JOURNEY TO STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS - The Perfect Weapon by Delilah S. Dawson

The virtues and themes that make STAR WARS work as a story aren't at all the same as the driving forces that make it work as a universe. In fact, what makes a good story and what makes a good setting for a story really have very little to do with each other.

Some stories are easily translated into classic movies, like the original Ghostbusters (not the actual original Ghostbusters, with the guy in the gorilla suit in it, though I'm sure no one ever made that mistake). The first Ghostbusters film was just a great idea for a movie and lightning in a bottle as far as the people involved in making it and the time in which it was released. But Ghostbusters, despite what Dan Aykroyd and executives as Sony would have you believe, is not a rich universe. It's one good idea propped up on some funny guys, just as the remake attempting to re-launch the story as a successful franchise is the same good idea propped up on a cast of really funny women. But the fact that they chose to reboot rather than have this follow-up stand as a descendant of its predecessor shows that there isn't a lot of room for new ideas in that world.  Because the world of Ghostbusters is not brimming with ideas. It's one idea that can only be re-captured through repetition. There just isn't anything new to say here.

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And anyone who thinks otherwise is courting disaster and ruination.

So what has any of that got to do with the STAR WARS universe? Well, the original STAR WARS film was like Ghostbusters, with a lot of the same merits that contributed to making it a classic movie. It was fun, original, exciting, and new to the audience.

Unlike Ghostbusters (which I'm picking on way more than it deserves here for the purposes of making my point), STAR WARS was not just a single good story propped up on one good idea. Leaving aside the fact that it had more story threads to follow for future installments, STAR WARS also established a rich mythology full of characters and concepts that could be (and have been) endlessly mined for new ideas.

http://decider.com/2015/12/16/cult-corner-star-wars-holiday-special/

With mixed results.

Part of the fun of the STAR WARS universe is the impression it lends the audience of being lived in, of being a place where everyone you see, no matter how peripheral they may be to the story you're watching, probably has an exciting story of their own.

Which brings us to "The Perfect Weapon", the story of Bazine Netal.

You should remember Bazine from EPISODE VII as the agent in Maz Kanata's castle who rats BB-8 out to the First Order. Aside from the fact that she apparently has the First Order on speed dial, we really don't know anything about her. We assume she's some kind of bounty hunter or mercenary from the way she acts, but beyond that she's just another denizen of the seedy underworld that is mostly only glimpsed through the eyes of our protagonists.

Pictured here with a guy who looks like Bossk after a severe allergic reaction to a bee sting.

But who is Bazine Netal?

Right away, the story clues us in to the fact that she is, in fact, a woman for hire. She may spend her off hours breaking the bones of any guy who tries to talk to her, but when it comes to the job it's all business. And this job in particular will challenge her to ask herself why that is.

As the story begins, Bazine is confronted by a rusty robot who pressures her under threat of counting backwards to accept a job before she's been told what it involves. When she agrees, the one-armed protocol droid plays her a message from its unidentified master, who appears to her in the form of a hologram. He tells Bazine to track down a case that was last in the possession of a stormtrooper named Jor Tribulus. Once the message is over, the robot promptly explodes.

Bazine visits her old mentor, Delphi Kloda, who was once the right hand man of Tasu Leech in Kanjiklub. He took Bazine in as an orphaned child and raised her, training her to become the mercenary she is. He loans her his ship, the Sparrowhawk, on the condition that she agrees to take a young slicer (the STAR WARS version of a hacker) named Orri Tenro with her on the job and show him the ropes.

In time Bazine and Orri develop a mutual respect and something of an affection for each other. Bazine opens up to him so much, in fact, she decides to murder Orri after the job is finished. But first they pull off a hospital heist so that Orri can grab some information on where Jor Tribulus has been spending his post-retirement convalescence. All they learn is that Tribulus' records are still being held in a retirement facility that's been closed down.

Instead of killing Orri, Bazine leaves him behind to finish the job herself because now that she has the data from the hospital she's confident she won't need a slicer anymore. This doesn't make a huge amount of sense because she's going to the retirement facility specifically to dig up the records there, so you'd think you'd want to have a slicer on hand for that.

Her one-woman army approach to the job complicates matters much worse than computer problems, though. When she gets there Bazine discovers that the facility is indeed shut down, but it is not entirely abandoned: It’s overrun with Vashkan apidactyls, a fancy space term for giant yellow jackets.

Before we go any further, I want to stop and take another look at Bazine's companion from Maz's castle. He's actually from a race called the Dowutin, who were introduced in the STAR WARS: COMMANDER game, which may not know exactly how to market for a younger audience:

If this first picture doesn't make you uncomfortable, then the one under it definitely will.

Am I the only one seeing this?

But let's move on:

Bazine makes her way carefully into the facility, which has since become a gigantic hive for the apidactyls, only to run across a former resident, ex-stormtrooper Aric Nightdrifter. Though he’s obviously gone a little cuckoo spending his twilight years in a giant hornet’s nest, Nightdrifter agrees to  help Bazine. He claims to have served under Tribulus and offers to take her to him. He basically keeps this promise, leading Bazine to a wax encased tomb for the fallen stormtrooper, who has long since been killed by apidactyls and buried in the waxy interior of the hive.

Tribulus’ belongings are with his body, though, including the mysterious case she was sent to retrieve, so Bazine is just about to cash it in and call it day... when things take a sudden and not quite comprehensible turn.

Not like then end of The Village, where people who thought it was necessary to go off in the woods and pretend it was the 1800's also inexplicably thought it was equally necessary to have a master movie FX artist create full-body prosthetic suits that they could use to terrify their children into never leaving home. This is more like Interstellar, where Matthew McConaughey thought it was necessary to send his past self a message in binary code to prompt him into doing the very thing he was trying to stop himself from doing. Word to the wise, Matthew, if you're trying to avoid confusion don't send a message in binary. Why send the message in code at all? Why not just write exactly what you want to say?

That's the way the end of the story goes here, where it all depends on a self-defeating cycle of circular logic without which the story would never have happened in the first place.

Little do Bazine and Nightdrifter know that they're being stalked this entire time by someone far deadlier (I guess) than giant yellowjackets. Nightdrifter is ambushed and killed by an assailant who turns out to be Bazine's mentor Kloda. Bazine is justifiably confused as to Kloda's betrayal, so he explains it all to her in tremendous detail. Gloating, Kloda basically explains that raising her was all part of a master strategy to have a patsy to acquire the mysterious case, and now that she has, he plans to take it and leave her encased in the wax tomb to suffocate and die.

Predictably, this does not happen. Since Kloda trained her to be a master mercenary, Bazine frees herself from the hive before he can even get back to his ship. She catches up with Kloda and kills him, retrieving the case and returning to the Sparrowhawk, after which she and Orri fly off to have more ethically ambiguous adventures.

Bazine never opens the case, so we never learn what’s in it. I can only assume it's Marsellus Wallace's soul.

But why did Kloda’s plan require her to be a patsy at all? The data collection that leads her to the case is done by the slicer Kloda provided, so you might think that Kloda was using her to do the dangerous dirty work, like getting in and out of an apidactyl-infested nut house. But he clearly didn’t care about that, since he went in after her and got out just fine on his own.

Kloda apparently didn’t want Bazine to be the one to make contact with his mysterious client, since his plan was to kill her and make the drop himself, so how was she to be a patsy at all? The only thing that went any different than it would have if Kloda had simply hired Bazine to bring him the case was the minor detail of his not getting the case and instead getting killed. And if he had simply foregone the step of raising an orphan to adulthood and sending her on the job only to tell her that her entire life was a joke and then try to kill her, then he would have been able to successfully complete the job with no difficulty. He could have gotten the data from Orri just as Bazine had done and he clearly had no difficulty getting through the apidactyl hive, so his long game of creating a patsy only to never actually use her as one only served to insure his failure.

It’s possible Kloda wanted someone else to take the job so they could take the fall in case it went South, but that still doesn’t explain why he followed her so closely that he sacrificed his anonymity in order to step out of the shadows and reveal his entire plan. It also doesn’t explain how he could have orchestrated her being hired by the robot, unless he were the one who sent the robot to hire her. But if that were the case, then that would mean that Kloda originally took the job from the client himself, in which case he had no anonymity to begin with and the theater of bringing Bazine into it didn’t accomplish anything. It makes sense that there is no actual client and Kloda was trying to get his hands on the case for his own purposes, which would mean that protecting his identity from outside parties wasn’t as necessary, but it still doesn’t explain why he didn’t just get the case himself, since he did all the same work as Bazine did to locate it and only complicated matters by involving her.

Villainous masterminds almost never make any sense in stories. In Skyfall, Javier Bardem tricks MI6 into capturing him so that he can get to M, but then he escapes and uses secret tunnels under the city to go to a completely different location and attack M, who is nowhere near MI6 headquarters. So couldn't he have gotten to her without letting himself be captured? In Spectre, Blofeld's plan is even more complicated and moronic. He lures Bond to his secret desert hideout, which Bond immediately blows up, when the whole time he clearly had staged the old MI6 building to be the setting for a rather theatrical attempt at blowing Bond up. So why did he lure Bond to his secret base in the middle of nowhere when he had already set a trap for him just across town? Why did Bane spend years building an army in the sewers of Gotham so that he could take over the Stock Exchange? Why did Palpatine send Darth Maul to attack Qui-Gon Jinn on Tatooine when keeping the existence of the Sith a secret was the most crucial element of his plan? Just about the only villain whose master plan makes perfect sense for the story he's in is the Joker in the Dark Knight, and he's supposed to be a chaos-worshiping maniac.

Because saying the villain is "crazy" is no excuse for sloppy plot work.

Maybe more to the story will be revealed when the contents of the case are revealed (if they ever are), but it feels like this story went out of its way to have a plot twist it didn’t need, when the turnaround had no genuine shock value for the reader since we started out not knowing who any of these people were anyway.

Other than that it's a fun story and a nice exploration of the mythology expanded on in the new movie. I could see where continued adventures of Bazine Netal would be worth reading.