Top 10 Moments In 'Star Wars' Legends

Star Wars

Dec 1

It's been over ten years since Lucasfilm rebranded the Star Wars Expanded Universe into Legends and made it non-canon, ending a period of more than 30 years that had produced hundreds of books and comics and dozens of videogames. The period is even longer if you include the books and comics that were published during the time of the Original Trilogy, like Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye or the original Marvel comics.

Although Lucasfilm and its publishing partners no longer publish new stories taking place in the Legends timeline, existing books and comics from that era are constantly reprinted.

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With this vast amount of content, it is hard to pick just 10 top moments from the former Expanded Universe, which covered a timeframe between more than 25,000 years before and roughly 1.5 centuries after the films' events.

But we will try anyway.

1. Then, There Were Two

The Phantom Menace established Darth Bane's Rule of Two, with one Sith Master who holds the power and one apprentice who craves it. Before that, countless Sith always fought one another, weakening the order as a whole.

Drew Karpyshyn's 2007 novel Darth Bane - Path of Destruction and his two follow-up books, Rule of Two and Dynasty of Evil, tell the backstory of the Sith Lord, who first worked as a miner under the name Dessel. After joining the Sith, he soon became frustrated with the constant in-fights among his allies. Taking on the title of Darth Bane and studied the teachings of the ancient Sith, where he discovered the so-called thought bomb. Convinced that the Sith could only survive if, at any point in time, there were only two of them, he traveled to the planet Ruusan, the location of a massive fight between the Jedi and the Sith. Deep within the caves of Ruusan, Bane detonated the thought bomb, imprisoning the souls of countless Jedi and Sith in a state of eternal madness within an egg-shaped object.

Bane later took on a young girl named Zannahas as his apprentice, who ultimately overpowered and killed her master.

Aside from Path of Destruction, the battle of Ruusan was also told in a 2001 comic from Dark Horse. While Karpyshyn mostly stayed true to the events of the comics, there are some inconsistencies between the two media.

2. The Secret Apprentice

When The Clone Wars movie presented Ahsoka Tano as Anakin Skywalker's padawan in 2008, this came as a shock for many Star Wars fans. But one year earlier, it was revealed that Darth Vader did have a secret apprentice, whom he hid from the Emperor many years later.

The Force Unleashed was a massive entertainment endeavor, a "movie without a movie" event, like Shadow of the Empire more than a decade earlier. Led by a video game that was groundbreaking for its time, The Force Unleashed (and The Force Unleashed II) led to two novels, comics, a soundtrack, and even action figures.

The story's main protagonist was a young man named Starkiller, who was taken on by Vader as an apprentice at a young age. Trained in the ways of the Dark Side, Starkiller became the Sith Lord's brutal enforcer, seeking out and killing Jedi in hiding until he was betrayed by his master and turned to the Light Side. The story of Force Unleashed II even included the formation of the Revel Alliance (an event that was later overwritten by Star Wars Rebels), and ended with the cliffhanger of Vader being captured by the Rebellion.

A planned part III never came to be.

3. The Man in The Armor

One of the criticisms of Revenge of the Sith was that Anakin's fall to the Dark Side was too quick and abrupt.

Mathew Stover's excellent novelization of Episode III goes a long way to describing the feelings and motivations of AnakinSkywalker, both before and after he became the man in the black armor. This story is further enhanced by James Luceno's books Labyrinth of Evil and Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader. All three books were later collected in the so-called Dark Lord Trilogy omnibus.

Labyrinth of Evil, which was published before the release of Revenge of the Sith, tells the final missions and battles of Anakin and Obi-Wan before the Battle of Coruscant, leading directly into the events of the film. Dark Lord picks up right at the end of Episode III and chronicles the first brutal mission of the fallen Jedi. The book ends with Obi-Wan discovering the true identity of Darth Vader.

4. The Quest for Eternal Life

Speaking of James Luceno, there were certain authors of the Expanded Universe that everyone knew would deliver once a book by them was announced, and Luceno was one of them. To this day, his 2012 book Darth Plagueis is regarded as one of the best Star Wars novels. Like his later apprentice, Plagueis was a public figure, leading a big Muun corporation as his alter-ego, Hego Damask. After killing his own master, Darth Tenebrous, he became obsessed with finding a way to create eternal life by manipulating Midiclorians and bending the will of the Force. After discovering a Fore-sensitive and ruthless young man named Palpatine, he took him as his apprentice, teaching him not only the ways of the Dark Side but also how to manipulate others to do his bidding, paving the way for the later Emperor.

The book very cleverly intersects with and thus enhances the events of The Phantom Menace and even ties into Attack of the Clones when Palpatine met the estranged Jedi Dooku and Sifo-Dyas, who ordered an army of clones from the Kaminoans.

5. The Hand of Plapatine

Another novel that is regarded as one of the crown jewels of the Expanded Universe is Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire (1991), the first novel of the "modern" EU and the one that brought Star Wars back into public consciousness after the "dark times" during the late 80s. The book introduced not only the characters of Thrawn (more on him later), Captain Pellaeon, or Talon Karrde but also Mara Jade, a young woman who was trained by Palaptine as his assassin and enforcer, much like Vader had done with Starkiller.

Going by the title Emperor's Hand, the red-haired woman, who usually wore black leather, was not only strong in the Force but also an excellent fighter and pilot who could communicate with Sidious by telepathy. When the Emperor died on the second Death Star, his last order (no pun intended) was to kill Luke Skywalker, which she ultimately did (from a certain point of view).

Although George Lucas never liked the character of Mara Jade, she became one of the most popular characters of the Expanded Universe, even getting her own action figure.

6. Moonfall

In contrast to the Sequel Trilogy, the former EU had always shied away from killing any of the main characters from the OT.

With one notable exception: R. A. Salvatore's 1999 book Vector Prime (the first book of the massive New Jedi Order series) introduced the Yuuzhan Vong. These extragalactic species would wreak havoc upon the galaxy for years to come. When the Millenium Falcon took refugees from the planet Sernipal on board because, after a Vong interference, its moon Dobido was about to crash, Anakin Solo, the youngest son of Han and Leia, had to make the impossible decision to leave Chewbacca behind, leading to a massive rift between Han and his son.

While the idea to kill one of the beloved characters came up early in the process of crafting the story for The New Jedi Order, the decision to choose the Wookiee was primarily made because it was hard to write "dialogue" for a character who would always need a kind of interpreter who would "translate" Shyriiwook

7. Crimson Dusk

The son of Han and Leia was seduced by a powerful being, fell to the Dark Side, and killed a member of his family.

No, we are not talking about The Force Awakens, but about the novel Sacrifice by Karen Traviss, published in 2007 as part of the Legacy of the Force series.

Jacen Solo, the oldest son of Han and Leia, began his descent to the Dark Side in book one of the series (Betrayal) after he met Lumiya, a Dark Lady of the Sith. Sacrifice had him completing his downfall when he took on the title of Darth Caedus.

Mara Jade, who was seeking out Lumiya, concludes that her nephew was under the influence of the Sith lady and followed him to the planet Hapes, where the two started to duel. Using a mind trick, Jacen killed Mara with a poisoned dart, sending ripplings to the Fore that hit both Luke and their son Ben. As with the death of Chewbacca, fans were shocked about the killing of Mara Jade.

8. Dogfights

Not really a "moment" per se, but rather one of the most beloved stories from the EU is the X-Wing series, consisting of ten books, all written by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston and published between 1996 and 2012. The events of the series started one year after the end of Return of the Jedi and dealt with Wedge Antilles' Rouge Squadron. a group of fearless plots on their missions to free the galactic core from the remnants of the Empire.

Aside from introducing characters like Corran Horn (who would in 1998 be the protagonists of the only Star Wars book that was written from a first-person point of view) or Tycho Celchu, the series focused heavily on the space fights of X- and Y-Wings against the forces of the Empire.

In The Krytos Trap, the third book of the series, the Rebels discovered that an Imperial prison on Coruscant was in reality a Super Star Destroyer hidden beneath the skyscrapers that rose from the ground to crush the Rebels.

The giant ship was later captured and used by the New Republic and then destroyed in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong.

Patty Jenkin's may-or-may-no-happen Rogue Squadron movie was said to draw heavy inspiration from the Rogue Squadron books.

9. The Men in Red

Most of the EU stories were written from the point of view of the good guys. One notable exception is Crimson Empire, a six-issue comic series published in 1997 and 1998. It tells the story of Kir Kanos, an elite Imperial Red Guard who finds himself opposite a traitorous former colleague who betrayed the Empire and killed other Royal Guards. In his struggle to survive and have his revenge, Kanos even had to ally with the Rebels, although his loyalties never changed.

Crimson Empire received a sequel in 1998 and a part III in 2012, but they never reached the popularity of the first story arc.

10. The Man in Blue

No list of the top moments of the Expanded Universe would be complete without mentioning the introduction of Grand Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo or simply Thrawn in Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire. The blue-skinned Chiss soon became a fan favorite, appearing in several books aside from the so-called Thrawn Trilogy and later even made the jump to current Star Wars lore.

At the time of publication of Heir to the Empire, Thrawn was a completely new kind of villain, neither as brutal as Vader, nor as sinister as Sidious, nor as arrogant and incompetent as other Imperial leaders, but a master strategist, who was always one step ahead of his enemies. With his skills, he brought the still-young New Republic nearly to its knees. In all his appearances, Thrawn had always been someone you love to hate while at the same time hate to love.

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