SPOILER Dark Disciple

I got a quick question that maybe someone can answer for me (couldn't find a non spoiler thread to ask this on). I was going to start reading this book and saw it was based on unproduced episodes of the Clone Wars Series, Should I finish watching the series before reading the book or will it not be to spoilery for the show? Currently I am on season 3 and trying to get through it as quick as possible. Thanks!!!

 

Thank You very much for the good response! I started reading Tarkin instead of Dark Disciple for now and hopefully I can get through Season 5 at least before I'm done with Tarkin!

 

I really enjoyed the book. I don't enjoy the fact that none of the Clone Wars timeline makes sense and that the book compounds that, but I posted about it elsewhere and don't want to beat a dead tauntaun.

 

It actually works quite well. There are many story arcs that are happening concurrently with other arcs. Bearing that in mind next time you watch it chronologically, it should help.

 

As I posted elsewhere it has nothing to do with the concurrent stories. it has to do with the fact that Ahsoka Tano is onscreen acknowledged to age two years despite every timeline saying she came into the way nearly a year in and left the war nearly a year before it ended. And numerous references to the long passage of time in "Dark Disciple," which takes place over well-over a year and yet the Clone Wars continue on for some time with him being allowed back on the battlefield as a general. I'll look for my initial post eventually but there are too many onscreen and onbook mentions of time that literally don't add up.

 

This would be what I'm most interested in, then, when you find your references.

 

So here is my initial post on this from back in August: https://thecantina.starwarsnewsnet....akes-no-sense-in-light-of-dark-disciple.4105/

This was based on the timelines here and here and here, and these facts:

Ahsoka is 14 when she enters the picture. We know that she first appeared about 2 months into the wars. (See here). "Tarkin" says that the Battle of Lola Sayu took placce 1 year, 9 months after Geonosis (so a year and seven months later). The bombing of the Jedi Temple was originally stated to take place "in the last month of the war," and Ahsoka leaves the Order then. (See here.) Even allowing for that to be readjusted following the new canon, the following happened AFTER Ahsoka left the order at 16 or 17: Yoda went on his vision quest; Darth Maul had his miniseries; Obi-Wan went on SEVERAL missions including the one depicted in "Dark Disciple" where he was essentially Quinlan Vos' handler.

More on Ahsoka's aging here and here.

WITHIN Dark Disciple it is made clear that Quinlan and Ventress were a "team" for weeks if not months before he

Spoiler

reveals he's a Jedi to her.

Then they

Spoiler

train

for weeks or months on his mission. Then Quinlan is

Spoiler

held captive and used for propoganda

for a significant amount of time. Then

Spoiler

Ventress is killed

. It would take at LEAST a month then for

Spoiler

someone who fell to the Dark Side to be rehabilitated enough to be trusted to go back in battle as a Jedi general

in time to be referred to in "Revenge of the Sith." I don't have my copy of the book with me, but after reading it the passage of time specifically referred to added up to over a year. A year AFTER Ahsoka left the Jedi order nearly three years after the beginning of the Clone Wars.

That doesn't even take into account the time it would take for Cut Lawquane (story here) to desert following the beginning of the Wars, settle down, get married, and then be found again well before the Wars ended. Or for Boba Fett to begin training as a bounty hunter, be captured AND IMPRISONED by the Senate and then escape and start practicing again. It's a mess even if you say "Lots of things happened concurrently." (And really, not that many battles took place concurrently. Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka appeared in over 3 quarters of the series, and often together.)

So yes, it was a mess before Dark Disciple but could have been dealt with by suspending disbelief. But Dark Disciple makes it a MUCH bigger mess because unlike the TV series, specific passages of time are frequently mentioned. I still don't understand why they couldn't have, with the reboot, enlarged the war by a few years. There is nothing, IIRC, in "Revenge of the Sith" that pinpoints the exact amount of time that has passed, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I finished Dark Disciple last night and thought I would share my thoughts here. For starters, it seems that one of the chief complaints is that this book was used as the medium to kill off a pretty important (and more importantly, pretty beloved) character in the new, canonical, expanded universe - that character being Asajj Ventress. Given that this book's foundation was comprised of the scripts for an 8-episode arc of The Clone Wars, it can safely be presumed that the Powers That Be had planned for all of this to play out on the show for everyone to see. Obviously, The Clone Wars' premature ending precluded this, but it's nice to see some of the story arcs be carried on in other forms of media. Not all shows that suffer a premature demise are so fortunate.

I have only seen the first 1.5 seasons of The Clone Wars, as I generally watch it with my oldest son (aged 6). He got a little spooked by a few episodes, so we've taken a break from it until he feels like coming back to it. I have the gist of some of the storylines that play out in later seasons, but I won't pretend to be a timeline/character/episode expert, as so many of you posters clearly are (experts - not pretenders - just want that to be clear!)

What I did come into this book hoping for was an adventure that captured the spirit and feel of The Clone Wars show. I think that Christie Golden succeeds tremendously in both the beginning and the end - Dark Disciple starts off in a breathtakingly fun fashion. Some books spend a great deal of time setting up plot threads, scenarios, scenes, dialogue and locations, but Golden is brisk in her descriptive terminology unless the situation demands explanation - this is to the benefit of the book as it makes for an action packed, energetic read.

Quinlan Vos is a very fun character to get to know. He's not your average Jedi Master, and given the nature of the plot in this book, that is an exceedingly good thing. None of the Jedi Masters/Council comes off particularly well in Dark Disciple. Indeed, Mace Windu comes across as a colossal jerk at best, and an astoundingly incompetent halfwit at worst. He flipflops between extremes, he seems to deliberately attempt to alienate virtually everyone he talks to, and he has one heck of an itchy trigger finger when it comes to executing people. He - and by extension, the Council - express some very "non-Jedi" methodologies in this book, and the only person who expresses any sort of reservation about this decidedly dark path is, of course, Obi-Wan Kenobi. But even Kenobi seems to exhibit an alarming tendency to just roll with whatever idiotic task the Council decrees be done. "Kill anyone who gets in your way" is one of the most egregious orders he receives (again, if memory serves correct, from Mace Windu).

Now, a disclaimer - it has been pointed out in this thread, and I find it an agreeable perspective, that this book is showcasing the frustration of the Jedi as a whole. That with the war dragging on, the bloodshed being carried out, Dooku and Sidious consistently being several steps ahead of them, they are fraying at the edges and beginning to act out of sorts. If the intent of this book was to show that even without Sidious and Anakin wiping out the Jedi Order, that the Jedi Order was on the verge of wiping itself out, then it did its job extremely well.

But it seems to me that even if a character as idiotic (I held him in low esteem before this book, and even less after) as Mace Windu is thinking this and it's a logical progression for his individual character arc, there are a number of people on that Jedi Council who I think it was extremely out of character to condone actions such as this. Chief among them, Yoda and Obi-Wan.

But that's enough about that - without the silly decisions, we wouldn't have had this book. The partnership of Vos and Ventress starts off very well. Both are very fun characters in that they are quick-witted, bantering rogues. The rapport they develop is believably established, even if the author is pretty liberal with the passage of time in the book. But where the book suffers the most, in my opinion, is the middle, when Vos and Ventress journey off to Dathomir. For one thing, the "training" storyline isn't written in a particularly engaging manner, and I found it a bit of a tough slog. It also felt like we were retreading too much old ground from the old Legends EU - to defeat the Dark Side, you must be the Dark Side, train in the Dark Side, master it, blah blah blah...it seems to me that a Jedi Master such as Vos, who certainly wasn't lacking in confidence, would have the prowess and skill to take on someone like Dooku in combat. Indeed, he would have been far better prepared for such a fight if he were in control of his emotions, you know, acting like a Jedi Master...rather than a raging, emotional, admittedly strong but also admittedly non-levelheaded aggressor.

I had hoped that with the establishment of the new canon, that we would get away from some of the old tropes that dogged the old one, and this was one of the chief issues I had with the Legends EU. Unfortunately, it greatly diminished my enjoyment of Dark Disciple. I think there was a lot that could have been done with the plot of Vos and Ventress taking on a mission to assassinate Dooku together - light and dark, good and somewhere in between, teaming up to take on pure evil. Instead, it became a standard "good Jedi tries to master the dark side to defeat the dark side but ends up turning to the dark side" fare. The nadir of Vos' grand plan never really seemed clearly realized - was he trying to overthrow Sidious with Dooku's help? Was he trying to replace Dooku as Sidious' apprentice? Was he trying to destroy both Sidious and Dooku in an attempt to win the war for the Jedi? It's never clearly outlined, which was irritating.

The story did recover somewhat in its final act, as Golden did a very good job of keeping me guessing whether or not Vos was truly good or evil and at what stage he was which. Ventress' recruitment of a team of bounty hunters was a highlight, and it's gratifying to see Boba Fett stumbling and skinning his knees a bit on the way to becoming the galaxy's best Bounty Hunter - you can see the potential there, but he still has much to learn. The action returned to the form that the beginning of the book had enjoyed, and helped to wash away the memories of the sluggish and deja-vu inspiring middle.

Ultimately, the book does climax with Ventress' demise and Vos' redemption, and those chapters were handled elegantly. What the book did manage to do extremely successfully was complete Asajj Ventress' journey and give her - in my opinion - a very worthy send off. One worthy of a Jedi Master, truthfully. She was definitely the star of this book, and I found her progression to be completely believable. So in light of that and a very enjoyable beginning and end, I found Dark Disciple to be a satisfying read. The very out-of-character actions of the Jedi and the retreaded plot line that comprised the middle of this story prevented it from rating higher on my scale.

My Rating: 6.5/10

My order of preference for the New Canon Books I have read to this stage:

1) Lost Stars
2) Aftermath
3) Dark Disciple
4) A New Dawn

 

Ok, this is an older thread, but I just finished the book and wanted to voice a couple of frustrations, both having to do with lines in ROTS:

1) "My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count." - I know that Dark Disciple isn't the only instance in the CW of Anakin running into Dooku, but now for this line to be true, Anakin would have to double his powers in what I assume to be a couple of weeks time.
2) "Master Vos has moved his troops to Boz Pity." - It seems like quite a stretch for the Jedi Council to put Quinlan back leading troops in the field after everything he did in Dark Disciple. He went pretty dark and I can't imagine Mace Windu trusting Quinlan enough to be a general again so soon.

I always see people freaking out that Yoda's famous "last of the Jedi" line to Luke is going to be retconned or no longer make sense with all the new canon. I wish they would treat everything in all of the movies as absolute truth and not cheapen it or retcon it.

Other than that, I love this book. Wish I could have seen it as fully formed CW episodes (there was never enough animated Quinlan Vos IMO), but I'll take it.

 

What do you mean by that last part with the "last of the jedi?"

 

"When gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be."

I have heard a lot of discussion around that quote should be kept as a true statement. Not ret conned into "from a certain point of view."

From what I've heard, it seems people generally want the new Canon to have Luke as the literal last Jedi at that moment. Not that he's the last jedi because ahsoka, ezra and kazan are still alive but not technically true jedi. I know that legends/Eu had a ton of exceptions.

I just don't want to see any lines from the movies get cheapend or their meanings changed. I feel like dark disciple did that a little for me

 

The good thing is that it was a decision done during the Lucas-Era before Disney bought his company ... so this isn't a case of Disney coming in and chaning everything
..

 

The first half of the book was engaging and great. Then in the second half, despite great storytelling skills, in my eyes - it destroyed itself.

Spoiler: Plot armor and other nonsense

I'm not even that angry at Voss change (although he directly caused Asajj's death, stupid punk) but more so of Asajj as she danced on the edge of unreal and often gone past it. She was totally out of character, especially in the crucial moments when he had Dooku's life in her hands. The real Ventress would not let Vos play with their plan and keep her clueless in the most crucial moments. She would snap, say something like "To hell with you both and your Sith bantha poodoo!" and run her lightsaber through Dooku's black heart. I'm really angry how they've miss handled her character and her demise - that was NOT realistic character arc for Asajj Ventress. That was the prime example making the stuff up because plot "demands it", no matter if it made sense or not. Christie, Story Group, you blew it up on this one.

 

I've already read the novel. It was a disaster. Ventress went from being a strong, ruthless female character to a "housewife" kind of woman. She was more like Padme at the end than the Ventress we all know and love from TCW, and frankly that disturbs me. It's hard to imagine a raspy, bald-headed murderer with dual red lightsabers and an appetite for destruction saying 'When are we going to settle down together, Quinlan?"

 

Finally got around to reading this since I've finished TCW. As I understand it, this plot was meant to be part of that series, but the show was canceled before it was completed. So...does that mean that Ventress was already "slated" to die in canon and that couldn't be changed? More on that later.


Anyway, as for the book's premise: even though in TCW the Jedi Council was obviously becoming morally unmoored (sorry, couldn't help it ), the idea that they would send a single Jedi to assassinate someone--even Dooku--seems absurd to me. Not even a strike team? Just send a lone guy off to do murder of one of the strongest Dark Siders in GFFA and expect him to come back clean and rosy-cheeked? I know, Palpatine, blinded by the Dark Side, etc. etc. But the Jedi Council in this book just seems too far gone. (Except for Obi-Wan, of course--that's why we keep him around! But even he is such a good little soldier that he obeys his ridiculous orders with just a token protest.) But, in light of what they did to Ahsoka, I guess I can accept it with an eye roll and move on.


I liked Vos tremendously in TCW and found Ventress intriguing once Dooku ditched her. So the idea of them teaming up sounded interesting. (Obviously they were going to fail to kill Dooku because we already know how he meets his end.) I liked the "getting to know you phase" of Vos and Ventress's relationship. But try as I might, I just couldn't buy them as lovers. The author just didn't sell me on Ventress really being that degree of vulnerable. Vos, yes, Ventress, no. I can't really articulate why, but I just wasn't feeling it. Maybe because I thought TCW Ventress and Dark Disciple Ventress were actually a bit different, and I kept seeing TCW Ventress instead of the one the author presented? I don't know.


I don't really get either why Vos felt he needed to follow Ventress's idea that he needed to do all this Dark Side indoctrination stuff. He's a Jedi Master. He kind of knows his way around the Force. Maybe he needs the Dark Side to kill someone in cold blood? Well then...his own Council sent him to assassinate Dooku and they seem fond of executing even their own without trial, so obviously he can just tap into the Jedi Dark Side That No One Acknowledges Is There, no new training necessary. (Yes, that was sarcasm, but I'm partly serious.) I guess Vos had his doubts he was fit for the job, and he was, er, highly open to suggestions from Ventress .


And then there's Ventress's sacrfice. Which, yes, was a "good" ending for her, and a nice completion of her own redemption arc. Now, I really like Vos, but if someone had to die sacrificially, why not him? He'd get a nice redemption too. Ventress is, in my opinion, a lot more intriguing because of the implications of her by-her-own-bootstraps return from the Dark Side--not, perhaps, to the Light, but at least as morally neutral and perhaps "gray" in terms of the Force. I'd hate for everyone to be Gray, but having a few Grey Side users would be very interesting, I think. Why couldn't we explore that more? Plus then we'd avoid the old "girl dies to save boy from himself" routine.


Well, anyway, this has been largely negative, but it's not as if I hated the book. It was a fun ride and I enjoyed it as long as I allowed myself a few facepalms here and there. I really liked how we were kept guessing about whether Vos had succumbed to the Dark Side or not. But TBH, overall it's hard for me to take too seriously.

 

-

 

I finished the audiobook of this this morning. I very much enjoyed the story, but got too many awkward flashbacks of Anakin and Padme when Vos would stroke Ventress's face (or whatever) and flirt with her. When the story would go towards "lovey dovey" between the two I thought it was weak and cringey.

Was certainly sad to see Asajj go, but all characters must have an end.

 

Darkhorse Vos was always the best Vos. Just sayin.

 

I mean they pretty much just send Obi-Wan by himself to deal with General Grievous in ROTS, so at least they’re consistent.