Spoliler Level: Fairly High
In the first book we saw how a lowly miner became Darth Bane, the most fearsome of the Sith, how he came to the conclusion that the entire way the mighty Sith Brotherhood of Darkness worked was flawed and should be reduced to only two, and how he brought it about. Now in the second book, we see how he puts it into practice, being the last remaining Sith Lord and training the only apprentice.
None of which stops Darth Bane from becoming even stronger and getting into more ferocious battles, literally striding out of the flames having cheated death. In other words, there's still a lot of cool battles with Bane being a bad-ass.
But in many ways, the book is the story of his apprentice, Darth Zannah. Introduced as Rain in the Jedi vs. Sith comics, this book shows her decline from the sweet yet traumatized little girl that Bane found at the ending of those comics and the last book, and her struggle to actually shed any of her remaining goodness for the sake of the power to never be hurt again. The book also quite heavily uses Darovit, the young boy who was barely mentioned in the last book but the lead in the comics. Darovit keeps coming in at key moments in Zannah's life, offering her a chance to turn away from the dark and back into the light.
It works really well, because we already know there's no saving Darth Bane, but we have no idea if Zannah will be the apprentice who eventually takes his place or if she'll be redeemed in the end.
This book was just as intriguing and exciting as the first one. It succeeds not only in interesting characters, but in getting to see how everything was put into place for both the Sith and the Jedi as we know them in Episode I. Looking forward to Book 3!
No comments:
Post a Comment