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Sacrifice: Detailed Spoilers

Posted By Paul on May 18, 2007

As we reported earlier, the major spoilers for the new Star Wars novel, Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice hit the fansphere today, a week ahead of the book's official release.

The picture is becoming clearer now, so this update is packed full of spoilers and analysis. Just scroll down the page to find them!

You sure you want to read on?

Sure?

Okay. Spoilers below. Highlight to read them:

SPOILERS

*In case you need to know the basic background of the 'Legacy of the Force' series: Jacen Solo, the son of Han and Princess Leia, is falling to the Dark Side.

Not only has he begun studying the ways of the Sith under the guidence of Darth Vader's former pupil Lumiya, but he's also become the leader of a paramilitary secret police, the Galactic Guard, doing the dirty work of the Alliance government in their war against the the Corellian seperatists.

To make matters worse, he's taking his teenage cousin Ben Skywalker with him. In case you really need your "Expanded Universe" explained, Ben is Luke Skywalker's son, and Jacen's hero-worshiping Jedi Apprentice.

Okay, that's the background out of the way. Now the real spoilers.

*Jacen sends Ben on a mission to assassinate the Corellian leader, Dur Gejjen—which he does, a long-range hit with a sniper rifle.

*In reaction, Ben's mother Mara—a Jedi Master in her own right—moves to take down Jacen. The fight is long and bloody, but in the end, Jacen stabs her with a poison dart, and kills her.

*Luke, learning about his wife's death, believes that the responsibility lies with Lumiya, the Dark Lady of the Sith—Jacen's mentor. Luke hunts down Lumiya and defeats her in a duel, but rather than saving her or bringing her in, he beheads her with his lightsaber.

*Ben subsequently tells Luke that Lumiya can't have killed Mara, as he was in the same place as her when he felt his mom's death.

*To complete his assumption of a new identity as a Sith Lord, Jacen has been searching for a symbolic "sacrifice"—killing someone close to him, to destroy his emotional ties to the wider world. In killing Mara, he believes that he has sacrificed Ben's love and admiration for him, and thus fully embraced his new role.

*Jacen now assumes the Sith name Darth Caedus, the winning entry in an online poll that's been running for the past few months.

*Elsewhere in the book, Star Wars has acquired what we believe is its first unambiguous same-sex couple, Messrs. Goran and Medrit Beviin - a bounty hunter and a blacksmith with an adopted daughter. They're Mandalorians, part of the same warrior-commando culture as Boba Fett.

*Still with the Mandalorians, it turns out that Fett's ex-wife Sintas Vel is still alive, frozen in carbonite by an enemy.

/SPOILERS

And, if that wasn't enough, here are my personal thoughts on all this:

PAUL'S ANALYSIS

Now, as a book, as a piece of self-contained storytelling, it's impossible to judge Sacrifice based only on plot spoilers. We'll try and get reviews online as soon as we can, but for now, there's not much conclusive we can say on this front.

What we can get to grips with, however, is what the events of this story mean for the wider plot of 'Legacy of the Force', and for Star Wars continuity in general.

And, to be honest, there's not much in these spoilers that is going to surprise anyone who's been following the fan discussion on "Legacy of the Force" over the past months.

Luke's killing of Lumiya is the one major event that may take some people by surprise, although I suspect that other people will react with a shrug. The news that Sintas is a carbonite popsicle rather than a corpse is genuinely unexpected, but that seems to be incidental to the main story, at least in the short term.

For a book that's been so heavily hyped, with no review copies and such a strict (but seemingly already completely futile) embargo by Lucasfilm and DelRey on the early release of any information, the storyline seems fairly underwhelming.

That's especially true when we consider that this book is being officially released on the thirtieth anniversary of the original Star Wars film, and seems to be the most major storytelling event to commemorate the anniversary.

In terms of killing major hero characters, Mara Skywalker is a very "safe" decision. She's an important character in terms of the dynamics of the Skywalker family, but she's not a movie character, and she's a part of the older generation of Han, Luke and Leia rather than one of the younger Jedi knights like Jacen, Ben, and Jacen's sister Jaina—she's not one of the characters who'll be expected to carry the story into the future of the timeline from here, in other words.

In short, you get maximum story impact for minimum fan outrage.

Jacen becoming a Sith has been obvious since the start of the "Legacy of the Force" series last year, perhaps for rather longer. The only thing that can really be said about him is that the character—and the storyline—might have developed differently if different choices had been made in the aftermath of the Jacen-focused novel Traitor in 2002. But such speculation obviously has little to do with the direction the character has taken in the current novel line.

Luke's execution of Lumiya is perhaps the development in Sacrifice that deserves the most attention. Removing Lumiya deprives the series of a strong antagonist—I suppose it's designed to allow Jacen to take centre stage, and in that sense, it represents a major plot-shift.

However, as I've said from the start, I'm not fully convinced that Jacen's storyline is enough to carry a nine-book series. We know he's lost his moral direction, and is trying to build a path to the future out of lightsaber-hacked bodies. I'm just not sure what you can do with that.

However, we don't just have to consider the fact that Lumiya's out of the series: there's also the fact that Luke Skywalker killed her, and apparently did so in cold blood, at the very climax of the novel. It's when seen from this focus that Sacrifice perhaps warrants most attention.

Luke Skywalker has become a widower, and he's become a murderer. The first of those points may represent an important redefinition of the character for subsequent stories. The second point, when put in plain language like that, looks like it may have been a mistake.

I suspect the idea behind this may be to force Luke to confront his own internal "dark side", his fears and anxieties and the breadth and depth of his humanity. I can see this leading to some interesting situations in the next couple of books in the series.

But there are really only two possible outcomes for a Jedi Master in this scenario: redemption, which runs the risk of rendering the entire storyline rather pointless, or some form of permanent moral and spiritual failure, which I suspect isn't what they have planned.

Well, actually, there's a third possibility, which is that this will be a meaningless incident in the long term, and the character will move on with quiet dignity. That's an idea I quite like, but it blunts the major point-of-impact of the book, rendering it rather muted after all the fuss that's been made.

Perhaps there's some surprise twist planned later in the series, but I'm not holding my breath.

The only thing that occurs to me right now is that the "reappearance" of Boba Fett's ex-wife Sintas Vel will probably tie in with Jacen's killing of her daughter Ailyn back in Bloodlines.

But this is a character whose entire backstory consists of one short comic-strip and a couple of throwaway references. Would they really be as clumsy as to introduce her as a carbonite-slab ex machina in the middle of the series? That would be like having Darth Vader killed in Episode VI by Corla Metonae because of the murder of her uncle Raymus three films earlier.

(And if you don't recognize those names... that's kinda the point).

Another thing that I should mention here is the ways that these plot points will be responded to by the fan audience. Karen Traviss is a writer who provokes strong reactions in the Star Wars world—sometimes, too strong, from fans who don't keep their tempers in check. But even her own fans can acknowledge that she likes "bombshells" in her stories.

Either way, it's likely that a lot of the reaction to Sacrifice—probably more than is justified—will be to the raw plot-points, rather than the actual story.

So, how's this one going to play? Well, what follows are my predictions.

Mara's death will be a disappointment to some, but a surprise to no-one.

Jacen's murder of Mara, and his formal assumption of the role of Sith Lord will be even less of a surprise: this is something that I suspect even the character's remaining fans will greet with quiet resignation.

The implications of Luke's actions don't seem to have sunk in yet. I'm not sure how quickly they will, really. But when they do, I guess that there'll be widespread discussion of whether cold-blooded murder is in-character for the Jedi Grand Master.

I suspect that some people will decry this as an implausible betrayal of all Luke stands for, while others will see it as just what Jedi do to Sith.

The majority, perhaps, will be less surprised than you might think.

As to Boba Fett and the other Mandalorians, I assume they have a plotline in this novel, but maybe it's a gauge of fan interest that it's not yet clear what exactly that storyline is. They've made a military-industrial deal with the insectoid Verpines, apparently, and Boba's discovered that Sintas is alive.

Some people will inevitably say that Karen Traviss is using Mandalorians too much in a series they don't belong in (and they'll point out that they've barely even been referred to so far by the other two writers in the series).

Some of the same people will, equally inevitably, say that the novel contains an implicit comparison between Mandalorians and Jedi Knights, favouring the warrior culture of the "Mandos" over the ?letist traditions of the Jedi.

They'll say that whether it's true or not.

But I suspect that this sort of reaction may be more muted this time. My own response is very shrug-shaped.

The way I see it, there are two possibilities here, if people want to make a fuss about this book.

Either all this is the overinterpretation of random details by overinvolved afficionados, in which case reacting with anger is just rude, or else—perhaps rather less plausibly—the author is deliberately setting out to manipulate the feelings of the readers by making provocative points.

In either case, the only logical reaction I can think of is one of calm restraint.

/ANALYSIS

That's all for now. We'll update with more news as we get it.

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