Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil, by Drew Karpyshyn

Today I'm finishing the Darth Bane trilogy with the last book, Dynasty of Evil. As I mentioned in reviews of the previous books I hadn't known quite how to feel about these books. On the one hand, the books don't try to make the Sith out as misunderstood bad guys or the Republic as little better than terrorists. But on the other hand with the ending of the last book I was unsure where the series was going to go from where it ended. The final book is okay but it leaves me ultimately wondering if we needed the story to be told at all.

The book picks up another ten years after the last book, with Bane and Zannah living in secrecy, slowly building their plan to destroy the Jedi and the Republic. The problem for Bane is that so far Zannah hasn't made any attempt to challenge him and take the mantle of leadership. Bane has become worried that Zannah is merely waiting for the ravages of time to do him in, completely violating the principle of the Rule of Two. But if Bane is to successfully replace Zannah with another apprentice he'll need to find a way to cheat death itself.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Serra, the daughter of the healer Caleb who Bane intimidated and then murdered, has married into the royal family of the planet Doan. When her husband, the crown prince, is murdered by a rebel group, Serra ends up on a path of revenge that will take her to face her greatest fears and confront Darth Bane.

The biggest feeling I was left with at the end of this book was did we really need to tell this story? I mean, I kind of like Serra's arc and discovering that revenge truly isn't worth it in the end and making her peace with that, but this is really the first time she's a character in these books. I think I'd have preferred a more in-depth plot with the Jedi across all three books, rather than the haphazard sort of approach we have to the non-Sith characters. It's not that Serra's a bad character, but it feels like they had a couple different ideas for protagonists against the Sith and went with all of the instead of just focusing on a few. I think it would have made the books feel more connected, because as they are they feel like episodes rather than a complete arc.

As for Bane and Zannah, I feel like we didn't need to see the ending of their conflict. We knew one way or another that Zannah would eventually replace Bane and continue the line of the Sith which would end with Palpatine and Vader. I kind of took it for granted that Zannah would be the one to succeed in this conflict and the biggest question was who of the three Force-sensitive characters we have in this book would end up being the next apprentice. I'm just left wondering if this was a story that needed to be told.

I think what would have improved this series would have been more development on the light-side of things, maybe having a few consistent Jedi characters, perhaps motivated slightly by revenge or tempted by the dark side, to serve as a contrast or foil to Bane and Zannah. Instead we end up with multiple characters who get far less spotlight time than Bane and Zannah. It also could have produced a better arc over three books than each book feeling like its own story. These books are okay, but definitely leave room for improvement.

- Kalpar

Darth Bane: Rule of Two, by Drew Karpyshyn

Today I'm looking at the second book in the three-book Darth Bane series, Rule of Two. As can so often be the case with trilogies, I felt like this book was meandering around rather than setting up the third act in the series. There is conflict and Bane and his apprentice, Zannah, move closer towards their goals, but I don't feel like they were brought to the lowest point in their story arc, like in other stories such as Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers, just for sake of example. Depending on how the last book, Dynasty of Evil, goes I'll have to see where the series goes. This isn't to say there weren't things I enjoyed about this book, but rather I really wished there were some things that were done differently with the book.

Basically this book starts with Bane and Zannah having several problems they need to overcome. Bane gets infested with Dark Side Force-eating parasites called orbalisks. The orbalisks are impossible to remove and cause Bane excruciating pain, but they form armor over his body that is impervious to even lightsabers, so that's kind of neat. Bane is also trying to create his own Sith holocron but keeps failing for reasons he doesn't understand and he suspects there's some secret to forming holocrons still concealed from him. Zannah meanwhile is performing her Sith training and is slowly working to become more powerful than Bane so she can finally kill and replace him, but she has to bide her time until Bane can teach her nothing more.

The thing that bugs me about this book is that for most of it the Jedi assume that the Sith are extinct after the thought bomb exploded on Ruusan. It's really only because one Jedi, Johun Othone, won't give up the idea that there are still Sith out in the galaxy and he manages to find Zannah's cousin who witnessed her and Bane attack him at the epicenter of the thought bomb. Once Othone, Valenthyne Farfalla, and a couple other Jedi find out, they go to hunt down Bane and end up...dead. Like, really anticlimactically dead, and once again, the Jedi think that the Sith order is extinct. So in that respect it feels like we got reset back to where we were at the beginning of the book which makes me wonder why we bothered in the first place. And the deaths of Othone and Farfalla are even more disappointing because I felt they weren't well-developed as characters but with intriguing possibilities for development that are literally cut short.

And the shame is there are some things that I really liked about this book and other stuff set thousands upon thousands of years before the movies when Jedi and Sith battled each other across the galaxy. There seems to be a freedom to include whatever weird cool stuff you could think of and throw it into the stories. I think it's kind of neat that a Sith alchemist came up with a way to use the Dark Side to turn flesh into metal and circuitry and create an army of cyborg zombies. I thought that was a neat idea. And I find it intriguing that the Jedi have a far more militant bend prior to the Ruusan Reformations and seem to allow things like emotional attachments. I say this because Farfalla has this ridiculously pimped out bed showing key scenes from his life including his birth and becoming a Jedi Master which seems like a really important emotional possession that the Jedi Order I'm more familiar with wouldn't permit. There's just a lot of neat stuff in how things look different compared to how they look in the movies.

Maybe if I want more of the cool, different, but still Star Wars stuff I need to go track down the comics and/or books set even further back in the history of the Republic. This book is okay, but I find the stuff that makes it so much like the movies I like less than the stuff that makes it different.

- Kalpar

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, by Drew Karpyshyn

So as you probably realized I've been listening to a lot of books from the Star Wars expanded universe, mostly from the new canon, and I had been feeling kind of disappointed with the results. So I decided to go back and look at a book from the old canon that I remember as being mostly good and see if my tastes had changed or if the books were as good as I remembered. I will say this book seemed pretty okay, if nothing particularly special. I think that's partly because this jumps outside of the movie canon going back to a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin so it doesn't have the baggage associated with the movies.

This book, as you can probably guess, is the start of a series about Darth Bane, who reforged the the Sith order and established the Rule of Two. This book starts with Dessel, a miner trapped on a company-controlled planet digging for cortosis ore that the Republic needs to build armor during the seemingly interminable war against the Sith Empire. Dessel and many other Outer Rim residents have little use for the Republic which doesn't really care what happens as long as the resources continue flow towards the Core. After killing a Republic trooper in self-defense, Dessel chooses to flee and join the Sith Empire as a regular footsoldier. But it's soon discovered that Dessel has an affinity for the Force and he is recruited to join the ranks of the Brotherhood of Darkness.

The book focuses mostly on Bane and his path to becoming the ultimate Dark Lord of the Sith, as well as his conflict with the leadership of the Brotherhood of Darkness. I thought it was interesting to watch how Bane develops as a character and grows in the dark side, opposed to how Luke or many other characters developed on the light side of the Force. It's not a lot to write home about, but I thought it was okay.

Something I wish this book had expanded on more, and maybe we'll see more of in the later books, was the Jedi order at this time. The book focuses a lot on the Sith Order and the Sith forces but doesn't delve a lot into the Jedi order or the Republic forces. In fact, we don't really see the Republic or any Jedi until the last third of the book or so. I think it would be more interesting to see the contrast between the Jedi and the Sith when the galaxy is in open war between the two factions before the Sith go into hiding. It's also interesting that Jedi are going around calling themselves Lord which seems counter to Jedi ideology, so I'd like to see how the Jedi order changed over a thousand years.

Overall I think this book was pretty okay and I'm willing to go check out the other books within this sub-series. I'll have to see if it has the same issues that other parts of the canon have had that I've noticed recently.

- Kalpar