Darth Vader (2017) 9: The Dying Light: Part 3
What is it ? : Vader arrives at the Jedi Temple standing on the back of a speeder, his cape flowing in the wind, and he orders the Clone Troopers stationed there to secure the building.
Inside Jocasta Nu is confronting the Grand Inquisitor, and discovers he was a Jedi, calling him a traitor, but he reveals that now the Jedi are the traitors. As they fight he tells her how the Jedi took him as a child and denied him knowledge from the library, and now the order has been destroyed no one can stop him, and he says that he used to dream of striking her down, something that would be easy because she wasn't made a librarian because of her fighting skills.
But as he moves to strike her down, Vader parries his blow. Nu takes the opportunity to pull books from the shelves and knock the Grand Inquisitor unconscious, and then she accesses the systems and deletes all the books. Vader follows her into the hidden archive, and the droid protecting it scans him and identifies him as Anakin Skywalker. He hurls his lightsaber at the droid, and it catches it, saying it is programmed in all the lightsaber techniques of the Jedi.
While Vader punches the droid into scrap, Nu grabs a weapon from the shelves of the archive, and loads it with her lightsaber.
She blasts at Vader with a powerful energy beam from the Lightsaber Rifle, but Vader parries it with his retrieved saber, as Nu declares it is her turn. . . .
High Points : So as I thought, Palpatines contradictory orders between the Inquisitors and Vader means they come into conflict, although the Grand Inquisitor gets knocked out extremely easily by Jocasta Nu, so I guess we'll come back to that conflict later.
But a throwaway moment I really liked was when the Guardian Droid recognises Vader as being Anakin, a droid programmed with the bio patterns of all the Jedi so it can scan and authorise access to it's vault, does it's job and recognises Vader as a Jedi Master, Anakin Skywalker, who wasn't granted access to the vaults, which is something else they denied him as a member of the Jedi Council. So it really seems as if he was onto something being annoyed at their reluctance to grant him the privileges of his rank, so him and the Grand Inquisitor seem to really have not been trusted as Jedi.
Low Points : But while I was impressed by the droid recognising Anakin, something which makes total sense, the idea that they could program droids with all the lightsaber techniques of the Jedi, so much so it can easily grab Vaders thrown lightsaber, really makes little sense. And if it was possible, why weren't the Jedi fielding an army of lightsaber wielding droids during the clone wars.
And the Grand Inquisitor getting knocked out by some books? I know the story needed him out of the way for Nu and Vader to have a moment, but he's supposed to be a skilled warrior, trained to defeat Jedi, but his one weakness is . . . books.
Oh, and I know the Jedi Archive is supposed to be high tech, so rather than have actual books, they're electronic books. But why do you still need to find the correct book instead of searching an electronic archive like the internet, when apparently these books can all be remotely deleted. You allow remote access for deletion, but not for reading and retrieval? The Jedi definitely prized restricting access to their knowledge over the ability to access and use that knowledge.
So what do you really think ? : While this issue has it's moments, once again it moves very slowly, there's lots of conversation between The Grand Inquisitor and Jocasta Nu, as he slowly explains why he hates her, and why he betrayed the Jedi Order because they didn't trust him with their knowledge. I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve here, I'm guessing to bring The Grand Inquisitor further into conflict with Vader, he wasn't trusted with information by the Jedi, and now here he is, not getting trusted with the full story by Vader and Palpatine. Which might be an interesting story, but we know that he's still Grand Inquisitor nearly 20 years later for the events of Star Wars: Rebels. So while it might be interesting, we know it's not going to come to anything.
Final Words : While it's a really interesting idea to arm Jocasta Nu with a Lightsaber Rifle, so she can combat Vader at range, turning a librarian into a far more effective combatant. I just get the feeling that the Rifle is here for the cliffhanger ending of this issue, and it's going to be gone within a page or two of the next issue, so has just been introduced to create some minor risk to Vader before we get on with the story next issue.
Score : 7.5/10
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