Part 1: Heir to the Empire
This May 4th, I decided to put the Thrawn trilogy in my reading queue. I’ve read them before, but the last time was sometime before Disney put out The Last Jedi. Once upon a time, as a young Star Wars fan, I thought that the prequels had completely overturned a lot in Star Wars novels written before The Phantom Menace.
Now that I’ve finished re-reading Heir to the Empire, I’m left thinking that I really didn’t have the proper perspective at the time. In broad strokes, I think the Thrawn trilogy fits better with the prequels than the Disney sequels do. It could have been a better movie.
The obvious caveats
The first two things to take note of are the basic logistical issues of scale and timing as they relate to Star Wars movies.
Novels are big. A faithful adaptation of a novel can fill an entire season of television. Heir to the Empire is about four hundred pages long, enough sheer content for a trilogy of feature-length films. A good screenplay version for the big screen would have to cut at least two thirds of the content to fit. This is tricky because Heir to the Empire is intricate. Zahn wove a complex plot and tried to keep each scene relevant.
The Thrawn trilogy takes place only a few years after Return of the Jedi, but the Star Wars sequel movies came out quite recently. The three main stars of the original cast would have been too old to reprise their roles in a movie set in the Thrawn trilogy. Recasting existing iconic Star Wars characters would probably have been more difficult than casting brand new characters, and the alternative to recasting (digitally youthened versions of Hamill, Ford, and Fischer) would have also been a bit troublesome.
Additionally, the books are already out. Curiosity helped bring at least some fans to the theaters for the Disney sequel trilogy, but there wouldn’t be many surprises in store if fans already knew the movies would be an adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy.
The audience cares about the characters.
Let’s take a closer look at the original cover art for Heir to the Empire. See the three big faces? Luke, Leia, and Han Solo. It’s the same trio of main characters as the original trilogy.
The Phantom Menace features Obi-Wan Kenobi, R2D2, C3P0, Yoda, and Palpatine. The central figure of the prequel trilogy is Anakin Skywalker, later known as Darth Vader. Most existing fans could not simply walk away from a new story about characters they were already invested in.
Who was new in The Phantom Menace? Qui-Gon Jinn (Obi-Wan’s mentor), Padme (who most fans guessed would be Luke and Leia’s mother), Jar-Jar Binks, and various villains the audience wasn’t supposed to get emotionally attached to (e.g., Darth Maul). A variety of more minor characters, many with close personal links to original trilogy characters.
The most notable exception to the pattern of major characters being either closely tied to the original trilogy or villains is Jar-Jar Binks. He was also widely disliked, called obnoxiously unnecessary… and some fans even theorize he was actually a too-cleverly-concealed villain.
To a lot of older fans, Jar-Jar as a hero didn’t quite fit.
In The Force Awakens, the main cast is mostly like Jar-Jar: Heroes without a close connection to the characters of the previous movies. Out of the six characters with the most screen time, one is a villain (Kylo Ren). One gets killed off (Han Solo). The other four (Rey, Finn, BB-8, and Poe) all faced the same uphill battle for acceptance that Jar-Jar did (with more success). It’s similar in The Last Jedi (with Rose Tico replacing BB-8 in the top six, and Luke Skywalker getting both a dramatic personality change and dying off).
Timothy Zahn didn’t make that mistake. He rationed his introduction of new major characters carefully, casting them as antagonists for their first appearance. A fan of the original trilogy could enjoy a Zahn-inspired Episode VII even if they reflexively disliked all unfamiliar characters. And they would probably only notice five significant new characters.
The first is practically a flat stock character (Captain Palleaon, Imperial officer). The second (Talon Karrde) is the head of a smuggling operation, the kind of character that Han and Lando would have associated with before aligning with the Rebellion. The third (Mara Jade) has a close personal tie to Emperor Palpatine and a powerful preexisting loathing for Luke Skywalker. The fourth has little more than a cameo appearance (Joruus C’boath) — significant, but short.
Grand Admiral Thrawn
Grand Admiral Thrawn is the main antagonist and the most significant new character in the book. He pushes the boundaries as a non-human with high Imperial rank, and as a Sherlock Holmes-like genius with a near-mystical ability to divine insights from art. The distinctive nature of Thrawn as a new character was why the books became known as the Thrawn trilogy.
This brings us to one of the big differences between the Thrawn trilogy and the Disney sequels: The Thrawn trilogy is a contest of cleverness, driven by characters who actively try to outsmart each other, work together to solve problems, and have consistent motives. The Disney trilogy is driven by transparently bad decisions by both villains and heroes, on both the small scale and the large scale.
Heir to the Empire picks up where Return of the Jedi left off.
At the end of Return of the Jedi, the galaxy is at a very optimistic point. The Emperor has been defeated. The second attempt at building a Death Star has been stymied. Celebrations have broken out across the galaxy, even in the heart of the Empire. In Heir to the Empire, the Rebel Alliance has been reorganized into the New Republic, trying to recruit former Imperial worlds and fill the power vacuum left by the Emperor. Nothing that an educated viewer wouldn’t expect to happen.
In The Force Awakens, the New Republic has risen and declined and its successor polity — the Empire-like First Order — has already managed to build a new and improved Mark III version of the Death Star. With the failure of the New Republic to address this rising threat, a third new faction (the paramilitary Resistance organization) has emerged and needs to be explained.
This is an enormous series of large scale political developments that happen entirely off-screen before the action happens. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the New Republic doesn’t exist yet; partly through The Force Awakens, it has effectively ceased to exist. This is an entire trilogy’s worth of politics shoved unceremoniously into the background.
There is no similar gap elsewhere in the saga, not even between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy. Between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, the Empire consolidates its power and continues construction of the Death Star, Darth Vader hunts for stray Jedi, and the Rebel Alliance expands and fights as best as it can. The first truly major new political development after the creation of the Empire and initial seeding of the Rebel Alliance is the dissolution of the Senate — which happens in A New Hope.
The discrepancies between the prequels and Heir to the Empire are mostly quite minor.
Most would amount to filing off serial numbers and changing a few names. When Lucas filmed the prequels, he chose to come up with new ships, aliens, and worlds instead of using ones developed in the expanded universe.
Heir to the Empire and the rest of the Thrawn trilogy are full of “old EU” ships, aliens, and worlds; they would mesh better with the prequels by simply using ships, aliens, and worlds featured in the prequels where appropriate, with no substantive effect on the story whatsoever. For example, if Zahn had written his trilogy after the prequels, he would probably have referred to “Kaminoan cloning cylinders” instead of “Spaarti cloning cylinders.”
In some cases, the prequels and the tie-ins to the prequels have helped. It’s much easier for audiences to believe that the Noghri owe Darth Vader for his good deeds after audiences have seen the heroic side of Anakin Skywalker developed in films and television series. Something closely resembling Zahn’s slave circuits shows up in The Phantom Menace. The prequels provide a solid motivation for there to be a legacy of distrust for droids with too much autonomy, as well.
The major exception is the ysalamiri — arboreal who somehow block access to the Force. Force-blocking creatures were a controversial introduction when Zahn wrote his trilogy, much as midichlorians would be controversial when Lucas came out with The Phantom Menace. For Heir to the Empire itself, these force-blocking abilities are of minor direct importance, especially after Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith helped show Jedi to be fallible and potentially vulnerable to surprise attacks.
If memory serves me correctly, however, things may get trickier later, so stay tuned while I re-read Dark Force Rising and write the sequel to this article.