欧宝娱乐

Stars: 2
Re-read: Leaning no, definitely not high on the list.
Recommend to: People who have already read the upper level EU books.

This series didn't live up to my memories of reading it in middle and high school. I think I must have just been wowed by reading so much about Boba Fett. Unfortunately for the series, it was about two books too long. It was somewhat infuriating how much Jeter would repeat things that are either easy to figure out or things that we've already read about over and over again. To make things worse, he also will take 20 pages to describe a conversation or events that should take 2 pages. It's like listening to a politician talk; he kept writing page after page without any substance. If Jeter had really condensed his writing and removed all of the repetition, there was probably a somewhat solid novel in this trilogy. It still was moderately entertaining, but it was a long way off from the masterpiece the teenage version of me thought it was.

The best part of the book is Jeter's characterization of Fett. It is far from perfect, but it looks really good when you compare it to what Disney did to him. Disney took a vicious bounty hunter who cared only about credits and getting his prey and made him into an incompetent wanderer who was mostly interested in being a nice guy and taking care of people.

The other characters were a disappointment. (view spoiler)[When you watch ESB, you get the impression that the bounty hunters assigned to hunt Han Solo are the best of the best. That is why they are given a task directly from Darth Vader. Would he be meeting with losers? No. Jeter made most of the bounty hunters suck though. He leaves IG-88 alone, and doesn't do any harm to 4-LOM.
He makes Zuckuss incompetent and timid. Dengar is portrayed as a second-rate bounty hunter and pretty stupid. Bossk is somewhat competent, but he is very dumb and simply driven by his rage and anger. Boba Fett maneuvers and manipulates them all with absolute ease. These characters needed to be impressive, not a joke to be constantly abused by Boba Fett to make him seem so much smarter and better than the rest.

Neelah never stopped being insufferable since the beginning of the second book. Kuat of Kuat was interesting for the first 1.5 books, but it turns out this was all started because of his ridiculously stupid plan and he had been manipulated this entire time by Kodir. Kodir comes out of nowhere to be the mastermind of the series, and is easily defeated because Neelah learned martial arts from watching Boba Fett. Kodir had already been shown to be an incredible fighter. She would be expert level, but Neelah disarms her with complete ease...because she watched Boba Fett.

A big missed opportunity was the end of the plot-line between Mubat and Balancesheet. I think it would've been really cool to see some kind of physical battle between the two. Maybe have Balancesheet take over some of the nodes and they overpower Mubat. Instead, Mubat is basically brain-damaged when Slave I crashed into his web, so he doesn't even put up a fight. Teenage me thought the character was awesome. Adult me thinks it had a lot of potential that went unfulfilled. (hide spoiler)]

This book was plagued with absurd events and decisions. The most egregious of which was (view spoiler)[the revelation that the entire plot was dependent on the ridiculous spy droid with fake Xizor pheremones at Luke's moisture farm. Kuat of Kuat had his plan to frame Xizor for the murder of Luke's aunt and uncle, but the problem is nobody would've ever believed it. There are so many problems. First, how did Kuat of Kuat know to have the droid there? I don't think this is ever explained. The droid was there when Luke comes back and sees his dead relatives, so this is a day at most after it happened. Why would Kuat even know about these events, not to mention be in a position to acquire this video? Even if that made sense, why would anyone take seriously that this droid just so happened to have these high quality olfactory sensors capable of sensing Falleen pheremones? Then, why would Xizor be involved with the storm troopers at all, especially ones working so closely with his rival, Darth Vader? Is anyone going to believe that these stormtroopers were taking orders from Prince Xizor? Or are we supposed to think that Xizor was there and knew the significance of Luke? (hide spoiler)]. Sadly, this insanity was the foundation of the plot for the entire trilogy.

Jeter completely goes off the rails in the action as well. The amount of damage and environments ships and people can take when they are main characters is beyond comprehension. A few examples: (view spoiler)[The worst by far was how much damage Slave I was able to take and still function. Fett gets the stormtrooper, and Slave I is already in really bad shape. It is somewhat of a question if it will survive hyperspace. So he makes it to Mubat's web, but Xizor is waiting.
Xizor gets a straight shot on Slave I, doing tremendous damge. The ship is literally breaking apart.
Large pieces are coming off of it. Multiple direct hits strike it. He seals himself in the cockpit.
Then he crashes into Mubat's web. For some reason, this doesn't do any harm to his ship.
After negotiating with Xizor, he leaves the web....back in Slave I. It was questionable if the ship could make a jump to hyperspace before. Now it was devastated in a space battle and is literally in pieces, but he is going to somehow travel and get it fixed.

Another example how much exposure to vacuum people can withstand. I can stomach Boba Fett having some resistance due to his armor, but multiple other people gets exposed to hard vacuum multiple times with very mild effect. When Neelah flies away from the remnants of Mubat's web, she destroys the transfer point between the web and the ship, and the web is being actively destroyed. Neelah opened a major hole in the wall when she flew away. But somehow, Boba Fett grabs Dengar and flies them THROUGH OPEN SPACE into the open hatch of the Hound's Tooth.
Dengar did get pretty messed up though; he had a bloody nose. There are a couple of other times that I don't remember specifics on where you read it and just think, "Why is the author acting like they wouldn't all be dead right now?" (hide spoiler)]



Other complaints:
- He describes what hard merchandise (the bounty a hunter is searching for) is about 100 times. It really got old.
- I don't think Jeter understands space, particularly in the SW set of rules. One example is when Boba Fett says they can't make a long hyperspace jump, because that would give the people after him long enough to find him. Nobody knew where he was though, and you can't intercept someone in hyperspace. Being in hyperspace for a longer period of time would present no danger at all in terms of the likelihood of someone finding you. I've also been very confused about Mubat's web. I know ships have been incorporated into it, but I don't believe they act as a source of propulsion. Jeter mentions a couple of times how Mubat maneuvered his web to a certain place, and specifically a different star system, but it doesn't appear that Mubat has a way of moving his web at anything close to light-speed. It just doesn't make any sense.
- Good lord, why does the entire universe know about the Battle of Endor before it happened? It's like in the earlier books when people apparently knew about Obi-Wan being a jedi living on Tatooine or knew about how important events on Tatooine were early on during the events of ANH. But people all through this book discuss how a battle is being set up in Endor and both sides are gathering their fleets. It makes me wonder if Jeter watched the movies at all. Everyone knows there is going to be a major battle at Endor, where the Emperor has his top secret weapons project? Why were the rebels surprised when the Empire's fleet shows up? Everyone else in the galaxy knew that was coming apparently.
- Another thing that isn't widely known in the EU but Jeter acts like is common knowledge is Prince Xizor's background. In Shadows of the Empire, we learn that Xizor's family was wiped out in a medical test by Vader. This is why he hates Vader. But Xizor destroyed all of the evidence of this, so that nobody knows about his quest for revenge. Apparently, this was common knowledge to people in this story.
- Like the other books in the trilogy, the cover is a complete mess. The cover has six stormtroopers, Emperor Palpatine, one of his royal guards, Bossk, and Boba Fett. A single stormtrooper is in the entire book. Emperor Palpatine is a very background character, and I don't think he even is in a scene in this book. It seems absurd that his face is the most prominent aspect of the cover. Palpatine's royal guards aren't in it at all. Only Bossk and Boba Fett are prominent characters. I just don't understand it.
- This one is mind-boggling. (view spoiler)[Kuat Drive Yards is essentially taken over by...a small group of obsolete and barely held together Y-Wings. What the heck is going on? Do they not have defenses? Could the rebellion have seriously just strolled in with a handful of ships and stolen everything and they just didn't think about it? And it gets worse because apparently, the Empire doesn't even respond. The y-wings just hang out and wait. And then we see that KDY has some incredibly powerful ships in this same book. Earlier in the series, Kuat of Kuat himself carpet bombs Tatooine for a chance of killing Boba Fett. Kodir chases our main character in a very powerful ship within pages of a handful of decrepit Y-wings taking over the most important shipyards in the entire galaxy. But Kuat decides to blow up the most important thing in his life, the ship yards because...these little ships were going to take over and Kodir had some stupid little plot to overthrow him. So he blows up the yards, except they apparently did a terrible job and Boba Fett single-handedly piloted out a Star Destroyer and messed up their explosives. I guess the best engineers in the universe didn't put in any redundancy. It was also completely pointless because Kodir was immediately shown to be a traitor and taken down. (hide spoiler)]
- There was a scene that made me cringe really hard. (view spoiler)[Bossk doesn't have what Boba Fett wants on him, so Boba Fett tells him that he transferred him the credits for the information.
Then he tells Bossk that he has finally won. Fett leaves the cantina, and Bossk is blocked by a wall of other patrons, who seriously start doing the slow-clap and are all congratulatory to him. This is in spite of the fact that Bossk has been made a fool this entire trilogy. And even in this book, he is treated with complete derision by even the bottom feeders of Tatooine. Now, he has all this respect because he just happened to get something that Boba Fett wanted? He didn't even really win in any sense. But Bossk, whom Jeter has made into a complete joke, now gets his redemption and finally "beats" Boba Fett.
(hide spoiler)]





First 2 reads: 4 stars