be an answer

to that for real and like a systematized answer because like we get into it a little bit how the X-wing works versus how the Falcon works. This is the first time I've ever really thought about it that like part of what having a frigate like the Millennium Falcon gives you is a place to sleep and stretch on these long hyperdrive transits. And even more than that, we get in the middle of all this that, like, Jedi can put themselves into a hibernation state while they're doing, like, long-distance travel, which it rules. They have to, like, wake up and eat every once in a while. But it really doesn't actually say this outright, but it immediately made me think, like,

oh of course there's this sort of sense that they like they show up exactly on time or just in the nick of time or like mythically early to become the hero of the situation because they literally can travel further faster than other people not because their ships go faster because they have to take less breaks along the way and that's such a fun detail for your like superhero space you know frontier cops to have their ability isn't oh we we have the bigger engines, and so we get there faster. It's that everybody else has to stop at rest stops and motels on the way, or has to, like, deal with, you know, or just, like, can't be comfortable, right?

Like, Luke isn't a little tiny X-wing, and this is the first time I've ever really thought about how uncomfortable it must be to do 12 hours of travel in a fucking X-wing, you know, let alone 10 days' worth, which he does at one point here. So lots of those little details. Has this technique come up again in any other books, or like media or anything because I had not encountered this and the thought of like Luke Skywalker just going into a deep sleep so he could get through space so every time

Zahn writes in this universe it comes up because he because also I think something he realizes with the idea of it taking time to go from space to space is partly his interest in like military sci-fi like just having everything move at the speed of plot is kind of frustrating because then like fleet actions don't doesn't carry weight right but also narratively it's a really good device to be like and so these people are off the board transiting and other things are going to happen in this meantime sure it's really good to be like these folks are in hyperspace for four days so we will check in on their plot when they come out of hyperspace so every time zon's writing in star wars like peep like Jedi be hibernating uh force

healing trances, like, they're just Confirating trances. The healing trance, of course. That's another classic. Apparently this has been reintroduced into the contemporary canon via some High Republic stuff. So, you know, Jedi you'd be sleeping. You know?

I love it. That's a great skill. We also get, I think, again, in the sense of putting a little backdrop in the world building. It seems like Zahn has an impulse that we've talked about that was maybe there with the prequel trilogy. This notion that the technological basis of Star Wars is capable of shifting because it's there's a couple

things that come through in the you know in the transit in the clon neither of the neither the falcon nor the X-wing can do a convenient like small jump to to the city because neither of them are equipped with slave circuits and so basically that is that allows one ship to take control of another and like feed it all the navigation data and neither ship has that equipped droids apparently fill the function now of like what used to be a pretty common technique in the old republican zon's view which is not only did they like have slave circuits to connect ships together but when luke shows the little the little widget to lando he finds in the cave Yeah.

Lando's like, oh, this is a beck and call for a fully rigged, like, automated ship. Like, you can press little buttons and say, like, come to me, like, leave. Like, but at the highest level, they were capable of coming to their, coming to their master's call and even, like, engaging in dogfighting. Just completely without a droid on board, without a pilot. Yeah. And for whatever reason, this is basically gone. from the galaxy. Doesn't this also come up with conversation around analysis of one of the fleets?

It's like Thrawn talking about, maybe it's not Thrawn. Maybe it's Pelion talking about. Or maybe it's not, maybe it's neither. Maybe it's a republic side thing. We hear Han say something like, tell that to the Katana fleet. When someone's like talking about the great advantages of slave circuits. Yes. And we don't hear anything more about that.

Maybe I'm thinking of something else because there's a bit where someone is saying like, um you know uh we wouldn't even it's it shows something obviously i did this reading like two weeks ago we had to reschedule so now it's not the tip of my tongue but yeah someone says something along the lines of like you know um we needed extra droids in the ships in order to do the maneuver da da da da da da da da and some of like gestures at that as being you know evidence that of the degraded situation the fleet is in and that like if if these ships were better manned or if they had been better upgraded or whatever, we wouldn't need to deal with this at all. I'll try to find it so that I'm not just flailing.

No, you are right, though, because somebody says, like, to replace slave circuitry, you would have needed thousands and thousands of droids to fulfill the same function aboard warships. Right. This idea that, like, the slave circuit represents basically a fully autonomous automatic ship. Right. Deroids represent maybe very highly efficient crew, but they are still crews of the difficulty of, like, crewing a ship.

and it's still like labor and resource intensive to pour a bunch of droids onto a ship even if they are saving you like human or like like biological crew members. I remember the specific thing here is or I found it specifically this is in one of the this in chapter 20

Lando is basically saying like hey if we built if they built those ships right with the slave circuits you wouldn't need to load them with droids what you just said and it's specifically that it's like they're just container ships they don't they're not doing anything special they're not doing anything fancy they if all you need to do is to get cargo from point A to point B in the galaxy and it's safe territory and you're not going to be outrunning pirates or doing dogfighting you could have just built these things with no no droids necessary

and that is not a type of tech we've seen that type of automation is not something I think that we see a lot of in Clone Wars or rebels or even in Andor, any of the, like, Mandalorian stuff. Normally, we have a droid to do that, you know? There is a droid pilot or a droid navigator. You think about Ackalite had those, like, droid chair pilots in what was an automated ship, right? Like, that prison ship was seemingly automated. And I think that that's an interesting maneuver here is that, like, you know, Zahn is imagining a world where, where completely automated ship

with the slave circuit thing that's like mechanical, then droid is a different type of machine intelligence and then humans and other mortal, biological beings, right? I think that that's an interesting

difference that we've kind of alighted. It does mean in the middle of all this, we do stumble into reading, reading in, you know, legends, old E you stuff is funny because it's like a walking mindfield of what we'd learn later

via what is now canonical, so we get that great bit about how, like, you know, Han and Landau don't like droid. They never turn their ship over to a droid. And I'm like, I'm sorry, actually, we actually knew that Landau used to have a huge crush on a droid, and actually she's in there now. She's part of the Millennium Falcon. You couldn't have known that at the time, obviously, but he was trying to smash, and says she's in there now. He doesn't mind droids so much. Maybe he made me this is why he doesn't like droids anymore. He misses his. Somehow Zahn, not knowing of the Star Wars future, the ripples remain where Lando is still a droid wife guy. It's wild.

And it's the two guys out with the droid wife trying to trick the empire. Yeah, yeah. Right, because we get C-3PO with Leia's voice, which, by the way, I've listened to some of this with the audiobook. Someone wrote it and was like, you should listen to the audiobook. I also listen to some of the audio. To hear the pronunciations. And there are some choices being made in terms of voices for new characters. Did you think, you know, I did not expect Talancar to sound like Enigo Montoya

and to have this sort of romantic, you know, or like Pussin' Boots, you know, this kind of like romantic Zorro Spanish accent. That is so funny. It's so fun. The more, I think in the scene alone, but, like, of all the characters with possible exception of Thrawn, card seems like the most butter won't melt in his mouth character. Like, he is, this, it is so funny imagining him as just like. He is chewing up the scenery in every scene. And then also, I will say, like, there is, the performance, I think the performance in some of the characters is really fun.

Luke, they nail Luke. I forget who the narrator is. Are they tagging a new narrator? No, it's one narrator who's doing all the voices. And, like, you know, his lea is pretty good. His Mara Jade is petulant. His Mara Jade is, like, I think if I had just read these sections, I would be like, yeah, cool. Mara Jade, like, kind of has, like, she hates Luke and she's, like, you know, consumed by this.

But, like, listening to it makes her sound childish constantly. she's performed with such like you can tell the reader doesn't like her you know and like wants to make her seem immature about whatever this is or maybe it doesn't want I don't know about intent but that's how she comes across and I was like all right I need to not listen to this the whole way through because I want to like I want my impression of RJ to be text-based and not based on someone going like that's the read Luke Skywalker, like very, it's bad. It's not good. Anyway.

She is a little silly. I'm not sure Mara shows to her best advantage in this opening sequence. We'll get to the Mara situation. The other big thing that happens on the Klan is, so no sooner have they shown up that, and I do appreciate just the economy storytelling. We'll just get, before they even touch down on the base, Star Destroyer shows up, all hell breaks loose. And then do we see the battle? No. Because Luke goes into a like Jedi combat trance.

Yeah. Again, always with the trances. But here kind of goes wrong because first we get an interesting moment where he's like, they're wildly outnumbered. So how can he even the odds? He can just kind of use the force to fuck with the Thai fighter pilots. And it occurs to it even as he's doing it is like, is this good? Is this good?

He doesn't have a choice. Like, it's him and the falcon out there kind of by, like, it's do it or, or get, get shot down. But he has this moment where it's like, this feels doubtful. Like, is there, is this something like, yeah, Ben did it? I don't know. But no sooner as you sort of start an engagement then, Sabayov sends him a big booming mental shout. You must come, you must come find me, Luke. find me on Joe Mark

Yeah We kind of move past something really quick That I want to make sure we don't skip Because it's only Do we come in in Chapter 11 this week And that's Luke on Dagaba Going through the Dark Side Cave That he went through before

And we did skip something Which is he has a vision And he keeps being like What's up with this vision And the vision instead of being He fights Darth Vader And then Darth Vader is revealed to be himself He is back on Jabba's palace

trying to rescue Han again. The sail barge. A sail barge, specifically, like where he's supposed to get executed. And, you know, Artu does the thing, shoots out the lightsaber, and he just misses it. He just doesn't get it.

And importantly, he sees a mysterious woman who has the power of the force and who has condemned him and his friends to death, a slender woman standing alone atop the barge. Because she's the one who kind of

of force grabs it out of the air. Laughing mockingly. Laughing mockingly. Because this is, it's still genre fiction. Oh, yeah. When bad characters pull shit off, they go, ha, ha, ha, ha. And because that is what you want to do when, just to let her know that you're, like, super twisted. Y'all ever dream of a woman who kills you in a moment of high drama?

I can't wait until we're introduced to this mysterious woman in this book. Who could it be? I can't imagine. Maybe there's another mysterious one we remember. Luke Skywalker was therapist, like three weeks from now. So that doesn't mean shit, right? Yeah, the brain just put stuff in there. I don't know.

Anyway, you found the cell phone down there? Yeah, it calls spaceships. Oh, yeah, cool. So, you know, the whole thing in the clon, the mole miners are taken. All my mole miners are gone. All my mole miners is gone. These are machines, by the way. They're not mole people who mine for the listener who is not reading along.

I understand this is Star Wars, so it's totally possible that we could be talking about a species of people who mine and they're made up, they're like they look like little mole people. So that's not the case. These are big machines, I believe. Yeah, Han describes it very, very usefully. I had to reread it because I was like there's no way this works as dialogue, but it kind of does, where he's telling, Leah what a mole miner is and it's just a they look like cones with the tip the tip cut off

and basically the conical part is the driller and it uses plasma jets to drill down real fast and then once it finds like the slag it wants in the in the like

in the central like rate the central column of the mole miner is a hatch and you just sort of open the hatch and scoop up the goods sure why not So, Throne wants these. But crucially, and I think this is something else that Zanz kind of dialed into it, I think, has become Star Wars, which is that their economy isn't like ours where it's like, oh, you just go and get more mole miners. They're kind of a bespoke thing that exists because they solve someone else's problem.

Lando had an idea to repurpose them for mining. But it's not like you can go It's not like you can call like The Caterpillar company And be like I need more bulldozers And there's always more bulldozers Like something like the mole miner is Hard to come by

Which is why Thrawn has to like go Like scavenging them And this is why like losing them Is kind of a body blow to land is operation Yeah there's a sort of You know A type of fantasy writing Or like age of discovery era

you know, you know, storytelling where it's like, oh, right, the Spanish have developed this new type of boat, you know, or, you know, the dwarves have built a metal or made a metal that can break through the obsidian or whatever. That is the way Star Wars works. It is not as simple as. I mean, there are big shipyards. A lot of the narrative that we're talking about is Thrawn trying to eventually get to some shipyards here. But there's a lot of, of on this one planet is this one resource or refined product, you know, whether that is the, um, you sound, they're going to do it again. Uh, hmm, I'm going to get there, right? Can I get there without looking at the word itself? No, I cannot. I have to look at the word. Say the

word. Salamari. Salamari. I'm always going to want to put a vowel in between the Y and the first S. That's where I'm struggling. Is salamari. So it's like, we can go get this creature from this one... I mean, let's go back to Kotor where, like, all of the culto in the galaxy came from Manon, right? Like, that's all of it. And that's just true about Star Wars stuff,

whether that is raw materials or cool spaceship, you know? So, a kind of fun, a fun economy thing. And so, like, but the tail end of the Neklon section, and, like, Lando's kind of figure out how to pull off this ruse de Guerre to trick the empire. After we get a little detour, this is something that comes up a lot also. In these books, there's usually a plan A or a first idea that doesn't work before they hit on the real idea. It's an interesting, like, we have Lando being like, I have an idea. We can, like, bury Leia, you know, bunker on the super hot planet.

and like nobody will find her so deep and like nobody would ever think to look at her and Han's like how long does it take this planet to rotate

is like 45 days it's like great so she'd be under the broiling sun unable to communicate for like 22 and a half days yeah yeah

but she'd be safe provided nothing goes wrong because like the sun is so scorching that you can't mount a rescue operation out in the sun. I love Lando. There's, we can't get into outlaws yet. We shouldn't spend 20 minutes talking about Star Wars outlaws. But Lando's in that game.

And there's like a banger Lando moment pretty early. His introduction quest ends with kind of like an all-time. Oh, I'm playing, I'm in Star Wars. I'm in the Star Wars. Like, ah, Star Wars is happening in front of me. Shout to Lando. Big fast. Anyway, you're right.

That wasn't a great idea. So there's a bit, they have a different idea. I was always having doubts about bringing the pregnant woman under the big space umbrella to the world too close to the sun to live there. You were, you weren't all bored for that from the job? I just had some doubts. You know, I didn't think that that was like part of Landau's like, you know, research planned when he developed it. I bet he consulted with, uh, with, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's his boy

with the cyborg implants who's described in this Lobot who I think is described as having dreamy blue eyes in this Yeah, he's still there He's not, Zahn doesn't name him But he's still there Yeah

You don't think Lobot ran the numbers I was like Leia will be okay I guess so I guess so I just don't think that he was like thinking about a pregnant woman When he was designed to get You're right

You're right That's you know, I don't know I don't know Well it's like It's one of those ideas That is like Well like Okay I really want

to help my friends. What do I have on hand? I've got a few of these mole miners left and I got a planet that like nobody can come to very easily. We can just, we can just like dig a big tunnel. Big hole for Leah. He doesn't have a condo somewhere nobody knows about this is Lando. It's wild. And zero idea about pregnancy either. Like it doesn't occur to a like just put her in big hall. I'm like she'll keep put her in a big hall and like it's like a turkey when it's done. When it's done, and just we pull her out of the big hole. Well, and it kind of gets to, I will say, because of the way the story wraps around on itself

and they kind of eject from this plan at a certain point, it's like, well, wait, what were we doing? I'm sorry, wait, what were we even doing to begin with? We didn't want, and correct me if I'm wrong here, because maybe this is me not following exactly right, but they wanted to not be in official republic, on official Republican missions and channels because they believe there's a

spy, there's a mole among the Republic leadership and so that's who's letting them know, letting Thron know and the Nogri know, they don't know the Throne of the Nogre, but they're letting the Empire know where Leia has been. They're trying to kidnap Leia and Luke

at the very least. And so we need to go to a place where we can kind of go to ground, but they also want to have access to like the Republic internet so they want to slice into it stealthily so that they can like research what's going on out there. So it's not just like we want to go to ground and hide. They still need to do stuff.

That was still always part of the plan, right? It wasn't just put Leah in a vault somewhere. Put her in a vault, but make sure that she can connect to Zoom is really... You're right. She has to be able to call in here. Anakin would love this plan. Like, yes, yes. Put wife, deep hole.

Put her in a big hole. hole, safe. No one can get to my life. Yeah. Why don't you put the whole world under glass, Anakin? Like, this is the, this is, what do you would do? I mean, uh, no, baby, it'll be fine. We get, look, you got an uba-buba droid and like, you got a big hole. What more could you want? Yeah. If Antiguan got that fortress earlier, it all would have been different. Bro, that's so true. If I was Yoda, I would have absolutely requisitioned Anakin to have a little emo fortress somewhere where he could have his little feelings.

You know, it would have worked out. This goes back to our big whole thing of like, and it would have been better if Obi-Wan had stayed on as like the Jedi counselor, like the Jedi counselor for Seteen. Like, there's all sorts of ways in which Jedi just needed little, you know, positions out in the world where they could, you know, sulk and it would be better. Sulk can feel safe. Anyway. And look, I mean, it is a through line here where like, Luke badly needs to be.

be distracted with from the whole like so restarting the Jedi order which the thing he clearly is just terrified off he's so scary people we're talking like multiple people talk about like before they land on the Klan lea's like something's bothering Luke and Hans like something's bothering Luke for a while yeah she's like but now it's different and there's more and so just this this notion of like Luke has been under this cloud that like his friends have noticed but they've been able to talk about for you know months it's wild at one, he is absolutely looking for the ancient texts when he goes to Dagaba. He's like, I feel like an idiot R2.

I guess I just kind of thought maybe Yoda left some tapes behind. I thought it's so good. The little bit about him being from the desert, so he doesn't understand that like the house would decay. And he thought it would just be like this like snow globe. He could go sit down on the couch again. It's so good. It's so good. I'm going to read the, um,

For a long minute, Luke just stood there, gazing at the massive vegetation occupying the spot where the house had been. A freshly renewed sense of lost struggling against the embarrassing realization that he'd been a fool. Growing up in the deserts of Tatouine, where an abandoned structure could last for half a century or more, it had somehow never even occurred to him to consider what would happen to the same structure after five years in a swamp. Oh, the note I've written here is books are so good. because you get access to his interiority like that, right? Like, if we'd gotten Luke saying

something like that out loud to R2, it would have been a little much, you know, if he had said, Art2, I just thought, you know, I guess on Tatooine, buildings last a little longer. We would all be like, bro. But it's a totally valid thought to have. And also, I think it's something,

and maybe this was just like guidelines that Zahn was given, but like, something Zon's doing here is, and it's the opposite attack that Star Wars goes now the pass is ever receiving the book opens with Obi-Wan being like

I love you I have to go I can't be here for you anymore and then Luke is like well maybe I'll see maybe Yoda's Force Energy will be there for me and maybe he left something and it's like that pass is even more inaccessible there's nowhere there's you won't even be able to convince people

that like any of it was real there's no sign that there's no sign of his passing there's a couple of rusted pots that are a couple years away from like disappearing completely. That's it. There's Darkside Cave and Ruins and not even assigned ruins. Even Luke's own expertise and his story as being the hot shot pilot, we get the note in that first conflict that this is the first time he's ever had a, like a dog fight

after becoming a Jedi, quote unquote. And it took me back for a second. I was like, wait, what do you mean the first time he's had a, and I was like, oh, I guess that's true. like there is no big space battle at the end of Empire after he comes back from Dagaba and then return he's not part of that part of the story you know there is a big space battle at the end but that's not what he's doing and it's been a few years and i guess it's telling that like he has not like been there's a way that you can imagine filling in the blanks between return the Jedi and and this book starting or it's like well Luke's been out there fight in the remnants and like going on little adventures but but Zama's telling it's like no he's most

mostly been, like, trying to occasionally train Leia, trying to think through what retraining Jedi in general is like, and being kind of sad and feeling kind of aimless. Well, I love it. And, well, we'll come to this in a second, but, no, we'll just deal with it now. He's still flying around in his X-Wing. He's only fucking X-Wing. To a degree, yeah, that's Luke Skywalker's iconic ship. But it doesn't make sense. No.

It's not a ship built for long-distance cruising. He still flies around in it. And it's like very, this is very American graffiti in some ways. It's like, hey, why are you still tooling around in this hot rod you built rather than like everyone's moved on, man. Like people are having kids. It's like the cat, like everyone has grown up and moved on. He could have kids and families. And he's like still in his hot rod.

He could have a ship that has enough room for him to stand up and train in. or go in the back and lay down and sleep where he doesn't need to be in the cockpit he's not even in the Republic military anymore you know but he kept his ship bro it's tough man I'm not saying you have to give the ship back like you put it in storage like that's cool

I get it kind of a big deal maybe it does belong in a museum though it did blow up the death star the first time so but it's like it's like a character that's like kind of imprisoned by being the legend of Luke Skywalker and I kind of love this for as a direction for the character where it's like

what do you and especially to a point you made last week nobody really knows what happened like his whole the Vader you know crossing back over at the last second all that's great but like that's not relevant to most the people who are fighting at Endor like

he he's Luke Skywalker he was there when the emperor died he's a war hero but like he doesn't fit anymore in in this government exactly he doesn't quite fit alongside his friends and so there's kind of this like where do I go what am I supposed to do and it sure seems like maybe he's been fucking around not really hitting the books on learning how to train Jedi until Leah having kids

has turned this into an emergency right Rob there is a and I say Rob because Allie you know this you maybe even know where I'm going with this but there's a sort of really there's an even more cynical take on this in Gundam which is the sort of Luke Skywalker of Gundam, Amor O'Re, Ray, the original UC Gundam. Amor Ray, like, saves the, the Federation in the first show, in the original first Gundam, and is, you know, unlocks his new type powers, it's, you know, kind of saves all of his friends in this dramatic moment, and then when you, when you finally find out what happened to him in the follow-up show, Zeta Gundam, this is like 20, this is like 40 years

old now, so I don't mind spoiling it. And it's not the crux of the follow-up show, but he's been put under house arrest by the government he worked for. And he, like, lives in a big mansion, and he is, like, slowly... He hasn't really lost his new type powers, but new type powers are about having empathy and connecting to others. And he's been kind of put in the woods and a mansion away from everybody, and all of his servants are actually, like, CIA operatives, making sure that he doesn't get re-involved with things. because they don't trust that someone who's driven by such supernatural empathy won't undermine their government plans. And there's a little of that here in the like, oh, my God, the hero of the last big war is sad and locked away. And this, like, can't quite figure out what the next step is.

I recommend Gundam for anyone who likes Star Wars. Anyway. So as they are hatching their plans on the clon, we cut away to the imperial camp. and we learned that the reason the empire was able to pull this assault off so precisely again to this notion of like slave circuits allow greater precision

it's hard to maneuver fleets of ships efficiently as groups but Sabayov like solves a lot of these problems he is a he improves performance and command and control all these things

and Thron fucking hates him like the degree to which the vibes in that camp are bad is really off the charts And once again And it's kind of funny to say this for a guy who's been in the Navy for 50 years And it's like kind of an age and imperial captain But boy is

Is Captain Pelion having to negotiate treaties between mom and dad As they snipe and bicker constantly Constantly They Again it's a thing that I feel like I'm going to be, when we go back to rebels, I'm so much going to be like, ooh, I really hope Thrawn gets someone who hates him and who he can't just outplay immediately, because it's such an important part of this characterization here. It's been

really fun. Yeah, I wonder where, like, because it's like so thinly veiled how much he like despises him. And I wonder if it's just like, is it the fact that like, he's not just a like a chess player on the like a chess piece on the board for him like that he actually sort of like pushes back against Trump's plans or he's sort of undermining him to go for Lee Skywalker

because it feels like I mean if Thron is the the culture guy the guy who understands people the like you know we we read our our hero characters is spending a chapter going through a plan and the next page is like I figured that out immediately

I know exactly what they're doing how many people do you think switch between ships because they definitely switch between ships like I it's it's a little it's interesting in Trond's characterization that he's not anticipating the pushback from the Jedi more and is not like massaging that

in a way that works for him or like giving him these moments where like he'll think that he got it over on Thrawn so Thrawn can take advantage of it later he's just like being pissed off which is fun but it like feels i'm like surprised that we're not getting him like more cunning than we've seen him instead he's like stroking his force cat and being like yeah i definitely trust you i i it makes me think that there's a longer game going or like yeah there's you can only fight a war on so many fronts and and step well there is a longer game going to some

degree right like it my read on what's happening right now partly is like he keeps coming back for more force cats. He's getting as many force cats as he can get, you know? And that's not just, sometimes you win that war against the shitty dark Jedi by like making sure that you and yours can never be touched by it. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, the precipitating incident for the latest blow up is that Sabayoff, in an early sign has gone a little bit rogue here. He knew Luke was at the battle. He didn't tell Thron. Instead, he sends his little lure to Luke. And then afterwards, he lets Thron know that, like, that's what he's doing. He talked to Skywalker. And Thron is furious because his enemies were there. Kind of at his

mercy. If he'd known that, he probably just, you know, wipes them all out there with the Star Destroyer. but Sabayov hid that information and but to Ali's point Thron is for whatever reason for whatever reason incapable of massaging the situation everything is immediately a contest of like dominance to the death like which of us is going to be in charge here

I'm going to make you bend the knee and like Pelion can detect this is this is kind of fruitless And also it's kind of weird because, look, nobody wanted a Dark Jedi be part of his master plan except for Thrawn. And he has the world's biggest case of buyer's remorse. It's so funny because he starts out being like, you know what the problem with the empire was? Dark Jedi at the heart of it, made it capable of like doing amazing things militarily, but also pretty fucked up.

You get rid of that one guy and the whole thing. But it could work for us. Well, that's the thing, right? is is he thinking of Sabayyath as a short-term fix while he gets it's it's you know the empire was addicted to Palpatine and it just tried to go cold turkey and that's not working you got a little bit of that methadone battle meditation while you try to spin up a system where you don't need it anymore you know you try to build new practices train up new people and again it didn't only need the empires the emperor's battle meditation it also needed all of the well

trained uh and committed people who died on the which we know they don't have which they know and we're this is going to be underscored again right he is not working with even the junior varsity of what the empire used to have access to they are not sending their best men this is not you know this is not but so so so so so sobayoff's like all right i'm gonna go to joe mark to wait for skywalker which is the plan we agree upon. And we had to say, that is indeed the plan they agreed upon. This is a thing that Pelion and Saba, Pellian sort came up with it. Sabiath agreed. Thron endorsed it. And the minute, the second Sabath leaves the room, Thron's like, we're just going to ambush the skywalking.

And we let that shit happen. Yeah. We got to get that Skywalk a motherfucker ourselves. And then if we want to decide to give him to Sabayath, then we can use that as leverage. But, you know. Well, that's Pelion's hedge. He's like, because he's like, if we just kill him, this is over. Like this whole thing is over immediately,

and we're going to have to fight with this dark Jedi master who scares this shit out of Pelion, even if Thrawn's like with the Salamiri, who gives a shit? We'll just, we can just deal with this. What's he going to do?

But Pelion sees this as like needlessly provocative. And so he's like, how about we stage it so that we can capture him? And then we figure out what we want. to do, we can make it look like we were just like, you know, interrupting a smuggling operation. And so Thron's like, fine. I won't blow it the fuck up.

And we'll see how that unfolds because that comes a major part of the next through line. Well, you know, we can just deal with his ambush. Yeah. Because actually it's when Luke is stuck that we, the next leg of his story begins. But Luke starts going to Joe Mark, runs into the Interdictor Cruiser, comes across, this like staged imperial patrol with the uh chimera right there and makes a daring escape he has to do a whole a whole set of like maneuvers and they have some clever ideas to to break clear of the of the ambush the big thing he has is he like dumbfires a pair of proton torpedoes not at the

chimera but instead at the freighter uh that they were using to stage the stage the ambush and because that blows it apart it's like a big chaff cloud the tractor beams lose him and then he does some sort of like emergency jump to break the hole the one tractor beam has on him and leaves

jumps out but it fucks up his ship the whole thing has done damage to the X-wing which Thron knows immediately because an interesting side effect of that little maneuver which is something Thron mentions at the end of a sequence where he goes down to the tractor beam, like, command center to figure out what went wrong here.

We get a little taste of Grand Admiral Thrawn's guide to training and motivating your Star Destroyer crew. What do we think? What do we think of how all this goes down? You know, the first time that we saw Thron do something similar in Rebels was when he put that guy on that speeder bike and had him speeded up until it blew up. And that might have been more brutal than this. Yeah. So I think it's in character. I like it.

I mean, I don't like it. But, you know, he's not, he's not, he is not winning the hearts and minds of, of his imperial recruits. He is, he is ruling through fear and, and precision, you know. Mm-hmm. And with little scary guys. He does have the little scary guys. He can kill people. Yeah.

Pellion never even saw Rook move. Peterson certainly never had time. to scream well and it's like thron's going down there to figure out like someone's going to die yeah question is who that's right and it kind of seems like the one duty ends up killing dooms himself because thron doesn't like a rat throng does like the kid running the tractor beam is like it's not my fault i wasn't trained to deal with this yeah and thron's like okay who trained you and the guy's like i think i trained though i honestly maybe if i don't know i don't know if we i don't know if we covered this in training.

Well, and there's that great little bit where he's like, he's a con, he's like, did you recruit him? And he's like, well, no, he's a conscript. And does that make him worth less of your time as, as, as, uh, than a normal enlistee? And the guy's like, no, I always try to treat people equally, which I feel like Thron is not, does not fuck with, you know, I don't think that that does he actually. Well, that might be the answer that saves his life.

Do you think that is the, that is the moment? Yeah, I guess so He decides to kill the kid Rather than the officer who trained him Yeah And so I do think he was kind of like Do we just have a shitty kid Or we have a shitty training officer

Who's not like bringing the The conscripts up to snuff And so like But either way someone's getting killed And then he concludes that So Palian's like so wait If you knew if you knew Skywalker was dead in space Why did we start gesturing at the

We don't even What happened is not the described. It is just, Rook does something, and it makes people start throwing up nearby. And so Pellian is just kind of like, so why did we do that? And Thron's like, because we can't, the empire at war, and we can't afford the luxury of men whose small

minds can't adapt to change the situations. And I was like, Grand Admiral Thron had, let me introduce you to the ASVAB test. Let me tell you, let me tell you what the standards for for enlisting in the military, any military. Especially, yeah, especially this one, which like half of its recruitment centers are fucking gone, you know?

Yeah. These boys need experience. Like the next person that chair is not going to have an X-wing reverse the acceleration so they could zoom out of the thing. That guy is the only guy who knows what to do now. Well, I suspect everyone's when we crack in the books. on that dilemma after this.

But he's not facilitating. I agree. Try's got a fun little line. Do you know the difference between a mistake and an error, Ensign? Anyone can make an error. But an error only becomes a mistake when you refuse to correct it. Then he has the guy killed. And I'm like, what's that even mean?

I don't know, man. What's that even mean? You're not going to let me correct it then. Let me correct it. I was going to correct it. Brutal. So, you know, know that sends luke stuck in space we get a long section with him trying to fix his ship uh you know

try to find various ways to uh basically take the precious materials from the busted parts of a ship and fashion some kind of uh radio so we can so we can call for help uh but but things are not going well for him uh basically he's the kind of pushing beyond the limits of his life support it's just the Jedi hibernation that's sort of keeping him keeping him in the game here but yeah he's he's totally stuck and did you all pick up a thing that I know one of the bells

I'm ringing a lot here is this is where it all begins this is where like some big cornerstone of the EU that we all think of as just like Star Wars is actually first introduced here there's a line while Luke is thinking

through everything stuck in space that he remembers Now, it's read in the audiobook as Yoda's voice, but it's just italicized throughout here. Did anyone pick up on this thing that is like, we have talked about it a dozen, dozen times, but it actually doesn't show up anywhere in Star Wars until here. For the Jedi, there is no emotion. There is peace. The Jedi Code, as first enumerated, is here.

Was Zan just riffing, or was he given that by George? I would love to know. I would love to know Truly Because certainly George based names of endorsing it Right With the Jedi coach Right

Exactly Exactly But I I'm so curious Everyone knows out there How that was arrived upon I would love to You know

I would love to know If that was something That Lucas was like Hey here's the gist of it Obviously there's other stuff Throughout this As they do talk about The Jedi

that is or is not aligned with what we eventually learn about what the Jedi, the whole deal with the Old Republic Jedi are. And when I say Old Republic, I mean, what we now think of as just the pre-imperial Republic, not the ancient old Republic, just the, you know, whatever. So yeah, please, if anyone knows if that was a collab situation, please tell me. But I was like, wait, could this really truly be the first, and yes, the first time the Jedi Code shows up, is heir to the empire. And I, which makes sense to some degree,

because you have the space for it and the cornerstone of the story is Luke is trying to rebuild the Jedi as an institution. So it's going to be part of this, but it is a big addition, you know? So yeah, anyway. But also enough, the biggest deal is not, made out of it. Like, Obi-Wan's last message to Luke is full of love and warmth, and Luke is clearly not, like, he's returning to a bit like a catechism, but not in the way that, like,

yeah, but the feeling's verboten, because that's clearly not animating any of his relationships with his family and friends. So, yeah, it occupies a space of, like, this is how we handle our problems versus this is how we live our lives. But, yeah, I just, again, I love the symbolism here of like So we've gotten this far on the story of Luke kind of lost in this new world

of the new republic and at the end of this leg of the story he's stuck in the middle of nowhere trapped in his X-wing unable to go anywhere in a Jedi in a Jedi hibernation what a rich place to inject a new wild card

into the dynamic but we'll get to that as he goes into his little trance he calls out for Leia. He senses someone hurt him. It was Leia. Leia is over on final approach to Kashik, and she's nervous because she doesn't know much about Kashik.

There's a gist of... This is most Padme she's ever come across. The most clodeworthy is Padmey she's ever come across as. Do you know what I mean? She's got... Not good, Austin. Not good, man. She's got real...

cracked open the Wikipedia last night energy while like drinking a martini you know what I mean like not even a martini please while drinking some boxed wine she's like what's up with the lookies yeah there's a bit of and she knows some stuff about like how they cultivate the rochier trees and chewy's like hmm interesting you know that wow you've really done your homework I don't know man I don't know and she's she's nervous mostly because in this in this world the wookie keys have not been like let's open ourselves up to the galaxy because things have gone super well when we've done that uh so they have become somewhat like we just kind of want to hang in our trees and we don't rumor has it don't really want to hang out with humans especially given that

this slave world and as they come in for a landing list like damn they've like because it's an incredible vista that is that unfolds here like the monumental scale of the trees everything looks big and then gets bigger as you realize how far you were away from it you were and there's this moment where it looks like you try to set the ship down on a tiny little tree branch and as they get closer she realizes the tree branch is a landing pad that could accommodate it's like an aircraft carrier deck and then she realizes it's just the right shape for an imperial strike cruiser and she's like maybe i shouldn't ask the wookies about how this landing pad got built yeah she has she has other thoughts like, I wonder if they've even ever reached the surface or things like, I'm now

realizing that this cable is a tree cable and I'm scared now. Like, they're just like, I, like, compared to the, the, like, quiet moments that we get with everybody else to, to have Leah's, like, big, a centerpiece, just her being, like, confused or, like, often wrong about things. was like a little disappointing given the position that she's usually in. The bit where she's like, wait a second, all of these trees are really one big tree. I wonder if the rookies know that or if their reverence for the trees has forbidden such thinking and research. Bitch, get in the little house we got set up for you.

Like we build spaceships. What are you talking about? It's, it's, whew. Yeah. Well, these wookies don't. We, we don't know about the little like tangled wood spaceships that they build. We just know that they are, we do know that they are explicitly, no, because she says that. That's one of the things she says, remember?

Is it like, they're technologically, she explicitly says like they're not like the EWOX. Well, yeah, no, they've gone out there and it turns out there like mega gearheads. Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes. so yeah i don't know inside of every sylvan creature is uh is a mechanic dying to get out just wish i could stop putting collars around these fucking trees and tighten some wrenches

on some engine valves yeah it's it's her trying to rapidly like learn about a culture yeah which i which is admirable and you're going to have some slip-ups you're trying to learn new things. But there is a degree of, yeah, real being, you know, but you know what, in fairness, she knows she's sucking. She knows she's sucking it up at this. She knows she's bad. Like she misreads, like, Chewbacca and a buddy, like, read each other like dogs, where it's

like, are they fighting to the death? No, this is them hugging it out. Yeah. And she's like, she pulls a gun. She's like, I need to shoot that guy off Chubbara. He's trying to murder Chubbacca. And this dude's like, nope, nope, that's just how we say hi. Oh, hey, what, tell me about the dude she's talking to?

Because that's weird. Most, she doesn't, I've heard wukies speak before, Rob. You tell me there's a guy who could communicate with her because she doesn't even really understand Chubacca all these years later. How can she understand this guy? Because Rolras got a wookie speech impediment that makes him, forces him to enunciate slow enough for her to figure out exactly what he's saying. Whereas every other wookie, she's like,

I have no idea, man. Like, I just wait for Han to react. Now, how that went down. Now, I have a question, a follow question for both of you. Is that what she believes when she first, when this guy first starts talking to her? Is she believes something different? Does she jump to a conclusion? Yeah.

She sure does think the one wookie I know this whole time must be the weird one. She does. She says, apparently. Apparently it did beside her, Chubaka was earth-erf-erfing quietly again. That's laughing. Let me guess, she suggested dry looking up at him. You had a speech impediment all these years and never thought to mention it to me. Can you imagine?

And she's like dealt with other wookie in like console, Senate situations. Maybe she hasn't. Oh, no, I think we can now safely say it. not a ton, didn't, didn't deal a ton with the wookies as, as the senator from Alderan. But there are those moments where she's like, well, I know that they want to kill me because my interactions with the cons, the Senate always say that like, they still really hate humans. You know what we got to get, we got to give it to Zahn, though. The first thing she says when she meets Chubak is someone get this walking carpet out of my way.

you're right she's still that girl she is she's not none of them were that much older than they were in that movie they're not that much older yeah

like she she is still like now I love this walking carpet yeah but she's 25 years old being like well I was 19 when I made that Facebook post yeah

so there there is a bit of like now she's trying to like rapidly like what are these people all about and again she's ending up in like like

Clone Wars Obi-Wan where it's like Pith Helmet and Now you see they hold the Rocher Tree and they hold the concept of the Rocher trees and their unity and such reverence that they could not even contemplate that the very fact their branches merge into one indicates

they're the same plant You ever asked a wookie about that? No I wouldn't wish to disturb their way of life God but she is apparently odd by the fact that they live in huge awesome tree houses

that are suspended massively like in the canopy of the forest that nobody knows how deep it goes but as they are moving her to the safe house she spots a no great window

creepy music's chord strikes and like the Wilkes in the village goes searching but they can't they can't find them but this this plan again crashed on takeoff. She's now

at Keshik and the Nogri already there waiting to make their move. Do you think Thron just has Nogri like already ready to go across the galaxy and little like pods to be like deployed to a nearby planet or do you think that he has like

No he does. That he does. Okay. They're always laid out like when yeah because there's that scene when Sabeoff is like you can't just keep sending Nogri at a Jedi. It's not going to work. and Thrawn's like We have plenty of no-grey teams

One of them will eventually succeed In the meantime, it only cost me dead no-grey At which point Pelion looks at Rook And is like, I don't know if we can be talking By the way, Pelion An officer who's been in Like the racism incorporated For like 50 years

He's like, well that was poor form Yeah, uh-huh I don't think you can talk that way about the Nogre. But he has this notion that there are multiple teams and they all of coordinators, but he just activate cells as needed. So he

just has like reams of these like Nogre commando teams that he can just whip anywhere, anywhere he wants. So yeah, so Laya's trapped on Kishik with one of them. We're going to get Nogree versus Wookiee. You know, Battle of the Battle of the decade. Let's see who's the real

badass critter in the Star Wars. Wars universe. Meanwhile, Han and Lando are going around trying to find talent card. And one of the places they look is the Abrogato Ray Space Port. And we just got another little interlude of like the whole wildness of the frontier that the smugglers kind of like loved, you know, being a part of and the new Hope era. It's all kind of receding. Like this, this shitty spaceport is now kind of nice and cleaned up. But it also turns out the government's also really repressive. And that's just a

background details. Like this is the progress of the new republic, but also the planetary authorities here appear to be like waging warfare on like an independent rural community that just doesn't want to be governed from the capital. Just interesting note of like, yeah, the whole old republic, new republic model of like, we just kind of don't touch this stuff and you send who you send the Senate and that's representation. But like, whatever it goes in these worlds, it's not our problem. That is continuing a pace.

But it does set us up with, I don't know, I'm a sucker for scoundrelish adventures. And I think we do get a good one here as they realize, like, a fellow smuggler has been busted by the cops. They're looking for their contact. They spot them at a Sabak game. And they have to go make contact without tipping off the playing clothes cops that are in the casino that they're trying to do this deal right under their nose. And we get one of my favorite things, which is a little bit of a con. Yeah. except that it ends up being a con

there's of course a second con happening right is what we eventually put peace together right so the situation here is they have the contact that they're trying to meet with he is at the sabak table he's being he's being blamed as being a cheat no he's being watched by the cops

he's being watched by the cops and while that suddenly a priest shows up yeah Han shows up And, like, lets the guy know that, like, hey, your ship is being impounded right now. Right, right. And they're trying to figure out a way to make an exit gracefully. And then a priest shows up and is like, you, sir, are a cheater. You're a cheat.

A priest shows up and starts yelling at Han. You got a skifter. And we get a little background world building here that there are religious groups throughout the galaxy that hate gambling. and that want to get rid of gambling and gamblers. That seems to be like what they do. What's the rest of their religion? I don't know. This is the force involved?

Who could say? Doesn't come up. This guy is called a reverend. Literally someone calls him a reverend. So we are really in Wild West like casino or Wild West like saloon card table, you know? And so they, he blames Han. he's like you know you you must have snuck this card in and it's actually not the sabok trick that we've seen the most right we've seen the i think it was in the solo movie the idea that lando had the little thing that would feed him a second card um like a better card than the one he was dealt this is like the card itself can be changed to be a different card like i don't if it's holographically but it's like if it's like if you you if you touch it on a certain point, it shifts what is on the card itself.

And Han is like, whoa, whoa, I don't play with the house deck, okay? I'm not the dealer. Exactly. So the attention goes to the dealer instead of either Han or their contact. And in the end, they end up getting away. Do they get busted briefly, but then like they pay their way out? The pit boss basically comes over. Right, right.

And at that point, the Reverend is like, all right, you know what? Maybe the dealer didn't do it. Maybe it's the house deck. Maybe this is a bent house. Yes. At that point, the pit boss is like, everyone gets the fuck out of my casino. And so that's the, and that kind of overrules the cops. Like, pit boss is just going to be like, get these people out of here.

You know, the cops are kind of frozen in place while this unfolds and everyone makes their escape. And so Lando and Han meet up aboard the Falcon with Finns. Torv, their old smuggler buddy, who wants to catch up with them a little bit. It wants to pay back the favor, which is a really smart thing for Torv to do, or like any smuggler. I like a smuggler who's like, I'm paying this back right now. What do you guys need? Like, I'm not trying to be in debt for 10 years and like, I owe you a favor for a long time. Smart maneuver to do this right away.

I actually, to your point, Rob, about like, loving a little scoundrel adventure. this stuff and even some of the earlier stuff does a really good job of having Lando and Han differentiate what type of smuggling and like scoundrelly stuff that they get into Lando is a people person Lando is someone who knows how to make deals and knows people and like has a big network of contacts

and Han is a little more boots on the ground is going to like get his hands dirty is going to be the one who goes in you know I wouldn't go all the way to like Lando is like the operator back home and Han is the one down the, you know, in the mission. But their specialties are a little bit more, you know, I trust Han with a blaster in his hand and with a trying to, you know, slice into a door and steal something, whereas Lando is the one who's going to build the team and get you connected and all that stuff. And it's, it would be very

easy for them to, for Zan to mush them together in a way. And he's a good job of keeping them feeling a little separate here you know um and also lander just is the one who knows more about the world and about what the local government's deal is and like where are the you know what are the little what are the weaknesses we can push on here what are the things we should be anticipating from the local police response stuff like that you know and he learns from torf they learned from torf wouldn't you believe it I work for talent card I'm taking them right now I would prefer

not to do that but if you let me have access to your ship and let me like put in the coordinates without in a way that you can't see them basically I can do that you know because we don't want to reveal where you are but we can

there is some sort of system by which I can fly you there blindly which is fun yeah it's and again yeah it does underscore the degree to which especially seeing how landa moves in this world how past it han is like han is still that guy who you throw him in a situation and he can like have enough chaotic energy to improvise his way through but he has no idea anymore who is who or like and he keeps it's kind of like it's a bit like the way luke is sad han is kind of sad in some of this where he's like he so badly still wants to be that guy

He still wants to be like, no, I'm one of you. I can, you know, I'm a, I'm a buccaneering scoundrel just like you. And he just doesn't know who anyone is anymore. He doesn't know, he doesn't know the players. He doesn't know the local politics. He just doesn't know what levers to poll anymore. And Lando has kept a foot in that world. And it continues to come up that Hans a bit lost there.

And so they are on their way to see Talancard. But, you know, who's beating them in. the punch there is Luke because Luke is awakened from his hibernation trance uh being hailed by cards flagship the wild card there's never been a less wild man it's so i again i the the decision the voice actor the the the reader for the book is because like talent card and where it is like urbane and like frosty cold it is it is is so hard to get a rise out of that guy. I think you mean he's flirtatious and he's playful and he's, uh, you know, he's always

one step ahead. That's like the way that they, they read him. I'll send you both an excerpt. I'm going to have to pull that excerpt. It's very funny. That is, I, you know what, though? I'm here for it because I got, I'm so curious to see a reading of card this 180 off. A guy I've had in my head for like 30 years.

30 years, yeah, for sure. He's like C.O. coded. Like, he's inviting people to dinner. He's like, he has a lot of appointments. He, you know, is making bargains. He's very fair. And I think they've done, so that's the interesting thing. To a degree, he seems a little bit like you could buy that this guy's a secret villain here.

Because, like, he's got, he is. management he is gordon gecko the as a as a smuggler in some ways now yes everything is about he runs his operation on the up and up uh you know everyone is an is a valued associate a colleague uh you know we don't really do hierarchy here but i'm just in charge and you know my new friend mara is my second in command but like you could read him as uh what's that episode of simpsons uh hank the guy in the volcano layer that Homer accidentally goes working for and he's like too good to be true

and turns out he's a super villain right right it's unclear whether card's going to go that way but like some of the way that he emerges into the story the CEO coding the guy who is like

industrialized and financialized being a criminal like running a criminal empire that this is the guy who's replaced Java and Java is basically a gangster right and this guy right

to contrast that you have the guy who is cool and smooth and no problems and let's work out a deal and of course that's the guy who raises to fill in the vacuum

the power vacuum that Jabba who is this unprofessional it's like Capone dies and Meyer Lanski moves out exactly and it's like we can you know let's just make all our money

you know the semi legit way the easy way yeah I'm looking to see if I can give you a clip right this second And while I look for it, I want to correct something because I found an earlier source for the Jedi Code, by the way,

which should be expected. It is the West End Games RPG. It doesn't call it that. It simply says on the bottom of a page, oh, I guess it says, it says the Jedi Code, and then a Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind,

and then it says, there is no emotion, there is peace, there is no ignorance, there is knowledge, etc. And so that's where Zahn is getting it from, which means that we have yet again, Again, another long-running Star Wars thing. In the same way that Faloni and Gilbert and all of our Clone Wars and Rebels,

people are constantly going back to the old toys, the old RPGs, the video games, everything else. Even Zahn was like, what do we got? What can we look at here? What are the different ships? And like the RPG source books were a huge part of that. We need to cover one of these books. We should just read. How much that book was just written by Greg Costa Cam?

I think Greg was the primary writer on it, but I do think that there was a I was just looking at the credits for it. There are some other folks on it. It is just wild to think that a huge amount of Star Wars universe is shaped by one of the most going rogue bomb-throwing game designers from that generation. Yeah, for sure. It's very funny.

That of his work is kind of like ended up set in stone in some ways. In Star Wars, of all places. Well, and it's so much more him the Jedi Code as we know it than it is what would have been Lucas's swing at it, which was originally going to be in Empire Strikes Back, in an early draft of Empire Strikes Back, where Luke made a Jedi oath. And that Jedi oath was, I, Luke Skywalker, do swear on my honor and on the faith of the Brotherhood of Knights to use the force only for good, denying, turning always from the dark side, to dedicate myself to the cause of freedom and justice. If I should fail of this vow, my life shall be forfeit here and hereafter. Sauseless. Empty.

Yeah, that had to be cut. That had to get cut. I can't have that. There is no emotion. There is peace. For all of its many problems that we have with it is a banger. You know, like, our problems are about engaging with it for, you know, it's like too intense. It's like, whoa.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's like a piece of fictional world building. It bends. Sick bastard. Yeah. I swear my honor is a night. Uh-huh. All right.

All right. I can't believe. Con gets a case in carbonite. And at the end of that movie, Luke is jammed into a locker. He continues to be kind of. bulliable throughout this book, which I think is maybe why Mara is the way that she is

because, you know, he, I can't believe such a bulliable boy killed my emperor, you know? This little nerd. Yes. So, yeah, so he, he encounters the ship and there's

a negotiation and he can't, he knows the vibes are off. They decide to give a ship a toe. They invite him aboard. And he needs talent card. Can you hear this? Yep. Watching Luke's approach was a slender man, thin-faced, with short dark hair and pale blue eyes.

Good evening, he said in a cool, carefully modulated voice. I'm Talancard. His eyes flicked up and down, Luke, as if measuring him. And you, I presume, are commander Luke Skywalker. Luke stared at him. How are the worlds? And then they had sacks. He said, striving to keep his own voice calm.

I resigned my alliance commission nearly four years ago. An almost smile twitched the corners of Cards' mouth. I stand corrected. I must say you've certainly found a good place to get away from it all. The question was unstated, but no less obvious for that. I had some help choose. I had some help choosing it, Luke told him, a small run-in with an imperial star destroyer about half a light year away.

Ah, Card said, without any surprise that Luke could see or sense. Yes, the empire is still quite active in this part of the galaxy, growing more so too, particularly of late. He cocked his head slightly to the side, his eyes never leaving Luke's face. though I presume you've already noticed that incidentally it looks like we'll be able to take your ship in tow after all I'm having the cables rigged now

Yeah uh-huh thank you Hang on I gotta hit the lightsaber line Is it coming up? Is it coming up? Okay yeah Feeling the skin on the back of his neck Start to tingle Whether a pirate or a smuggler Cards should certainly have reacted more strongly To the news that there was a Star Destroyer in the area

Unless of course He already hadn't understand with the Imperials. Allow me to thank you for the rescue as well, he continued. Artu and I are lucky you happened along. And Artu is... Oh, of course. Your astromic droid.

The blue eyes flicked down briefly. You must be a formidable warrior indeed, Skywalker. Escaping from an Imperial Star Destroyer is no mean trick. Oh, I imagine a man like yourself is accustomed to giving the Imperial's trouble. Imperial's trouble. I don't see much front-line action anymore. Luke told him. You haven't told me how you came to be out here, Captain, or for that matter how you knew who I was. Another almost smile. With a lightsaber attached to your belt? He asked Riley. Come now. You're either Luke Skywalker, Jedi, or else someone with a taste for antiques, and an insufferably high opinion of his swordsmanship.

Yeah. You know? he sounds like a twilight oh they are there's a little well we didn't know that yet either we didn't know that we were doing french twilac yeah yes but yeah that's yes he sounds like her his dad he does sound a little like her his dad's incredible he is an adventurer from the continent he is he has a little a little of the romance languages in him he is a little of the the latin you know now i kind of see why Mara J had won an HR at that dinner. Oh yeah, I mean, I

should go back and listen to that because I was not listening to an audiobook for that. And I have to imagine that More line, my love. Exactly. Right? Oh, no, I mean nothing. Buy it. Oh, my God. Bring the

finance bro card. I don't like this one. We can have whichever card we want. Look, there's got to be, there's got to be a fan fiction where this card forms a polycule with Luke and Tron in the course of like a few scenes. Easy. It might still happen in this version of. Landau shows up. He's like, hmm.

You seem like some fellows who know how to get things done, says Landau. No, he has to be in a sweet green by himself, like stressed out and. sad about like, how am I going to deal with this appointment that I have with Thron and then I have to talk to Luke afterwards and I have to hide him. Yeah. So this is the thing. It changes the characterization. It really does.

I do love to see, because, like, this is probably the last we're going to see of Talancard being fully in control of anything. Right. Where he's interviewing Luke Skywalker. He's got this ace in the hall, which is that Luke has looked behind him. there's no one else on the ship there's no like he knows what he knows what's going on something's off and card is just like yeah no but you know i'm nothing who found you uh credit for that belongs to my associate mar jade and luke stretches out with the force and gets a jolt of something

and card is like yep that's her and it took me while to realize she only feels that way about you you know what's up with that And Luke's like, no I sure don't And Card's like Ah, well Nevertheless I am so sorry then

We have nothing more to talk about Zapsin with Sun Gun Luke down Card Flawless victory Captured himself a Jedi Yeah You know the Fates have smiled on him

You know He clearly knows what he's doing here In complete control of the situation Well Yeah This is a The car caught the The car right

the dog caught the car situation by the tire, and it's like, oh, shit, I'm not supposed to have this Jedi, man. And it appears by the time that they get back to Carr's base on Mirker, Carr has started to realize that there are fewer avenues for him than he expected from, like, capturing Luke Skywalker. Yes. That the options are less savory than maybe he initially thought they might be. Like, imagine you opened your mailbox today, and there was a Faberger egg in there.

What are you supposed to do with that? Do you know how to get rid of a Faberje? And do you know how to fence one? I don't know who to go to the faberjee egg to a museum, but I bet I'd go to jail because they'd be like, did you steal this? And I'd have no good answer for it. So you suddenly have this thing that's worth a lot of money that's very precious to a lot of people that's caught up between a bunch of different people who say they want the

thing and you got to answer for it, you know? I'm just going to put it in the shed Fuck it You just hang out over there That's what I'm gonna do Also like You're pretty confident That like

You've got the Faberjé egg Turnoff powers around you You have the cats That don't make Faberjia eggs Do do their weird shit Right But like This is still a Faberjay egg

That's killed tons of people It's not a Faberjay egg It's like It's like It's like Fisible nuclear material You know what I mean It's like

It's like you woke up With some uranium rods In the mail This guy killed the last guy in your position in the galaxy or at least he sat in motion like leah strangled him yeah yeah but the entire debacle on the sail barge with luke skywalker yeah to say nothing of the emperor just saying nothing of the previous the first death star i don't want him you take him so and you just told someone else sorry i can't help you find that guy well we'll get to that

so when luke wakes up lu luke wakes up and he's like ha ha card thinks he drugged me he doesn't know about Jedi toxin purifying rituals. Like the Jedi, little known ability. They had the ability to, like, in the space of mere hours, accomplish what months of assaye berries. A steady diet of assaye berries can accomplish for you, you know, over a period of seasons. But Luke is like, ha-ha, I will use my Jedi toxified.

which is also so funny because it's like all of these little trances Luke knows now is this what you were learning? These are the these are the maneuvers that they were teaching you this was like he was doing midnight you know dream calls with Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan was like by the way I can't tell you anything about the history of the Jedi but did you know that you can clear toxins when you have a hangover focus on your point Like, which I guess is easy. Okay, Obi-Wan would teach that one. He would teach that.

Especially Allen Guinness, Obi-Wan. I feel like that's right. Oh, absolutely. Like, that man, you know that man had to peel over Sheree off a few floors. Oh. So. So. Yes.

Turns out it's not drugs. Or is it also drugs? Use drugs because they need to. he had to Mirker. But once he's on Mirker, he can't feel the force. He wakes up. And here's finally awake, are you? I mean, this is, you nailed it, Rob. So, we meet Marry Jade.

Not so easy to suddenly lose everything that once made you special, is it? Oh, she does say that. I don't think she's at her best. No, dude. We do have to admit, this is a 25, 28-year-old who, like, had a pretty good job straight out of like assassin college. That's right, which by the way, we don't know, just to be clear, we, none of this

has been unfolded for us. No, no. Oh, yeah, so you're right, I'm jumping ahead. I shouldn't mention this. All she says is you lost everything that once made you special. You're now just a mere mortal, like the rest of us. And Luke's like, you must be Marjade and she's like, that doesn't impress me either. Carter, I told her. She's not,

she's kind of annoying in this opening scene. so it's not just the voice acting in this sequence it is in fact how it's written what were you going to say allie yeah i mean there's there's something about the way that she's written where she's like always glistening or she's always gloaming or they're always talking about how tiny her gun is or how green her eyes are it's like i you know they keep putting her in the scenes but like being like um she's beautiful but she's you know she doesn't like luke so she's annoying about that um and i like it's such a weird vibe but i will say in fairness it has been a weird vibe there is it begins to become clear marjade great second in command awesome smuggling executive tons of

talent. Really fucking weird about Luke Skywalker, though. Like, you ever, you ever just like, you ever just been Chey Gamara and Luke Skywalker comes up? Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, not good, right? No, no. I wouldn't

call it good. No. No. She was sitting in a high-backed chair. Her arms draped loosely over the arms in a posture that seems strangely familiar. A slender woman about Luke's own age, with brilliant red-gold hair and equally brilliant green eyes. Her legs were casually crossed.

A compact but wicked-looking blaster lay on her lap. A genuine living human being. And yet, impossibly, he couldn't sense her. The confusion must have shown in his face. That's right, she said, favoring him with a smile. Not a friendly or even a polite smile, but one that seemed to be made up of equal parts bitterness and malicious amusement. Welcome back to the world of mere mortals.

And with a surge of adrenaline, Luke realized that the strange mental veiling wasn't limited to just her. He couldn't sense anything. Not people, not droids, not even the forest beyond his window. It was like suddenly going blind. Don't like it, do you? The woman mocked. It's not easy to suddenly lose everything that once made you special, is it? And so on.

Very sneer. I mean, she's sneering. It's an accurate performance. She is sneering at Luke the whole time. But also. I wonder if Mar Jade was ever special. Wait a second. If she's saying she knows what it's like to have lost something, then she's lost something.

If only someone could make Mara realizes, realize she's still special. Oh, God. So, but that's how Luke first sees her, though. There is like an incredible green eyes, red hair, can't sense her. Can't censor. Also, she's doing Sharon Stone from basic instincts, but with a gun. Also, to be clear, she felt Luke's presence in the darkness of space through her hatred. she has like a hatred radar on for Luke and well and when he called right she was the one yeah yeah

and yeah there is uh i think the the thing that is kind of funny though is she's she's clearly got this grudge she wants to play the scene with him yeah he doesn't i'm sorry i don't know who you like he doesn't know well she's not giving him anything she's not like like, do you know what I mean? She's not like, do you over that time? No, she's nothing. But also it's incredibly frustrating because, like, she wants to be like, this guy thinks he's so great because he's got the fucking fourth.

But you get this fairly diffident kid who's like, huh, I guess I can't feel the fourth. Because Luke is kind of, like, Luke, as played by Mark Hamill, in many aspects of his character, is lovable, admirable in many ways, but also gormless. Yeah. And so she wants to play the scene of like, that's right, you're not the big powerful Jedi anymore. He doesn't feel like the big powerful Jedi. And so she wants to beat up on this guy who's like a small being.

It's very annoying. And I think that's what, like, she comes across kind of whack here. But we know he can switch into that mode because he can do the like, you know, like my father before me. Like, he can get serious. But, like, he has to be, he has to step up to the plate to do that. It has to be game time. And she's the assistant of the guy who's feeding him right now. Do you know what I mean? Like, Talent Card is like, yeah, he's kidnapped Luke. But Luke can always, like, understand that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a valuable. It's all in the game. It's all in the game. Exactly. We don't kind of bring feelings into it. You know, it's business. And Talent Card is that

guy who is like, enjoys talking to Luke a little bit and explaining the situation. You haven't heard about these weird forest cat lizards, have you? Just because I kidnapped you and I'm exploiting you, it doesn't mean we can't be friends. Right. Do you want to watch the game with him to come to dinner? Which is part of why, Allie, your sweet green talent card is so clutch. It's such a better characterization because he's so lonely. He just wants a buddy.

He just wants to hang, which is what he wants from Han. and Lando, too, also when they show up. To a degree, it's what he wanted from Mara. Right. Like, he collects interesting people. Oh. And so he's got this big, he's got this big headquarters with all these formal rooms to receive and hang out, and nobody's there.

It's him and his two dogs under his big tree. And Mara is really interesting, but Mara has this real weak point, which is that you talk with her too long, and she's like, fucking hate what the empire's become. And you're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, me too. He's like, listen, this is not an HR situation.

This is a PBR situation. Let me know if you want one. I'm trying to drink some beers. I'm trying to hang out. Except he just wouldn't let himself drink PBRs, the problem is. He was like, I have a great, I have a great bottle for you on my cellar. And you're like, talent, it's all going to be the same to me. He's like, no, no, not this one.

You're going to understand. So, so, but like, yeah, he and Luke have a, and Luke reveals himself not to be a complete, like, he understands the predicament he's in. And he understands the predicament card is in, which is that, like, it's kind of awkward, which is that as card lays it out, in a lot of ways, the simplest solution is the one Luke wants, which is you just send me back to the New Republic, they'll pay you a reward, whatever. But the empire knows what happened. and the New Republic doesn't, and so if Luke just shows back up, like, can be traced back to card, that's not good. The Empire is really dangerous. So, like, the Empire has key information whereas if Luke just disappeared, that's a tragedy for the New Republic, but, like, he just disappeared in space. And, hey, isn't it convenient that he spent the last few years kind of

slowly, you know, prying himself away from being a useful part of our government? In some ways, Are we even going to feel his absence? Probably not. I think we're going to be fine, you know? It's not stated, but there are times I do feel like, a bit like at the end of, just because Alex Guinness came up. Yeah. At the end of Lawrence of Arabia, where Guinness's character, Faisal,

is like to the British, like to Allenby, the British commander, I think we both realize we better now if Lawrence were not around. Yeah. Like it is like, I can totally believe. Yeah. The Republic wouldn't be the sorry. if he just disappeared. He is an open question, and he is someone who,

he's like the classic type of guy who could decide he wants to get into politics and throw the whole thing for a loop, right? If Luke tomorrow was like, oh, I want to run the Republic, he would have the loyalty of a lot of the military, he would have a lot of loyalty of like the people. Classic populist movement is famous general from the, from the revolution decides to overthrow the government that gets put in place post-revolution, you know, so. And he's a Jedi.

And he's a Jedi. And he's the last people to rule the empire, rule the galaxy were Jedi. Right. Like he's the only one now left who has the same skill set. Let's just get rid of this guy, honestly. Where's that little Bothan freak? Can we get some assassins on this guy? That's why I'm kind of surprised.

Like, we, you know, it hasn't really been addressed and it hasn't come up that, Like, they haven't even found a place for him in terms of, like, giving him a way to spin his place. Like, it feels like Han is getting involved because he has this relationship with Akbar and he wants to get close to Leia. But, like, you would think, like, you know, I'm surprised that, like, with how stretched and how thin and how thoughtless what we're seeing of the New Republic, like, that they haven't, like, found a thing for him to do that they don't. really neat well and crucially um i kind of wonder so monmouthma wants lea in her government like like when mothma's pinned down being chief of state lea is her envoy her fixer uh acbar and phalia are bickering but like lea is like if mhmatham is the king of this chesed lea is the queen uh much as she was in the during the rebellion uh i get the sense that han is a package deal with lea

and they're trying to find stuff for Han to do as well. His whole, like, maybe I'll, I can help. Honey, I can go talk to my smuggler buddies. That's great. Go talk to your smuggler buddies. We don't even know you anymore, bro. Okay, my smuggler buddies don't want to work for us anymore. That's because Montcalamari hang pirates.

Also, we passed over. There was that hit and fade attack when we talked last week. The Empire's little raid they're doing is a test run for Sabayoff. the Republic is sending aid to pick up the pieces after that and you reference the conversation often which is that Akbar is demobilizing a ton of warships to turn them into freighters

for this duty which requires refits and basically demilitarizing them and turning them into haulers which seems not good for again it's still an active war but they don't know the thron is out there so yeah like I kind of wonder if the new republic

has a use for any of these people really except Leah. Leia. Yeah. But they couldn't at least get him into classic cars just to keep them busy. You know what I mean? They couldn't give Luke like a painting, like some painting supplies and some sort of like artist in residency title. Just get him busy. Keep him busy. Yeah, pay that's what the force feels like, buddy, you know?

They excessively deferred to him. They were like, well, he's the only He's the Jedi. He'll figure out what Jedi should do. Yeah. And I also kind of wonder, I do wonder if there's a degree to it, thinking about things they could use him for. I'm sure, what does this, Phalia, the Bothan? I'm sure Thalia is like, I bet

he'd be a great assassin. And then, and then you've got to be like, oh well, sorry, no, because he's like kind of like a little goody two shoes. He's not going to kill anybody for us. We can't like use him on missions, right? Is he like, is he like chill enough to like be sent undercover somewhere? Is he like,

too much of, like, a big noble hero for us to use in that way. Outside of, like, you know, like, we're not even to give him command of a fighter unit anymore. He did that bit, you know? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, he's a loose sense. So the other thing, Card lays out. And Card here, he doesn't want to, like, much in the way Han was like, I don't want

any party or revolution in the first movie. But Han had nothing going on for his life, right? Like, Han, like, was in deep with the mob. Like, like, Han's life was a shambles. Talon is the man who has everything. He's got the best job. He's got his ideal job. He's running an awesome galaxy spanning, smuggling ring.

He knows everything that's happening everywhere. He's not even smuggling dirty shit that often. Tor, I forgot about this until just now. Torv explains that the stuff that they've been running lately is food to, like, the libertarian, you know, land rightists or whatever you know the guys who are like we don't believe in government

but we do need food which is a fun little detail because it's like Han is like wait are these rebels like new rebels against the Republic and Torv is like no they're just they just want to live out in the woods like and we help run them food

that they don't have to pay taxes on or whatever in medical supplies and stuff and so it's like we're a away from Java and the hut syndicate, you know? So he seems like he has, what do you get the man who has everything? Yeah, you leave him alone. He doesn't want to throw in with any side of this. And this thing, he lays out with Luke.

Luke is like, long term, the empire's going to lose. Yeah. And Talon's like, that could be a long ways off. In the meantime, I have interests on both sides. So, you know, obviously I have to play my cards carefully here, but I can't commit to one side to the other of this thing. It's just not good business. Mara interjects at this point

Maybe the Empire can still win If Leia and Luke weren't around Holdman Motham's hand And cards like Yeah Okay well if that that were to happen Yes it could go differently Thank you Mara

But like The way she's an awkward presence in this Like Girl you were talking yourself out of promotion You've got a good job here Don't fuck this up You got a good job You got a good life

life after the war you know what i mean are back in a room looking at looking in the mirror just don't just don't talk about the empire just don't get pulled in the skywalker bullshit it's the best job you've ever had since you know the other one you're better than this

don't fuck this up okay remember remember where you came from remember how hard you work to get here hungry skywalker yeah we didn't feed you dinner did we little piss baby So the meeting kind of ends with like I just

How are you just hang here And we'll figure out what to do with you Go back to your very comfortable room Mara Don't even try to leave The windows the window's not locked But if you if you open it and crawl up There'll be an alarm

And then it'll be race between The wildlife for me As to what's going to kill you first Okay Mara says Luce Okay, Gumby Okay, Mara He just doesn't care

It's so funny It's very What do you do with this? It's like I don't I'm sorry I don't know who you are Yeah, I'm sorry I don't think about you at all

Like Yeah Which is also in some ways a fun like this is the like it's almost like the tragedy of the OC being written into a into a story later yeah which is that like oh I was a major part I was a key part of this whole narrative I've I had feelings about everything that happened in the in the story that everyone knows and it's like yeah but you weren't like none of us know you from there yeah so yeah and there's some other OCs that we have feelings about like we we killed that

Boba Fett, motherfucker, but like, we felt some way about him before he died. And, you know, so you weren't even like that. You weren't even on that level. You weren't even an IG-88 type, you know? Darth Vader didn't look at you and say no disintegrations. Darth Vader didn't look at you. As far as we know, maybe he did. Maybe we didn't see that part of the story, but.

Oh, I can't wait to know the details of what actually happened there. Because I feel like the moment where she. He's like, well, you were really mean to be that time. It's just going to be not the way that Zahn wants it to play after all of this. Well, also, and I do wonder, like, is there a bit where, like, if Luke really had wronged Mara and, like, in front of Talon, he's like, oh, shit. It is the, that could change how this plays out, right? Right. But it, like, it just, like, the non-comprehension is just like, well,

Oh, this has only gotten more mysterious for Carr, not less. As for all of us. So Marr stalks off. Luke's locked in a cabin. And then Toro shows up. Landon and Carlisian are coming for dinner. And Mara's like, why didn't you just send them away? Which does seem like the same.

because the favor was tor was oh oh do you mean she says that's a talent you mean yeah yeah because he's lonely he wants to hang interesting people are here and they're his but like they're his type of people they're not just random new republic if akbar showed up you send akbar away maybe you send akbar away with some guns and you say i could provide more guns for a nice you know fee or whatever but this is han and and lando they got stories I got stories what if we could be boys this is an opportunity you don't get very often well and also like once again mara kind of blowing it where she's like well then torf can pay off his own debts and card being like you don't quite get how this organization operates do you tour works for us his debts are our

debts this is how we're paying them off but it does seem there is an element of like boy you want to do a real high wire act for your for your little dinner part party. This is, his actual thing here is like, if we can let them stay here overnight, they have a meal, they have breakfast before they go, then guess what? They'll, no one will ever believe we had Luke, right? Like, what's a better way to prove we don't have Luke than to have them be here the whole time, which is a sitcom premise?

Like, a hundred, this is going on two dates at once type beat, you know? Dude, it is a bedroom farce. just wait a hundred percent like the sheer number of like doors opening closing they should have given him a mid-Atlantic accent you know what i mean that's what they should have given him on the audio book this conversation does um it doesn't relate to card but it does relate to finances a little bit and something that keeps emerging in terms of like card has that comment to luke where he's like well you're certainly fine spending other people's money aren't you when Luke offers to like pay him double what the empire would pay just to get out.

And then I think there's a, there's a similar moment with Han Solo where he's like, yeah, we can just pay off with the, the Republic bank account. It's like, I really want to see the companion book to this one. And it's everybody still at the Republic base being like, where is Leah? What are these charges on the Republic finance account? Like, we have to get rid of these three. you know young adults these college students basically who keep running up this bill when we're like trying to make countries trying to build buildings and highways etc um do you imagine the news stories that like

oh my god hans running with his old buddy and they're running up huge bar tabs that include gambling chips and like the republic's just covering it i can't imagine i can yeah yeah but there is an element of Han and Luke, now operate in a world where, like, for whatever reason, the Republic will backstop them. Like, they just, okay, you ran up costs, fine. We can't very well have this go bad, so we'll cover the costs. And the people who still work for a living, who are still out there, like, not getting the hero of the Republic, endless tab. Do you feel a certain way every time they bring out the government. charge card.

But yeah. So, Han and Landau come. We get one of the funniest bits I think we've seen with Han and Landau ever, which is they're sitting down to dinner and it's not just Han, Landau, Card, and Mara. There's also like the other card guys around, including this guy, Ghent, who's like 17 or whatever, 19, and is like, I heard you killed a bunch of slavers and rescued all these people and you gave him the spaceship. And Han is trying to like downplay his heroism over and over again. Well, it was a law. The law there says when you kill a slaver, you have to give the ship to the

slaves that were on board the ship. It was not a choice I made, you know. And like keeps escalating. Bit by bit by bit by bit is like deeper and deeper bits. of heroism and Lando giving him shit for being increasingly heroic and Carr trying to back him up by being like, well, that is the law. That is how the law works there that you do have to give, you know, which is, by the way, a wild thing to do. There's the bit in this conversation where Hanna eventually is like, well, you know, Chewy was there and Chewy really hates slavers because the whole thing with, you know, it's wookie slaves. And like, you You are out of pocket.

Like, what do you do? Just take the dub. Let this little, let this 19-year-old think you're a cool guy. And we also get the name drop. Speaking of things that would show up later, the Zigerians are here. The fucking cat, the cat empress slave empire. It's them. That's who Han ran out of run in with, which is wild.

Which, again, I think it's from the role-playing game originally. And again, Zahn pulls it from that. Which is great. Fantastic. Love it. Also, I think it draws attention to the fact that, so, yes, Card isn't impressed by Luke Skywalker. We know at great pains, Mara is not impressed by Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Lando Karazian.

But they do work with people. And so, yes. They're the entertainment tonight. Talens people are reacting the way we would react to being invited to a company dinner. and Han Solo and Lando Carrizian are there. Yeah. Like people are like, their minds are being blown that they're actually here. This kid is like, you guys are the coolest dudes in space.

And when it speaks to the type of people who are around car. Like one of the recurring things maybe that's happening in these books is like, what is the state or what is the state of the next generation in the old empire, the new republic, the crime syndicate. et cetera, right? The future of the Jedi, et cetera. And you could really easily contrast this stuff to the coerced, you know, and drafted members of the empire since they've lost their power. We've talked about that, like, those people have been forced in some cases into working.

And here we have young, eager, hero-worshipping smuggler smuggler in training like he hasn't surrounded himself with the sort of people Jabba has surrounded himself with could you imagine anybody in Jabba's palace being like Han Solo he saved people from a bunch of slavers no the people

they were like Han Solo yeah he's frozen in a block of stone down there that's what we do to people like that we don't feed them we don't we don't like hold little feasts to celebrate that they're visiting it's great

and then right as this conversation is Han is really getting back to the corner about what a big hero he is. Phone rings. A card you need to come down here. Grand Admiral Thrawn is dropping by for a little a little chin wag.

It's great. It's so, like, I didn't realize how funny some of these sequences are. It's so funny. Just the mounting horse. So, split through Grand Admiral. Groucho Marx be playing talent card here as the night goes gets worse and worse you know he so we've seen like

cool calm and collected this guy doesn't make mistakes thron rattles him thron's like i'm just wondering you know we should we should chat i'm here for salmary but i just wanted to catch up and i'm kind you know i'm looking for more warships uh and also i want to know why he didn't join the hunt for skywalker and card says well at the time we were super busy and thron's like What do you mean at the time? We haven't found. Nobody's coming in. It's still time.

Yeah. And he's like, well, you said he was an X, you said he was an X-wing. And I know about X-Wing's, uh, he would be out of fuel and probably, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, you're thinking like if he's a normal pilot, but of course, Jedi have their little tricks now, don't they, in the middle of this conversation, there's a weird little glitch. And Card realizes the Tron's already on his way down. The glitch was him basically passing through the tunnel of the upper atmosphere as a shuttle

landing to come talk to Carr. Oh, today's such a bad night. We don't have any entertainment for you. There's no, because he does have entertainment. I'm not even at home. And it's like, I'm sitting outside. It looks like your home. I'm two blocks away.

That's your, that's your Camero, right? That's yours? I know that. I know that car. Oh. It is so, like, it goes to shit so fast for, for poor old card. and at that point Mara again in the process

trying to lose this job is like why don't we just turn everyone over to Thron come on and Carr's first reaction is like we couldn't do that to guests which is very like which is very funny he's great he's good

you have a coded R yeah yeah I want more guests to come hang out more guests will come hang out if they learn that I'll just turn them over throng i can't be a criminal mastermind if people don't know i'm a man of my word god mara you are not fucking up my first big dinner party at merker base i'm not letting you do it go move luke and

don't put the lightsaber somewhere no one will see it please well and also like marr marr keeps arguing the point and like throng comes the like thront card comes this close to being like shut the fuck up and just do it and he doesn't instead he gives what is the good answer which is we can't give thron all this stuff right now because like he has a star destroy in orbit we can't negotiate from a position of weakness which i think is the key thing he realizes quickly that thron first of all it's already too late that's what we know about thron and maybe card sensing this but what we know about thron is it's already too late like if he showed up up and he's like I've got all these rebels here

he's going to be executed right there they're going to go into custody but like the fact that he hasn't turned them over immediately means it's already over that if throng catches him it's done so he cannot do that move but

Mara is so furious about just like let's stick it to these rebels and she won't stop arguing the point and Card finally finally sends her off and then tries to gather himself his narration is it's going to be a most interesting afternoon. But, like, dude, that guy's heart is racing.

It is pure panic time. I love that he references Cloud City Lando stuff specifically as like, hey, listen, you can't negotiate with the empire while they're in power around you, like while they are projecting force in your system. You can negotiate with them when they're far away. But once they have like turbo lasers pointed at you, they're not going to keep their word, you know. So let's wait until, even if I was going to turn over Luke,

now is not the time I could do it. I could do it in three days when I say, oh, wow, you know, I went looking for him after we met, but I can't do it now, you know, which is great. And speaking of, I guess, shoutouts to Empire Strikes Back, our author reminds us, Hey, do you remember Luke has a robot hand? Luke forgot

I do love this bit where he's moved to a storage shed He's not just been moved to a storage shed He's been moved to a storage shed In a LucasArts adventure game Like he's in a puzzle box room He's an escape room They've put him in a box in a room

Where it's like There's an outlet across the room Mara hasn't blasted that one Exactly Oh the outlet by the door Mara blasted it, though. That one's not useful unless I get some new wires. Can't reach that.

I can't reach that. Can't reach that right now. It's out of reach. The other room, R2, is restrained. Artu's over there in the other room. Yep, that's my prosthetic hand. Exactly. And it's just him trying to figure out how to hotwire the door using cables that he's

able to pull both from his robot hand, but also from... Well, he pulls the copper out of the wall from the dead outlet, but they killed it at the breaker. Right. And so he has this whole idea of like, like Mara destroyed the power running the door, but I'll just use the power from over here and to complete the circuit. A lot of Luke stuff, we skipped this bit, but when he was trying to repair the X-wing, also about getting a lot of cable from one place and putting it into another place. Remember he was going to have R2 stripped 27 kilometers of cable from the, from some part of the, of the, the X-wing to then attach to the broadcast antenna so that he could replace it and send out a better message.

And there's a bit where R2 is like, you want me to do what? And Luke is like, come on, you're telling me you can't do what like a factory machine doesn't even have sentience can do? And it's like, yeah, dude, because it doesn't have sentience. It's not going to be mind-numbing work over days. Well, also, it's probably got the right hands and arms to do it. Yeah. Art2 probably doesn't. Yeah.

But the R2 Luke stuff, by the way, in the section is really interesting. I kind of kept going back and forth as to how well Luke could understand R2 in any given point. There's a discord I was in where there was some conversation and discussion over whether he could always understand R2. or whether he could only understand him. There's a bit early on where R2, when they leave the cave in chapter 11, where R2 speaks so quick that Luke can't keep up with him. And then there are times when it seems like Luke is responding to the sounds of a dog, right? Where it's like R2, you know, groaned beepily or whatever, you know,

and Luke is like, I know, buddy. But there are other times when they're like talking about strict mechanical information. And I think that by the end of this section, I'm pretty firmly committed to when it's easy to hear what the beeps are, Luke can understand binary, which is the language of the droids in Star Wars, and can actually understand exactly what Artu is saying. But there are moments, even through this section, where it seems like they're talking past each other or something. I think it's fun to pay attention to how Zon uses the ambiguity here or kind of opens and shuts the ambiguity as is necessary for a scene. Yeah, that really, I took notice of that when in the like middle space ship repair scene. Because, like, you know, in Star Wars, we never saw a depiction of, like, R2D2 speaking to Luke through the, the, like, flight deck system. Like, it felt like there, there was, like, a text communication happening there.

We do. Empire that's happening. Yeah. Oh, that happens in Empire? Yeah, but they don't make it explicit. But in the reaction, in the shot of Luke, in the X-Wing, when it's like, R2's like, where are we going? and you see Luke's eyes flick up to a display and he reads it and he says we're going to the Dagobus system

interesting. Yeah, I thought that it was really interesting that both like they have that method of communication but also like, you know, Zahn never writes like and then R2Duty said or like and then on the screen it appeared like we have to go left or whatever. It's like still you know between them even within text. And I thought that that was like both an interesting writing choice on top of like

oh you know they have these like multiple modes of communication and they can speak to verbally and nonverbally it's just like depending on the situation yeah there are so it's interesting zan observes through text really strict rules about how Star Wars

like he basically is trying to like render in a novel the way Star Wars works on film it does it really well I think by doing decisions like this in other EU stuff some writers do just start having droids talk but usually through

like you like what their little you get the little display what their speech is translating to I'm not sure we ever get like we get some POV scenes from Chubacca's perspective I'm not sure we ever hear like Chubaca just like speaking in his own voice

like how like how he talks like in the wiki language that I can ever pronounce. Shuriwuk. Shuriwak, something like that. But yeah, like this is something that a lot of writers kind of wrestled with because I think some, you know, you can imagine just running out of ideas for how to describe a droid beeping and a character reacting. So, yes, like, R2 grumble beepily.

At a certain point, you're like, I need to stop. I just need to have this droid fucking talk. but also I do kind of like like again Zahn's heroes are all problem solvers they are all like you know observant paying attention to the surroundings Luke is also still a guy who grew up on a moisture farm like repairing busted equipment

and so once he realizes like he just needs to jump this door and he puts two and two together with his hand as has a power source you know boom gone and then our two is in the unlocked part of the shed, so he gets R2 out, they go steal a shed. Something Starfighter-ish, the

Skip Ray Blastboat that he finds, it's described as like bigger than an X-wing. It's got like a front pilot seat and then like a duo backseat. He just jams R2 between the two seas because there's no droid socket, which is funny detail. It's great. I think this is another another tabletop game

original, I'm pretty sure. So, you know, back to it. He sneaks that out of there. And then Mara seems to be having a crisis. Is that, like, you know, he sees her coming out of her meeting with card.

And she seems to be really debating what to do next. And I'm not sure if it's implied, does Luke see her deciding to go rogue and maybe just go and murder him anyway? Or is she grudgingly deciding to follow orders? And she's not going to, she's not going to do that. I'm not sure. He's like he sees her, he sees her deliberating, you know, and then like making a decision. Yeah, I'm not sure how he reads it outside of time to go.

Yeah, I think, I mean, as far as what the. the reader knows is that she's supposed to be going back there to like put a like a tarp over the Millennium Falcon and like move things deeper into the trees so um thron doesn't know what's going on but I think what he is watching is her realization that like oh there's a motorcycle missing and that means Luke Skywalker is missing but I don't think that that's like a deliberate like I'm going to go check on Luke out of turn? Yeah. There's another way to think about it.

Maybe what he's noticed is... Oh, it's mooted. Sorry, so she's literally trying to figure out that exact thing. Right. She's trying to decide what she's doing, right? Yeah, she hasn't really come down on it. Right, right. And then when she...

Then she does realize that he's missing. And that is like, all right, he's fucking dead. I'm the one I have to go get him right now He's not going to get away Right And that's the end of this chapter Yep With her taking off in a second skip ray

With his lightsaber Yep Because her plan had been like I could go kill him In the shed He doesn't have the force And I'm Mara Jade My eyes are glistening green

Maybe you haven't heard My red gold hair Is yeah is flashing. I love her. She's great. Need more. He won't be able to stop my life dancers for him.

So, but yeah, like the last thing that brings her up short is, like, she wants to kill Skywalker, but it would really disappoint card. They've been so good to her. Can she really do this?

Again, another dark, Mara, don't fuck this up. like Card doesn't deserve this you can't just kill Luke Skywalker you have to kill Solo and Calarizian and Carr's gonna be like so ashamed he's so ashamed embarrassed right and then while she's having that thought she sees

the skip ray fly away she's like Card what the fuck are you doing why did you send the skip ray and then she's like ah fuck Luke must have stolen that time to go yep yeah and so that's where we leave things we leave them now chasing across the skies

of Mirker Thrawn on his way to crash a dinner dinner party that he is not invited to solo in Calrissian hidden off to the site with the leftovers so yeah all the pieces are in place for

the finale next week chapters 23 to the end of Air to the Empire I'm excited I'm excited to finish this one up excited to get to the next one yeah I can't wait for the mystery to be revealed

the mystery of Marra Jade or the mystery of the mole miners the mystery of the mole miners I suppose both yes but mostly Mara the specific beat whenever this veil comes off it's going to be I think frankly hilarious

I'm anticipating it being do you want to place a bet as to whether that veil comes off in this book or if it's a future book oh that's right we're reading a trilogy we're reading a trilogy

Um, wow. I think, I think Luke is going to leave this book having an idea or being like, oh, I suddenly recognize her or something. Right. Okay. That is my cult shot, but who knows? I don't fucking remember. I don't remember. Because, again, I didn't remember half of the stuff that was in here was in here, let alone individual plot beats, you know?

and I, for a little while, played in a table-tub, but played in an online muck where someone played this talent card. So, you know, you would think I would have all this stuff really locked in. Like, is this talent card or like, sexy? I mean sexy, sexy internet talent card. Welcome to the wild card. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes, exactly.

Just for everybody at home, there are 224 works featuring Tellen Card on an archive of our own. and it seems to be about 40, maybe 50 of those are him in a relationship with somebody. Okay. Is there a particular... Yeah, who they pair them off with. So there's Mara. There's Shada Du Kahl.

Oh, yeah. That is the future wife. Oh, okay. And then there's Luke's Skywalker, obviously. And then I was just like, just, you know, moving my mouse while we were talking. And one of them was Telancard slash Winter. Oh.

I don't read that. I can see it. I could see it. A man who just loves having all the information and a woman who can't lose any of it. Who can't write. She is the, right. She can't, yeah, she's a perfect memory. Like, Savarian from Book of the New Sun.

She doesn't know what to do with all these memories. That's right. He doesn't know what to do with all these feelings. God, that's actually such a good idea. Fuck. You will not, because, because. I don't think Winter gets her due romantically in the stories

when they finally sort of give her more of an inner life. Well, we, you know, we shall see. We are. Yeah. That is interesting. Boy, less love for Talancard.

It's been a while since talent. I'm, you know, older fandoms, well, you really unchecked fanfiction. There's a real, there's a real era

split, you know? Well, it's also weird, like, there was, um, there are a lot of, like, really obscure Harry Potter, um, ships that were,

like, the number one ships this year. And it was because, like, websites keep going down. So their archives keep getting, like, ported over to fan-fix sites.

Yeah. So it's, like, messing with the numbers. So maybe, you know, if somebody's going to unearth an old Star Wars, a specific fan fiction website and town will... And pull stuff over. He'll rise to the top once again. What can hope? Well, I think we'll understand more of these shipping dynamics as we get through more of these,

more of these books. I cannot... I don't know if we will ever get around to it. the the introduction of Shada and where she exists in the universe is fun and where they try to sort of retcon her as well into the original trilogy and then also because I think this is going to be a dropped thread that beck and call that Luke found oh right I don't think it comes up in the rest of these books I think I think Zahn might have forgotten about it but either way it ends up being pivotal something he writes like 15 years later where it's like you know we really need to get to the bottom of that back and call

that's so funny so it doesn't come up in these books it's not like I'm not sure they ever answer what the fuck it was doing there on Dagobah that's so incredible it's yeah and then it's like becomes a pivotal like quest for for a character in a later in a later book but yeah so that that is that is where we leave things off with with Air to the Empire sort of at the tail end of an evening of conversation and frank exchange of views with a true rogues gallery of scoundrels.

Speaking of rogues galleries of scoundrels. Oh, sure. Y'all want to talk Outlaws a little bit before we were at? A little bit. It's gotten, you know, so Star Wars Outlaws is a new game from Massive entertainment. It's an Ubisoft studio and it's an Ubisoft Open World Star Wars game. And it got really middling reviews. Yeah.

But it is a, it is not about a Jedi. It is about a little scoundrel, an aspiring scoundrel, a shitty thief. A shitty thief. A decent gambler. So important. I mean, I haven't lost a game with Spock yet. Maybe the best in the galaxy, I think, I might be. I almost tweeted last night.

I was like, the end of this game needs to be her meeting Lando and him being like, let me teach you about investing. I mean, a small business ownership. Truly. You, you, like I said, Lando is in this game. you'll meet Lando. I may have more Lando stuff to go, I'm not sure. I know there's Lando DLC coming. They are doubling down on Lando with this game.

She is such a K, the main character is such a, at least for the first half of the game or whatever, she does not know how to do anything. She is like, they committed to the idea that she is like a low-level street criminal from Canto Bight, who is in over her head. they play her up as like, there's a little bit of like internet disaster lesbian or disaster bisexual energy with her where she's just constantly flustered by hot women who like repair her

speeder bikes or repair her guns or tell her who to go kill or whatever that I think sort of works but sometimes she just seems a little too in over her head. But my hope is that that will change as the game continues and fundamentally she's surrounded by a bunch of characters who I think rule I don't even think she's bad I think they're just playing honestly that she doesn't have she's Rizzless because she's just like she's annoying she's like a 20 year old who doesn't know anything about being a smuggler because she's not a smuggler she's stumbled into being a smuggler you know I mean like the way she's she sort of laid out in the beginning like the thing that is annoying about her is like she kept thieving in her own backyard like it like it is imagine

you live in a building with someone who keeps sealing people shit and everyone knows it's them and they keep being like I don't know why is everyone acting as a way like I didn't do anything I never I never touched it right and it's like everyone like

the pond isn't that big K you know like you know yeah go do it somewhere else go to tourists at least stop trying to rob from the gang from your neighborhood you know you are not Omar we know your little cat dog thing

is like we know you trained it to like lift keys and shit stop doing this and so there is a bit of she finally pissed off the wrong people has to go actually learn to be a criminal for real but they're like in the early stages it is the most like ha ha like nobody can stop me from chasing my dream of being a thief and blowing out of this town and everyone's like we just want you stop stealing shit from like us please chill and then running back to your big scary like stepdad and being like You can't touch me

I will say given the severity of some of those reviews I'm having a pretty good time Oh I'm having a blast I think you know To some degree this is Fans of the genre and the genre here Being both open world games and you haven't

Like had one of those yet In the last year that like you've gorged yourself on And the other the other genre is Star Wars It's such a visually dense game It's so filled with star wars ass locations that are lovingly rendered um you know this is 16 year old austin's dream game you know in a real way of like it'd be cool you have a spaceship and you could take a planet and you'd lay it with the planet you could take a job you can take a job with the huts but in the

last second you could decide i'll screw the huts i'm gonna side with the neither the pikes nor the crimson dawn existed at that point so i wouldn't have said them yeah but now i would say the pikes or the crimson dog with black sun i would say black but they're not in the game funny enough which is weird um uh i think the reputation mechanics are really fun um for for people who don't know this is a game where you are gaining rep with the with four different crime syndicates eventually um and uh often to gain rep with them you have to betray another one and the base level thing is really common of like when you get more rep you get more like gear you get bonus you get bonus gear you get bonus gear you get bonus their merchants give you discounts the merchants give you discounts special items to

upgrade your your weapons and your vehicles um but the the more interesting thing that happens is they give you better access to their locations and their districts in the world and so like you know early on i didn't go with the pike syndicate and it's not like and that's it i'm a pike syndicate girlie now what it really means is i can get to their vault easier and that means I'm going to go get the vault keys and then use the fact that I can get into their stuff easier to do missions against them and to rob them and then try to like balance that out by being like, come on. Do they immediately know if you've robbed them or they do not immediately. You have to get caught. You have to get caught.

They have to see you. So like you can get in most of the districts have it set up where there's like no one, if you're not liked, you can't come in at all. But if you're liked, even up to max, you can only go in one zone, like one depth. But they, and at that point, if you go into the restricted zone, they will get pissed at you. And if they see you, they'll escort you out. And if you get caught stealing or if you get caught whatever, you'll lose rep. And I think in that restricted zone, they will fucking kill you if they see you in a place you're truly not supposed to be, right? Or they'll start fighting you deep in that space.

And that is a really fun thing. And then also just the game expects you to lose rep and gain rep and lose rep. And that feels like the fantasy of the smuggler, right? that Han is in good with Jabba today and tomorrow is out and that is 100% the way so far the rep stuff has been working for me which is kind of clever like the whole

you're rolling like okay you want to be in with these people now but like you'll have to do your heel turn to fix things up with the other gang but I'll put you on the outs with this one but like you've gotten what you need so and you know you don't give a fuck about the rep of and this was like the big ice on the cake the Imperials

so when it goes bad with the Imperials you're not like oh I got to get out of here without killing too many of them because I don't want to ruin my rep. You're like, oh, it's on. I'm going to shoot my way out of this base. And then if I have to go, like, do a little side mission to, like, get the patrols that are out for me to lower my wanted level. I'll do that after. But for now, it's game time, you know? It's very fun. Yeah. And, like, I think it's just if you, like, just hang out in places that have, like, really good Star Wars vibes, this one does. It's like an Assassin's

Creed game, but like for Star Wars, right? Like, in the sense that like, the way people have been like, man, this reminds me of like how much I love these parts of Italy. This is like, man, this reminds me how much I fucking love Star Wars. It does, do you. I love just like hanging out like, oh, they got, they got

a shitty diner in here? They sure do. A little 50s diner with booths? I can do deals, shady deals, in my diner booth, and then I can go to the jukebox and play the latest hit. Can? Yeah, they're like, pulling your speeder up to the gas station out in the middle of the like the wind torn that first planet is great it has the it has the best it's gorgeous it's like brings my shooter to its fucking knees oh yeah absolutely i need to turn it down but the problem is when it's like when the frames catch up and it's giving you like the rolling grasslands and the like the blowing dust it's like no i'll even if five frames a second i'll take it yeah it's good good good enough. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. I'm off that first planet and I'm on to, or I'm off the, I guess the second, there's like an intro planet. Then there's like the open world.

It becomes a proper open world game. It doesn't have any of the like towers and stuff that you think of as like the Ubisoft model. It's a little more. There's a little bit of like treasure hunting, but it's all like figure out this little puzzle and like climb into this restricted area, but it's small. Yes. But I think the thing that I really started to realize where I was like, I think I am in that like fans of the genre space where I'm like, look I hate the checkpointing I hate that like you have a stealth mission go bad and then you lose all the progress who you're caught

that sucks that's that's annoying but I knew that maybe I was a little more closely aligned to what this game's doing than a lot of the reviewers because like first time I'm like Sabak and you see all the expressions

the passover players faces and the way the play goes around the table and people shooting the shit while they play I know you've not played this yet there's a little Sabok droid that deals you the cards and it has like a it has like an arm that sweeps all of the the credits that you've put down to bet the tokens that you've put down to bet and the whole thing looks like it's going to fall apart at any second which is like such an easy thing they could have gotten

wrong like everything could be too shiny and fresh the way like some of the contemporary star wars tv shows make things look this droid arm feels like it's wobbling it feels like it's going to like come like one bolt is going to break off uh and yeah like you're in that you're at that card table you're there you're looking at people's faces you're trying to read their plays and also they're like erodeon and a zabrack and it hits people you do a star wars podcast they're out you bust them and like you can speed it up to skip the animations not me i'm like no i'm gonna look and and oh god okay last thing please your cute little uh axolotel uh nix

when you're idle waiting for your turn in Sabak, the little guy crawls up on your shoulder and pierce, and Kay will show the little guy her cards. Yeah. And he'll make like an approving or disapproving little chitter. And then the cards are back then. But you can also send him to scope out other people's cards. And people are like, oh, I got this cute little guy on my shoulder.

But let me tell you, there's other ways to cheat that I've learned since then, Rob. There's lots of Sabak cheating techniques. The world is full of... Well, and then there's straight-up Yakuza game moments of, like, do you want to play a little rhythm game about feeding your little buddy? And it's like, fucking A-I-do. Dude, those moments... The first time I hit one of those moments, I was like,

did no one... Maybe I didn't read enough reviews or whatever, but, like, I don't remember reading about that at all. And it's the sort of thing that feels like it should be... Five years ago, we would have all seen that on Twitter two days before the game came out. The four-minute-long feeding, you know, like... It's not, you're not just feeding it.

You're splitting a meal with your little buddy. And it has all of the attention of like, like, you said, a yaku's a minigame or like a monster hunter food thing, like that degree of fidelity is happening. It's great. I love Nix. I do not expect to like Nix. Yeah.

But Nix is like a hitman coin that can, like, do a little dance or wear a cute little purse. Or wear a cute little purse or steal a gun for you. Yeah. it's like it's like we got too satisfied with kid you pet the dog that a game comes out where you like split a meal with your little buddy and then 5.5 I mean I kind of do feel like that is the case for this game I as a as a former game critic I do think that there were times where my taste is shaped by the fact that I'm playing everything that fucking comes out right and like I am very lucky that I there have been games that have been big open world games that

have come out in the last year that I was kind of interested in playing and then I didn't play them I didn't play was it Rise of the Ronin that um that team ninja open world game I didn't there's like a bunch of things in that space where I was like oh maybe I'll get around to that and like I just didn't do it and I'm glad I didn't now because I haven't been I haven't had the open world bloat feeling in long enough that I'm not being, that I'm not feeling bad. I didn't play Final Fantasy Rebirth, right? Which I know is another big, too big for its own, for its own good, uh, open world RPG this year. And so like, I have the space in me for Outlaws and I'm really enjoying it. I also wonder if there's just,

they never get code to people early enough. So like, oh, I cannot imagine trying to play it's starting to have to shock you on a game. Because I think the reason I'm liking this so much is play a couple hours into that. Yep, that was fun. Dip in. And then I'm out. If I'm much progress no but I don't feel like I'm chafing against like there's all the shitty content to go through and I don't care about any of it whereas like my experience of it is like

oh yeah I'll zip over there and like go pick up that treasure and then I'll go rob that imperial but sure that's cool yeah yeah so it's also just the distorting effect of like the way the review process works out and here I think

you know that's large down Ubisoft it is they're so paranoid about controlling narrative around these things that I do think especially with these bigger games I don't think they appreciate how much if a game has irritating bits

in it how much a reviewer will despise those bits by the end and like it is very hard to step back and be like that wouldn't have hit that way if I didn't

you have the experience you have with the game and you're forced to confront like how much of the same shit you do again and again and I think it is very I do not think it helps these games be well received by reviewers by being like you get a weekend with it

you get a few extra days with it uh you know good luck because like having been through those grinds by the end of it you're like if i have to do another one another quest like this that unfold in this way i'm going to lose my mind like like get learn new trick like make less game or make different game but like i'm sick of this one and that is not happening to me because i'm just like I'll just crack up in photo mode I wonder if I can This person This person hanging out in front of this food stand

Has an interesting energy I'm just going to take a photo Try to capture like The other thing is this Massive and Respond More dialed in on Star Wars Esthetics

Than Star Wars Compared to some of the recent shows Absolutely I mean Partly it's I will say like I have a really specific instance here of a thing that I really love on Tashara, that first big planet.

Rob, I don't know if you noticed this, but this is this planet that, you know, Star Wars planets have biomes in a very cartoonish way, where it's like, oh, this is the lava planet, this is the ice planet. Tashara is the wind planet. And so that means that things like trees are constantly bent because the wind has

blown them to be bent 100% of the time. But it also means that, for instance, there are these like tunnels that have been caught, like the mountains have been eroded by the wind people talk there's phrases in the local language or the local dialect about that style of like you know even even such and such a rock will give away to the wind with time and what has revealed these kind of like or this orange or that's underneath this kind of like bright orange really beautiful streaked rock material and one that's all that's used in the interiors throughout the planet the big main city will have like smoothed out version of that specific building material on the ground or on the walls. And that already is something

that's like one step beyond what many of the TV shows are doing when they're thinking about their locations. They're not thinking like what would the local builders have access to to create these spaces with, right? I think Andor did that, right? We talked a lot about that type of world building in Andor where we thought about like the way that the scrapyards, you know, reflect, or the town near the scrapyards reflected the history of the labor there, stuff like that. But like, Booba Fett was never thinking about things that way. Obi-Wan was never thinking about things in that way.

It was really like aesthetics first and not holistic systems-driven stuff. And the second part of this is like, it's, I don't know that I've ever played a Star Wars game where I've bumped into a stormtrooper and my reaction has been like, oh shit. Like, whoops, fuck. And the storm trooper goes like, watch it. And it works. Like, it plays, it hits, like, the system just worked. It felt like you bumped into the Storm Trooper at the cafe by mistake, and you're like,

ah, shit, shit, shit, shit, please don't make it into a thing. And that's kind of an achievement for someone who's been playing Star Wars video games since I was six or whatever, you know? Like, they did that part of it. And whether or not that means that it stacks up against your favorite open world game. Like, I don't know, but, like, I don't know. GTA6 ain't going to have Stormtroopers or speeder bikes in it.

It just isn't, you know. It's going to have a bunch of other stuff going on, I'm sure, you know, but it is not going to have the really great sound design here, the soundtrack that is classically reminiscent of, but also has some really new sounds inside of it. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's the part of the Star Wars universe that I loved from when I was a kid, right?

Which is like, I want to know more about smugglers and scoundrels and criminals and heists and heroines. and here it is building the team doing the Ocean's 11 thing and some of the writing is pretty good at like I love the Pike Syndicate dude your first meeting with him where he just sort of gruffly dismisses you with

you're new to this world come back when you're not and it's like I will die for this crime lord because that's like that is incredibly generous advice to a young piece of shit like yeah yeah yeah I'm excited

Rob there's some stuff coming that is really fun have you met have you met the hot droid yet have you met no i'm dying to be the you're just keep just keep doing the main story you'll get the hot droids in your area like never is it's not him it's a different one yeah yeah yeah he's great all right his deal there's great we'll check back in yeah we will all you gotta start playing i know yeah i watched the stream i watched like an hour long stream of um some people who do not know star wars at all that was already see the rdc folks yeah uh huh yeah okay Keith, AMCA guest, Keith has been streaming a lot of it actually over on Run button.

I've watched the first one of those so far, but I do. I've been a little busy. We had to reschedule some stuff for things going on in my life. But I am very much looking forward to getting into the world. I'm excited for you. We will check back in with Star Wars Outlaws at some point and see the fate of our favorite outlaws on the planet Mirker. and figure out what's going on with them mole miners.

But with that, we've reached the end of another episode of a more civilized age. Our show is produced by Ricardo Contreras. This one might not be. I can't remember what the plan is for this one. I think Allie is going to knock it out, yeah? All right. So usually our show is produced by Ricardo. Yes.

This week might be Allie. But it is always supported by our listeners at patreon.com slash civilized. and yeah next episode we are going to be reading the rest of heir to the empire until next time please rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice and welcome back to the land of the living not so special anymore are you get his ass We're going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.