5,000 BBY
*I’m not recapping anything, dammit. Go back and read the last one if you missed it.
*As the story starts Danner is fixing the roof of Taleena’s room. I bet he spills some perfume on himself.
*One of the interesting things here is the contrast set up in the very phrasing. I think the most moving one to me is when, early in this story, as Danner is thinking about his life on Perdition, he realizes that he feels “right.” This is in contrast to a line that explicitly stated that Kiran felt “wrong” in the last story. I really loved this.
*Thinking about Kiran: “If he did survive and did arrive . . .” Um, we’ll do the hand jive?
*Oh, boy, he just slipped and spilled the perfume on himself.
*So, I think this is the most interesting things about these stories. It’s not just the events that we see from three perspectives. It’s the very phrasing itself that bleeds over from story to story. It’s a way of sort of pointing out that these three characters are so close to each other that they see things nearly exactly alike. And, yet, tragically different.
*So, you get things like Danner echoing Kiran’s thought about Taleena: “Wouldn’t she be glad to see him?” And when Kiran shoves Danner away into the door, both Kiran and Danner notice the sound of the door rattling. Those kinds of things are the same from one story to the next. Some of the prose is exactly the same in this story as in the first one. And yet it doesn’t feel lazy; it feels kind of mythic.
*So, Danner, we find out through hearing his thoughts, is just as shocked as Kiran is to hear that Taleena has been unfaithful to Kiran while he’s been gone. So, he’s innocent, but he still feels that he needs to defend Taleena to keep Kiran from hurting her.
*At some point, really, Danner should have said something to that effect.
*So, obviously, this one has a downbeat ending. “The last thing he saw was a wave of sky-blue energy flashing before his eyes and the briefest glimpse of smoke as the flesh of his neck began to sizzle with the decapitating death blow. . . then there was darkness; then there was light and then, there was simply nothing at all, not even justice.”
*Frankly, I think that ‘not even justice’ should have been left off. It’s a bit too on the nose and the “simply nothing at all” is a really great, totally bleak ending line.
*This one was better than the first one. But that was partly because of the first one, I suppose. I mean, the way it played off the first one, particularly in the contrasts. Like I said earlier, I loved the contrast of Kiran feeling “wrong” and Danner feeling “right.” And I liked the details that carried over in the phrasing and such. I wasn’t expecting connections in that way, so I enjoyed that.
*CANONICAL STATUS: This work is fairly explicit in its introduction that the tale about to be told is a myth, used to illustrate the reasons behind the Jedi vow of non-attachment. It is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.
** ½ out of **** stars.
Nathan Butler
*Next time, it’s obviously the conclusion! Parallels: Taleena! Taleena, you ignorant slut!