Tag Archives: synergize

The Cestus Deception

A week or so ago, I got caught up in Star Wars excitement despite myself, and snagged a Clone Wars novel at Half-Price Books, the second one I’ve read now. The whole idea is the thing where they can do some guided merchandising, build a bit of storyline between the two movies, and just generally synergize. Still, though, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. (See also how I’m writing this from a line I’ll be sitting in for the next ten or eleven hours in order to see that one movie at the back half of the two I previously referenced.)

In any case, I finished The Cestus Deception a couple of nights ago, and have now found time to leave general impressions. They are largely the same as the impressions I had of Shatterpoint last year. You’ve got your exciting lightsaber duels, only with Obi-Wan instead of Mace Windu (also a tentacly-headed Jedi named Kit Fisto), an army of Force-sensitive bio-droids being manufactured to kill Jedi, and also lots of clone troopers. They are busily being humanized even as the Jedi are slowly being crushed by the pressures of the War. You have to admire Palpatine’s strategy; he’s put them in this impossible position where if they sit back and do nothing, everyone hates them, but if they step up and do what needs to be done in order to win the war (like force the cessation of Jedi-killing droid manufacture if it can be handled diplomatically, and I think we all know that it cannot), they get their hands dirty and nobody trusts them anymore. Much like Shatterpoint, this is more of the dirty hands storyline. I really hope the movie tonight touches on some of this theme before things start going bad, so that it’s understandable where the popular lack of support came from. If not, well, at least there are lots of people with the talent to make it clear in non-movie places, and I can just take the whole thing as one piece. Frankly, I’d rather be able to rely on the movies for everything, though.