(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
One of the more enjoyable pop culture trends of recent years has been the willingness to give bit characters a bit more time in the storytelling sun.
Concomitant with this, has been an appetite for imbuing these characters, good and bad, with more humanity and depth, not necessarily to move them even more appealing or sympathetically human, but simply so they can be seen as more well-rounded characters and what they do can be judged in the light of the entirety of who they are.
One of the latest characters to be given the fully-human treatment is Bazine Netal, born on the Inner Rim world world Chaaktil, who emerges as one of the characters at Maz Kanata’s castle on Takodana in The Force Awakens, film seven in The Skywalker Saga, and the first sequel to the original Star Wars films.
In this instance, she is a spy for the Empire-derived First Order who oppose the burgeoning, nascent New Republic and it’s her actions reporting on the fact that Han Solo has just ferried Rey, Finn and BB-8 to the planet, in the Millennium Falcon no less, which kicks off the First Order Resistance War in 34-35 BBY.
That night have been it for this promising character but one of my favourite writers, Delilah S. Dawson has given her the backstory she needs in the brilliantly good short story, Star Wars: The Perfect Weapon.
“My bedtime stories were tales of bloody pirate raids. My friends were grizzled murderers who taught me how to punch. My jump rope was a garrote. But it was better than the orphanage.” (Bazine Netal)
In this tightly told and highly engaging story, Bazine Netal is revealed to be someone who has gone through a LOT, an orphan adopted by combat school operator, Delphi Koda in Chaako City, where he instils in his young charge a host of survival and fighting tactics which enable to become one of the most fearsomely capable mercenaries of her generation.
She has the ability to carry out all kinds of missions, and she is does so with great success and impressive skill, but like many a lone wold operator, think James Bond for one, she is perilously alienated any sort of meaningful communal humanity, seeing friendships and relationships of any kind as a liability she simply doesn’t need.
When she is given an assignment to track a veteran ex-stormtrooper who has a mysterious steel case in which lie unspecified goods that must go to the unknown commissioner of the mission, and in a very Mission Impossible-y droid-exploding kind of way, it’s obvious there is something off about the mission but she’s promised the kind of money that will enable her to retire as a reward and so she sets off for the planet Vashka, with one of Koda’s current students, Pantoran slicer Orri Tenro along for some real world spycraft experience.
It’s at this point that any further narrative reveals must end because #spoilers but suffice to say it’s a compelling set-up for a story that not only adds some high stakes espionage and mercenary action to the Star Wars canon, but which explores the richly broken humanity of a character who has a lot of intriguing, almost affecting layers to her.
She is, in many ways, a highly capable person who can more than look out for herself, which becomes graphically evident in this pitch-perfect story, but she is also lost from the normal emotional course of human experience and life and at the heart of a story of success and some victory, stands a person who may have won the battle for a great many things but who has ultimately lost the war for her own soul, which, it turns out, is based on the kind of great deception that would break anyone else.
(courtesy official Delilah S. Dawson Instagram)