Star Wars: The High Republic – Light of the Jedi is the novel that formally kicks off the new and hugely ambitious High Republic multimedia storytelling initiative, but it just may be doing something else sneakily in the background: setting up Darth Plagueis, the Dark Lord of the Sith who would, one day, go on to teach – and be murdered by – Darth Sidious, the main villain of the Skywalker Saga.
The High Republic epoch starts some 200 years before all of the current (and most of the upcoming) Star Wars films and television series, and it depicts the antithesis of those stories: a galaxy at peace, an Old Republic that is idealistic and prosperous, and a Jedi Order that mostly lives out in the field, being a part of the galactic community that it has sworn to guide and defend. Unfortunately, audiences have already been made well aware that this golden period is doomed to end in the long slide toward deterioration and collapse, as the Galactic Senate becomes corrupt and the Jedi become insular, priming for the return of their mortal enemies, the Sith.
But beyond one or two tantalizing clues or innuendos, the ancient Jedi enemies are nowhere to be seen in the pages of Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi. Instead, readers are introduced to a brand-new High Republic villain, Marchion Ro, a man with a long and mysterious past and a seeming blood vendetta against the Jedi, who have apparently afflicted his family before. Being the symbolic leader of the Nihil, a band of savage space pirates and marauders that hitherto have been too small to show up on the Republic’s radar, Marchion concludes that it’s only a matter of time before Supreme Chancellor Lina Soh and the Jedi Council start to close in on him, stripping him – and the rest of his “people” – of their way of life.
Ro, then, begins a vast and hugely complicated plot that will transform his Nihil, preparing them for the war that is to come, and awaken his true nature, allowing him to shed the placid, spoiled life of a figurehead and transform into the cunning, calculating, bloodthirsty strategist that he always secretly was. Even at this early juncture of his overarching plan – remember that The High Republic is designed to run for some five or six years – one can’t help but compare the convoluted, multifaceted scheme with that of Lord Sidious’s throughout all nine films of the Skywalker Saga. All of which begs the question: is Marchion Ro secretly Darth Plagueis, much like how Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine concealed the true identity of Darth Sidious? There are several hints buried in the text that would seem to point in this direction.
Decades before the events of Star Wars: The High Republic – Light of the Jedi, Mari San Tekka uses her strange, probably-Force-fueled power to locate special routes through hyperspace to help her family come to fame and prominence, establishing them as the dominant hyperspace prospectors of the galaxy – and, thereby, providing a familial lineage to their distant relative, Lor San Tekka, the old explorer who helps locate Jedi Master Luke Skywalker during the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. At some point, an individual by the name of Asgar Ro takes Mari as his own, using her pathways that are otherwise computationally impossible to help transform a low-level group of Outer Rim pirates into a sizable, menacing force – and rendering himself as their leader.
That band of marauders is called the Nihil, and Asgar becomes their Eye, but it is only a symbolic position as opposed to a substantive one. Eventually, this comes to an end with a blade in the back – one of the actual, on-the-ground commanders wishes to eliminate him in a power grab. Marchion Ro, Asgar’s son, instead assumes his father’s mantle and role and is, at first, content to merely toe the line, collecting his share of the plunder and maintaining the status quo. This is until the Republic's Chancellor Soh begins the effort to consolidate the Republic’s presence in the Rim in the form of the Starlight Beacon space station. Seeing the writing on the wall, Marchion decides it’s time to remake the ragtag group into an actual fighting force, with himself firmly positioned as their grand general.
The impossibly complex plan starts with Mari San Tekka, who is well over a century old now and who is kept alive in a type of medical cocoon. Still believing she's prospecting – and making money – for her family, Ro has her deliberately chart a “Path” for one of the Nihil vessels that lands it directly in the way of the ship, a massive cargo freighter called the Legacy Run (itself a hundred years of age) that is transporting supplies and settlers to a new life out on the wild frontiers of space. The Run is torn to pieces after it attempts to avoid the collision, and its parts – some of which still contain living, breathing passengers – emerge from hyperspace all across the region, shredding through space stations and ships and slamming into worlds and moons. Billions of sentients die.
In the chaos that ensues, Marchion provides his people with projections of exactly when and where the remaining remnants of the Legacy Run will drop into realspace, with instructions to exploit the information for gain (blackmailing one planetary governor, for instance). In the process, the Nihil intrinsically become linked with the Great Hyperspace Disaster, and the Republic predictably marshals a defense fleet to eliminate the threat – which, in turn, helps to unite the disorganized ravagers in common cause. Ro is only too happy to step up to meet the sudden needs of the moment – much like Supreme Chancellor Palpatine does in the unexpected start of the Clone Wars centuries later – unveiling a new usage for their unique hyperspace Paths as he does so: combat, which throws the traditional war playbook out the window and demonstrates the true potential of a unified, cohesive Nihil.
While Disney and Lucasfilm may have shown a propensity for hewing to certain elements or characters that were originally established in Star Wars Legends stories, that original, now-defunct version of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, they have also demonstrated a willingness for going their own way, “overturning” classic storylines. Odds are good that Darth Plagueis may very well go the way of the latter – meaning that his backstory, and even his previously established species of Muun, could be wiped clean (it’s never established what type of alien Marchion Ro is in Light of the Jedi, but it’s very obviously not that). This, in turn, could mean that Lord Plagueis will get some sort of grand introduction somewhere in The High Republic – and Lucasfilm and the architects of the epic multimedia initiative could even attempt to position him upfront, right before the eyes of audiences right from day one.
This isn’t as big a leap as it may at first sound. With the upcoming Disney+ series Star Wars: The Acolyte chronicling the rise of the dark side of the Force during the nadir of the High Republic, it has the golden opportunity to show how the Dark Lords of the Sith maneuvered themselves into the position to enact their revenge, slaughter the Jedi Order, and reinstate their interstellar empire. By having the centuries-spanning High Republic transition from a time of peace and prosperity to the secret rise of Plagueis and his newly appointed apprentice, Darth Sidious, it would strongly parallel the narrative structure that George Lucas himself enacted with the prequel trilogy.
Another parallel – or “rhyming,” as Lucas liked to put it – would be Marchion Ro hiding his Sith identity for the majority of the story, only revealing it at just the right, climactic moment, in the throes of some type of victory or another, just as his student would do over the course of Episodes I through III. And just what that victory could be is already established in the very last scene of Light of the Jedi: a Force vision that’s set in a sickly purple light and that shows “horribly mutilated” Jedi fighting battles they can’t win and fleeing in open terror from “awful things that lived in the dark.” The prophecy ends with an image of “evil, horror, sweeping across the galaxy like the tide” – which could very well be another rhyme with the ravages of the Clone Wars and the establishment of the Galactic Empire during the Skywalker Saga.
And then there’s a mysterious device that Ro brandishes, a rod which has also long been part of his family and whose description sounds very much like some sort of ancient Sith relic (lest that sound too far-fetched, Light of the Jedi introduces another Jedi who wields a recovered kyber crystal that was plucked from an old Sith lightspear and purged of its red-hued misery and pain). This weapon is covered in bizarre symbols – such as screaming faces – and emits a purple glow, which only seems to seal the Sith deal.
There are many instances in the novel where it could seem like Ro might have a secret Sith identity. Whether or not Marchion Ro turns out to be Darth Plagueis in disguise, fans of The High Republic have plenty of tantalizing clues to keep them guessing, and a thrilling storyline even without that connection to the Star Wars trilogies.
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