Warning: this article contains spoilers for Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, which is available in stores now. You can check out an exclusive excerpt from the novel here.
There has been plenty of time for Star Wars fans to vent their thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker, and Shadow of the Sith comes when the ground has cooled enough to explore the story further. One of the film’s major criticisms involves just how chaotic the plot is. It had the daunting task of not just wrapping up the largely unplanned sequel trilogy, but also bringing an end to one of the most iconic series in cinema history. Many Star Wars fans would agree it's not entirely successful in either goal.
This new book’s role is to flesh out several major plot threads referenced in Episode IX, namely Luke and Lando’s hunt for Ochi of Bestoon, and that assassin’s hunt for Rey and her parents. It’s an ambitious idea, and author Adam Christopher’s adventure crisscrosses the saga to create a story with a scope as vast as the film that spawned it.
Read on for a breakdown of what exactly is revealed in Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, how it helps to fill in some of the many gaps in The Rise of Skywalker, and why the book still shows some of the weaknesses of Disney's current Star Wars strategy.
Rey's Mysterious Parents Revealed
Readers get a proper introduction to Rey’s barely glimpsed parents in the novel, and even the six-year-old Rey, whom we learned was left with the beastly Unkar Plutt in The Force Awakens. Her father is Dathan, a man revealed in the Rise of Skywalker novelization to be a failed Palpatine clone. Her mother is a non-Exegol resident called Miramir.
Despite their ties to the Emperor, aka – the most evil guy in the galaxy, Rey's parents don’t have much in the way of personality traits. However, we see their love for each other, concern for Rey, and even some glimpses of their early romance. Christopher tries to make us get invested before their eventual deaths, but they are more nicely rounded plot devices than compelling characters.
Meeting Ochi of Bestoon
Ochi of Bestoon gets a fair amount of page time, with his part of the story following up on his appearances in Marvel’s Darth Vader comics. Those comics feature a younger version of the bounty hunter in the service of the black-clad Sith Lord, and a trip to Exegol that leads to Ochi getting his face singed and eyes scorched by sentient kyber crystals.
Somewhat surprisingly, Ochi’s story in this book has him desperately seeking a return to Exegol: he’s really hunting Rey so that he can bargain with Sith cultists for the right to revisit the planet. Making the planet an obsession for the intriguingly brutish bounty hunter gives it some roots in the saga, rather than seeming like it was made up on the spot during the writing of Episode IX.
Luke and Lando's Team-Up
Of course, Lando explains in the movie how he and Luke were on the hunt for both the assassin and the Sith homeworld, so we naturally get to see the two of them teaming up here. It’s exciting to see these legacy characters in a situation where they aren’t strictly just passing the torch to the new heroes, even though the plot splits them up a fair bit for the pursuit of different story threads.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the less lore-heavy exploration of who Lando has become 20 years after Return of the Jedi. He’s a man with the same, cocky facade but a soul haunted by his daughter’s disappearance. The disappointment in delving into Lando’s characterization is that he’s just one among an ensemble in the book’s follow-up, and so he really needs another story to bring his character arc to a close.
Much of the story’s attempts to bring in some character development is tied tightly to a need for answers to long-standing questions. The fact that Lando was hanging around on Pasaana for years is explained (in a somewhat plausible way) by having him want a base away from the galaxy at large. This makes his later appearance in Episode IX feel less of a crowd-pleasing shoehorn into the narrative.
Of course, there's the even bigger question of why Rey’s parents left her with someone as neglectful as Unkar Plutt. The argument in the novel is that enough money would buy his loyalty for a short time. Star Wars is absolutely full of retcons, which is only frustrating here in the sense that the storyline constantly seems like it’s lining up to make justifications for the missteps of the films.
Shadow of the Sith's Imperfect Climax
Shadow of the Sith boils down to a chase across the galaxy involving Ochi, Luke, and Rey’s family, and so much needs to happen for it to feel plausible. Luke is guided on his quest by visions of Exegol, and Lando – much more implausibly – is drawn into this struggle by overhearing a drunk Ochi telling all at a bar. There’s an effort to make these events feel organic rather than jigsaw puzzle pieces by bringing in characters we already know a bit, whether it’s The Force Awaken’s hastily-killed Lor San Tekka or The Rise of Skywalker’s equally hastily introduced Allegiant General Pryde. This ultimately highlights the fact that the canon Star Wars novels often exist to massage out the weaknesses from their source material.
Christopher is as tactful as possible in setting all of this within the canon at large, though, with Luke’s storyline touching on many different bits of lore that’s been built up over the years. The most significant example is that his main opposition is a Sith acolyte and the real Sith Lord who resides within her mask. It’s a direct follow-up to events that occurred in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy, but there’s no need to have read those books. The problem with this approach, though, is that the character simply becomes a cypher used for plot purposes, which is a feeling that persists throughout the book.
The story is perhaps more enjoyable when it is more interested in just being a part of Star Wars, not beholden to a particular book, series or film. The nod to the prequels is a nice one, giving the universe a bit of flavor. Luke has a fight inside a wrecked droid control ship from those films.
More entertaining and worthy of appreciation are the gleeful references to some of the Legends works. The novel's epigraph is lifted from Matthew Stover’s much-adored Revenge of the Sith novelization, a sign of someone clearly interested in quality Star Wars reads. Another is an affectionate play on the much-mocked reference to hot chocolate in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy. Star Wars canon should feel like a fun toolkit rather than a weight writers are forced to stick with.
These flaws notwithstanding, rewatching The Rise of Skywalker is a bit more enjoyable after diving into Shadow of the Sith. It’s easier to accept the random reappearance of the Jedi’s enemies and a sudden reveal of their homeworld, as at least there’s some groundwork that makes these things feel established in canon. This can’t alter the fact that The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t function fully without this new addition to the story, and it still lacks the heart that a more focused, purposeful film could have delivered. Shadows of the Sith is worth reading if you care about the saga, but hopefully, such finely-tuned course corrections won’t need to be on the Sabacc cards in the future.
For more on the connection between the Star Wars novels and movies, learn how the Expanded Universe was born and see all the characters who made the jump to live-action.