“Rings”
Creative Staff:
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Steven Cummings, Victor Olazaba, Wayne Faucher
Colors: GUIRU-eFX
Letterer: VC’s Travis Lanham
What They Say:
THE ENDGAME GAMBIT APPROACHES! The final moves of Lady Qi’ra’s great game have begun. The Sith have been summoned, and the Fermata Cage will open… For Qi’ra, it’s all or nothing.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment was a bit of a hard read as a case of trying to get a lot accomplished quickly and catching people up that may have missed elements from some of the books. It’s also a point where it all just feels like a bit too much, which didn’t make this a high-priority book for me to keep up with. Charles Soule is one of my favorite Star Wars writers but this is just hard stuff at times to deal with because it’s operating at a compressed rate right out of the gate. It’s stacked with things and dialogue but at the same time doesn’t feel like it accomplished much. Steven Cummings along with Victor Olazaba and Wayne Faucher have done a good bit of Star Wars in the past so a lot of this looks good but there are a lot of areas where it also has a kind of basic look, especially some of the Imperial ships, and that just gives it a lighter and almost rushed look. And with a sizable cast of characters to it, there’s a lot to get in there and it just doesn’t feel as cohesive.
As we hit the penultimate issue here we get a lot of events moving forward but it’s all about the setup for the finale more than anything else. It’s getting all the right pieces in place and essentially getting ready to say goodbye to things – depending on how it all goes. Will this be the end of Qi’ra? We know it’s not for Palpatine or Vader but her fate is up in the air. Her goal is still the same in trying to eliminate the Sith Lords and using the Fermata Cage to do so. That has her pushing the Archivist, who is defenseless at this point, to find a place to operate it once again. With the Cage drawing on all life around it if no Sith energy is available being a dangerous thing, she ends up back at the Amaxine Station in order to pull this off. But the problem is that even then it doesn’t give her any defense against Vader or Palpatine who will sense when it opens as it unleashes the Sith energy and she’ll be attacked quickly. It’s a decent little conundrum to deal with.
The problem for Qi’ra is that she’s burned up almost all of her external resources and the few that are still out there aren’t interested in throwing their lives onto the pyre here, even if they sense that she’s close to victory. So this forces her hand to bring her remaining fleet out of hiding and protect the station directly and attack the Imperial ships. While she does leave Cadeliah behind with a message for her to be seen later, there are a lot of foot soldiers that are still following Qi’ra so we get a nice “hidden” fleet that now gets to attack. It does leave you in that moment where you say things would have worked better if they had thrown in with the Rebellion and could have stopped untold suffering, but this is what vengeance is and how it blinds people like Qi’ra, even as methodical and intense as they are in their planning and design. It has a good larger scale to all of it and a sense of a lot of power in the mix, though it all comes down to our Sith Lords as they finally board the station.
In Summary:
This installment has some decent stuff in showing us how Vader and Palpatine operate together as he gets Vader to train with him for a bit while exercising his complete control over his apprentice. There’s a lot of dialogue in this issue as we see how Qi’ra wraps up events with Cadeliah and her attempt to draw in more to help protect the Archivist, but it all leads to the larger action sequence. I’m curious to see less the finale and more the fallout from it with who has survived and where they go to ground after this when you look at where various elements show up in a post-ROTJ world. It’s a mixed series at best that I think just gave too much into the pressure of a sprawling event that never had clear enough direction or characters to sustain it. It has its moments but those go only so far.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: March 1st, 2023
MSRP: $3.99
