Today saw the release of the 39th (and penultimate) issue of the second volume of Star Wars: Doctor Aphra from Marvel Comics, and below are my brief synopsis and thoughts on this installment.
Doctor Aphra (2020) #39 begins aboard Domina Tagge’s flagship the Acquisitor, where Lady Domina and her crew are under attack by countless droids inflicted with the Scourge virus, as a continued tie-in to the Star Wars: Dark Droids crossover event. She’s able to fight them off for the time being, and sends her cousin Lapin Tagge out from the ship in an escape pod to preserve the bloodline in the case of Domina’s fall. Cut to the Ark Angel IV, the much smaller ship belonging to the title character, rogue archaeologist Dr. Chelli Lona Aphra. Chelli and her ex-girlfriend Sana Starros have another ex-lover Magna Tolvan in restraints, because the Scourge was able to corrupt Magna’s cybernetic parts as well. The assassin Just Lucky asks to be let off the ship at Canto Bight, where “Dark Droids” are also running rampant, so he can help his brother Pak and boyfriend Ariole Yu.
From there, Aphra sets to work on a way to counteract the Scourge, and she does so using the spider-legged droids that the Scourge itself was utilizing to infect other droids. She reprograms these spider droids to knock out the affected robots, and with Sana’s assurance they travel to Tagge Space, where that family’s fleet is in deep trouble. Domina Tagge has been captured by the Scourge and continues to put up a strong front against the A.I., but her own cybernetic implants make her vulnerable to the virus. We get a lot of monologuing from the Scourge about his plans (this chapter of the story takes place before he’s able to inhabit the bodies of purely organic beings) while Chelli and Sana sneak aboard the Acquisitor with their secret weapons. They knock out a bunch of droids with the spiders and one very effective EMP, but they come to Domina’s rescue only after her cybernetics have been corrupted.
The trio scrambles back aboard the Ark Angel and Domina instructs Aphra to throw her out the airlock if she starts to turn, but first Chelli returns to the larger ship, ostensibly to plant another remotely detonated EMP. Instead, she suddenly jumps into hyperspace, leaving her allies behind and insisting that she needs to run the Acquisitor into a planet at lightspeed in order to eliminate the Scourge menace for good. And on this ostensible act of selflessness, this second-to-last issue of Doctor Aphra (for now) comes to a cliffhanger ending. Will Chelli survive, or is she just planning on faking her own death yet again? We’ll find out at the end of next month, but until then I had a whole lot of fun with the Dark Droids tie-ins here, so no real complaints from me about writer Alyssa Wong’s exemplary work on this title.
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #39 is available now wherever comic books are sold.