#crosscurrent

Admittedly, I mostly skimmed this, but the plot followed Kyle Katarn's student Jaden Korr, who is suffering from PTSD and gets a vision of various ghosts (including Mara!!!) telling him "it all begins in a black hole on Fhost". This turns out to be the name of a bar (heh), where Jaden meets a crew of salvagers who take him out to the site of his vision, where they encounter a Jedi from 4500 years in the past and a secret Sith dreadnaught carrying macguffin ore that amplifies dark side powers, all of which got shipped through time through a bad hyperspace jump.

Just in case you thought I was making this up, here is an actual quote:

Khedryn licked his lips. “Just so I know what to tell him: you’re saying I have an old Imperial distress call coming from a moon no one’s charted before, a five-thousand-year-old Jedi aboard my ship, and a five-thousand-year-old Sith dreadnought with some evil ore aboard flying through my sky?”

Oh,yeah, and Jaden's being stalked by an Anzat assassin in the employ of (wait for it) Darth Krayt, because the Anzat are vampires who feed off life energy ("soup") and eating Jedi gets this one high. The Sith want the macguffin ore, because Sith gonna Sith. The past Sith and past Jedi duke it out, and destroy each other, as you’d expect.

Meanwhile, Jade and co. all go down to the nearby planet, which has a secret abandoned lab full of secrets--the Empire under Thrawn was making Jedi-Sith genetic recombinants, which of course ended badly for them.

“I suspect they recombined the DNA of Jedi with the DNA of Sith.”

Khedryn’s lazy eye floated in its socket, fixing on nothing, as if it did not want to see. “Why would they do that? Being a Jedi or a Sith is a choice, isn’t it? It’s not biology.”

Jaden shook his head. “We didn’t know all there is to know about how biology meshes with Force use. Perhaps they sought to create some kind of breakthrough Force-user, one unbound by the limitations of light and dark.”

“How is that possible? Light and dark sides are exclusive, aren’t they?”

Jaden turned off the computer and Dr. Gray disappeared. “The line between light and dark is not as clear as many think.”

Even if the explanation is total bullshit, the laboratory exploration is genuinely creepy, A++. The clones are worshipping the cloning tank, which they call "Mother" and fill it full of bodies. The only one we see is a clone of Kam Solusar, but the implication is there was at least one Mara clone at some point who might still be alive. Jaden kills the "Kamclone," but is distracted by the Anzat assassin, and then the rest of the clones get away, leaving the three survivors to band togther to track them down. And I guess no one thinks to tell Luke or any of the other Jedi anything??

Anyway, this is okay, I guess, but it's hard to get into it because there's such a tenuous connection to the characters I actually care about, AND it's a weird little oneshot that doesn't really make an impact in larger plot. The time travel and the clone plots are two separate storylines that feel like they have very little to do with each other and the former was just there to pad out the story, especially since it doesn’t have any real effect on Jaden’s character or his quest. I was not expecting the tenuous Mara connection, though. I'm also amused that apparently hyperspace time travel was actually canon and not just a thing that fanfic writers made up.

I'm not really sure what the point of this was, but to be fair, Legends was kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel--to be brutally honest, it was due for a reboot anyway. The real problem I have with it wasn't the reboot per se, so much as one that got rid of most of the genuinely good bits of the EU in exchange for its own brand of WTF--but that's a rant for another day.

Here are some more passages that struck me:

The deep snow clutched at their feet, as if trying to slow their advance and give them time to reconsider. Jaden looked up, eyed the slate of the sky, imagined not snow falling but reified evil.

Um...dramatic, much?

Jaden knew that at some top-secret Thrawn-era facilities the participating scientists would be forced to endure surgical alterations of their facial structure while on assignment, changing back to themselves only after their work was completed. None would be able to recognize another afterward. He wondered if that had happened in the facility, and if so, why.

The Empire is a piece of shit, full stop. 

Also, fuck this ageism so hard:

“It means he has an intuitive connection to the Force,” Jaden said. “Were he younger, it would mean he was trainable. But given your age, Marr, even with your mathematical gifts, training is probably out of the question.”

But by the end of the book, Jaden agrees to train him anyway, so I guess that was character development for him? IDK. I still hate it, though.