The Hunger and the Dusk #5: This issue is the best in a series where every issue so far has been a gem.
First things first, I realize the question propelling this series is: What if the elven lands beyond the sea were a nightmare? Many fantasy worlds have such lands - Everett in "Forgotten Realms" and the Undying Lands in "Lord of the Rings," for example - and Willow is turning their usual portrayals as havens on their heads.
We get the first hint of the problem when the Vangols' leader tells Mikil that "Vangol" means "Sky-Dweller" in the old tongue. The Vangols believed they were taller than the other races because they used to walk among the clouds. One day, they decided to cross the sea to find the stars that lay beyond them, only to discover "doom," a doom so terrible, the leader tells Mikhil, "that all your mighty history will shrink, and your wars with the orkren will seem like the squabbles of children over toys." The gang is staring down the barrel of trouble, in other words.
Based on recent observations, the leader realizes Cal is sentimental and orders his people to bring Mikil above ground as bait for the Last Men. True to form, Cal is leading the Last Men after Mikil, despite Tara insisting that Mikil wouldn't want him to risk so many lives for his own life. As Tara warned, the Vangols attack. Cal orders the Last Men to push the Vangols towards the water. Tara tells him that they can't survive an advance like that, but Cal is undeterred. The Vangols' leader emerges and takes on Cal, who only survives because Tara is able to use some sort of sorcery to hurt him and force the Vangols' retreat.
Cal is thrilled at the success, but Tara is irate that Cal risked their lives unnecessarily. Later that night, a sexy AF Cal bathes in a stream as Tara tells him that she's healed Mikil but he, like everyone else, needs rest. Instead, Cal wants them to travel to higher ground since they're vulnerable in the grasslands. Tara laments that they don't fight the orcish way, and Cal tells her they can't, because their society has been collapsing for 100 years. (Interestingly, they don't even remember the name of their gods, if they had any.) Cal asserts that humanity has managed to keep the orcs at bay, and Tara quips that "at bay" means attacking "innocent herdsmen." Cal retorts that those "herdsmen" raze farms for grazing lands. It's...tense.
Annoyed, Tara decides to leave, and Cal apologizes for getting angry, which shows a lot of understanding on his part given she was the one to start the fight. Tara is packing her bags while asserting the treaty was doomed to fail, and Cal again tries to get her to stay. When she refuses, he insists on going with her to return to her family, since he gave his pledge to Overlord Troth. But Tara flips, saying that she's the daughter of an overlord and he's just the "bastard son of some illiterate raider." Cal looks physically wounded and Tara horrified. She tries to apologize, but he lets her go. Sev is devastated, since Tara was the best (if not one only) chance for peace, and Cal laments that someone else will have to try to make the treaty work because he failed.
In other words, Willow doesn't just fill in some blanks spaces in her world-building here but also delivers an issue with serious emotional heft. You feel Cal's helplessness that he can't make the alliance work, both politically with the orcs and likely romantically with Tara, and Tara's impatience when the differences between the humans and the orcs seem insurmountable. Again, this series is one of the best on the shelves.
The Space Between #3: Oof, this issue hits in the feels. Beckho rights the ship (heh) here by breaking the repetition we saw last issue. Instead of telling the story of two people coming together to change the Dodona, she focuses on the consequences of some of these actions.
Ten years after "the Tumult," the Dodona is off course. The issue opens with Juni, one of Pari's protégés, committing suicide by opening his mask in space. After Pari retrieves Juni's body, he meets Bee with his new protégé, Eden, at a park. They discuss how Juni knew about the Dodona's fate since he was a pilot and lost hope. Even optimistic Pari concedes that he and Bee passed on their reproduction token the previous year given the possibility they'll never reach their destination. As they sit, a creepy guy named Rue appears, and his intense interest in Eden disturbs her — she asks Bea and Pari not to leave her alone with him.
Later, Eden and Pari review the situation, and Pari laments the Council isn't focused on the problem since they're too busy (understandably) keeping on the air and water (barely) after the sabotage during the Tumult. Apparently, the pilots only discovered the problem when they realized the star around which New Home orbits was moving. As they're talking, Rue makes the situation worse when he 'casts the situation to everyone on the ship, destroying what remained of morale.
Realizing they have little choice but to go around the reluctant Council, Bee, Eden, and Pari use Bee's legacy access to the archives to go through the Dodona's schematics. It turns out that "an airlock without a real lock" exists in the zoological repository. To correct the Dodona's course manually, someone will need to open the lock and perform an unauthorized space walk, though it will likely kill the species in the enclosure where the airlock is located.
Bee and Pari make one more appeal to the Council, which dismisses Pari's concerns given they have over 100 years before they're supposed to reach New Home. Pari stresses they don't have 100 years to fix the problem, but the Council isn't hearing it. Pari storms from the meeting and tells Bee that he plans on taking the one-way walk to fix the problem that he believes he caused. Eden arrives and says that she's the one who's going to open the thruster, since Rue apparently made the announcement to get her attention. Thankfully, Bee tells them that they're both idiots for thinking that they're to blame.
Two days later, when Bee wonders if she can breed humans who can live in marginal environments so someone doesn't have to do the walk, Eden tells her they only have 12 hours to correct the Dodona's course. Bee agrees to help, and she and Eden meet Pari at the repository. Rue appears as well because he's now stalking Eden, and they all make their way past the animals. (We learn the Council kept the repository quiet because they'd eliminate the animals first if they had to do so. Also, hilariously, no one knows how the house cats escaped.)
The Council put the most dangerous species, to its mind, in the airlock: the flying squirrels. (They were — not unreasonably — concerned about its reproductive rates.) Bee and Pari enter the enclosure to remove the squirrels so they don't die when they open the airlock, but an insane Rue puts on Pari's suit and heads out the airlock. Pari manages to close it behind him, and Eden decides to go after Rue. Bee and Pari try to catch the squirrels who escaped the enclosure, to no avail, but eventually feel the Dodona correct its course. Eden returns and confirms Rue died once he opened the thruster to move it. She's devastated, worrying that she let him commit suicide because he frightened her. Again, Bee isn't having it, saying he chose to do it.
Later, the Council treats his death as a suicide, and, based on Eden's comment that the ship needing a hero and not needing to know they had Rue instead, it seems like the Dodona residents know that he corrected their course. Of course, as Pari said, the sensors still aren't working, so they don't know for sure if they're on the right course.
Beckho takes an interesting turn here as we start seeing the ship's residents struggle with their mission as they get closer and closer to New Home. I wonder how she's going to wrap up the story with just one more issue, but she certainly amps up the tension here.
Star Wars: Darth Vader #42: This issue is odd, as Pak focuses on two different stories that seem to have nothing to do with each other.
On one hand, Vader successfully confronts the Machine-Augmened Rebels, or M.A.R., Corps, and implants the Imperial droid processors in them. Pak does little to make the Corps interesting, barely giving us their names, so it's hard to feel too badly for them.
Meanwhile, the Emperor is displeased with Grand Vizier Mas Amedda's performance, given he failed to take out a weakened Vader, and moves his favor to now-Administrator (and no longer Sub-Administrator) Moore. Moore visits Vader in Mustafar as he tries to improve upon the now-captive Corps. She offers him the Schism Imperial's services, telling him the right mid-level bureaucrat in the right place can help him. That said, I'm still not really sure what the Schism's goals are, other than seemingly taking out the Emperor.
Honestly, I feel like Pak is really wearing out this idea that Vader is in rebellion against the Emperor and that the Emperor wants him dead, since I really don't have a good sense of either Sith's motives. Everyone else keeps making these observations but they themselves don't. I'm guessing it's a certain level of strategic ambiguity but we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment