We're just over a week out from Star
Wars: The Last Jedi finally hitting the big screen with the force
(heh heh) of a fully functioning space station, and already our tiny
little minds are already racing to think of what the long awaited
sequel has in store for us and our favorite inhabitants of a galaxy
far, far away. While a VERY healthy opening box office is a foregone
conclusion, predicting what director Rian Johnson has planned for his
first stab at Star Wars is a much harder job. But taking into account
over forty years of stories across all types of media, he'll be hard
pressed to deliver something crazier than these bad ass moments from
Star Wars history.
The Yuuzhan Vong Invasion
Long before JJ Abrams said, 'Let's call
it The Force Awakens', the adventures of Luke Skywalker and company
continued in the Expanded Universe, an ever growing series of novels
that opened up the Star Wars universe in a way George Lucas never
dreamed of. While most of the books consisted of our heroes fighting
a seemingly never ending parade of former Imperials and the odd
galaxy destroying weapon, things were thrown for a loop with the
introduction of the Yuuzhan Vong, a race of warrior aliens from a
galaxy farther away than we could ever imagine. Religious zealots who
viewed anything mechanical as blasphemy, they existed outside of the
Force and thus untouched by most Force based attacks, which the New
Jedi Order discovered in their disastrous first encounter. With
powerful, gentically engineered, purely organic weapons, the Yuuzhan
Vong soon made short work of the galaxy, conquering every planet in
their path. They also nutured a deep hatred for the Jedi, possessing a
power they had been denied, and offered freedom to those they
captured in exchange for turning in any Jedi Knight. Their years long
invasion had a lasting effect on the Star Wars universe, not least
the death of Chewbacca, and the beginnings of Jacen Solo's, son of
Han and Leia, descent into the Dark Side.
Anything Involving Grand Admiral Thrawn
Step aside Darth Maul, there's a new
ultimate bad ass in the Star Wars Universe, and his name is Grand
Admiral Thrawn. First coming to our attention in Timothy Zahn's Heir
to the Empire, the book that kicked off the whole Expanded Universe,
Thrawn is one of the Emperor's most ruthless allies, commanding the
entire Imperial navy with a mixture of ruthless cunning and tactical
brilliance, while lacking the megalomania that proved to be his
master's undoing. With deep blue skin and piercing red eyes, he made
quite the first impression when he was first introduced, taking the
broken Empire we saw at the end of Return of the Jedi and making it
once again the most powerful force in the galaxy. Not even his death
at the end of what is now lovingly known as the Thrawn trilogy could
stop him, with the character being used time and time again, from
prequels in the expanded universe to even jumping media to appear in
computer games and the third season of the fantastic Star Wars:
Rebels cartoon.
That Twist In Star Wars: Knights of the
Old Republic
Long before Bioware took the gaming
world by storm (then ruined all the goodwill they garnered with the
ending of the third game) with Mass Effect, they had delivered
possibly the best Star Wars game ever with Star Wars: Knights of the
Old Republic. A role playing game set almost 4000 years before The
Phantom Menace, players found themselves in control of a Jedi tasked
with taking down Darth Malak, a Dark Lord of the Sith who is razing
the galaxy with The Star Forge, an endless source of military
resources that once belonged to Malak's ruthless former master, Darth
Revan, who is long since dead. While it's boundless amounts of fun
traveling the galaxy with a mismatched group of soldiers, scoundrels,
and droids, every choice you make leaving you on the edge of the
light or dark side, the true beauty of the game comes about halfway
through. Nearing the Star Forge, the player themselves is revealed as
Revan, left for dead after being betrayed by Malak and brainwashed by
the Jedi council to no longer pose a threat to the galaxy. The reveal
is masterfully handled, and gives a new meaning to the moral choices
the player is presented with: will you go down the light path as
penance for your evil ways, or pick up where you left off down the
path of the dark side.
