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When Marvel relaunched the Star Wars comics line, the world was a simpler place. Lucasfilm had just rebooted its official continuity, there was room for new stories, new insight into familiar faces, new opportunities to flesh out the space between the Star Wars movies. And now, we come to this: zombie droids.
Okay so, yes and no. Yes: zombie droids are the main impetus of Star Wars: Dark Droids, a new line-wide Marvel Star Wars event written by Charles Soule, kicking off with a solo miniseries with artists Luke Ross and Alex Sinclair (and lettering by Travis Lanham) before disseminating across the rest of the publisher’s current Star Wars titles throughout the rest of 2023. No: they’re not really zombie zombie droids, in the sense of the undead, but zombie-ish, given Star Wars’ generally weird approach to droid sentience that for the most part is only made weirder in Star Wars: Dark Droids, a new line-wide Marvel Star Wars event.
How we got from there to here—the here being zombie droids, need I remind you—is a story of current Star Wars canon, an ode to the brilliant ideas and ridiculous excess that Disney and Lucasfilm once sought to excise with the transition of Star Wars’ old Expanded Universe into this fresh new continuity. It’s also a story about how Star Wars is great, and extremely silly, and how those things are not diametrically opposed. But to cut a very long story short, zombie droids exist now—in this case, the period the Star Wars comics currently take place in between the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which I must stress is about a year—because of a Thing called the Spark Eternal, which now is a Thing called the Scourge?
Image: Luke Ross, Alex Sinclair, and Travis Lanham/Marvel Comics
What is the Spark Eternal/the Scourge, you ask? I’m so glad you did because this is a ridiculous amount of set up to deliver before we get to the properly wild stuff. The Spark Eternal first appeared in the Doctor Aphra comic series, an ancient artificial intelligence developed by a splinter Dark Side cult at war with the Sith called the Ascendant. In the present day Aphra found herself temporarily host to the Spark after accidentally re-activating it, but long story within the long story short, it got wrenched out of her and she’s okay now. At the same time, Qi’ra—yes, Emilia Clarke from Solo, she’s back now, she has been for a while—had been using the Crimson Dawn to stage a massive war against Palpatine and Darth Vader, hoping to use a mysterious prison called the Fermata Cage to lock the two in time and throw them into a sun. Briefly allying with the Spark in her attempts, because it too hated the Sith, Qi’ra ultimately failed thanks to a betrayal by the Knights of Ren (yes, those ones from The Rise of Skywalker; no, don’t worry about it), went into hiding, and the Spark no longer had a body. It’s a good job then that the Fermata Cage dropped a peculiar small disc of ancient so-evil-even-the-Sith-forbade-it technology that the Spark merged with, becoming the Scourge, and casually just hanging out biding its time.
Phew! All caught up. We are now on the same page, that page being page one of Star Wars: Dark Droids #1, out this week.
Image: Luke Ross, Alex Sinclair, and Travis Lanham/Marvel Comics
Which means, at last, zombie droids! Whatever the Spark did in becoming the Scourge, it has now developed the ability to infuse itself into not just a single host body, but multiple—but in doing so, can seemingly no longer inhabit organic hosts. So when Palpatine sends a cleanup crew to the station where Qi’ra had just tried to turn him into a time-popsicle, there are inevitably droids among the operatives, mostly KX-Security Droids (you know, K2 from Rogue One), and the Scourge immediately starts implanting itself among the droid contingent.
What follows from there in Dark Droids #1 is a very typical faux-horror zombie story with a sci-fi twist. The Scourge finds its way back to an Imperial Star Destroyer, and makes short work of infecting the thousands of droids aboard, and then murdering the tens of thousands of organics aboard, gassing them, stabbing them, choking them to death, venting them out into space, and so on. And oh no, it sends an agent to start infecting the Rebel Alliance while they’re planning how to destroy the new Death Star, starting with, gasp, C-3PO! Like I said (what feels like a very long, long time ago thanks to all the background context), this is, in fact, the least interesting thing about Dark Droids. It’s all set up, and there’s no real engagement with the big questions about droids in Star Wars, outside of an opening rumination by the Scourge about how the galaxy perceives and treats droids as a sentient species before the Scourge promptly starts overriding their personhood anyway.
Image: Luke Ross, Alex Sinclair, and Travis Lanham/Marvel Comics
So far at least—because the actual fascinating thing about Dark Droids #1 comes at you completely sideways and out of nowhere for a few pages, disrupting the humdrum of zombie droids to tease an eventual way out of this calamitous new threat… and maybe even answers to some of those big questions about droids. While the Scourge is busy doing a bunch of organic-murder aboard the Star Destroyer, the action cuts to a mysterious place called the Colony of the Second Revelation, where a small group of droids is building a new member, and housing within it a computer core made up of contributions from the group’s “own experience and understanding, shadings of our knowledge and hopes and self determination,” according to their leader, Ajax, a droid in priestly garb.
Ajax himself is a character familiar to people who’ve somehow been able to keep up with Marvel’s Star Wars comics—a droid from the time of the High Republic who once staged an uprising in demand for droid rights, cut down by the Jedi after his rebels slaughtered the colony of organics they served—but that’s not the point here, unlike the rest of Dark Droids, leaning on months and years of previous comics setup. Neither is the point that, as Ajax goes on to explain, that they alone must now stop the Scourge from overriding the personhood of Droidkind across the galaxy. The point is these are Droids with faith. They have a religion, a belief system through which they create entirely new life: not replicas of themselves, but new beings born from a collective amalgam of their own history, experience, and values. From their own souls. It’s a creation myth for droids as a people beyond their literal construction, but not an actual myth because it’s real.
Image: Luke Ross, Alex Sinclair, and Travis Lanham/Marvel Comics
Ajax notes that there are not many of these kinds of droids in existence across the galaxy, but even then, they do exist. This is the spark of something Star Wars has always skirted in its murky conversations of droid identity and sentience—who gets to count as people when it comes to droids, and what does it say about how the organics of the galaxy treat them regardless of that? There are a zillion mines in this narrative field for Dark Droids to dance around in discussing this, even if it deigns to do so much beyond what is established in this issue in favor of its larger zombie droid story. And even if it does establish whatever Ajax and his people have found for themselves as a seemingly stable droid culture, what we know of the rest of the Star Wars galaxy beyond this moment in time seems to indicate it will never spread far enough to impact the vast majority of droids in the 30-odd-year window we have for the post-Return of the Jedi era right now anyway.
But even with those caveats, this is an area where a lot of other recent Star Wars material has tried, and failed (or failed by not trying at all, in The Mandalorian’s case), to dig deep into one of the perpetually ethically challenging pillars of its worldbuilding. If Dark Droids tries to go deeper—even if it ultimately fails like other Star Wars stories before it—that’s frankly going to be a much more interesting experiment to watch unfold than zombie droids.
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