Review: ‘Star Wars: Inquisitors’ #1 Is a Missed Opportunity
I’ve been very excited to read the first issue of the Star Wars: Inquisitors comic mini-series. I’ve always been fascinated by this group of dark siders serving the Sith and I’m appreciative of any glimpse I can get into their inner workings.
A lot of Star Wars fans don’t love the Inquisitors as they usually look weak and ineffective (which is the point, so we don’t have to watch Darth Vader constantly lose against Jedi during this time period). As a fan of the Inquisitorius, I was looking forward to a comic series that showed us more of how the Inquisitors interacted with each other and gave us some insight into what they think and feel.
Sadly, Inquisitors #1 struggles on that front, just as it struggles to set up an interesting premise for the miniseries’ main story, with little insight into the Grand Inquisitor himself as he is tasked with killing a new and uninteresting Jedi character. Even the writing for Darth Vader feels off, with the dark lord brought in seemingly as an expositionary tool and nothing more.
Hopefully the series will get more interesting as different Inquisitors are brought in. The Grand Inquisitor is probably the most well fleshed out member of the Inquisitorius already, so there is a greater opportunity to learn more about the Fifth Brother, Seventh Sister and Ninth Sister in future issues.
Spoilers ahead…
The opening pages of this issue are narrated by the Grand Inquisitor, so we do get a glimpse into how his mind works and what he thinks. Unfortunately, it tells us little beyond what we already know about the character as all he says is that he is committed to wiping out the Jedi and will do what is necessary to succeed; it’s a bland, unimaginitive and predictable sentiment. It’s a sad state that the 2017 run of the Darth Vader comic gave us a much more interesting look at the Grand Inquisitor than the opening issue of a series that is dedicated to him.
We see him threatening the local villagers to have them reveal the location of the Jedi Tensu Run. It’s a tactic straight out of the Inquisitor playbook, which we’ve seen the Inquisitor himself do in Obi-Wan Kenobi and his other Inquisitors do in Tales of the Empire, and the scene feel a bit derivative as a result. While it is a good introduction to the character, anyone reading this has probably already seen those series and it just wasn’t very exciting to watch him do that again.
The Grand Inquisitor reports back to Darth Vader, who really is just an expositionary tool to provide readers with Tensu Run’s backstory. We learn that Run has become a symbol of hope after breaking civilians out of an Imperial prison on Regis Kor.
We know little about Tensu other than this, so he isn’t particularly interesting at the moment. I have a slight problem with this heroic Jedi making a name for himself. We have plenty of tales of Jedi surviving Order 66 at this point, so it seems strange to declare a brand new character as a legendary figure when he’s not mentioned in any other stories around this time.
It also exacerbates the other problem that Star Wars has in revealing new Jedi that have survived Order 66. I have always railed against the idea that introducing new Jedi in the Dark Times undermines the success of Order 66, as it’s only been a handful compared to the thousands of Jedi that were killed, but I did groan at the idea that yet another Jedi has survived.
Perhaps it would have been less of a problem if I was more satisfied with other aspects of the story. I don’t have an issue with the Inquisitors rooting out inexperienced padawans who have managed to hide away somewhere across the galaxy, but having a new Jedi character go on the offensive and kick up this much of a fuss feels too much.
My other issue with this scene is Darth Vader himself. He becomes a narrator as he tells Tensu’s origin story, but his dialogue goes against every other depiction of Vader in this period. Vader is a man of action and few words in the comics and animated series, so for him to be telling the Grand Inquisitor a story that he surely already knows doesn’t ring true to the character. Vader only speaks when necessary, and this story feels wholly unnecessary for him to tell in this context.
Inquisitors is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Tensu Run. It does need to properly introduce the character, which it attempts to do here, but it comes at the cost of learning more about the Inquisitors, which surely should be the point of a series like this. The result feels like a messy compromise, with Tensu feeling underdeveloped and a lack of insight given into who the Grand Inquisitor really is.
We at least get to see the Grand Inquisitor cut down a small group of Jedi in a scene that makes him look competent at his job, but it’s fleeting.
The issue ends with Tensu Run declaring that he is going to hunt down the man who killed his old master, which hopefully will make things more interesting in future issues. The cover for the next issue seems to suggest that the story will focus on the Fifth Brother, so hopefully we will get some new insight into that character than we did with the Grand Inquisitor this time.
Rating: 5/10
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
