Broken Legacy: Why Star Wars shouldn’t go back to the future

As a Star Wars fan, I feel like I should be more excited about the Legacy comic book series.  It’s trying very hard to be just as epic and sweeping as the Star Wars trilogy, and it’s established a colorful cast of characters and built off of existing Star Wars lore.  The title legacy is that of the Skywalkers, specifically how Luke Skywalker’s great-grandson Cade is trying to face his destiny as the scion of great heroes.

Yet it all rings so shallow.  For being the flagship Star Wars comic book series, it’s been one of the worst series I’ve had the misfortune to read.  The comic reaches for grand moments without realizing it hasn’t earned them, and as such the comic reads more like, to quote a friend’s reaction to the series, “overzealous fan fiction.”

Clearly the bad hair was a recessive gene from Anakin Skywalker.

Two problems hold Legacy back from being an honest-to-goodness heir to the Star Wars name.  The first, and most significant, is the main character: Cade Skywalker.  Cade is the child of tragedy — he’s the child of a Jedi Master and an Imperial intelligence agent, and grew up without a mother.  At a young and tender age, the Jedi Temple is attacked by the resurgent Sith, Cade’s father is killed, and Cade is taken in by pirates.  When the comic resumes seven years later, he’s a bounty hunter using death sticks to deaden his connection to the Force to keep the spirit of Luke Skywalker from nagging him.  Moreover, he’s more interested in staying alive than helping anyone, and even when he does attempt to be altruistic, he’s not above using evil ends if it works.

The entire endeavor reads as though George Lucas decided Spawn should be the hero of Star Wars instead of Luke Skywalker.  Cade is an antihero, but the writers of Legacy forgot that antiheroes are supposed to have charisma.  Han Solo in A New Hope wasn’t a nice guy (the way I remember it, Han shot first), but he also didn’t turn Obi-Wan over to the Empire for a tidy profit (which Cade does in the first few issues of the series).  The writers go out of their way to make Cade unlikable, and they don’t give us any particular reason to root for him — he’s a jerk.  He betrays a Jedi, he’s a drug user, and the mission that begins his “heroic” quest — rescuing the Imperial princess from the Sith — starts only because Cade sees dollar signs.

The blond hair makes him look more like a Sith on spring break than a dyed-in-the-wool villain.

Cade is ostensibly the hero of the story just because his last name is Skywalker and everybody keeps telling him he’s their only hope, but it seems like in any other Star Wars story, Cade would be the villain.  There have been a few Star Wars characters who made the leap from bad to good (Kyp Durron being the foremost example from the novels) — heck, the arc of the original trilogy is based on this concept, Luke redeeming Darth Vader.  But nowhere is it less believable than in the pages of Legacy.

Over the course of the series, Cade tries to reclaim his legacy.  He finds Jedi in hiding, he rescues the Jedi he originally betrayed, he has ambitions of destroying the Sith.  Yet even by the end of the series, he’s as dark and moody as ever.  In the “Tatooine” story arc, fully three-fourths of the way through the series, Luke’s spirit is still telling him to take a side, and he’s still only in it for himself.  By the last issues, he’s trying to find and destroy the Sith scientist who destroyed the Mon Calamari homeworld, but it rings false.  It strikes me as more incidental than anything else — his motivations aren’t heroic, and he’s not making any money off it, so why is he doing it?  We’ve received no indication that Cade is moved by their plight — heck, to my memory, we’ve never even seen Cade interact with a Mon Calamari or Quarren character.  He’s the same old Cade, doesn’t change.

In a saga about good and evil, only jerky neutrality can save us!

I’m not even convinced at this point that the Legacy story is supposed to be one about heroism and legacy, simply because Cade doesn’t undergo anything that resembles an arc.  Cade ends up fighting and killing a lot of evil people, but that’s mostly incidental — he keeps getting caught up in their plots.  What’s worse is that the story keeps treating Cade’s “neutrality” as though it’s the right choice.  The Jedi still respect and harbor him despite the fact that he’s an open user of the dark side (way to separate your feelings from your responsibilities, Jedi).  He makes the brash decision to artificially keep his nearly-dead friend Azlyn Rae alive by putting her in a cyborg body — which even she feels is worse than death — but they just modify her cybernetics a bit and she’s right as rain, no consequences for Cade making a stupid decision.  When the time comes to destroy the Muur Talisman, Cade’s the only one who can do it, because his neutrality means he can avoid the temptations of Karness Muur — even the Jedi, paragons of order and goodness, are helpless to destroy it, but because Cade looks out only for himself, only he can resist its power and successfully destroy it.  Bullshit.

The second problem with the Legacy series is the Sith themselves.  The prequel trilogy hurt Star Wars for more than just being terrible movies.  By introducing a group of Machiavellian Force-using masterminds who are so intimately tied to the Jedi, the prequel trilogy has ruined creativity in subsequent works.  Nearly every major villain in a Star Wars story now is a Sith in some way, shape or form, and writers have gone through some serious hoops to bring Sith villains into the “present.”

The first day of the Darth Maul Fan Convention.

The Sith are now an overused villain.  Nearly every event in the Clone Wars happens because Palpatine foresaw it.  The Sith are behind the major events in the new novels.  They’re the villains of all the new video games — gone are the days of TIE fighter pilots or super-stormtroopers.  If a Jedi trips and falls in any Star Wars story now, it’s because a Sith was responsible in some way.  It’s a dual problem: not only are the Sith significantly watered down by repetition (Darth Maul sure doesn’t seem special and unique anymore, does he?), but it’s also an easy out for writers looking to come up with villains.

It would be easier if the Sith were more interesting, but truthfully, I find them pretty boring — they’re just evil Jedi.  I personally would love to see more varied, interesting villains in Star Wars stories — other Force-using groups with vendettas against the Jedi, bounty hunters, crime lords, strange aliens, real bad guys — but it’s just way easier to say a Sith was behind everything, either as a lightsaber-wielding badass or a shadowy figure cackling in the background.  At this point, I’m pretty close to believing that every bad event that ever happened in Star Wars is specifically because of one specific group of dark-side-of-the-Force-using ex-Jedi (as opposed to all the other groups that must be out there), and if it weren’t for the Sith, the Star Wars universe would be unicorns and rainbows forever.

Darth Fan Service.

In Legacy, the Sith have returned after a couple decades of hiding — a Jedi hid after the Clone Wars, learned the Sith teachings, became Darth Krayt, and decided to found his own Sith group to “impose order on the galaxy.”  They make an alliance with the remainder of the Empire to destroy the Republic and the Jedi, which they do, then they take over the Empire and the rest of the galaxy.  Hey, wasn’t Anakin Skywalker supposed to bring balance to the Force or something?  Maybe they didn’t read the rest of the prophecy, which said Anakin will bring “balance to the Force, for about a century at most.”

The book presents some Sith infighting, but the featured Sith — Darths Krayt, Maladi, Nihl, Talon, and Wyyrlok — don’t have much in the way of personality, and they don’t make for particularly compelling villains.  Krayt has exactly two traits — he’s dying (because of the techniques he used to extend his lifespan), and he believes in order.  (Why he decided to the Sith were the means to his goal, considering they always fall apart to infighting, and didn’t just decide the Jedi should be in charge of government, is beyond me.)  Talon is supposed to be — what, exactly?  She’s drawn like a 13-year-old boy’s fantasy, but she’s as stiff as a wooden board and shows zero individuality.  Ditto Maladi, who’s supposed to be a devious spymaster, and Nihl, a terrifying warrior, neither of whom does anything particularly remarkable.  Why should I care if any of them kill each other?  They’re all presented as roughly interchangeable anyway.

Only the greatest of heroes can save us from his cardboard personality.

This is particularly troubling for Darth Wyyrlok, since he goes from being Darth Krayt’s personal lackey to actually killing Krayt and usurping his throne midway through the series.  When this happened, I was fairly shocked, since I hadn’t seen it coming and Wyyrlok had apparently done such a good job hiding his motives that I was taken by surprise.  However, subsequent issues showed that Wyyrlok had no actual motives and remained as much of a blank slate as ever, his reasons being half-mumbled “Darth Krayt was bad for the Sith” rationalizations.  This does not make for a compelling villain!  The villain should be the most interesting character in the story, because then you appreciate his mad vision and you care who lives or dies when they inevitably meet up with the hero.  But instead you’ve got a limp villain crossing lightsabers with an unlikeable hero and I can’t summon the sympathy to care.

I’ve spent a lot of time hammering on Legacy for its huge, gaping, Star Destroyer-sized problems, so I feel like I should talk about what the series does right.  I can sum that up in five words: Gar Stazi and Emperor Fel.  The interplay between the Republic remnants, led by Stazi, and the Imperial insurgents, led by Fel, is what has kept me reading the series.

As far as I'm concerned, Gar Stazi is the true main character of the Legacy series.

Gar Stazi was originally intended to be a one-off character, but fan response brought him back, and I’m glad the fans were right on this one.  He’s the de facto leader of the Republic, a smart politician, and a cunning tactician — and even better, he’s written as being these things rather than being described as them.  We see him think his way through what looks like certain defeat and concoct brilliant plans on the fly, just as we read him maneuver through his troubling alliances and maintain his principles.  He’s unambiguously presented as a smart, heroic character who helps people and believes in the cause he’s fighting for.  I would’ve gladly read an entire comic series starring Gar Stazi and the Republic remnants.

The handsome face of totalitarianism.

Emperor-in-Exile Fel works for me as well, because he’s also written as smart — he knows enough to use decoys, he’s constantly trying to find new ways to foil the Sith, and he also believes in what he’s doing.  He’s a man who legitimately believes he’s the smartest man in the galaxy and the most qualified to lead, and he’s a big proponent of strict law within reason (hence his opposition to the Sith, and his more relaxed attitude toward the Jedi).  You’ve got to admire that he’s a man of conviction and vision, and you sense that his idea of running the galaxy isn’t really so bad.

Also up there on the character scale is Legacy’s answer to Gaius Baltar, Noah Bennet, and Omar Little — Nyna Calixte.  She’s unquestionably out for herself, but her goals often align with helping the Jedi or the Empire-in-Exile.  She’s fun to read, simply because she knows how to work a situation to her advantage, and she’s got strong political savvy — she knows how to make people do what she wants.  She’s the ultimate survivor, making herself useful to every side but really serving none.  I also find myself wishing she’d gotten more attention from the writers.

In a series overpopulated by Sith, the one who's not a Darth is king.

In a world of cookie-cutout Sith, one villain does come off as mildly compelling, too — Vul Isen, the Sith scientist.  An insidious scientist in the tradition of Goebbels, Vul Isen specializes in destroying enemies of the Sith through biochemical means.  He devises a Sith leviathan to kill the Mon Calamari and later uses chemical agents to just poison the oceans, and he’s a heartless butcher to boot.  Moreover, he’s the one Sith character who’s not a Darth, and he actually seems to enjoy what he does.  Vul Isen was fun to read, and whenever he appeared in a story, I knew I was in for a good time.

Ultimately I feel like Legacy is only half-good.  The sections about Gar Stazi and the Alliance and the Empire-in-Exile was compelling, but whenever the story switched over to Cade, I rapidly lost interest.  Cade reads too much like a character written by committee to appeal to new fans by being what they think a “badass” should be, but that’s a vision incompatible with what Star Wars is all about.  The Alliance/Empire sections reach at what makes Star Wars great — stirring moralism, larger-than-life characters, life-or-death fights — while Cade is content to wallow in comic books’ worst excesses — endless wheel-spinning, unlikeable protagonists, half-baked ideas.  Sorry to say that I won’t miss Legacy.