Category: Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

In last week’s new release Maul: Lockdown, Darth Maul is sent to uncover a reclusive and mysterious arms dealer hiding out in Cog Hive Seven, a space-based prison whose architecture is infinitely rearrangeable. This has two benefits: one, escape is much more complicated when the route out of your cell is constantly changing, and two, it allows Warden Sadiki Blirr to pick any two inmates and smack them together like action figures. The resulting deathmatches are then broadcast to the galaxy for gambling purposes, with Blirr herself collecting a healthy piece of the profits. This system of near-constant combat makes up the spine of Lockdown‘s bloody proceedings, and while the Rubix-Cube-like concept of Cog Hive Seven is a novel approach, the general premise of gladiatorial combat has a long and storied history in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, dating almost all the way to the beginning of the Expanded Universe.

My comrade Lucas Jackson touched on gladiators briefly back in Star Wars and Genre: The Sports Story, and he may well return to the subject one day, so I won’t get too into the details here; what I’m more interested in is what the many instances of coercive life-or-death combat suggest about the Star Wars setting as a whole.
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By and large, I’m perfectly content to let Episode VII rumors come and go without comment. They can be interesting, and I don’t begrudge anyone choosing to cover them, I just think that there’s rarely much to be gained from spending one’s column inches picking apart developments about which we’re drastically underinformed, and that may or may not even be true to begin with.

But a certain image of the sequel’s development has been coming together over the last couple months that I think could make for an instructive thought experiment—meaning, even if every assumption I’m about to make is incorrect, my point can still stand. So keep in mind that this article isn’t an endorsement of any particular rumors, it’s just that—a thought experiment.
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As the evidence starts accumulating that Star Wars is in for, if not a total reboot, at least a big, clean break from the past, it can be easy to lose track of how many existing stories in the Expanded Universe never quite wrapped up. It’s a tough bar to set, of course—every time I see someone ask “what loose end do you want resolved?” one person inevitably confuses “loose end” with “lack of information” and says something like “what happens to the Big Three after Crucible?”

So when I started formulating this article in my mind, I knew I had to focus on some of the best (read: most egregious) cliffhangers the EU had to offer; stories that really did leave characters in life-or-death situations with no easy resolution, only to meet untimely ends as the franchise moved on without them.

And then, as I started making a list, something even more interesting occurred to me—this isn’t really an EU problem as much as a video game problem. Sure, there have been some comparable situations in the larger body of material, but the only item I considered that came from the “modern” era of the last decade or so that wasn’t from a video game was the Galfridian family of the comic series Invasion, which was put on indefinite hiatus after its third story arc—a hiatus which, between the comics license leaving Dark Horse and writer Tom Taylor becoming something of a powerhouse over at DC Comics with Earth 2 and Injustice, I think it’s safe to say is now officially infinite.

But as much as I’d have liked to see more of the Galfridians, their last appearance offered far more resolution than some of LucasArts’ finest could claim. So I figured, if a theme emerges, might as well embrace it. Let’s talk about the three great dangling threads of the late, great-ish LucasArts era of Star Wars video games.
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A few weeks back, a critical discussion of the Legacy of the Force series at the TFN Literature forum turned to a topic that doesn’t normally come up too often: privilege.

The specific impetus was the penultimate novel, Revelation, wherein Jaina Solo spends time training on Mandalore in preparation for a confrontation with her Sithy twin brother. Boba Fett’s fellow Mandalorians, thoroughly established by this point as hardscrabble farmers for whom mercenary work is only an intermittent source of income, are quick to laugh off the ex-Chief of State’s daughter with the (possible) Coruscanti accent, and what they see as her pretensions of warriordom, but over time she proves herself up to their challenges and, eventually, earns a grudging respect.

But this is Karen Traviss, an author with, well, a singular perspective on the Jedi Order’s place in the larger galaxy—so it’s perhaps unavoidable that the prose squeezes a little more sympathy for the Mandos (even from Jaina’s POV) than we’re used to seeing, dwelling here and there on, say, the softness of Jaina’s hands, her education, her growing up well-fed, and so on.
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