In this volume we get a fresh look at the iconic villain, such as how he acts when nobody's looking, but that never dilutes how menacing he comes across. Since this is right after the destruction of the Death Star and the Cymoon 1 weapons factory, Vader gets scolded by Emperor Palpatine and later finds out that his master had been ready to replace him. We get to see more of his meeting with Jabba the Hutt from Skywalker Strikes and his hiring of bounty hunters Boba Fett and Black Krrsantan. In a plot point that is barely worth mentioning, Vader is assigned an adjutant who quickly betrays him and whom Vader kills for the trouble.
In the meat of the story, Lord Vader enlists a rogue archaeologist named Doctor Aphra (there is a sly wink to an Indiana Jones quote when Aphra is introduced) who has a ship called the Ark Angel. Aphra has just recovered the personality matrix of a protocol droid called 000 or "Triple Zero" who in turn activates an assassin droid disguised as an astromech, known as BT-1. He wants their help in order to steal a droid hive (?) from Geonosis to create his own private army of battle droids. In other words, in a development that a teenage boy would delight in, Vader now has his own murder-happy droid pair and Wookiee (Krrsantan) working for him, like the dark side versions of C-3P0, R2-D2, and Chewie.
The agent Cylo-IV is brought to Vader by Black Krrsantan and then tortured to death by Triple Zero, who learns the location of Cylo's base. This turns out to be where the Emperor has been secretly training and enhancing other apprentices, including a pair of lightsaber-weilding twins, apparently for the purpose of having Vader fight them all and prove his worth. Later, Boba Fett reports that he found the destroyer of the Death Star, but all he got was the boy's name: Skywalker. This gives Darth Vader a flashback to Revenge of the Sith (oh the humanity) and the memory of Padme being pregnant when he killed her, and he realizes he has a son.
I wasn't as impressed with this series as with Jason Aaron's writing in Skywalker Strikes. The problem with centering a series on Vader is he has to be provided more dialogue than we're used to, and sometimes these lines don't seem easy to imagine in James Earl Jones' voice. And some of the plotting seems kind of "ooh wouldn't this look cool" instead of "let's tell a thoughtful story". However it remains pleasing eye candy and the attempt at humanizing Vader is not entirely without merit.
No comments:
Post a Comment