Originally published on Patreon
I'm not sure that I know what Sabe is supposed to be trying to achieve anymore, or even if I'm meant to know or not. Last issue she had Vader wounded on the ground, ready to be killed, something she's been trying to do for a while now, and she decides to give him one last chance to honour Anakin and Padme. And now she's teaming up with Vader against the Emperor, but then working for the Emperor. I'm honestly finding it kind of hard to keep track of it all and feel like I need a spreadsheet, or one of those conspiracy walls with string connecting stuff in order to keep track of it all.
So, after finding out that Vader's latest target was working for the Emperor, she and Vader head off to Coruscant to have a little chat with Palpie in the Imperial Palace. As you'd expect, Palpatine isn't a fool, and allows the two of them to walk in just so he can set his guards on her to either kill her, or have her prove she's worth keeping around. The fight that ensues feels a bit forced (not pun intended), and the moment when Sabe runs behind his throne and makes his guards shoot at Palpatine feels a bit too silly to me. These are the most highly trained folks in the Empire, and they shoot at the guy their entire job is to guard? Okay.
I don't know if this is intentionally designed to mirror the fight at the end of Return of the Jedi, but it feels kind of similar thanks to the setting looking the same, and Sabe calling out to Anakin to help her. It feels like a warm up to the fight that will eventually lead to Vader becoming Anakin once again, and that the main thing preventing that is that he just doesn't care about Sabe enough. She has the face of the woman he loves, but it's not her, so it's not enough to appeal to the good man inside him. For that, the issue is decent enough, though I'm starting to bore of all the double crosses, secret agendas, and manipulations that the series has turned into.
Another thing that this series seems to keep doing, such as at the end of the last issue, is almost killing Vader. I'm sure that the desire is to show a man who keeps almost being killed, yet keeps getting back up again, like an un-killable slasher villain; but it does also make it seem like it's quite easy to break Vader. It feels like it wasn't too long ago he was getting his limbs ripped off by Palpatine, or he was getting beaten up by Obi-Wan, or was getting smashed around by Ahsoka. It just feels like it happens a bit too much. He might be hard to kill, but he's not hard to beat it seems.
Star Wars: Darth Vader seems to be treading water at the moment, not really giving us much. I don't know where this story is going, and I'm struggling to care much about it; and being bored reading about Darth Vader isn't something I thought would happen.
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