Those two previous books aren’t the only Prequel era stories fans can look forward to. Where Claudia Gray is examining Qui-Gon in Master & Apprentice, Cavan Scott is taking us even further back with the backstory for Qui-Gon’s former master turned Sith Lord in Star Wars: Dooku – Jedi Lost. This story is being presented in a very different format than a regular novel, however. Rather than a prose novel, Dooku will be an audiobook complete with a full cast.
Commenting on the difference in format, Scott said “My first ever job in the UK was writing radio drama for Doctor Who. In the UK we have this long tradition of radio drama. It never went away in the UK and we still have a national broadcaster who broadcasts a radio play every day in the afternoon. It was like coming home to me to write this. It is written very much like a play. You don’t want to be too descriptive in some of the descriptions because you want to give the audio engineers the free reign to create something amazing, same thing with the actors.”
Despite being such a prominent villain in the Prequel Trilogy as well as The Clone Wars series, very little of Dooku’s life is actually known. With Dooku – Jedi Lost, Scott wanted to tap into Dooku’s history and chronicle how he went from one of the Order’s most promising Jedi Knights into one of the galaxy’s most powerful Sith Lords. For this, Scott really winds back the clock on Dooku’s origin. “We start with Dooku at age 10,” he revealed. “We see him from being a youngling all the way through to being a master, a very well respected master. We cover a lot of ground with him and see how he became the man we know and love. We see his relationships and that’s the fascinating thing about Dooku. We don’t really see his relationships in the films or The Clone Wars. We get hints of what those relationships would have been like. In this, you get to see him with Qui-Gon. You get to see him with Sifo-Dyas. You get to see him with various other people. You get to see how that person literally formed over decades which was challenging but also an amazing release to really mould that character.”
Given his actions as a Sith Lord it’s almost hard to believe a man like that was once a great Jedi, especially given the regard Masters like Yoda and Mace Windu give Dooku before the Clone Wars. “He was an incredibly tragic character. You got to remember, he was a Jedi for a long time and he was a master well respected. If he had been the Dooku we know all the way through he wouldn’t have lasted that long,” Scott explained. He elaborated further on Dooku’s character arc, saying “One of the things we looked at is why he walked away. For me, conversations I had with Del Rey were talking about his motivation. Anakin’s life is all wrapped up in the fact that he’s the Chosen One. It’s something he rails against, something he feels he has to live up to. Dooku wants to be the Chosen One. He knows he’s the Chosen One for heaven’s sake, but at the same time he wants to be a good Jedi. He’s got that inward conflict already. He wants to be the best Jedi there has ever been which is in itself not a very Jedi thing to want to be. He’s having to cope with the fact that he is being taught by the grand master as well, which is a big thing, when Yoda chooses him to be his Padawan. That’s a momentous occasion, but in Dooku’s mind he’s like ‘Well of course he was going to choose me’.”
Star Wars: Dooku – Jedi Lost will be released April 30.
Breaking away from the adventures of Jedi and political intrigue is Alexander Freed’s Alphabet Squadron. Much like Freed’s Battlefront: Twilight Company, Alphabet Squadron focuses on members of the Rebel Alliance’s military, but this time he will follow Rebel pilots rather than ground soldiers. “Alphabet Squadron is about five New Republic pilots immediately after the Battle of Endor,” Freed said. “All of them are expert pilots but also deeply traumatized. Several of them are survivors of losing their entire squadron and are a mishmash of X-Wing, B-Wing, Y-Wing, etc., hence the alphabet.”
This unlikely team of starfighters is brought together by a very familiar face to Star Wars fans. “They are assembled under New Republic Intelligence in the time after the destruction of the second Death Star under the oversight of General Hera Syndulla to hunt down some TIE Fighters,” Freed revealed. Hera was, of course, a main character in the animated series Star Wars Rebels and has popped up in other media, namely Marvel’s Star Wars comics and a spoken reference in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The mission Hera assembles them for is to track down and eliminate a tough TIE Fighter unit called Shadow Wing.
“Shadow Wing is the Imperial nemesis of Alphabet Squadron,” Freed explained. “We used the metaphor of this is not the all-star team of Imperial pilots. This is the Superbowl Championship of Imperial pilots. These are the wing of TIEs that have just survived and gotten better and better. No one ever meant it to happen. They are doing a lot of damage after the destruction of the Death Star.” Shadow Wing will also be receiving a story of their one in the form of the Marvel Comics miniseries TIE Fighter written by Jody Houser that will explore the backstory of the pilots and origins of the team.
Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron will be released June 11.
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