Today saw the release of the fifth and final issue of Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics’ Star Wars: Dark Droids miniseries, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this climactic installment.
Dark Droids #5 begins with an incident in which the evil artificial intelligence known as the Scourge changes its strategy from merely corrupting the minds of droids and cyborgs to actively harming organics, exploding a transport full of passengers and triggering an escalated conflict between the robotic denizens of the galaxy and their masters. We get some voice-over dialogue from the Scourge explaining his actions over this, while checking in with characters from the four Marvel Comics series that have been crossing over with Dark Droids: Darth Vader, Doctor Aphra, Bounty Hunters, and the flagship Star Wars title. Then it's back to the communications-hub planet of Epikonia, where we are reminded that the Scourge still seeks a way to take over the minds of organics themselves, all while it is still struggling to navigate the countless droid consciousnesses it already controls.
This is around where another question occurred to me about the Scourge’s strategy: if, up to this point, it could only occupy the brains of droids and “hybroids,” why not simply implant cybernetic parts into the other organic beings it wished to possess? Wouldn’t that make the process a whole lot easier? But Dark Droids, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, is plagued with questions like that, which are sadly never really addressed or answered in this final issue of the miniseries. Instead there’s a ponderous conversation between the “Prime Entity” of the Scourge and the splintered-off being called the Elder, followed by an incursion of the Scourge’s ship by the revolutionary droid Ajax Prime and his new team from the Dark Droids: D-Squad spinoff. This is all fine and entertaining enough, but it’s also one of those situations where nothing terribly surprising happens and the method by which the Scourge is eventually eliminated is just way, way too easy for the threat it supposedly posed– in that way it reminded me of the Night King’s death in Game of Thrones: I suppose you would call it an anticlimax after how much the resolution had been built up over the course of the series.
Having the Prime Entity be so vulnerable (and having its destruction cause the instant defeat of all its many offshoots) really does feel like a cop-out, though I personally can’t come up with a better way to conclude this story… I suppose I was hoping writer Charles Soule would be able to. There is a little hint at the end, after Ajax Sigma has begun to rebuild his Colony of the Second Revelation with a droid formed from the remnants of the Spark Eternal, that Ajax might try to utilize the Scourge’s methods in his own efforts to reform the galaxy. But wouldn’t that just end up being pretty much this same narrative over again? I dunno, I didn’t find that reveal terribly exciting, and I actually preferred Ajax Sigma as a somewhat benign presence. And that brings me to the other major question I have coming out of Dark Droids– how are the organic beings of the galaxy going to prevent something like this happening again? What safeguards are being put in place to stop droids from being so effortlessly corrupted? I would like to see the events of this crossover have reverberations through the ongoing Star Wars comics, and I’m hoping that Soule and his fellow writers have that in mind as Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Publishing enter into 2024.
Star Wars: Dark Droids #5 is available now wherever comic books are sold.