Star Wars by Charles Soule vol. 8: The Sith and the Skywalker

I mentioned very recently that the penultimate volume of Greg Pak’s run on “Darth Vader” did a really good job of building up to its climax.  Moreso than in this title, even.  That’s mainly because Soule isn’t doing any buildup here.  Vol. 8 IS the climax of his run.  After seven volumes, it has finally come time for Lando Calrissian to pay the piper and answer for the crimes he’s committed against the Alliance.  While we know that he’s going to survive the experience, the real questions here are how is he going to do it, and will they be worth our time?

Then there’s the more pressing question that this volume opens with.  Namely, “Why do we have to go through a two-part story about Luke and a khyber crystal before we get to the main event?”  I was worried that including this story was going to cause Lando’s trial to be spread out over two volumes, but that’s thankfully not the case.  Better still is that this isn’t a random two-part story.  It’s actually a follow-up to a story from vol. 6 where Luke found out how the sith corrupt the khyber crystals that go into their lightsabers.  Now that he knows what he’s up against, he’s ready to go back into the crystal and find a way to heal it.

Rather than a two-issue diversion from the main event, this wound up being pretty interesting on its own terms.  Even as it dabbles in some obscure “Expanded Universe” lore with the Fallanassi, it still uses them well enough here to facilitate Luke’s journey.  One which is predicated more on empathy rather than strength.  Healing the corruption of the crystal requires the Jedi to be understanding of the hate that caused it in the first place and to meet it with an open hand rather than a closed fist.  Soule even finds a way to tie it back into Luke’s own journey as well, since we all know that he wants to find a way to save his father rather than defeat him.

This all left me feeling good rather than impatient when “The Trial of Lando Calrissian” kicks off.  Well, aside from the short that introduces us to Advocate-at-Large Salli Georgio, the lawyer who’s going to represent him at his hearing.  There hasn’t been a lot of courtroom drama or representation of the legal system in the “Star Wars” universe that I’ve seen, and since Soule was (or still is, I’m not sure) a practicing attorney at one point, it’s not surprising that he’d want to tackle it at some point.  The problem is that while Salli’s defense of Dengar is certainly novel, it fails due to a reason that’s patently obvious in hindsight, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in her lawyering ability here.

Not that Lando needed another card stacked against him when his trial kicks off.  After having been manipulated into confessing how he had to turn the Talky droid that helped develop the Alliance’s new security code to Jabba the Hutt, by said same Talky droid in the previous volume, the case against him seems open-and-shut.  At least to General Crix Madine who believes that this could be easily addressed by introducing Calrissian to the nearest air lock.

However, the Alliance is not the Empire and Mon Mothma is keenly aware of the problems that would result from such a summary execution.  Lando is a well-liked figure in their organization and announcing that he’s betrayed them all would be a major blow to morale; therefore, her solution is to have a closed-doors military tribunal to offer the man due process before they decide what to do with him.  This is when Lando calls in Salli to defend him and before things can really get started… something big happens.

This doesn’t quite split the narrative in two between the trial and the pursuit of this new development as Soule finds ways to keep them closely tied together.  He even finds ways to make the trial seem like less an open-and-shut affair than it might initially seem while also serving as a referendum on the growth Lando has demonstrated over the course of his run.  The out-of-the-courtroom stuff is also interesting as the bad guys are tracked down and even have some notable interactions with their… special guest that prove illuminating on the evils of the Empire.

In the end, Lando’s trial doesn’t hinge so much on determining his guilt or innocence.  As Salli tells her client partway through the story, they’ve got him dead to rights and the trick is to convince them that they don’t care that he’s guilty.  This essentially means that we’ve got a courtroom drama where the climax doesn’t hinge on the interpretation of the law, but on the people involved deciding that Lando’s such a great guy that they don’t want to kill him.  I can appreciate the speechifying, especially Mr. Calrissian’s impassioned “You were lucky to have me” closing argument, but it just doesn’t satisfy in the way that I was expecting.  That there was additional skullduggery undertaken to help his case does make things a bit more interesting; though, savvy genre fans might be able to see that final twist coming.

The trial does look as good as the man at the center of it, thanks to regular artist Madibek Musabekov.  He winds up having to draw many more talking heads than in his previous arcs here, but he’s able to make them emotive enough to carry the drama.  The various flashbacks within then also keep things visually interesting, even though the focus in this arc is squarely on the speechifying.  Steven Cummings, with an assist from Jethro Morales in the second issue, handles the opening two-parter, and they do get more interesting stuff to draw in Luke’s journey into the khyber crystal.  It’s all handled capably, though I appreciated the more metaphorical stuff in the second issue.

All told, we get a reasonably satisfying climax to Soule’s run on “Star Wars” here.  The finale of the trial doesn’t land as well as I was hoping it would, but everything before it, including Luke’s two-parter, was certainly entertaining.  It’s all enough to make me look forward to re-reading the entirety of this series when the final volume arrives next month so I can see how Lando’s story holds up from beginning to end.