– Spoiler Review –
Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire, written by Delilah S. Dawson, is the last big park tie-in content, doing the heavy work of setting up how and why Vi Moraldi and the Resistance are facing off with Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and the First Order on a little backwater planet Batuu that you, dear reader, can visit. Unfortunately, in doing so, the novel forgoes a lot of opportunities and comes up short in overall entertainment.
Black Spire brings characters back from Dawson’s first Star Wars novel, Phasma: Vi Moradi and Captain Cardinal. Originally the main reason for my excitement for Black Spire, Vi and Cardinal, who now goes by his birth name of Archex, end up being one of several weakspots in the novel. Their sections were the highlights of Phasma, but in an effort to contrive story to make the Galaxy’s Edge park’s story fit in-universe, they get the short end of the stick. For starters, the snippy, humorous, and spunky Vi Moradi seems to be missing, instead replaced by a Vi who sounds eerily generic, spewing Resistance propaganda loudly in crowded places unlike a covert top spy would, while most of it is without any real bite, “Resistance, good. First Order, bad!” and she makes the choice to take away a lot of other people’s choices in her efforts to build a Resistance base at Black Spire Outpost on Batuu; from all the videos I’ve seen of the real-life Vi Moradi one can meet at the park (like even this recent one), she seems to be more like the Vi we remember and has a lot more personality. And as Leia’s top spy, she makes some truly strange decisions, from essentially forcing all of her recruits into joining the Resistance by putting them into a position where they have no other options, or sneaking away from her entire team for no discernibly sane reason, which leads to her imprisonment and graphic torture. I’m a bit squeamish, I’ll admit, but when the torture feels 100% avoidable and has zero bearing on the story beyond maybe trying to show Vi is tough, this is something we already knew from her novel-long torture in Phasma. The torture there was baked into the story and made sense, as unfortunate as it was, making her turning of Cardinal all the more impressive, but here she goes through it, is rescued because one of the side characters says something to her crew, and is all but forgotten shortly after as the novel reaches its climax, begging the question: why did Vi need to be tortured again? In fact, especially after the torture, Vi has her doubts from time to time, but in the span of a few sentences she always talks her way out of them, making the adversity she faces in Black Spire feel insignificant, something the epilogue of the novel makes even worse. This is a true shame, as someone who is supposed to be Leia’s top spy, showed plenty of personality, and is one of the few leading black females in Star Wars, the Vi full of all that potential washes away here into someone bland and forgettable. And while it’s great to have her be the first canon ace-identifying character*, it’s only really brought up when Cardinal makes an advance on her, thus making it feel like a missed opportunity. UPDATE: And as some people can say way better than me, there’s questionable decisions made regarding this Black character that a sensitivity reader could’ve helped with.
Speaking of Cardinal, aka Archex, any tension between Vi and him from the previous novel is mostly forgotten, to the point Archex, for reasons, thinks Vi has been hitting on him and he makes a move on her. What could’ve been a lot of interesting, complex interactions between two people with a ton of baggage, never happens as they very quickly make nice and are extremely supportive of one another, which is commendable to be sure, but it never feels earned as it all seemed to have happened off-screen, between novels. Archex similarly feels generic, as while we’re told he’s a good man and he certainly helps the building Resistance crew better their blaster skills, we barely see it as he’s largely immobile and left at the base. And with only a handful of chapters in his POV, we don’t get to see often enough how his experience from Phasma, literally and figuratively, truly impacts him. One of his best POV chapters is his last one, where he stims up to make a true difference in the climactic battle and ends up making the ultimate sacrifice, so just as he gets truly interesting again, he ends up dead. What makes his (literal) lumbering through Black Spire, only to die in the end, come off even worse is how the epilogue chapter, only one or two chapters after his death, completely erases his sacrifice, sets up the park, and shrugs off the events of the entire novel.
Building a narrative around making a park experience fit in-universe is no small feat and I envy no-one of their jobs or believe I can do any better, but the contrivances in Black Spire are too hard to ignore, something A Crash of Fate managed to avoid rather easily due to not directly setting up GE’s experience, while it brings up some curious questions about the park’s narrative overall. Batuu, as backwater as we’ve been told, has no strategic value, so while the idea of building a Resistance base out of the First Order’s growing and prying eyes is a great idea, the mission fails because it has to so visitors can interact with both Resistance and First Order, but this makes a lot of Black Spire‘s events feel pointless. Vi coming to Black Spire Outpost (BSO) puts these good people, Vi’s words mind you, directly in harm’s way and she goes through a lot of mental gymnastics to make it seem like a good idea to bring the fight to their doorsteps, as the First Order had zero reason to show up until BSO big shot gangster Oga Garra calls them due to Vi’s presence. Normally the FO comes to a world to strip it for resources and leave it once done, but there’s no hint Batuu has anything of value to the FO that ever would’ve driven them to visit, instead the book goes out of its way to ensure we know it’s not important whatsoever, so the fight only comes to BSO thanks to Vi’s meddling. In fact, the idea of Vi being so gung-ho about setting up shop, while locals die or are injured, never quite feels right, no matter how often she gives a speech on the horrors of the First Order or how General Leia gave her such an important task, as it’s simply necessary to make the park work. Also, the First Order’s Lieutenant’s reasoning late in the novel for not going back for reinforcements reads less like a rational decision and more of a contrivance so Vi and team gain a win by novel’s end. Vi and Archex mention the mean Captain Phasma to their recruits from time to time, like it’s supposed to mean something to them, but if this planet really is as backwater as we’re told, would they even know who that is, especially as we meet many locals who think the First Order is a myth? Should they actually know/care General Leia Organa wanted Vi to make Batuu important to the Resistance?
But the biggest, glaring problem with having to make this work so the park can have a showdown between the Resistance and First Order when you visit comes from the Epilogue chapter where someone, we are never told who, rats on the Resistance on Batuu, bringing the First Order back, and completely undoing the victory Vi and her new recruits, plus Archex’s sacrifice, pulled off only a few chapters prior. This random incident helps set up the park’s events after the novel’s main events make it reasonable for the First Order to never return to Batuu, but will the results of involving Batuu be worth it in-universe to the larger story? Will Batuu be mentioned in The Rise of Skywalker like Sullust was in Return of the Jedi, as a place where the Resistance fleet gathers before the meaningful final battle (making this feel even less worth it)? Is Vi and her little outpost really important enough for Supreme Leader Kylo Ren to show up when he has an entire, less backwater galaxy to conquer with the New Republic and Resistance out of the picture for now? With there being seemingly no plans to directly resolve the BSO storyline at the moment, beyond TROS‘ macro conclusion to the sequel trilogy conflict, will we learn if this was ever worth it besides setting up the park’s one-day long events in-universe? One potential thought: maybe had Vi and team failed, thus setting up for the FO to come in might, there’d been no potential to erase the book’s events. Either way, once the book actually gets to the final conflict, it barrels through it with an infectious intensity.
A Crash of Fate, in retrospect, doesn’t feel as product-placement heavy for GE as Black Spire ends up. I’ve never read a Star Wars book where people eat or drink, or talk about eating and drinking, as much as Black Spire, mentioning GE food and drinks as often as possible, even being used in part of a pep-talk for one of Vi’s recruits, almost like something out of a food commercial we’d see here on Earth. It’s the nature of the beast, but it feels unnatural because we’ve never had anything like it in Star Wars media, and while I appreciate it’s hard to avoid, it never really feels organic. There is a natural sense of discovery however with the shops and places you’ll be able to visit or find at the park thanks to the guise of Vi being a newbie to BSO, but as I said before, the amount of times specific items are referred to again and again make it wear thin. What I both enjoyed and disliked was how Dawson paints life at BSO, and the many activities Vi gets up to for the middle portion of the book, mundane. In a way, having characters taking 9-5 jobs or having them worry over employee discounts makes the park seem more accessible, like it’s maybe not set terribly too far away in a different galaxy, but it also does the inverse and robs the GFFA of being special compared to ours, as it feels distinctly not in-universe and more our universe. I don’t when or if I’ll get to visit the park, so would my opinion change if I’ve been? Would these mentions of all the food and drinks become more tasteful, having enjoyed them myself? For the time being I can’t answer that, so for now for someone who hasn’t visited, and only lives vicariously through those who have, Black Spire both makes sense in giving what you find and see within the park bearing in-universe, but it’s easy to see the real life hiding behind it, robbing some of the magic.
Like a few of the other new novels, Dawson arranges a unique cast to join Vi and Archex on their Batuuan struggles. There’s Ylena, a Gatherer for Savi’s Scrapyard, looking for hidden gems in the trash (a job Vi takes up to help pay Resistance bills), a kind soul who takes Vi under her wing, often finding ways to show her support in a roundabout/mystical way; Dolin, a farmboy who leaves behind his technologically devoid lifestyle (think Star Wars Amish) in the outskirts of BSO to fight for something more; Kriki, a Chadra-Fan full of ways to tinker with, improve, and sabotage tech, who battles her fear to help the Resistance; Zade, a loud and flamboyant smuggler who uses his unique charisma to help draw others to the cause; and Pook, Vi’s melancholy droid, coming off like a more helpful version of Marvin the Paranoid Android. There are aspects to all of them I enjoy, from Kriki’s enthusiasm and desire to go on adventures, Dolin’s struggles with his family regarding his decision, Ylena’s mysticism, and Zade’s humor hiding a dark past, but we start learning more about them just as the book ends, finally being shown not told about their pasts, as POV chapters don’t happen until far too late. Ylena is full of intrigue, but her ending up with Dolin feels like a missed opportunity of sorts; Zade’s dark past gets a short chapter and begging for a more thorough exploration; and Dolin’s village rejecting technology and how they might feel at large over the coming conflict is never explored beyond Dolin’s interactions with his Grana and a late save from his villager buddies, but I’d love to see how their village functions in a universe like Star Wars. Much like Vi or Archex, I enjoyed the new characters, but I ended up wishing Black Spire did more for them.
Here are a few other things:
- *As this great Eleven-ThirtyEight article discusses, it’s amazing to finally have the representation for those who identify ace, regardless of the depth or usage of the identifier.
- It’s mentioned the tracker the Resistance has on Archex records all their conversations, but the potential story thread of having us wondering if he’s being truthful or just saying what the Resistance will want to hear never materializes, as he’s earnest the whole way through.
- The official site updated it’s Databanks with a lot of stuff involved with Galaxy’s Edge, including Oga Garra.
- You can see Dawson at Galaxy’s Edge in a recent Star Wars Show! Even better, Dawson got to meet Vi at the park!
- A big thanks to Numidian Prime collecting all the Galaxy’s Edge Easter Eggs!
- Interestingly enough, Women of the Galaxy revealed Vi would be involved with the park before the novel was even announced!
Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire ends up reading like a lot of missed opportunities to simply set up a park for readers to visit, though I’ve definitely read far worse Star Wars books; your mileage may vary with this one, especially if you’ve been or will be going to the park.
+ Cast of new characters
+ Cardinal’s final bow
– Full of missed opportunities
– Felt contrived in many places, especially the epilogue, to make the park work
– Late game torture that felt wholly avoidable and unnecessary
Ryan is Mynock Manor’s Head Butler. You can follow him on Twitter @BrushYourTeeth. You can follow the website @MynockManor.
ALSO BY DELILAH S. DAWSON:
Phasma (novel) | The Perfect Weapon (short story) | “The Secrets of Long Snoot” – From a Certain Point of View (novel) | “Rose and Paige” – Star Wars Adventures: Forces of Destiny (comic miniseries)
GALAXY’S EDGE RELATED REVIEWS:
A Crash of Fate (novel) | Galaxy’s Edge (comic miniseries) | Myths & Fables (novel) | Thrawn – Alliances (novel) | Star Wars Resistance: “Fuel for the Fire”
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