Dooku: Jedi Lost (Star Wars) by Cavan Scott

Star Wars returns to audio, with mixed success

Star Wars has a history of producing excellent full cast audio dramas, beginning with the famous National Public Radio adaptations of the original trilogy, and given that it has been such a long time since there have been any (I think this is the first one since the Disney acquisition), I was very excited to learn that a new one was being made, and even more excited given that the story it would tell would be a long-untold chapter of the saga: the story of how Dooku left the Jedi order (I know there are some works that touch upon Dooku’s early history, like Jude Watson’s ‘Legacy of the Jedi,’ which I haven’t read, but I believe this is the first time the story has been told in depth). What we ended up getting was a good look into an underexplored corner of the Star Wars universe, which nonetheless left me unsatisfied in a few respects.

First, I have to address what seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Star Wars has a really good track record when it comes to voice acting; the voices in ‘The Clone Wars’ are of uniformly high quality, the actors all sound just like their film counterparts while still making the roles their own (when you think about it, James Arnold Taylor has spent more time playing Obi-Wan than Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness combined, for instance). Star Wars audiobooks, too, have benefited greatly from talented narrators, several of whom are represented in the cast of this drama (Marc Thompson, Jonathan Davis, and January LaVoy, all of whom are excellent). The cast of this drama give good performances that bring their respective characters to life, but there’s just one major problem: Dooku sounds nothing like Christopher Lee. I don’t understand why Lucasfilm didn’t, or couldn’t, get a good soundalike for the role. Corey Burton, who voices Dooku on ‘The Clone Wars,’ is excellent and would have been great. Maybe he wasn’t available or something, but I’m sure there are many other great choices to be found among the actors Lucasfilm already has a relationship with. Euan Morton gives a perfectly adequate dramatic performance, and I suppose he is mostly playing a younger Dooku (although he doesn’t sound like a young Christopher Lee either), but the dissimilarity of his voice from the established voice of the character yanks me straight out of the story, particularly in the framing device scenes, which I think are supposed to take place during or just before the Clone Wars.

And that brings me to my second gripe, which concerns the story’s framing device. The chronology here is a bit confusing to me, but it seems to take place early-ish in Ventress’ apprenticeship under Dooku, before she leaves to become a bounty hunter and all that nonsense, and all the Dooku history is told through diary entries and recounting by other characters. I really didn’t think this framing device added much other than unnecessary confusion to a story already burdened with lots of characters to keep track of (several generations of Jedi padawans and masters, for instance, many of whom sound quite similar). The different in-universe narrators certainly didn’t seem to shape the story in any Rashomonesque way; we just get an interlude with Ventress, she finds her next diary or interlocutor, and the story resumes unchanged (occasionally even relating events that the ostensible narrator did not even witness). Framing the narrative through Ventress seems to me to be an effort to tie ‘Jedi Lost’ in with the Dave Filoni-led content that’s been dominating so much of Star Wars canon lately: ‘The Clone Wars,’ ‘Rebels,’ and books like ‘Dark Disciple’ in which characters like Ventress frequently feature. One feature of the Filoniverse, as you could call it, which I find personally dismaying, is its tendency to over-clutter the Star Wars timeline: Darth Maul comes back to life right before ‘Revenge of the Sith,’ Ahsoka lives into the original trilogy era, there are Jedi running all over the place causing trouble when they’re meant to be all but extinct, and so on. I find the way Ventress is treated in this material to be characteristic of that sort of clutter. She was a Nightsister, then a slave, then a Jedi padawan, then a Sith apprentice, then a bounty hunter, and whatever else. I much prefer the treatment of the character from her original appearance in the Tartakovsky ‘Clone Wars’ series, where she’s just a formidable Sith assassin unburdened with excessive backstory. I thus found her presence weighted this story down, and in particular her interactions with her ghostly Jedi master were a frequent source of confusion (if I, an avid Star Wars fan, have difficulty following this aspect of the story, surely a general audience will also have difficulty). Few Star Wars stories bother with the story-within-a-story structural gimmick, so I’m at a loss as to why the choice was ultimately made to use it here.

My final gripe is that, while ‘Jedi Lost’ does fulfil the promise of its title, it ends leaving much of the Dooku backstory still untold. I can only imagine there are plans for a follow-up at some point, and I suppose I can’t complain about the prospect of more Star Wars audio dramas, though I would have thought one drama would be sufficient for this particular story. Despite an episode or two late in the run of ‘The Clone Wars’ that explored the character of Sifo-Dyas, many questions remain about his and Dooku’s role in commissioning the clone army (questions that I think arose in the first place because of George Lucas’ sloppy planning of the prequel trilogy, but fortunately there is a solid history of other writers plugging Lucas’ plot holes).

Now, I know I just spent a lot of time nitpicking, but I did enjoy ‘Jedi Lost.’ As usual with Star Wars audio productions, you have great production quality, with lots of nice sound design and of course plenty of John Williams’ music. There were a couple of slightly questionable music choices, but overall it’s the usual high standard we’ve come to expect. I also really liked the insight the story gave into the functioning of the Jedi order in the late Old Republic era. This is an era of Star Wars that I’ve always been interested in precisely because there aren’t supposed to be any “wars” in it; I like seeing how Jedi operate in peacetime, with no Sith Lords bedevilling them. The Star Wars universe has vast potential for imaginative storytelling, and Cavan Scott does mine some of that potential with some cool sci-fi set pieces. Despite my misgivings, I am still glad to see Star Wars return to audio dramas, and if there are to be follow-ups, I eagerly await them.

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