Hello everyone!
Well, against overwelmind odds, I made it.
I honestly thought I was going to have to push this week's book post back a little because I'm currently neck-deep in a book translation, but apparently my brain can only take so much actual translating and I needed occasional breaks.
This meant jumping into hyperspace whenever I could.
And to be fair I think I ran through this book in three sittings, maybe four.
This brings me to an end of a trilogy which I'm super excited about because I often start reading a series and then it sort of falls by the wayside, and a year or so later I'm there like OH CRUD I SHOULD HAVE READ THIS ON.
Yeah, I'm like that.
But now enough about me, and more about what's happening across the stars.
The Last Command is calling for attention.
Links to the previous two books, Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising can be found down at the bottom of the page, and you kind of need to know what happened in the first books to understand the third.
Namely, the New Republic is scrambling to fight against Grand Admiral Thrawn, and our heroes Luke, Leia, Han, Lando and Chewie are trying to find some sort of way to kick the blue-skinned alien where it hurts. Or, better still, somehow eliminate him and not have to deal with him EVER AGAIN.
I'm with you guys. I'm so with you.
Okay so, by the time this last chapter opens, Thrawn has repurposed the old Katana flet and put clone crews onto the ships, so now he has the means and the time to attack the New Republic by being sneaky and cunning.
He actually uses a cloaking device to ensure planets or systems THINK he's got some cutting edge technology, when in reality it's all for show.
But it's working. And the New Republic is scrambling.
Luke is hunting down the location of the clone factory when he runs into Talon Karrde and the two of them agree to work together on this, which launches Karrde on a mission of his own while Luke has to run like the wind from more Imperial forces, ending up with a sort-of broken down ship and without a clue where to get the spare parts. In the end, he goes to the Noghri planet, the alien race that the Empire had used as slaves all along but Leia had managed to bring over to the New Republic. Being the son of Vader, Luke is also greeted and aided.
Meanwhile on Coruscant, Leia gives birth to Jaina and Jacen Solo, much to the happiness and joy of proud papa Han, only Thrawn is lazily attempting to appease the insane clone Jedi C'baoth so he sends a strike team to the planet to grab the three.
Luckily for Leia, Mara Jade is in the capital so she and Senator Iblis, along with Lando and Chewie, can actually do something about this strike team, eliminating them so they don't really get their intended targets; but unluckily for Mara, a contingency plan for the strike team is to point a finger at her, causing the New Republic to put her under house arrest.
And while this is happening, Luke is still stuck with the Noghri, and information is still being leaked to Thrawn via someone called Delta Source, and Thrawn is still frog-jumping across the galaxy, defeating the New Republic at every turn.
He plans on cutting right into the heart of this budding new regime, and to do so he's going to use asteroids.
You read that right, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Before this happens, Mara learns about the clones Thrawn is using (she's been out of commission for about a month because of brain damage during the battle in Dark Force Rising) and guesses that Wayland might be the location where the cloning factory is, since she remembers seeing the tanks and everything while going there once.
So Leia & Co make the executive decision without telling anybody to break Mara out, and send her, Luke, Lando, Han and Chewie, along with R2-D2 and Threepio to Wayland to try and shut the operation down.
While they're doing that, let's back up to the asteroids again.
Karrde and his men actually see those asteroids while making their smuggling stops, but they don't really know what the point is until later. For the readers, what happens is this: Thrawn launches an "attack" on Coruscant, the capital of the New Republic, and Leia is at wits end with the feud between Iblis and Mon Mothma because Iblis is the one qualified to defend them, but won't do it unless Mon Mothma asks him herself - with good reason, as it's later explained.
She can only appoint people to positions of power if she trusts them, and the circle is really, really small.
Anyway, Mon Mothma does in fact ask for help, but Thrawn pulls the plug then, leaves the asteroids cloaked around Coruscant as a barrier, roughly over three hundred and fifty, and departs.
What does this mean?
It means the planet can't lower its defensive shields because gravity would pull the asteroids down and they'd demolish Coruscant (think beginning of Armaggedon style), and equally they can't launch anything from the planet, providing an effective stale-mate since no one can go in - or out.
So now Thrawn is free to do as he pleases, mostly, and C'baoth heads over to Wayland because he's nuttier than a fruit cake, our band of misfits lands on Wayland proper to hack their way over to the mountain (with some Noghri boyguards backup), and Karrde pops up to Coruscant.
Remember Karrde?
In this book he tries to form a coalition with the other smugglers to firmly stand against Thrawn since being on the side of the New Republic might be in their best interests. Only, their meeting gets shot up and later on, Thrawn actually plays his cards so that smugglers think KARRDE was the one who got the Imperials to shoot at them.
Unhappily for Thrawn, he's picked a really stupid smuggler and ship thief to be a pawn of his, because while attempting to make sure Karrde gets lynched by the smuggling mob, he accidentally falls for the oldes trick in the book, which is to say he gives away too much information that hasn't been spoken out loud yet, in classic Agatha Christie style, and the rest of them swing from Karrde to him, then decide to go help the New Republic.
And what the New Republic might need is some sort of device that can only be picked up from three locations, and it's rumoured the New Republic will hit a loosely patrolled one. So the smugglers decide to go to the SECOND location to grab the thing and bring it over.
Except the New Republic is being sneaky and is only PRETENDING to go for the first location while actually going for the second one.
It's convoluted, I know, but bear with me here.
Having finally discovered Delta Source with the help of slicer Ghent (it was an organic microphone hidden in plants, for some insane reason), Leia now learns that the cloning facility is going to be guarded by ysalamiri who negate the Force, rendering Luke helpless. So she enlists Karrde's help (Karrde popped on by after the meet with the smugglers to pick up Mara) to go after them after Karrde explains that, instead of nearly four hundred asteroids, Thrawn actually only had about twenty-two, and the New Republic has already destroyed them. So they've been sitting there for no reason whatsoever.
Also, I thought the device they actually need to steal from Thrawn should have helped with these asteroids and that's why they were launching those raids. But I'm not 100% sure because the raids are STILL underway despite the asteroids being effectively gone, so I mean ...
Anyway.
Thrawn decides on a whim that the first location for the attack is a decoy and sends forces to defend the secondary one where the smugglers are also conveniently waiting and Wedge and Rogue Squadron get to see some action in space again while Admiral Ackbar commands the attacking fleet.
On Wayland, things are going ... slightly off the rails.
C'baoth has somehow gotten a message out to the natives of the planet to come attack the mountain he's imprisoned in (Thrawn put him in there because he learned that the crazy clone took control of the minds of the garrison sent along with him) providing a distraction for Luke and his team to head in. Initially Force-less, they separate to get the job done, and Luke and Mara end up in the throne room with C'baoth, who reveals he's made a Luke clone, Luuke, from the hand Luke lost on Bespin, and has Luke fight him because, I quote "one way or the other you will kneel to me". As will Mara, supposedly, but in the final show-down with the Force again at use, when Leia and Karrde arrive with Han to try and help out, Mara cuts down the Luke clone, fulfilling the Emperor's last wish that had been bugging her mind throughout the trilogy (YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER), and in the end also killing C'baoth since Luke keeps on harping about how he can help and heal the man.
No, Luke. Unlike Vader, this guy is CRAY CRAY. Vader was only a servant of the Dark Side. C'baoth is so crazy you could open his head and there's be swirling rainbows spitting out sparks in there.
Moral of the story: if it's crazy, kill it.
Thank you Mara. Moving on.
Having set the mountain to explode, the team then hightails it out of there, and even as the message reaches Thrawn, who's happily overseeing the battle against Ackbar, he gets what he deserved when his Noghri bodyguard, Rukh, stabs him right in the heart to avenge his people. See, as stated in previous books, the Noghri were only waiting for the right moment to strike, and all their teams and citizens deployed across the galaxy had the exact same orders.
I knew Thrawn was going to kick it this way. I just knew it since the Noghri was always with him.
The Imperial forces retreat, it's a victory for the New Republic, Karrde and his smuggling coalition manage to actually hold together, and Luke convinces Mara, who's finally at peace with herself (killing "Luke Skywalker" will do that to you) to come help them negotiate since she's the only one both sides trust.
And that's where we leave them. FIN.
It was an amusing and action-packed ride to the finish line, although some plot holes in this one weren't just large enough for an X-wing, they had enough room for the Falcon AND Rogue Squadron to fly right through them!
For example, if Thrawn was launching attacks all over the galaxy, who was stupid enough to send the foremost military mind, Admiral Ackbar, to review some obscure system defences in the middle of nowhere when he was so clearly needed at Cruscant? I mean, I get it, Iblis needed his moment to shine, but come on. Obviously Ackbar could come back for that final hit, so let's be a little less obvious about needing him out of the way, shall we?
Then the device the New Republic needed, which I'm still unclear about. Did they or did they not need it for those asteroids? Wasn't that the whole purpose of launching those raids in the first place? And then they figured out they DON'T need them, but the raids were still on ... that's a mighty useless point you're trying to make there, Mon Mothma. Those fleets could have been much more effective elsewhere, couldn't they? Or am I missing something? I'm going to have to read that part again since I'm honestly so confused.
Someone says somewhere, I think it's Leia, that Thrawn is using Force to grow and mature the clones in fifteen to twenty days. But how, specifically? C'baoth is with him most of the time this is happening, and the ysalamiri are all around that mountain, making it a Force dark spot and, since the clones are grown INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN, the Force just can't be used. Period. This one deserves Ackbar's entire fleet running through it with the Admiral gurgling PLOTHOLE!
While we're on the ysalamiri topic, it deserved a bit more explanation. When Mara and Luke face C'baoth, he presses something and the Force returns, implying that the thousands upon thousands of ysalamiri have been destroyed, presumably by the garrison he took with him to Wayland and who took weapons and other stuff from the barracks then went out of the mountain. But here's the kick: those weapons ended up in the hands of the two native tribes attacking the mountain, and if I remember right (and to be fair Thrawn doesn't strike me as that stupid) there wouldn't have been THOUSANDS of soldiers given to C'baoth. So how, exactly, did this whole thing go down again? And wouldn't there be ysalamiri throughout the mountain, as well? Did they have a kill switch where someone came over and said BOO and they fell over and died?
I'll leave it at that and go to my personal favourite of the entire trilogy: Thrawn.
Oh, Thrawn.
On the one hand, I like him. He's intelligent, cunning, ruthless, and has all those striking qualities of an antagonist you want and need. But then that gets negated by making him entirely unrelatable and unbelievable. The Jedi with all their Force sensitivity couldn't predict half of what he nailed right, like he was just always there for conversations or happily strolling through his opponent's minds. For some reason he decides exactly how Luke escapes one time, and of course the many times he can just predict what the New Republic will do is beyond ridiculous. I mean, this dumbs down the New Republic, effectively, so that Thrawn can come out on top. Wouldn't someone in that organisation (I don't know, Winter maybe?) suggest they need to turn things around and do it differently? Studying art to understand someone's mentality is all well and good, but if, say, you're expecting Ackbar to run defence but you actually get Wedge instead, there is no possible way Thrawn could have seen that happening.
He had the makings of a fantastic villain. But he was just too perfect. The times he was defeated and the reasons why were so blatantly ridiculous that it made no sense since he's supposedly so highly intelligent. The audience has no way to connect with him so therefore he remains an annoying gnat you want to throttle just because he's such a snotty, arrogant know-it-all.
A warrior is supposedly always prepared to lose. There weren't nearly enough losses on Thrawn's side to make it believable, or relatable. By this count the New Republic should never have won at all.
It's so frustrating because it could have been SO GOOD. As it happens, while I did enjoy this trilogy and it was a fascinating adventure with really good writing and the action sequences were fantastic, I was annoyed with so many things throughout that I can't say these are my favourite books, or favourite characters even. I think maybe I should just NOT think through these.
Would I read these again? I would, after some time's passed. I'd probably still want to just claw Thrawn's ridiculous smugness off his face, but I'd read it again.
Still, all in all, despite my griping and harping, this was an enjoyable way to spend a few afternoons.
Now I need some Star Wars break. I leave you with Han clan Solo, who's probably wondering whether his kids will actually be allergic to Wookie hair when they grow up, or if they'll become secret ninja assassins before they're five.
xx
*image not mine
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