Star Wars: X-Wing: Mercy Kill (2012) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? Did you all have a good weekend? I had a quiet one. As you may have noticed, I didn't post anything for the rest of the week after I posted my Starfighters of Adumar review. Well, I ended up having a busy week after that between going out with Brad and getting Batman & Robin and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III on VHS, completing both series on that format, and getting my Covid shot. I also decided not to watch the finale of Goosebumps. The first season really just dropped in quality for me. The first five episodes were a really strong start, but by the end it became less about the scary Goosebumps stuff, and more about the teen drama, and it ended up becoming so generic by the end that I just didn't care about any of the characters. The 2015 movie was more engaging for me. But, I'm not here to talk about Goosebumps, I'm here to talk about the final book in the Star Wars: X-Wing series, Mercy Kill, by Aaron Allston. So let's get into it.

Mercy Kill feels out of place, not only as part of the X-Wing series as a whole, being that it was published thirteen years after Starfighters of Adumar came out, but in the batch of Star Wars novels being published at the time. Mercy Kill came out in 2012, at a time where Del Rey had taken a much darker tone with the Star Wars publishing line than Bantam Books had in the '90s. I'd say that the shift in tone came with the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States, but Del Rey and Lucasfilm were already two years into the publication of The New Jedi Order in September, 2001, so it was more a general shift in tone for entertainment.

Despite the compelling storylines and interesting characters, the original X-Wing series was made to be a cheesy Sci-Fi series about the pilots of the squadron that blew up the Death Stars, and the background pilots from the movies that either never got any screentime or got a moment or two, such as Wedge Antilles, Wes Janson, and Hobbie Klivian. Basically the idea was to take the focus off of Leia, Han, Luke, Chewie, R2-D2, and C-3PO. In fact the entire Bantam line of books was meant to harken back to Star Wars's roots as a goofy Sci-Fi film inspired by the comic books, pulp Sci-Fi novels, and movie serials that George Lucas grew up reading and watching. Which is what Splinter of the Mind's Eye, The Han Solo Adventures, and The Lando Calrissian Adventures are like as well.

Fast forward to 2012 and the landscape of Star Wars, both in the movies and TV shows, and in the expanded universe of comics, video games, and novels, had drastically changed by the prequels and the endless playground that those movies opened up in terms of the in universe chronology, being that authors, comic book writers, and video game developers could finally tell stories set in those eras of the Old Republic, the Clone Wars, and the rise of the Empire. Eras that George had forbidden them from telling stories in throughout the '90s due to him making the movies.

At the same time authors began going much much darker and alot of times more angsty with the characters and their storylines. Suddenly Chewbacca gets killed in Vector Prime, the first book in the The New Jedi Order series, published in 1999, only a couple of months after Starfighters of Adumar was published, and by the end of the 2000s, two out of three of Han and Leia's children had been killed off, as had Mara Jade, whom Luke had married in 2000. Suddenly there were stakes, characters were more flawed than before, with Luke making so many mistakes, which nearly led to the fall of the New Republic and later, the Galactic Alliance, as well as the extinction of the New Jedi Order. Which doesn't explain why fans were so against the way Luke was portrayed in The Last Jedi, being that both versions made very similar mistakes, and both ended up leading the son of Han and Leia to turn to the dark side and become a Sith Lord. But, that's a topic for another post.

What makes Mercy Kill such a bizarre book is that Aaron Allston's brand of humour feels out of place in a book published in 2012. Because of the darker tone that Star Wars started having in the 2000s first with the novels and then the movies and TV shows, Allston's brand of humour is almost too childish. Not that you can't have humour in books, movies, shows, and comic books that have a dark tone to them, in fact it's encouraged, otherwise you get bogged down in darkness, but, things like Wraith Squadron's loose interpretations of the law on missions being played for laughs, and things like the Kettch joke from the first three Wraith Squadron books, almost feel inappropriate for a darker book.

So basically, Piggy had left Wraith Squadron near the end of the Yuuzhan Vong War, because Runt had been killed needlessly during a tense mission, at Piggy's own hands. After spending years as a math professor, Piggy is convinced by Face to return to a rebuilt Wraith Squadron to take down a corrupt Alliance general following the events of the Fate of the Jedi series, which ended five months before this book was published. While coming to terms with what he'd been forced to do to Runt all those years ago, Piggy also has to overcome his hatred of Scut, a Yuuzhan Vong assigned to the squadron. Well, "assigned" isn't really the right word, since Wraith Squadron was unofficially reformed for this particular mission, without the knowledge of Alliance Intelligence. Scut was recruited. Scut also has to come to terms with the fact that neither Piggy nor Bhindi, the field commander of this iteration of Wraith Squadron, are perfect, despite what his human adopted parents told him about Wraith Squadron, as the Wraiths had rescued Scut's adopted father during a mission to take out High Admiral Teradoc, one of the warlords who were left following the Battle of Endor, and the deaths of Ysanne Isard, Warlord Zsinj, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and the resurrected Emperor Palpatine, approximately four years after the events of Solo Command and The Courtship of Princess Leia. 

Unlike with the original Wraith Squadron members from the first three Wraith books, I didn't get a good grasp on any of the new Wraiths. I remembered Bhindi Drayson from the Enemy Lines duology that Allston wrote for the The New Jedi Order series in 2002, and Myri is the daughter of Wedge and Iella while Jesmin is the daughter of Kell and Tyria, named after Jesmin Ackbar, but, besides Scut, we don't get any time with the other new members of the squadron. It was cool having Piggy as the main POV character though given how I felt like he got shafted in the original Wraith Squadron novels.

It was also nice seeing Face, Dia, Wedge, Kirney Slane (current and longest existing identity for Gara Petothel/Lara Notsil), and Piggy back with Kell, Shalla, Elassar Targon, and Runt appearing in flashbacks. Runt and Dia haven't been seen since Solo Command, and neither has Gara/Lara/Kirney, though Shalla appeared in Betrayal, which was the first book in the Legacy of the Force series, which came out in 2006, and was written by Allston, and pretty much everyone else appeared in at least two books of The New Jedi Order in the early to mid 2000s. Kell would make one more appearance in Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn, which came out in 2013, but with Allston dying in 2014 and Disney ending the Legends continuity that same year, Mercy Kill is the final appearance of Wraith Squadron and those characters that Allston first created in 1998.

Honestly, the villain side is nowhere near as interesting as Warlord Zsinj and his people were in the original Wraith Squadron books. This time around you have the typical traitor amongst the good guys that we've seen way too many times in fiction. And this time Allston definitely didn't do anywhere as near a good a job with Thaal as he and Stackpole did with Erisi Dlarit and Gara Petothel/Lara Notsil in the earlier books. Mainly because we spent no time with him until the very end with the Wraiths catch up with him to arrest him. The thing is with Erisi, she worked for Isard because without the Empire her family would lose the Bacta monopoly, and Gara was a member of Imperial Intelligence. Her whole deal was going undercover into enemy territory and gathering intel on the New Republic for the Empire or Trigit or whoever to use against the Empire's enemies. As she said to Myn Donos in Solo Command, sending Trigit the information that he used to destroy Talon Squadron was her job. It was nothing personal. But with Stavin Thaal, he's just your stereotypical greedy bureaucrat, who decided he wanted to get rich more than he wanted to defend the Galactic Alliance. That's not even remotely interesting at this point.

  Mercy Kill is the only X-Wing book to come out in hardcover. The paperback came out in 2013. That's the copy that I have. I think I got it in either 2013 or 2014. I don't remember exactly though. I just know I got at some point before the second paperback edition came out.

That second paperback edition was the Legends banner edition. Like with every other X-Wing book, I don't own the Legends banner edition so I have no way of knowing when that edition came out. Especially because Wookieepedia, Amazon, and the publisher's website don't list the Legends banner release date. Just the release dates for the original hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions. 

Overall, Mercy Kill is a really good book, and a sad way to end Aaron Allston's career as a Star Wars author. Unfortunately he passed away from heart failure at the age of 53 in 2014, as the Legends continuity ended and before the Canon continuity books really got started. I really enjoyed it. While I prefer the Bantam era X-Wing novels written by Stackpole and Allston in the mid to late '90s, Mercy Kill is still a great way to end the series. It just doesn't feel like it fits in with the late 2000s and early 2010s Legends era. The story is very much of its time, but the humour is very much of the Bantam era novels, which can feel a bit jarring given how much more subtle the humour is in Allston's other Del Rey era Star Wars novels in comparison to this book and the rest of his X-Wing novels. 

I honestly found it interesting that Del Rey agreed to do a tenth book in the series, given it had been thirteen years since Bantam had published Starfighters of Adumar, and the X-Wing series feels out of place with the Del Rey era novels, so I thought it was interesting that Del Rey chose to do another book in the series after so many years. Mind you it was something that the fans had wanted since the last book had come out in 1999, ending the Bantam era. Which is great because of how heavy the Star Wars novels of the 2000s and early 2010s were. 

That's it for me for today my friends. It's also it for the X-Wing series as this is the final book in the series. I am going to take a little break from Star Wars books for the time being as doing all ten X-Wing books took a long time and I want to read and review a few other books before the end of the year. I will do more Star Wars book reviews in the New Year though. Otherwise, it's a lowkey week here in the Geek Cave. I have a comic book review in mind for Wednesday, and then on Friday I'll be putting out my first in a series of movie reviews where I take a look at the Home Alone franchise since it's only a little over a month until Christmas. So until then have a great night and I will talk to you all later. Take care.