Threepio and Chewbacca face off against Darth Vader as the try and protect a planet they themselves have rigged to destroy. Meanwhile Luke Skywalker has run into a mysterious young woman who claims to know of The Force, but her motives have come into question. One their own mission, Han Solo and Leia Organa try to trick the Empire into taking down a notorious crime boss, with aid of Leia's ex.
Review
This issue is one of the last of this run. The story has been building up to to the Rebels finding and establishing Echo Base on Hoth. Considering there are only three issues after this one, the series seems hell-bent on waiting until the last second to actually get there. The main group of Rebels has spent five painfully slow issues pretty much getting nowhere. It’s hard to imaging that this arc will get to where it needs to go as the clock ticks down. In all three separate storylines, the characters have stayed in the same locations and are still dealing with the same problems they have had to deal with the whole time. The worst part is that all the characters are very, well… out of character. It seems that Greg Pak has no grasp of who the Star Warriors are. This arc needs to wrap up, and wrap up fast. The light on the horizon is that a new series will be starting soon, taking place after the events of The Empire Strikes Back with Darth Vader veteran Charles Soule returning to write.
The bulk of the content in this particular issue is characters talking to each other with zero action, despite Vader showing up. How can this be? The legendary Sith Lord shows up and tries to talk to rock people through Threepio. He doesn’t even threaten anyone! He also somehow doesn’t even recognize the droid he built as a kid. Star Wars as a whole has always done a great job showing that Droids of the same kind have different voices. Even astromechs like Artoo sound different than each other. It seems ridiculous that Vader wouldn’t notice the very specific voice that Anthony Daniels provided the character. On another planet, Luke acts like he’s met a Jedi master in the girl, Warba. In the entire run of this series, Luke has been cautiously optimistic about discovering Jedi secrets, but here he is blindly trusting a woman he met while she was tricking people during playing cards. The only neat revelation in this issue was learning that Warba grew up near the Temple of the Whills on Jedha, so she knows all these things about The Force from them. However, she just uses this knowledge to trick Luke. How uncivilized! Han and Leia aren’t even worth mentioning. Han dances with somebody and steps on her feet. Leia tries to come up with a plan that she has been unable to so for way too many issues. She finally is given a plan by her ex-boyfriend. This is the same character that blasts a hole to the garbage chute on the Death Star on a whim. Why is she so helpless now?
The art in this issue is anything but bad, but still incredibly basic when compares to the earlier issues of this series. It feels like the staff is just producing filler to sell issues. The same backgrounds from the whole arc litter this issue. This is such a direct contrast to the Doctor Aphra series that has a wildly different setting each issue. The human characters are reasonable facsimiles of the actors that played them. However, it should be noted that Chewbacca, Threepio, and Vader look amazing. Those are characters that have been historically had to capture in comics. Strange that the humans look so generic, where the cyborg, Wookiee, and droid look near perfect.
Final Thoughts
At this point, this series is pretty much just waiting to die. With just a handful of issues left, the story needs to dramatically change. It's hard to expect it can get there. The new series can't come soon enough.
