Hogan Reviews

While looking for something Star Warsy to read before the next phase of the High Republic I thought that now I’ve read the Thrawn Trilogy what else from the old Legends canon have I always wanted to read? Then I remembered the Darth Bane Trilogy, specifically this first book which depicts the downfall of the Sith and how the infamous “Rule of Two” was created. Obviously who knows how much if any of this book will eventually “count” in the new canon beyond Darth Bane being the man who created the Rule of Two, but who cares? This is far from the first franchise with more than one timeline I like, so let’s take a look at the first bit of Old Republic media on this blog!

When this book talks about depicting the rise of Darth Bane it isn’t kidding as we start all the way at the beginning when he was just a miner called Dessel on the planet Apatros, though admittedly a rather massive and muscular miner due to his species and the physicality involved. The life is miserable, he gets into a fight with a veteran miner and reveals he had a really nasty and abusive father to boot, so the fact he’s subconsciously tapping into the Darkside of the Force isn’t a shocker really, though he is abnormally strong in it. “Dess” sits down for a card game with some visiting Republic troops and unknowingly uses the Force to predict their moves and win a large sum of money, but this also upsets one of the troopers who later tries to attack Dessel in the Apatros mist but ends up stabbed himself. Two other troops witness this and run off, leaving our… I was going to type “anti-hero” but really  “villain we’re following” would be more accurate, with no other choice but to go on the run and where better to go to not be found by the Republic than the camps of their enemies, the Sith?

The original cover, with an admittedly not-all-that-muscular looking Bane. It’s the robes, they hide his glorious figure, or something…

At this point the Republic, with the Jedi in tow, and the Sith, who use both Darkside Force users and generic troops, have been locked in war for hundreds of years. The latter have recently began increasing their ranks of Force users via temples and Masters training multiple apprentices ala the Jedi, all the idea of Kaan, leader of the Brotherhood of Darkness. To combat Kaan’s “Army of Darkness” the Jedi have formed an “Army of Light”, led by respected Jedi Master Hoth, and while plenty of Jedi see the direct fighting to be against their code he still managed to amass quite an army. This is the state the Galaxy is in at the moment and due to not knowing he has Force powers himself Dessel ends up with the generic foot soldiers, though he does at least rise in the ranks due to his natural gift for battle strategy, ruthlessness and his Force-aided precognitions, eventually joining a group called the “Gloom Walkers”. His run in the regular army is a successful one until a specific mission on Phaseera, where he knows he and his men are being sent on a suicide mission so rebels against his commander, leads the attack and achieves the desired result but his way rather than the doomed original plan.

Dessel is arrested when he returns to camp, despite accomplishing his mission, and while he rots away in a tiny dark hole he is discovered by Sith Lord Kopecz, who senses his power and deems it strong enough that he’s willing to take him back to the main Sith training temple on Korriban, reserved for students with the highest likelihood of becoming Lords. On Korriban Dessel takes the Sith name “Bane”, a reference to what he father always used to call him, and soon becomes a favourite of the tutors due to his natural ability. Unlike his fellow students Bane enjoys time in the archives reading about past Sith like Revan, but when Bane kills a student in a duel he begins to doubt himself, made worse when he realises his father’s heart attack was actually caused be him unknowingly using the Force. To try and push himself back into action Bane challenges the top student Sirak to a duel but is beaten within an inch of his life, further crippling his confidence. The Masters, including the head of the Temple Lord Qordis, decide to stop training him and it all looks bleak until a traitorous Jedi called Githany arrives and sees Sirak as her only true threat but knows she isn’t strong enough to defeat him by herself, so after sensing how strong Bane is in the Darkside decides to train him personally. This coincides with Bane reading more old texts and regaining his focus, so he decides to ask the blade master Kas’im for personal tutoring at the same time, never telling either of his masters of the other and therefore keeping them both thinking he’s weaker than them, all while planning his rise.

The Legend re-release cover, similar but a different art style. I like it.

Bane soon defeats Sirak in a rematch and regains favour with the Masters but he begins to see them as going against the true ideals of the Sith thanks to his time in the archives, and when he clashes with Lord Qordis over this he leaves the Temple and heads to the nearby “Valley of the Dark Lords” to find teachings he can actually use, but sadly he finds them devoid of artefacts and any lingering souls of the dead have long-since been cleansed. Bane has no choice but to pretend he’d seen the error of his ways while secretly deeming the current Sith Order a shell of its former self and planning its downfall…

As you can tell the story never stays put long enough to get boring yet gives you just enough to make you interested in some of the new characters as it goes along, plus Bane’s evolution is fun to follow, even though he is in no way presented as a “good guy”, more a “cooler bad guy than the other bad guys”, which is fair enough, really. The writing is great, nice and breezy but by no means dumbed down, and the ending is good and ties things up nicely, to the point where you can tell this wasn’t meant to be a trilogy at the beginning. Another highly regarded “Legends” book that lived up to its hype, perhaps more than the Thrawn books did…

Overall Thoughts:

Some great art of Darth Bane. No idea if its official or not, I just wanted to break up the text a bit more!

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction was a great read, despite our protagonist very much being an antagonist it worked because those he targeted were mostly other Sith that while portrayed as equally evil thanks to following Bane through his life we still find ourselves routing for him over them as we reached the conclusion we knew we’d end with, the start of the 1,000 years of Sith-less space (well, according to the Republic and Jedi, anyway…) Great stuff.

Githany invites Bane down to the archives where Girak and his cronies are waiting but it turns out this was a ploy by the ex-Jedi to kill her rival with Bane’s help (i.e. her original plan) and it works, as Bane decapitates Girak with little issue. Instead of explaining himself to Qordis Bane walks off and steals the Master’s ship and flies off just as Qordis gets word from Master Kaan that he, his fellow Masters and all the students were to deploy themselves to Ruusan, where Kaan and Jedi Master Hoth have been stuck in a stalemate for months. While everyone joins the war proper Bane heads to Lehon, a planet steeped in Darkside history being the planet where possibly the original Darkside users the Rakata were born, and where the deadly Jedi Civil War that saw the destruction of the Star Forge take place (hooray for Knights of the Old Republic lore!) There he once again finds nothing of use… until he stumbles upon a Sith Holocron created by Darth Revan where he details all his knowledge and the idealism of the ancient Sith, literally everything Bane was looking for…

Jedi Master Hoth in his early Jedi armour, I guess. I wonder if the planet was named after him or if that’s just a coincidence?

I would like to point out that at this point we have had quite a few scenes with Hoth and his fellow top-ranked Jedi falling out and we’ve seen that Kaan and Githany have some strong positive connection despite the former losing his mind, and both fear Bane’s potential, especially now he is referring to himself as “Darth Bane”, the Darth title having been retired to stamp out “old ways” of the Sith. But to keep this review under 2,000 words we’ll jump back to Bane, who is soon confronted by his old blade master Kas’im at the “Temple of the Ancients” and the two end up duelling, with Bane winning. At this point Darth Bane knows its his destiny to bring the Sith back to the old ways of “one to wield power, one to crave it”, in other words the Rule of Two, so he comes up with a plan to gather all of the current Sith into one area and take them all out, with a bunch of Jedi to boot. To do this is once again pretends that he wishes to rejoin the order after seeing the error of his ways and so is visited by Githany, who Bane soon susses out is there to kill him via poison lipstick but that’s okay because Bane is thinking of making her his apprentice and lies and deception are good traits in a true Sith. So confident in his powers is Bane that he intentionally kisses her three times before she leaves, but to his horror is underestimated the poison and nearly dies, only sustained by the power of the Darkside imbued by killing an innocent man’s young children in front of his eyes and then eventually killing the man himself once he’d finished despairing (again, Bane is no anti-hero…)

Lord Kaan and his… fancy belt buckle. Classic.

Bane is cured by a local healer and actually leaves him and his young daughter alive because there’d be no purpose in their deaths (awwww…) and heads to Ruusan where he meets with Kaan at last and finds he has a uniquely powerful Force ability to influence minds via his speech, but it’s a power Bane is able to resist, not that he lets him know that. He pretends to be under the command of Kaan and tells him of a dangerous self-sacrificing Force attack known as a Thought Bomb, and then manipulates events so that Kaan’s army is out in the open attacking the Jedi only for a large amount of Lightside reinforcements to arrive thanks to his ordering the Sith blockade to stand down. With no other option Kaan rallies all his men into a cave and begins the ceremony, and just as Hoth and other brave Jedi arrive to stop him Kaan completes the ritual and all the known Force-using Sith, plus a whole bunch of Jedi, are wiped out in one single moment, including Githany who finally snapped out of Kaan’s control and tried to flee but didn’t get far enough. The long war with the Sith is over and the Republic and the Jedi believe the Darkside users are no more, but unbeknownst to the wider galaxy Darth Bane is in fact the sole survivor and he soon has his eyes on a new apprentice…