The year is 11 ABY, shortly after the events of Champions of the Force. Kyp Durron has just been returned to Coruscant with the Sun Crusher by Han Solo after having destroyed the entire Carida system, along with its 25 million inhabitants, for a trial.
LUKE SKYWALKER speaks before the council headed by MON MOTHMA, Borsk Fey‘lya, and Leia Organa Solo.
LUKE: …so, anyways, if you guys could just release Kyp back into my custody, I’ll just, uh, take him back to Yavin 4, the planet where he initially encountered the spirit of Exar Kun and turned to the dark side, and continue his Jedi training.
MON MOTHMA: What? No.
LEIA: Absolutely not.
BORSK FEY’LYA: It feels borderline criminal that you would even ask us that.
MON MOTHMA: This is a court of law. You get that, right? Like…I get that he’s your buddy, or whatever, but he’s literally killed more people than Darth Vader and Moff Tarkin put together.
LUKE: Right, right, I know, but he’s really sorry.
MON MOTHMA: I mean…okay?
LEIA: That super doesn’t change the amount of people he killed. Right? Like, even if Hitler had survived the bunker and been super apologetic at Nuremberg – and I’m sorry to invoke Hitler here, but I actually do think it’s a kind of apt comparison – we wouldn’t have just said like “Oh, well, thanks for the apology, go in peace,” right?
LUKE: I don’t know who Hitler is.
LEIA: Whatever the equivalent of Hitler would be in our own timeline, then.
LUKE: Look, to be fair, he was under the influence of the evil spirit Exar Kun at the time. Who has now been destroyed, we’re pretty sure. Although people thought he had been destroyed before, and he sure hadn’t been, haha.
LEIA: Didn’t he willingly accept the tutelage of Exar Kun during his time on Yavin 4?
LUKE: I don’t follow.
LEIA: It’s just that it’s sort of less…exculpable to have been possessed by someone if you asked them to possess you.
LUKE: Well, I’m not going to let him get possessed by another Sith spirit and destroy a second star system, if that’s what you’re worried about.
MON MOTHMA: That is exactly what we’re worried about.
LEIA: Also, it feels morally…questionable…that you think we would turn a mass murderer over to his own mentor for justice just because he belongs to a highly secretive religious organization. This isn’t Medieval Europe, or whatever, we don’t have special canon law for Jedis.
LUKE: Okay, but like, I sort of feel like I’m the most qualified person to decide what his punishment should be, and I really think he’s punished himself enough.
MON MOTHMA: Okay, see there I just straight-up disagree with you.
LEIA: Yeah, this hearing isn’t about whether or not he can go back to being a Jedi. That point is super moot. It’s mooted.
BORSK FEY’LYA: We’re just trying to decide whether to execute him or imprison him forever.
LUKE: Oh, is there still capital punishment in this time period?
LEIA: I mean…maybe? It’s not the future, right, it’s “long, long ago,” so we might not have advanced past the death penalty.
LUKE: Well, sure, but you don’t think a society that has come up with intergalactic space travel has also figured out a better way to treat criminals than executing them?
LEIA: Honestly, not necessarily.
MON MOTHMA: Either one is better than your plan, which is just going back to teaching him how to move battle destroyers with his mind.
LEIA: You’re honestly a horrible teacher.
BORSK FEY’LYA: Frankly, I’m a little confused why you’re not on trial too.
MON MOTHMA: Yes, let’s put him on trial later. In the meantime, I think we should execute Kyp Durron, because even though I’m opposed to the death penalty for regular human beings, I’m pretty sure there’s no way we can contain someone powerful enough to power the Sun Crusher with his brain for the rest of his life.
LUKE: I feel like we’re really getting away from the other option, which is let him apologize and come back with me to hang out on my Jungle Friendship Planet.
LEIA: Apologize to who, though?
LUKE: To…to all those dead people.
LEIA: There’s literally no one left to apologize to.
LUKE: He had a really hard upbringing, you guys. He lost his brother!
MON MOTHMA: Did he have 25 million brothers?
LUKE: I…no.
MON MOTHMA: Okay, then, you see how it’s sort of not the same thing.
LUKE: I guess.
BORSK FEY’LYA: So we’re agreed. Kyp Durron will be executed immediately for his crimes against the New Republic and sentient beings everywhere.
LEIA: Absolutely.
MON MOTHMA: No question.
LUKE: Can I at least return to the planet where Kyp Durron turned to the Dark Side under my tutelage and continue training a bunch of unknown quantities with absolutely no oversight or standardized curriculum, lacking even a single metric for measuring progress?
MON MOTHMA: Oh, that’s fine with me.
LEIA: Yeah, I see no problem with that.
LUKE: Okay, then. See you guys the next time one of my students goes rogue and murders everyone, I guess. Which hopefully won’t be that often.
MON MOTHMA: Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s what we’re here for.
OFFSCREEN, KYP DURON is summarily executed for the murder of 25 million innocents, as is appropriate.
Tags: kyp durron committed war crimes, sequels no one asked for, star wars expanded universe
Related Posts
The Sequel To Rebecca The Second Mrs. de Winter Deserves
The Hogwarts Houses of the Periodic Elements: A Critical Analysis
Joe Manganiello Read The Fountainhead And His Takeaway Was That People Should Quit Their Jobs To Work In Quarries
Children’s Stories Made Horrific: Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear?
Dear Businesslady: A Garden Of Job Advice
Signs Your Industry is Being #Disrupted By Tech Guys
This. THIS. It is a thing of beauty.
Like…I get that he’s your buddy, or whatever, but he’s literally killed more people than Darth Vader and Moff Tarkin put together.
Surely Tarkin should be held responsible for the destruction of Alderaan, which definitely had a population of more than 25 million.
Well, he’s dead, though, right, so he’s sort of beyond the reach of the law.
Can you summon a force ghost? If yes, what forms of justice can be meted out on a ghost?
HOW COULD A PLANET HAVE MORE INHABITANTS THAN A STAR SYSTEM THOUGH
The star system had fewer inhabitants than Canada, that’s how.
Remember when the ship in Alien was worth only $42 million?
http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/USCSS_Nostromo
The men who write science fiction stories, like all other men, are poorly suited for rigorous pursuits like mathematics or economics. Their mental fortitude simply cannot handle large numbers.
You’re assuming that their dollars are worth roughly the equivalent of ours. You don’t even know that they’re American dollars, for that matter.
Well, gadgetry tends to get cheaper, so maybe mineral-hauling spaceships of THE FUTURE would be only moderately expensive instead of preposterously expensive
Pretty easily, if the star system was only relatively recently colonized.
It was not a very popular star system, I s’pose
I feel as though Luke is at least criminally negligent on the whole Carida thing for a whole number of reasons, but mostly because he put the ridiculous Jedi scanner thing that Wedge found on Kyp AND IT HAD A RED GLOW INSTEAD OF BLUE. And Luke is all, “Well, I guess it’s because he’s young DERP DERP DERP.”
“Jedi scanner”
*vein pulses in forehead*
I have limited appreciation for the extended universe stuff but I’m glad at least some of us goes out of its way to remind us that Luke never really stops being a dorky farmboy who’s expected to wield galactic influence with a medium amount of experience in moisture farming
well the authors of the fate of the jedi series agree with you
He “lost his brother ” because he MURDERED HIS BROTHER ON CARIDA, LUKE.
I know Kyp can’t be executed twice, but I wish there could have been a separate trial for everything he did pre-Carida. Justice for Qwi Xux!
Oh Qwi! I love how the other EU authors did pretty much everything they could to write around the Jedi Academy trilogy. I think one of the Stackpole books opens up with Wedge being all, “look babe, we’re just different people now. You literally have no memories, and I see myself with a much more fleshed out character. Its not you, its me. Well actually its you. It’s mostly you.”
I’m not going to lie, I had the biggest crush on Kyp Durron when I was 11.
I WAS ELEVEN, OK.
I love that Mallory’s Star Wars dialogue earns capitalization and punctuation.
Also, this is perfect.
But how could you execute someone who’s that mysterious, dark, and broody? Just because he’s also more murderous than mysterious, dark, and broody? That’s borderline barbarism!
DEEP NERD QUESTION
Wouldn’t faster than light space travel make moral relativism pretty thorny, because all of time & history is happening in a simultaneous instant? Would the people of the Cardia system even *have ever existed* in a meaningful way by the time-reckoning of Coruscant’s system?
Clearly I’ve been working on my “Unpopular Opinion: I’m a Sith Lord” essay for a while
But if there are no meaningfully existing people in a certain frame or reference, how is a self-respecting Sith Lord supposed to demonstrate their power by murdering big ol’ piles of innocents?
I’ve been sitting here for several minutes trying to figure out if the Unpopular Opinion series is self-satirizing or not. Regardless, I think such a piece would not be appropriately appreciated over at XOJane.
It’s an airtight case and they can’t get him for all the murders, but they can hang ‘im on emotional distress for making the jedi feel millions of voices cry out and be silenced, Capone-style
also does the theory of general moral relativity conflict with interstellar’s love as FTL telecommunications broadcast theory or is that a special case due to the black holes and all
I think former death row inmate Princess Leia knows a thing or two about capital punishment policies.
Excuse me, that’s GRAND Moff Tarkin to you.
Ilu. Are you watching Star Wars rebels?
No, I don’t get the channel! I’m actually still working through Clone Wars on Netflix. Now THAT show has some interesting stuff to say about the inherent fascism of the Jedi Order. (I suspect a lot of the time it’s saying that stuff kind of by accident, but still.)
I dunno. There’s one arc that plays as though directed by Paul Verhoeven. I suspect there is a core group of writers and directors who savor exposing the fascism.
I have a super nerdy explanation for how one can imprison a powerful Jedi but I’m keeping it to myself. You’re welcome.
I hope it involves ysalimiri.
Does it involve shaving their eyebrows so they can’t brood? I figure, no brooding, no dark side. Vader had to have an Artificially Broody Helmet after he got all tortured up by Obi-Wan, though. So maybe it wouldn’t work.
But as I recall he still had eyebrows, they were just concealed under a thick layer of white makeup. Like Cesar Romero’s mustache as the Joker.
nooooo tell usssssss
What if we need that info, tho? Don’t turn this into one of those things where you’re the ONLY ONE who knows who the killer is/the secret that will destroy the Evil Mastermind. That never ends well. Get it out there on a public foum, that’s what I say.
A++ here for the jedi literary criticism
also still super mad about Mara Jade getting killed by her dumb nephew. “I was too in tune with nature” is the worst reason ever for someone to turn Sith.
That was the book that made me bail on the whole EU – I think until that point I’d read everything in print, even the YA stuff that I was definitely too old to be reading. I even made it through the solo kids getting assimilated by space ants. But killing off a top 3 (Jade, Thrawn, Horn) original EU character was just too much.
ugh, the space ants. They were really difficult to get through…Especially when the whole story arc was framed as “here are some non-subtle hints about why Dumb Nephew is about to be evil!11 Lol!”
Speaking as someone whose main source of information about SW canon is swtoronline, and some prompting from friends when I’m going ‘who? what? why?’ in an instance, it is my opinion that what the Jedi Academy really needs is a Psychology 101 class.
I’ve never read these books, but pretty much anything written by Kevin J Anderson is guaranteed to be trash, right?
Worse than trash, there was an entire plot line in the second book dedicated to the Solo’s children, who were toddlers, being kidnapped by a Rat King who lived in the sewers of Corruscant.
But, you have to understand that when these books were among the first original starwars material since the Ewok movies. SW nerds were desperate for anything we could get our hands on. Looking back, most of the EU novels not written by Zahn or Stackpole were hot garbage but that didn’t stop me from buying every single one, often in hardcover, as soon as they came out.
Hmmm…this makes me wonder. What is the WORST EU novel series?
I think I’d have to say Black Fleet Crisis. It’s a one-stop shop for all the hallmarks of bad Star Wars writing: Luke going through another distinct psychological phase like some sort of college freshman! Leia getting kidnapped! Thinly veiled stereotype villains that have never been mentioned before! The New Republic as a whole getting its ass handed to it by like one or two star systems worth of dudes!
Yes! the Black Fleet Crisis was so creepy!
Ha – I actually remember the Blackfleet Crisis more favorably, possibly because it had a cameo from Cindel Towani. In terms of series I’d have to with the space-ants towards the end of the EU novels. I won’t even dignify that run of books by looking up it’s actual name. Worst book in the EU has to be the Crystal Star.
Crystal Star was pretty bad. I still like space ants, bad as they were, better than Black fleet tho.
I was on the fence for Space Ants. It was pretty bad at points, but the parts that didn’t have to do with the Space Ants (amazingly, a substantive portion of the book) weren’t terrible. Crystal Star escapes being worse than Black Fleet by virtue of not subjecting me to a full trilogy of badness.
In retrospect, all of this is really a compelling invective against my literary choices as a youth. I really WOULD read anything that had Star Wars on it. At least it’s not as bad as getting way into those weirdly pro-Confederate Battletech novels. Which is a thing I also did.
Mallory, have you been reading David Brin’s star wars criticism?
See, this is why I could never take the Star Wars Extended Universe seriously at all. I mean, when the Founder ordered the genocide of about 800 million Cardassian civilians near the end of the Dominion War in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you can be sure that she went to jail.
JUNGLE FRIENDSHIP PLANET.
Oh god. This really is my day for reliving middle school apparently.
MAKE IT STOP NOW.
As a person who has read exactly one Star Wars book in her life (and that was a novelisation of Revenge of the Sith I’M SORRY I WAS A TEEN, also I quite liked it because it had more feelings than the movie) I feel like I have missed out on Important Life Experiences.
This stuff sounds exactly like the kind of thing high school me would have enjoyed, if I’d spent less time worrying about what other people thought of me and my reading habits.
I remember that novelisation being pretty good, though I don’t think I have a copy of it anymore. I wonder if I can get it on kindle?
Yeah I was definitely surprised, it had a lot of bits that weren’t even mentioned in the movie, explanations and asides and all the interesting stuff.
I have no idea if that’s something expected of the novelisations or if my terrible teenage love for Hayden Christensen’s hot, hot whining just led me to accidentally pick a good one.
The Revenge of the Sith novelization is definitely the best of the film novelizations, by far.
I know quite a few Star Wars fans who consider it a significant improvement over the film, at least.
And it has an incredible first few pages, making “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” actually mean something to the reader.
It’s because it’s from the Stover 3! Traitor, Shatterpoint, Revenge: what if our novels actually had emotions? It’s a bit cartoonish and telegraphed, but at least it takes the emotional shots and it’s willing to work dark.
long story short leah you LUCKED OUT.
The only Star Wars book I have ever read is a novelization of The Phantom Menace (I hadn’t even watched the films, but it was a book and it was in my house so of course I read it multiple times); there is no judgement here.
😀
Now you’re making me remember that I had a copy of a Phantom Menace novelisation lying around, too! I actually don’t remember if I read it or not, but I remember the Baby Anakin cover photo vividly…
This just reinforces to me that Zahn’s trilogy was awesome and then it was almost all downhill from there…(Okay, the X-Wing books were pretty good.) And while I had major issues with JAT, the scary part is it wasn’t the worst. I mean, I’ve honesty repressed reading Crystal Star. I know that I DID, but I can’t remember a thing about it. I suspect I’m probably better off for it.
Is this the place to start arguing about how the Sun Crusher was a ridiculously overpowererd plot device and representative of everything wrong with sequel escalation?
Yes it is!
I had the audio book of this trilogy as a kid and I will never forget the horrific sounds of the crystal spider things from the first book. Because you know, the sound engineer wanted to add “realism” and thought letting you hear the monsters was a good idea.
Wow. I have not seen a Kyp Durron murderer thread in YEARS. Takes me back to theForce.net boards around the Bantam era. And while I will not under any circumstances defend the JAT, Kyp gets a bad rap. I think the text paints a pretty clear picture of Sith mind control/warping evidenced by Kyp’s almost complete turn around after Exar Kun was defeated.
For that matter I think the dialogue in RotJ paints a very similar picture of Vader which is the only way Anakin’s redemption works, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
My favorite comment on this trilogy comes in Stackpole’s I, Jedi, when Corran Horn BLOWS UP Kun’s temple from his X-Wing and is all: “There, problem solved,” and then quits his training at the Academy because he can’t handle Kyp getting off scot-free and the way Luke handles things in general. And then he becomes a way cooler Jedi on his own and makes a lighsaber out of, pretty much, trash. But then, I’m a diehard Stackpole/Allston(sniff!)/Zahn fangirl, so basically anything any of them wrote is cool by me.
Well, gadgetry tends to get cheaper, so maybe mineral-hauling spaceships of THE FUTURE would be only moderately expensive instead of preposterously expensive
It was not a very popular star system, I s'pose
I still thinks it’s ridiculous that Kyp Durron got forgiven, as did most of the other Jedi who went dark over the years (e.g., Kam, Luke himself a few times), but Alema Rar–who was literally absorbed by an evil hive mind which had been poisoned by a Nightsister and a Shadow Academy graduate, and who literally had no control over her actions for much of her arc because she was controlled by that hive mind–was apparently irredeemable thanks to her actions. To the point where, when she was finally killed, Luke basically said, “Well, there was nothing we could have done for her anyway. Who wants to party?”
BRING STANDARDIZED TESTING BACK TO THE JEDI ACADEMY.
NO YOUNGLING LEFT BEHIND
Oh gosh, that was a close second to Zahn's books. I'm not sure what was funnier, Corran's dry wit or Stackpole's attempts to fix the Jedi Academy ridiculousness. Didn't he also write that Luke was under some kind of influence that was clouding his judgement during that time, too?
can you tell me, then, were all the blue people in that movie Kree? I was very very confused and struggled to tell people apart.
Those who accusing Kyp for doing this on purpose… shut the hell up!
Kyp was a teenager, possessed, his targets were mainly military and he felt regret at what he was “forced” to do. Others who have fallen to dark side have no excuse, hell you might as well blame Picard for killing dozens despite the fact that the Borg took control over him and dozens of others.
“He was under the influence of the dark side of the Force at that time, affected by the mental sendings of a long-dead Sith Lord. And in the years since, he has proven himself to be courageous, a defender of life—”
―Luke Skywalker
Star Wars fans… the biggest hypothesis on the planet