On the Last Command

This is a really good conclusion to the Thrawn trilogy.

As with the other books in the trilogy, the real strength was in world-building. Thrawn felt a bit stronger this time around, as did the other major villains and Mara Jade, but the original protagonists left much to be desired—at times, they didn’t feel like the same characters that existed in the original trilogy. I couldn’t help but feel that Chewbacca did not get nearly enough attention as he deserved, while Han, Lando, and Luke felt “thin” in characterization. As before, Karrde is probably my favorite new character, and the smugglers received plenty of deserved attention. Leia was also well done.

One of the things that’s so interesting about the Thrawn trilogy is about which “atmospheres” or “vibes” from the original trilogy they pull on. In the previous volume, Dark Force Rising, there was very clear influence from A New Hope while this one similarly pulls on Return of the Jedi. It seemed that none of the books heavily pulled on The Empire Strikes Back except for one fairly brief scene in Heir to the Empire on Dagobah. It does make sense, as The Empire Strikes Back is a story that is thoroughly consumed with Vader, and while the other two in the original trilogy have heavy Vader influence, there’s more to that world than Vader.

The pacing here, on whole, was excellent. The Coruscant and Wayland scenes were some of the best in the trilogy, and there were no subsections that I wanted to speed through (which I did in some of the other books in the trilogy—and the movies, I could not care less about Dagobah!), which is a sign that Zahn gave deserved attention to all components of the story. The climax of the book,

Spoiler

which occurs on Wayland

, was especially well done, but Thrawn’s ending seemed a bit too abrupt.

Spoiler

I know that all of the books fed into this with the Noghri arc, but Rukh was never really pulled into that and there should have been more there.

The book definitely follows much better in the spirit of Star Wars than the sequel trilogy and, realistically, this is what the sequel trilogy probably should have looked like. Nevertheless, I have high hopes that the Ahsoka Disney+ series will pull from this set of books, and perhaps the next season of The Mandalorian will too. We’ll have to wait and see.