Jedi Academy trilogy, I’m bristling over how much I hate this.
So, I’ve told you about the Maw, it’s apparently complete level of self-sufficiency and the newest addition to the Imperial Super-Weapon Club. But I’m not done with it yet!
Alright, so we’ve established that this is the place where the Death Star was developed, right? A weapon like that is outrageously expensive, right? You wouldn’t want to pay for it more than once, or if you did, you’d probably start at small scale and increase it later on. So of course there’s still a full-sized, fully functional prototype. In the Maw. Complete with propulsion system and targeting equipment. In fact, it has everything but the extraneous crew housing and launch bays. In fact, it consists entirely of the laser, propulsion system and the spherical space frame.
[Fume] It’s Darksaber. [/Fume]
So what happens after our valiant heroes run off with shiny new toy? Daala goes after them! Not with her Star Destroyers, because They flew the Sun Crusher through them. Yeah, apparently the engine in this thing are so powerful that it can overcome the friction of crashing through the hull and dozens of decks and through hull again. And it’s not as though this thing is shaped like an armor piercing bullet! Well, actually it is, but it flies as if it were that bullet standing on its point and the side of the bullet was the front. So, rather the opposite of an armor piercing bullets.
Daala takes off after them through the outrageously hazardous and difficult to traverse Maw, which I remind you was a big enough issue that they were scared of doing it with the Falcon, in the Death Star prototype. Oh no, it’s still the size of a small moon, but apparently its propulsion and navigation systems can totally handle this.
Meanwhile, back in the namesake of the trilogy, Luke’s students have been succumbing to the Dark Side pull of the building that they live and work in. I can’t emphasize this enough. The entire conflict of this story line is based around the fact that Luke didn’t do his bleeding homework!
The spirit of Exar Kun is possessing the students and trying to kill Luke, who’s in a coma for some reason. Don’t ask, I don’t remember. I think a vessel in his brain may have burst from the sheer amount of stupid taking place in this book.
Anyway, Luke’s strongest student goes all dark side on them. Kyp Duron, a guy I will never be able to separate from the tiny Micro Machine figurine I have of him wearing a purple jumpsuit and a black cape, is stronger in the force than Luke. Kyp blows his stack and pulls the Sun Crusher out of the heart of the Yavin gas giant and climbs in and goes forth to singlehandedly kill more people than Palpatine did in thirty or forty years!
Meanwhile, back at the Jedi ranch, Luke is still sleeping off his aneurysm. The Jedi tots band together with the power of love or something, I tend to forget, and beat the specter of Exar Kun. Then Luke wakes up. Plot line closed.
So, Han manages to find Kyp, talk him down off the ledge, but before he does, he blows up the prototype Death Star and wedges himself into a vending machine plastic ball and launches himself into the void of space so that he can put the technological marvel that is the Sun Crusher into a black hole in the Maw.
Han picks him up and everyone lives happily ever after.
And Kyp Duron manages to commit genocide against an entire star system because his underwear was wedged too far up his own butt and is never charged with anything like the war crime that it was.
This series ended up so bad that Michael Stackpole came back years later and had to fix it with retcons in I, Jedi.
AND ANOTHER THING! I left this out of my Darksaber rant because I thought it was in these books, but apparently Anderson’s books are so incredibly bad that they all just kind of blend together!
At one point, Four Star Destroyers show up at Yavin 4, apparently under the command of a decent character, Gilad Pellaeon, who apparently got shanghai’d by author caveat. So, they’re going to destroy the academy!
You want to know what Pellaeon was doing at the start of this book? He was about to lead a fleet of TWO HUNDRED Victory-Class Star Destroyers into battle against an opposing warlord’s fleet of TWENTY Imperial-class Star Destroyers. And apparently those were about even odds. Why? BECAUSE ANDERSON WROTE IT THAT WAY, THAT’S WHY! Who needs logic when you simply get demand things! Andeson doesn’t even bother to familiarize himself with his setting half the time, does he? He just sees something and parrots it!
So, four Star Destroyers! Enough fire power to level an entire world! So what happens? The apprentices hold hands, stand in a circle and use the temple as a focus for their abilities so that they can push them out of the system. All four. Out of the star system entirely. Where they don’t just jump back in and comment about how cute that was and launch all their bombers and fire all their turbolasers and pound the planet to dust!
So, they can do that. I guess they read that LITERALLY NOWHERE. I have no idea how they come up with this idea that they could just do this! I imagine in the back of my mind that it’s something like, “Star Destroyers, in my orbit? *Yawn* I’ll just push them with my giant force pusher.”
And this ability is so powerful, so incredibly useful that it is never used again.
It gets worse! Apparently Daala, who just kinda showed up and took over because shut up she just did, appropriated a Super Star Destroyer from Imperial Warlord no-name because he doesn’t matter and only exists as a vessel for Daala to get another SUPER WEAPON. By the way, it’s no ordinary Super Star Destroyer. No, in fact, it’s a stealth Super Star Destroyer. Because the element of surprise is so bloody important when you show up with a craft 19 kilometers long.
So Han Solo and one Republic cruiser blow it up.
The End.
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE!
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