Overview: Encountering a mysterious phenomenon, a starship serving the Jedi Council disappears. To get to the bottom of it, the Council send Quinlan Vos, a Jedi Knight still recovering from his last mission during which he had his memory erased and was sorely tempted by the dark side of the Force. This errand will take him to Dathomir, where he will allow himself to be captured and enslaved by the witches. As a slave he will participate in the Nightsisters' efforts to probe the secrets of ruined temples on the surface and will attempt to solve the mystery of the starship's disappearance.

The Art:

There's a considerable difference in the art between Parts One and Two of "Infinity's End." In both, the art is exaggerated, primitive, which is to say crude, but stylized, reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoon fare of days gone by. Likenesses of the main characters, Vos and the witch-queen Zalem (now how's that for a witch's name?) for instance, aren't particularly consistent from page to page in either part, but drastically so in Part One. There's nothing subtle about the lightsaber action, either. Whenever Vos lights up, and that's fairly often in the first two of four parts of this story (during which he's supposed to be incognito, using his lightsaber only in emergencies) there's plenty of spurting blood and flying body parts.

Renditions of the characters improve in Part Two, not only in consistency, but also in quality (modestly). Zalem, in particular, is much more convincing, for appearing less toon-like: In Part One, her brief appearance put me in mind of Slappy the Squirrel, of Animaniacs fame.

Far more interesting than the characters in the illustrations are the ruins on Dathomir (first seen inside the covers in Part One, p. 11). Their Egyptian inspiration is obvious, from the Sphinx-like statue of a feral quadruped in the middle distance, to the ruined pyramids, pylons and obelisks extending to the horizon. They even have the Giza texture, most obviously in the final, full-page illustration of Part One, Vos facing the forbidding, pyramidal Star Temple -- probably the best illustration in Part One, but totally overwhelmed by the tedium of the preceding pages.

What first catches my eye about both covers is a feature they have in common, the title, "Infinity's End," because of the way it's rendered. Those are not n's and y's and e's, those unusually shaped letters in the title; they're not even Anglo-Roman letters at all, but Greek, which wouldn't be a problem, if it weren't that those Greek letters, [eta] for n, [gamma] for y, and [xi] for E, are more or less equivalent to the Roman letters e, g and X respectively. Transliterated, the title becomes "Iefieitg's Xed." (The small s, and the small d in "End", are also Greek, the letters sigma and delta, but represent the same sounds as s and d in the Roman alphabet.) This isn't a serious problem, it's merely distracting.

That aside, Andrew Robinson's covers (colored by Matt Hollingsworth) are much better than the interior artwork, but still somewhat stylized. The first cover's Nightsister faces (still sporting the Sith Witch makeover seen recently Dark Horse's Darth Maul limited series) are striking, far superior to, far more menacing than, the cartoon caricatures inside, but the remainder of the illustration is just . . . dull, static figures and architecture in the sand.

The second cover's Giant Wuffa attack manages to be more dynamic, but Vos's mandatory wacky prequel-era 'do comes across a wee bit effeminate, and the overwhelming greenness of the cover is at odds with the interior artwork, and the previous cover, both of which depict the scene of the cover's action, and both of which are more true to its desert colors.

The Story:

Overall, the first two issues are painfully juvenile, having, like the art, all the sophistication of a Saturday morning cartoon. And it's derivative: Backstory, continuity and source material are fine, but. . . wouldn't it be good to include an original idea in the mix, somewhere? Or even an original combination of existing ideas? Perhaps in future installments.

The story begins with what appears to be a Republic starship that seems to be, and to have been for some time, responsible to the Jedi Council, on an unknown mission to the world Ova, or somewhere near it (this kind of vagueness is a persistent feature of the series so far). Catastrophe strikes, as Ova vanishes, and the hapless starship along with it.

This is the best part of the book, and the series so far, and, for all that it depicts a tragedy, it's funny: the episode reads like a parody of Star Trek, at least the New Generation version, with a slow, stodgy, risk-averse captain, no doubt the president of the Jean-Luc Picard Fan Club, Coruscant chapter, pondering proper procedure as he, and his crew, are ineluctably caught up in the destruction of Ova.

But, it doesn't last. After four pages, Mills and Bachs skip ahead three months, pick up the Jedi action, and drop the ball, spectacularly. The quality of the art and the writing both decline precipitously and never recover; inconsistencies and illogicalities pile up; bad dialogue chokes up the pages as the cartoonery commences.

Quinlan Vos arrives over Dathomir, sent by the Jedi Council to discover the connection between the Witches of Dathomir and the fate of Ova. He arrives incognito, with four days to learn the truth, before a rescue ship is due to extract him.

There are so many things wrong with this scenario, it isn't funny. First, Vos's fake identity is preposterous. He may be under orders to use his lightsaber only in emergencies, but everything else about him screams Jedi, from the familiar Jedi habit (which must be distinctive, otherwise, why did Qui-Gon go to the trouble of substituting a poncho for his customary robe on Tatooine?), to his manner and actions. The outer robe disappears without explanation between Parts One and Two, but the damage, by then, is done, and the lack of explanation merely adds to the haphazard feel of the story. Second, the Council, represented by Mace Windu and Saesae Tiin, (who, in Part Two, will expect Vos to stop the witches' activities) completely ignore the fact that the witches previously had no problem dealing with the Jedi, including Yoda himself, sent to recover the Chu'unthor. So, now that the stakes are even higher, a lone Jedi is supposed to handle a situation there? Third, what sense does a four-day time limit and planned extraction make, when entire planets are at risk? Do they expect the matter to resolve itself after that? Then why bother sending a Jedi in the first place?

That's not even taking into account that Vos is not fit for the mission after the events of "Twilight." A challenged Jedi, even one with psychometric powers, is a dangerous choice to send into the Dark Side wonderland Dathomir has become (says Mace Windu: "The Dark Side saturates Dathomir. . . ." -- when did that happen, anyway?) with all the temptations it offers.

Yet that is precisely what is done, and Vos's "special ability" is the justification used in the story: when Mace Windu and Saesae Tiin appear to fill in backstory and deal with the question of Vos's suitability -- during a fencing match -- don't the Jedi ever do anything else, don't they ever have dinner meetings? do Mills and Bachs think we need these visual clues to realize the characters are Jedi? -- Vos's psychometric power is the only concrete qualification Tiin can come up to justify sending him on the mission, and it's a very slim justification, as we soon see. After his first day at the Dathomir temple ruins, the focus of Vos's "investigation," all his psychometric sense has revealed is the impression of an "ancient power," and "a great secret" -- Zowie, way to psychometrically grasp the obvious there, Quin. Surely, almost any other Jedi, with the Force as his ally, could perform similar feats, and could do so without the risk involved in sending the unstable Vos, and without the complication, and diminution of the Force, psychometry independent of the Force represents.

In fact, Vos learns virtually nothing in the course of the first two parts of this series that the Jedi Council, without apparent communication with him, don't already know, and it is only after this becomes clear that we get the unheralded transformation of Vos's mission from intelligence gathering in Part One to problem solving in Part Two. Indeed, the Council seem to know a lot more about the problem than Vos learns, and to know it before Vos ever reaches Dathomir, begging the question: Why did they bother to send him to investigate?

Further complicating the matter, Vos himself makes a reference to Council reports being accurate, regarding the Temple on Dathomir, suggesting there were other intelligence sources on which the Jedi could rely.

Of course, on Dathomir, all the males are slaves; so Vos is quickly captured and enslaved, naturally, and put to work on the excavation project being conducted by a band of witches who can only be the Nightsisters, though their clan goes unnamed. This constitutes his plan, in its entirety, to be captured, and led to the source of the mystery. It comes as no surprise, or it shouldn't, when, while pursuing a witch in Part Two, he utters the profound question: "Which way did she go?"

The work the witches have their slaves doing is excavation work on an ancient temple complex; or so we're told: There seems to be no visible evidence of excavation, all the structures being well exposed; and the slaves don't seem to be doing much more than dragging stones about. No effort is made to explain the reason for continued surface excavations, when the witches have found what they want using "subterines," salvaged spacecraft adapted for the purpose, and have done so long before Vos arrived: their tinkering below the surface had resulted in the destruction of Ova, three months prior. But that's only one of the many inconsistencies: another problem with these artifacts, these Temple Ruins, is that we've never heard of them before, not with reference to Yoda's trip to Dathomir to rescue the Chu'unthor, not during Luke's trip to rescue all and sundry during the abomination known as The Courtship of Princess Leia. They're like those found on the planet Ova, we're told in the story, and linked to Dathomir by the nature of the glyphs found on them, but we've never heard of these, either, Ova's ruins or the Dathomir glyphs.

The witches who capture Vos maintain quite a slave labor force at the temple site, and a diverse one, too: a Givin (befriended by Vos), Gamorreans, Jawas, a hammer-headed Ithorian, Duros, a possible Trandoshan and a Gran. That's remarkable diversity for a backwater world, an isolated "prison planet," to have at any one time.

But Dathomir's backwater status is in tatters, and getting more tattered with each story that involves it. The Jedi know about it, having used it to exile "arms manufacturers" and a rogue Jedi in times past, not to mention having lost Chu'unthor there approximately four centuries prior to this tale. From Darth Maul, we learned that the Sith know about it too; Maul, in fact, is able to identify a Nightsister by sight -- the Sith not only know the world, but its inhabitants -- and well, notwithstanding that Emperor Palpatine (who is Darth Sidious as surely as Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader) is said to have been ignorant of its nature and inhabitants in other sources. And surely Black Sun's pre-prequel era head, Master Lex, knew it; he employed the aforementioned Maul-identified Nightsister and had brought her from Dathomir himself to become his bodyguard.

As careless as the witches are with their slaves' lives, to maintain the population we see, it must practically rain ill-fated male spacers on Dathomir. From which it must follow that there is an incredible amount of traffic going through the system, a considerable portion of it on ill-fated space vessels, and all of them seemingly male-only operations -- either that, or the Nightsisters deal swiftly and permanently with inbound females. These are hardly conditions one would expect in the vicinity of a planetary backwater.

Mills spends considerable time establishing the nefariousness of the Nightsisters, not only through their treatment of Vos and his fellow slaves, and the consequences of a slave raid by a rival clan, but through their cruelty to an ostensibly deformed and mentally deficient witch, Zalem's daughter, Ros Lai, nicknamed "the Rancor" by the slaves -- a thoroughly unsavory and disturbing display.

No doubt the treatment of the autochthonous "Kwi" lizards is meant as another illustration of just how evil the witches are. "The Kwi," as they are called here, appeared formerly as "the Blue Desert People," who gave Luke and Isolder a lift in The Courtship of Princess Leia, and are progeny of "The Kwa," so says Mace Windu, seemingly just shortly before Vos learns this for himself (again raising the question, What, precisely, was the point of sending him in the first place?) Alas, they're "degenerate descendants" of that once proud and powerful lizard folk, again according to Windu, an "elder species," architects of the Star Temple, which controlled "infinity gates," their means of traveling not only the galaxy, but the universe -- what a difference an a makes! These lesser sons of mighty reptiles are being used as parts -- more precisely, for parts -- in the witches' efforts to operate the machinery still in the temple: the controls are made to respond to Kwa hands, Kwi paws are the nearest approximation available, so, the less savory of the witches' slaves are rounding up Kwi and severing their paws for the project. (Perhaps the Jedi would have been better served had they dropped a PETA commando team on Dathomir?)

Vos, as written by Mills, is scarcely a more sympathetic character. It's plain that his reactions are intended to convey his unsettled mental state, his susceptibility to Dark Side temptations, but, poorly executed, they land wide of the mark, making Vos come across moronic, mean, and misogynistic, an angry, aggressive man with a readiness to resort to physical, even lethal, force one wouldn't expect in a Jedi, let alone one in "enemy territory," on a vital mission. For example, Vos's reaction to the treatment of the Kwi is to kill the chief butcher, a big, brawny character, but very poorly armed, and no real threat to a Jedi. No matter, Vos spits him on his lightsaber anyway, and carves a few of the brute's subordinates for good measure. This seems a fairly significant display of anger and aggression, and unnecessarily lethal (not to mention unchivalrous). Surely a Jedi should have been able to incapacitate a few poorly-armed slaves without leaving them in pieces on the ground? This, as does almost everything Vos does, only serves to emphasize the foolishness of the Council's decision to send him.

In both cases, the ugliness of the characters' behavior is more pronounced, and more jarring, than it otherwise would be, because of the contrasting juvenile simplicity of the artwork, an effect similar to the impact one might experience from seeing Yosemite Sam mug an elderly Toon and use the proceeds to buy crack from the Tasmanian Devil: It's common enough fare on prime time TV (and even more so on cable), but in a Looney Tunes? It's outrageous.

Very little truly new is being done in the Expanded Universe now; "Infinity's End" is no exception. We are again subjected to familiar settings, Dathomir and Coruscant; a familiar situation, a Jedi trapped on the surface contending with the witches (even receiving aid from the Blue Desert People, as Luke Skywalker did); familiar villains, the Nightsisters (one of whom recently figured prominently in the conclusion of the Darth Maul limited series); and the familiar assortment of background aliens.

But the déjà vu goes beyond Star Wars. In their explorations, the witches disturb the guardian of the Star Chamber, a "giant wuffa," also called a "great worm." When this thing surfaces and opens its jaws, it's Shai Hulud all over again. Even before this, there's the Trekkish element, fairly parodied, in the opening of Part One, and a certain Shatnerian quality to Vos's behavior at times of maximum bluster and violence. When Zalem the Witch Queen speaks of imminent escape from "our miserable prison planet," and "the power of the Elder Gods" to be theirs once they open their local Infinity Gate, that sounds awfully Lovecraftian. (Is Cthulhu, or some close relative of his, waiting inside the polyhedral "star chamber"?)

There's even the strange familiarity of the Dathomir architecture, as remarked above. The wholesale transportation of architecture from terrestrial Giza to Dathomir long ago and far, far away, down to the detail of a mysterious subterranean chamber, holding the secrets of the ages, of the sort believed by some (not of the Egyptological mainstream) to exist under the Great Sphinx's forepaws, is even more amazing; and, associating those imported ruins with a lost civilization, mysterious artifacts of immense power, and interstellar space travel technologies unrivaled by the starfaring Republic, suggests an "Ancient Astronauts" scenario involving the Kwi/Kwa.

Part Two wraps up with one more bit of borrowing, as Vos, having set the Kwi loose and sent his Givin sidekick to steal one of the witches' drilling ships, confronts a Nightsister, none other than Ros Lai . . . .

So, next up, they're going below, no doubt to the Star Chamber itself. Maybe they'll bump into Erich Von Däniken. Probably not: There won't be anything surprising in the remainder of the series. The only true mystery in this series is what possessed the Council to concoct the plan of sending Quinlan Vos to save the day on Dathomir? (Or, alternatively, what possessed LFL and Dark Horse to approve this story. Unless this reviewer misses his guess, neither mystery will ever be solved.)

What other mystery presents itself? The Jedi knew already everything Vos finds out in these first two installments; what could his ballyhooed psychometry possibly add? Given Vos's attraction to the Dark Side, and the superior forces arrayed against him, what chance does he stand? It doesn't take prescience, or the two final parts of the arc, to answer that one: an excellent chance. No doubt, he'll win the day; he has to, to make sure the witches are in place on Dathomir when Luke & Co. come calling after the Galactic Civil War, and no pesky "ancient power" rains on their parade, since only George Lucas can wreak havoc with continuity and get away with it. But it seems safe to assume that Vos's triumph will be of a piece with everything else in this arc, trite and boring. And, since it must come to nothing in the end, it's eminently skippable.

Of course, it could always be worse: it could be Star Wars: Underworld: The Yavin Vassilika.

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(Dexter's passion for Star Wars, still undiminished nearly a quarter-century later, began in May 1977, when a late-night showing of A New Hope set his young imagination ablaze. An avid action figure collector, he has been known to lurk about local toy shops at ungodly hours, in hopes of beating the competition to the latest wave of Hasbro goodies. When not tracking down the latest resculpt of Darth Maul or Qui-Gon Jinn, he devotes his free time to pondering the most efficient use of his dwindling free storage space. His other passions include his library, and writing.)