Dark Empire is mostly pretty fascinating. Kind of crosses over into the surreal almost. Worth a read to see something so different than what you’d expect a SW story to look like.
That’s exactly why I really like Dark Empire.
I’ve always felt that he EU is the place where writers/illustrators should take chances and make stories set in the SW universe without having to conform to the movie-aesthetic. They don’t really do that anymore, and I personally think it makes the EU somewhat bland and predictable.
Dark Empire is an OK take on a premise that’s inherently hard to write well. The Emperor returning in a clone body is something that sounds like a bad fanfic.
Especially since cloning tech was so little seen during the OT. If there had been more emphasis on it during the movies up to that point, it might have been more acceptable. As it is, it feels like a not-really-justified way to get the Emperor back into SW.
Well, people tend to gloss over that Palpatine wasn’t just cloned in Dark Empire. The post-PT Palpatine has become just a regular sith, but back when DE was written he was seen as much more of an mysterious ancient evil type of character. And he does specify in the comics that he has the ability to transfer his soul (or “Force ghost” I guess) into other living beings. His clones are essentially just empty shells. Also being pre-ROTS they seemed to imply that his use of the Dark Side drained him of life, hence his appearance and rapid aging.
(I would also personally say that cloning not appearing in the OT was more of an opportunity to do something new than some kind of inconsistency. We hardly get much of a look at the galaxy at large in the three OT movies, but we do know that it exists/existed. Only using what was seen in the OT would many a lot of limitations.)
Am I the only one here who genuinely likes Dark Empire?
The first one that is. DE II pushed everything a tad too far, and Empire’s End was simply underwhelming and dull. But I do feel that DE I is a great example of the EU taking the SW characters into different territory and making something that’s both familiar and vastly different at the same time. I even think the story I quite good, and I feel that a lot of the so called “inconsistencies” are quite nitpicky, and some times even evidence of people not having read it in the first place. The only big critique I personally have of DE I is how oddly it’s placed within the overall canon. And that doesn’t really impact any part of the story other than the opening crawl in the first issue.
Overall I think DE I was a great way of further exploring the conflict between Luke and the Emperor, and Luke and the Dark Side, which as many people tend to agree on, was very rushed and downplayed in ROTJ. DE I is the dark Luke story that the movies never could explore, and then some.