Overview: A grave danger to the galaxy has emerged from a phenomenon traced to the planet Dathomir. To investigate, the Council have dispatched Jedi Knight Quinlan Vos. Cut off from Coruscant and the Council, embroiled in a power struggle among the leaders of the Nightsisters, Vos must face the crisis and the temptations of the Dark Side alone....

As in the first two issues, the artwork appears erratic. In parts three and four it's less cartoon-like overall, but still crude and distorted; in a word, haphazard. There's a possibility, I suppose, that this is a deliberate stylistic effort, but it doesn't really look that way, because characters tend to morph from conventional to cartoonish to deformed and back again, more or less at random.

Bachs seems to lack control. (I'd say he lacks imagination, too, but I can't determine to what extent the visual banalities in this series are his alone, and which were forced upon him by the idiotic script.) What besides lack of control can account for the vast differences in each character's appearance from panel to panel and page to page, let alone issue to issue? (Vos's disappearing and reappearing Jedi robe is a particularly obvious, and grating, example of visual inconsistency.) To what do we attribute the shaky perspectives, the stylistic excesses that exaggerate and distort so many faces and figures not only in these last two parts of the story, but in all four?

Pity the poor witches. They're a prime example of the defects in Bachs's representations. No doubt they are intended to be taken as shapely and attractive. But they bear the mark of Bachs's carelessness; there is a tendency for their curves to get out of control. In some of the panels they leave curvaceous behind, headed straight for bent and twisted. In others, their brawny, silicone-enhanced figures mutate, becoming knobby, bulging parodies.

But the damage is not limited to characters' bodies; as noted, the faces supplied them also do not hold true from one instance to the next, and are further marred by their limited range of expressions; frowns, squints, bared teeth and bulging eyes are their only constant features. So mutable, so frugally endowed, the characters often look as asinine as their dialogue sounds. Because of the exaggeration, and the limited range of expressions Bachs fits them with, the characters also come off as doltish. Vos squints for the most part; in Part Four, when particularly incensed, he performs a one-eyed mega-squint worthy of Clint Eastwood -- or maybe Popeye the Sailor. The witches tend toward pedestrian vacuity and snarls.

The only thing Bachs's artwork had going for it was the Egyptian architecture, and it has virtually disappeared; only one measly pyramid appears in the background of a few panels. Instead, we get witch-tent interiors and a lot of subterranean "landscape" once they do finally get underground. Or do we? It's a featureless purple expanse they "fly" through, looking little like any kind of tunnel or other underground space. The "subterines," modified spacecraft that have crashed on Dathomir (which world must be the Star Wars equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle) are, or were, hyperdrive-capable. Are we supposed to take this for something analogous -- hyperdirt, maybe, or dirtspace, made accessible by the witches' tinkering? Or is this simply the result of poor visualization of an underground tunnel system?

Cover:

Andrew Robinson's covers for "Infinity's End" still put anything inside them to shame. For all that it's nearly monochromatic, Part Three's cover is interesting. Even though there's something not quite right about the perspective, the figures appear much more natural than any inside, and more dynamic, particularly the witch depicted. She also differs from the witch inside in other ways, among them being more conventionally feminine in appearance, and wearing a different costume than the one the character wears in the relevant scene in the story, but those are both improvements. Dathomir gets another makeover, this time as a red planet, which, so far as we know, it is not; but, still, the cover is interesting and by far the best of the four cover illustrations.

Part Four's cover makes me think of Tomb Raider -- the game, not the feature film. The uneven paving stones, light showing around their joints, remind me of Tomb Raider's break-away false floors, the ones that all too often conceal beds of sharp stakes below. It's also a very toothy cover -- subtlety of expression being rare everywhere in this series -- with three sets of angry chompers bared by Vos and the two major floating heads in the background behind the Disco Ball of Doom. The smaller face to Vos's left, and the Kwi to his right are also toothy, for what that's worth. It's conventional Star Wars: a Jedi, a lightsaber, a big, menacing ball. And ... it's boring.

Mills's script in parts three and four shows little if any improvement over parts one and two. In carelessness and inconsistency, it is the perfect complement to Bachs's illustrations, wandering from flirtation with the trials of a tempted Jedi, to an interplanetary disaster epic, to a Sithy soap opera, and back again, all wrapping up in an anticlimax of truly epic proportions.

We pick up the action where it left off in the last issue, with Vos confronting a Nightsister. That confrontation had interfered with what seemed the more promising development, travel to the mysterious Star Chamber and, perhaps, some grand conclusion of the story. In turn, the interference is interrupted, and the galactic crisis is put on hold, so the witches can hash out the soap-operatic strife within their clan. It takes the remainder of the issue to bring the story back to the Star Chamber and its mysteries, and even then, Vos & Co. are only setting out; they won't reach their destination until well into the next, and final, issue.

When they do at last go beneath the planet of the witches, when they breach the Star Chamber, they find, as predicted, not Cthulhu or any of his kin, or even Erich Von Däniken, but the Disco Ball of the Gods. Wow, that was really worth waiting for. (Especially when Mills has already revealed all that is ever revealed of the star chamber so early in the story, robbing later installments of a mystery that might give an otherwise bland batch of fights and flights some interest.)

What ever happened to the old maxim, "Show, don't tell"? I'd think in a graphic medium, it would apply even more than in conventional prose. Evidently, Mills doesn't think so. He passes up few opportunities to describe what has already been shown us. Take for example this redundant dialogue: "The witches think we're dead. Now let's hunt them!" -- It's already been established that the witches think Vos's ship destroyed, and it should be fairly obvious, when we see the ship more or less intact and moving under its own power, that the ship and its crew have survived the threat; wouldn't it be far more elegant to show the ship, or maybe one of its occupants, tracking a witch ship, than to have an unidentified speaker (or speakers: it's not made entirely clear how many speakers there are, either) blathering this way?

Mills's predilection for useless or redundant exposition is also exemplified by the continued presence of Mace Windu and Saesee Tiin. They add nothing to the story. They interrupt the action, and take precious time and space to tell us things that we either already know, don't need to know, or could be told in other ways. Jedi frowns and platitudes neither enhance the menace to Coruscant nor heighten the suspense at the crucial moment. Would the Death Star's attack on Alderaan have been any better for tedious scenes of Alderaanians worrying in A New Hope?

While we're on the subject of needless things, neither should it be necessary to work the title into the story; but Mills does it anyway, and maladroitly at that. When the time finally arrives for Head Witch Zalem to execute her sinister plan, out of the blue, without any prior reference or explanation (which, in this series, is amazing), she blurts out, "Now, Jedi Knights ... let's see how you cope with Infinity's End." [emphasis in the original.] What sense does that make? None, if we assume that by "infinity" she means what is ordinarily meant by "infinity." Leave aside that Infinity's just a bit big for even the Jedi to take charge of; ending infinity would seem contrary to Zalem's original goal of getting off Dathomir and, it was implied, ruling the galaxy. Of course, ending infinity isn't really what she attempts to do, but that doesn't help Mills much: that hideous line is still there, the sorest, most protuberant thumb in a veritable army of afflicted thumbs. (Neither does it help that, contemplating the line, I picture the Jedi trying to deal with being crushed under the ample fundament of some creature called "Infinity.")

And inconsistencies abound, confirming the impression of a haphazard script. The consequences feared by the Jedi (still represented by Windu and Tiin only: all the other Masters must have scheduled vacations at the same time) change; the witches' intentions change to simply whacking the Jedi, or perhaps this is the concrete action to which "escaping our prison planet" descends. From Jedi fear for Dathomir in particular and its neighboring systems, to fear for a single targeted world; from an escape plan to a program of vengeance for the witches -- what sense do these transitions make?

Perhaps the biggest inconsistency, however, involves the abandoned high technology artifacts of the long-vanished Kwa.

The mechanics of the Kwa's star temple -- the Big Dumb Threat that propels the story -- are never properly explained: How this ancient pile of stone could have been harnessed to transport anything or anyone is far from obvious. Introduced as the Kwa's means of traveling the universe, it seems designed to fulfill no transportation function; rather, it seems to function more effectively as a weapon. When first triggered, as a consequence of the witches tinkering about outside the Star Chamber trying to get in, the machinery obliterates -- consumes -- an entire planet, Ova; and the Jedi say as much as that the safety of many planets in surrounding space is in jeopardy. This in spite of all the safeguards built in by the all-powerful Kwa. But, when the witches finally gain control of the Infinity Gate (without triggering any more such phenomena, it should be noted, though space is disrupted in the vicinity of Dathomir itself, conveniently precluding any rescue of Vos), and use it deliberately, they point it at a target, and discharge it, seemingly without doing any additional collateral damage. (The localized distortion of space around Dathomir mentioned in the story fits quite well with the weapons-system interpretation: it's an effective shield that can keep all starships, or shipborne forces, out of the Dathomir system, an excellent defense for a weapon.) No transportation, other than of the potentially lethal Infinity Wave itself, occurs. So, again, it must be asked, how could this ancient death-ray have been harnessed to move anyone or anything from point A to point B, given the destructive consequences associated with its every operation?

Disaster at the target is averted by the expedient of turning the wave around at the source, which, aside from defying logic, looks stupid depicted as a U-turn on a monitor in the illustration; furthermore, this mighty, space-altering, planet-destroying wave ostensibly manages to do no more upon arrival back at its point of origin than to shatter the generating station. Some threat to the galaxy.

Pinning so much on the witches and the artifacts strikes me as a serious error. What's more interesting is the core of Vos's character, his attraction to the dark side and the internal conflict it engenders; but that is essentially ignored. Instead, we get what becomes an Irwin Allen movie captured between comic book covers. True, Vos's temptations have been examined in "Twilight," but, as we have seen time after time in this series, borrowing and recycling seem to pose no problem for Mills and Bachs. As it is, after being made much of, or at least being made noise about, in the first issue, Vos's conflict is all but forgotten, reappearing only at the very end of the story in an unconvincing fashion, a brute-force attempt to tie up a loose end. Vos still gets angry, but there's no credible impression created that he's in danger of falling to the dark side in the concluding installments of this series, as there was in "Twilight."

Does psychometry damage the brain? Does being on the surface of Dathomir? Vos's portrayal here raises these questions, because, even memory-wiped and saddled with a Devaronian sidekick, for lack of a better term, in "Twilight," Vos was sharper than he is here. Still fatuous as "Infinity's End" concludes, he blunders from panel to panel doing little more than blathering away, delivering flat quips and flatter exposition. (Vos's isn't the only, or most seriously, offending dialogue, it should be noted; it all has a tendency to be short, emphatic, and slack-jawed.)

Vos is still rather quick with his saber, and seems most effective when resorting to it. Of course, he comes off in this swordplay a good deal more ruthless and less chivalrous than one would expect of a Jedi Knight, which is only to be expected: he's fighting women -- muscle-bound women up to their implants in the dark side, granted, but with inferior training and weapons.

It further weakens the script that Mills opts to make psychometry Vos's primary power, perhaps in an attempt to avoid wrestling with the difficulties presented by the non-athletic Jedi Force powers, but then leans heavily on it as a means of revealing information, motivation, and simply moving the plot along when it gets stuck, making of his deus ex machina an irritating jack-in-the-box.

So far as this reviewer could detect, there was a lot less borrowing -- or at least a lot less additional borrowing -- in the final two installments of the series, but, considering that some of the borrowed elements in the story (Egyptian architecture; the ST:TNG parody in Part One) have worked the best, the second half of the series might have been better, or at least no worse, had there been more borrowing.

Then again, maybe not. Vos takes a Schwarzeneggerian turn as he gives a balky machine the Vulcan salute to prevent the Infinity Wave from reaching its target, a la Total Recall. Other elements of the conclusion will no doubt remind the reader of the end of The Wrath of Khan. It doesn't help.

Infinity is supposed to be endless; "Infinity's End" isn't (quite), it only seems that way, through Mills's and Bachs's want of skill. A vast threat is cooked up out of well-known materials. All manner of crap gets added as the series plods along to an unsatisfactory solution. Carelessly written and illustrated -- Thank the Maker, it's over.

The best thing that can be said about "Infinity's End" is that it ushers in five issues of the on-going series without Quinlan Vos. (Unfortunately, Vos will be back in "Darkness.")

It's crap! Flee!

Seriously -- it is bad. Seriously bad. If I weren't a collector, I wouldn't have gone beyond the first issue.

Discuss this article on the Echo Station message boards.

Order Star Wars comics now from Things From Another World, the only official online Dark Horse comic distributor.

(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.)