-Spoiler Review-
It’s hard to know, at the beginning of an adventure, what types of perils and troubles you will face on any journey. The Legendary Adventures have been no different: from exploding temples, to destruction in space, through hand to hand combat, against droids and clones, I have been wearied and delayed in relaying my last report. But wait no longer: read my experience of Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived!
“Malgus knew it was folly. Empires and the men who ruled empires could not stay sharp when surrounded by comfort, by peace.”
For a lot of fans like me, who weren’t too interested in the video game world, our only experience of BioWare’s The Old Republic series is through the cinematic trailers. One of the most breathtaking ones was entitled Deceived. In this trailer, the Jedi Temple is sacked by a Sith Lord, a Twi’lek, a gunship full of Sith, and Mandolorian warrior Shae Vizsla. After the gunship crashed through the wall of the Temple, Sith Lords spilled out of the ship to kill Jedi and wreak havoc in the Temple. After the initial impact of the ship on the temple, the focus of the trailer shifts to the fight between Darth Malgus and Ven Zallow, Jedi Master. The battle ends with the death of Zallow as Malgus watches the Sith Army invade Coruscant.
If you are curious who is the “deceived” that the video is named after, this book has your answers. The book opens on Alderaan, where the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire are hosting a peace conference. The Republic sends Jedi Master Dar’Nala and Knight Aryn Leneer as representatives. The Jedi Council hopes that these two Jedi can aid the Republic in bringing an end to the war. Recently, the war has come to a stalemate, neither side really gaining any ground against the other. Unbeknownst to the Jedi, Emperor Darth Vitiate has captured Jedi Knight Revan in an effort to prolong his own life. But Vitiate is also planning on creating some momentum for the Sith Empire in the war. How? By attacking the Jedi Temple head on, the same event you can view in the trailer above!
News of the Sith Empire’s attack on Coruscant reaches Alderaan. Aryn Leneer is affected even more personally than most as Jedi Master Zallow was her former mentor. Aryn becomes furious at the Sith for their deception, both in wasting their time on Alderaan and for the destruction that they caused to her home. Too little, too late, the Republic and Jedi learned that the Sith Empire never had plans to make peace with the Jedi. Aryn’s anger swells in her, and she thinks about the different ways that she can get revenge on the Sith for what they did for her. Maybe one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that we don’t get the sense that Aryn has been warned about the danger of anger and revenge. Because she doesn’t seem to be concerned about her anger levels, she creates a plan to chase Darth Malgus across the galaxy and kill him for orchestrating the attack on the Jedi. Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of her internal struggle to coincide her hopes for revenge with her Jedi training. This leaves the story feeling a bit lacking, as we know that she should be struggling a lot more to balance her anger with the serenity that Jedi teachings should offer.
Oddly enough, lessons about revenge don’t come from the Jedi. Instead, they come from a criminal? Zeerid Korr, known also as Z-Man, was a Naval officer turned smuggler. His daughter, paralyzed from the waist down, relies on Z-Man’s money to be able to keep up some semblance of a life while living with her aunt. This causes Z-Man to start making spice runs for a shady organization, from whom he has kept his daughter a secret. We meet Z-Man as he is offered a large deal, one which he thinks would be able to get him out of debt and make enough money to buy his daughter a new hover chair. Instead, he meets with Aryn, by the will of the Force, or for the sake of the plot, someone whom he is already friends with. The two travel to Imperial occupied Coruscant to find info on Malgus. Along the way, Z-Man teaches Aryn lessons about herself and the futility of revenge.
The lesson on revenge becomes a bit muddled in the novel, though. Vrath Xizor, a former Imperial sniper, learns of Z-Man’s daughter. Constantly put in danger of having his daughter’s existence exposed, Z-Man has to decide what to do about Xizor’s knowledge. After a full novel telling Aryn that revenge isn’t worth killing over, Z-Man ends up killing Xizor to hide his secret. Now, Xizor did not do anything to Z-Man to warrant revenge (as I said before, it was Z-Man’s fear that he would be exposed that motivated him), so the stories are different. In the end, the lessons from Z-Man became more hazy and muddled than they were supposed to be. While Xizor does nothing to harm the daughter directly, Z-Man still considers killing him throughout the novel. This is not revenge, so it is not entirely analogous to Aryn’s problems with Malgus. But it would have been cool to see an ethical debate come out of this: what is the difference between revenge killing and killing for self-preservation? Aren’t they both murder in some sense? If not, how is one justifiable? Even if the novel never reached a satisfactory conclusion, this conversation would have boosted the book a bit more in my mind.
Though, not every character in the novel is flat. Darth Malgus may be one of the most compelling Sith we meet in the Old Republic. It’s no secret that I usually don’t find villains very compelling: they’re usually one-dimensional, have no goals except “be evil”, and we don’t know what drives them. I was worried that Malgus would be too flat of a villain, or too much like other villains and fail to stand out. I mean, his costume alone suggests that he is one of the models for the future armor of Darth Vader himself. Instead, we see that Malgus has his own agency in the novel. As Malgus learns that Emperor Darth Vitiate has no plans on holding Coruscant after it had been sacked, he tries to turn against the Emperor. Instead, Vitiate wants to use Coruscant as a piece of leverage against the Republic so that he can regain some of the planets that the Sith had lost in the Outer Rim.
Update: Having read the Bane trilogy, we know that having too many Sith is a huge hindrance to the mission of the Sith. With too many desiring power, Sith Lords start fighting each other. They kill and maim each other for the chance to be the top Sith Lord, which usually winds up damaging their own efforts. In the previous novel, we saw that some members of the Dark Council had turned against Vitiate for his plans to extend his own life indefinitely. Now, Darth Malgus turns against his fellow Sith Lord Adraas and Angral, who support Vitiate. This causes a great debate about the goals of the Sith and their purpose, something that we don’t see explored often enough.
Not only is our image of Malgus painted by his ambition, but we learn more about him through his foil, Eleena, a Twi’lek slave. Unfortunately, Eleena is not a well-rounded character. Instead, her only characterization is as a slave who loves her Master. We see some of their intimacy because she alone addresses Malgus by his given name, Veradun, rather than his Sith title. Malgus loves her, and has no qualms in admitting that, and uses his position and rank to give her better treatment than some Sith warriors under him. His relationship to her throughout the novel challenges him as a Sith, asking where his loyalties lie by privileging her a priority over everything else, and whether she will distract him from his final mission. Unfortunately, Eleena is always acted upon by others in this book, given very little of her own autonomy. Aryn captures her at one point and uses her as leverage to gain a fight with Malgus, while Malgus kills her because of the weakness she exposes in him. Fans use the term “fridging” to talk about killing women in fiction to further a man’s story; sadly, Eleena is another a stark example of this concept.
Though the characters were all over the place in terms of development and growth, I found the cast to be mostly enjoyable. The plot helped, too. The Sacking of Coruscant, powerfully shown to us in the trailer, is written well. Battle scenes are well-written and most of the dialogue is good, too.
Some of the distractions, especially having read more and more of the Legends canon, become fairly distracting later on. For one, and you’ve probably noticed this, is that a novel taking place thousands of years before the movies features a Vizsla and Xizor. I know, they may not be related, but that’s a sort of connection I neither wanted nor needed. It was a minor detail, but merely changing their last names would have probably helped me enjoy the novel more. Secondly, the book moved from space fantasy to space sci-fi. In one scene, Kemp had to figure out how to use Star Wars lingo to describe Aryn taking a taxi to an airport. (It’s hard to describe why is this is strange without quoting an entire two pages of the novel, but that this is literally what happens without reading the sort of messy scene in the book.) In another scene, Malgus uses the Holonet, essentially a version of Google in space in this novel, to figure out the name and some info on the Jedi (Aryn) who is chasing him. It’s hard to imagine a fully armored Malgus using Google..and the narration doesn’t help here, either. It’s a minor nitpick, to be sure, but these details were almost too real, but then covered, unsuccessfully, in Star Wars skin.
Other than some truly minor nitpicky details, and some flat-characterizations of the women, Deceived was mostly a good novel. Those interested in The Old Republic can’t avoid reading it, but even those who aren’t interested would still find a book worth reading.
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Essential Legends Collection: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction | Darth Bane: Rule of Two | Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil | Darth Plagueis | Shatterpoint | Kenobi | Rogue Squadron | Rogue Squadron: Wedge’s Gamble | Heir to the Empire | Dark Force Rising | The Last Command