Galactic strategist

The appeal of Timothy Zahn's Grand Admiral Thrawn has persisted for decades

Image: Andrew Liptak

The latest Star Wars TV series Ahsoka wrapped up its season the other week, and with it came something I've always wanted to see: Grand Admiral Thrawn in the flesh.

For generations, George Lucas's Star Wars has provided some frightening villains in the form of Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Emperor Palpatine, Boba Fett, and plenty of others. It's hard to understate the menace and sense of evil that comes off of Vader's costume, and even decades after first watching the film in theaters, I still get a bit of a shiver when I catch a glimpse of him, either on screen or in person.

But Thrawn was something different: when Timothy Zahn introduced him in his 1991 novel Heir to the Empire and its two sequels Dark Force Rising and The Last Command, he brought a different sense of danger to the world. A cunning strategist, Thrawn was an Imperial officer who seemed as though he was impossible to beat, someone who could out maneuver and out-think his opponents.

In the late 1980s, Star Wars as a franchise was winding down: The Return of the Jedi had come out in theaters in 1983, and while there were some roleplaying games and TV shows out there, Lucasfilm had begun closing down its marketing and licensing efforts. Without new movies, there wasn't much interest in new toys or products from companies.

It wasn't until 1989 that Lucy Wilson, Lucasfilm's director of publishing attended a book festival in New York and spoke with a publisher who expressed an interest in something a bit different: new stories from the Star Wars universe that branched off from the films. She took the idea to George Lucas, who gave it his blessing, and she began looking for publishers to partner with. Ballantine Books, which had published some of the earlier novelizations and spinoff novels, passed, thinking that without new films, the books likely wouldn't sell well. One publisher had been interested, however: Lou Aronica of Bantam Spectra had written to her a year earlier, expressing an interest in publishing a line of books set in the universe.

“I talked about wanting to publish these books as events, launching in hardcover, which was fairly unusual for licensed properties at that time.” Aronica told me several years ago, noting that he wanted the books to land with the same impact as the films. Wilson was impressed with his proposal, and they signed an agreement for a trilogy of books. There was a stipulation: they had to be well-written, they'd have to take place after Return of the Jedi, and they couldn't bring back Darth Vader.

With an agreement in place, Bantam Spectra began looking for an author. Its senior editor, Betsy Mitchell, suggested Timothy Zahn, an up-and-coming author who'd written an number of space opera novels over the course of the 1980s, and who'd won the Hugo Award in 1984 for his novella Cascade Point.

Zahn was excited at the opportunity, telling me in an interview that “It went from very cool to aaah!” With some requirements for the book, he noted that he "didn't want a Vader-type or Emperor-type" villain to drive the plot: he needed a different type of threat for the heroes, something they hadn't faced before.

He came up with Grand Admiral Thrawn: an alien Chiss who had risen through the ranks of the Empire through his tactical brilliance, who understood an enemy's tactics, strategy and weaknesses, and who commanded his forces not through fear or threats, but through loyalty. "If you’re up against somebody like Thrawn, and he’s four steps ahead of you, your heroes have to bring their A-game to the field," Zahn explained. "When you have smart villains and smart heroes, you have a more exciting, interesting story.”

If Emperor Palpatine or Darth Vader were rough analogs of Adolf Hitler, Thrawn was Erwin Rommel, a feared German general who fought against the allies in Northern Africa and in France during the Second World War. If the former used brute force to achieve their means, the latter read Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Carl Von Clausewitz's On War.

Zahn's Thrawn trilogy was an immediate success, and helped spawn a growing multimedia franchise over the course of the 1990s. The Star Wars Expanded Universe – now branded and republished as Legends – had its ups and downs as various authors explored the lives of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa in volume after volume. The series has its ups and downs, but there's a nearly unanimous assessment from fans that Zahn's novels are some of the EU's highest points.

It's a virtue of setting a high bar right out of the gate, but also because Zahn really understood how the Star Wars universe ticked, and how to construct a story that hit the right tone and scale of the films.

That's a hard thing to replicate, and over the course of the series, various authors threw a number of new threats against the franchise's heroes. They ranged from the strange (the Ssi-ruuk in Truce at Bakura who stole the life energy from sentient life to power their technology) to mythical (a long-dead Sith Lord named Exar Kun in the Jedi Academy trilogy or ) to conventional former Imperials (Ysanne Isard from the X-Wing series and Zsinj in Courtship of Princess Leia).

In most cases, their role in the stories weren't able to accomplish what Zahn had set out to do: provide a new challenge for the heroes. At its worst, the EU provided an adventure of the year for the Skywalkers, Solos, and New Republic, one that they'd overcome with a bit of action and luck, before moving onto the next challenge in the next book. That's not to say that these are bad books: Exar Kun provided an interesting window into the science fantasy side of the franchise, while Isard comes the closest (for me personally, anyway) to Thrawn when it comes to the former Imperials trying to rebuild the former Empire.

As a result, Thrawn was never overshadowed or topped as a formidable villain. He not only provided a different type of threat to the heroes, but he was a villain who was grounded and With his death at the end of the trilogy, Zahn ensured that he was someone who went out on a high note and who couldn't be reused to detriment. Indeed, when Zahn was eventually returned to the EU for a new novel that would cap off the fight between the New Republic and the remains of the Empire, he didn't bring Thrawn back directly, but just the possibility of his return to overturn everything in Specter of the Past and Visions of the Future.

With the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999 and its sequels, the focus of Star Wars shifted to other eras, and with the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, the entire continuity that was the Expanded Universe was rendered non-canon to pave the way for a new trilogy of films.

There was no shortage of speculation about what those new films (which ultimately became The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker), and Zahn's trilogy came up plenty of times as a possible blueprint for what they could be. (However, word broke pretty quickly that whatever the films would be, they would be original stories.) Still, that didn't stop fan castings of actors like Benedict Cumberbatch as Thrawn, or speculation that he'd be included in the films somehow.

Even as the Expanded Universe was rendered non-canon, it became quickly apparent that Lucasfilm wasn't above reusing some of those ideas, and in 2016, the company announced at Star Wars Celebration that Thrawn would be returning to the fold by way of one of the animated shows, Star Wars Rebels, and that Timothy Zahn would return to write what eventually became the origin story of the iconic character.

The return to canon status was pretty seamless: fans by and large knew who Thrawn was, and the same qualities that Zahn imbued in him remained the same: he was a master tactician with a keen interest in the art of his enemies, and over the course of Rebels, we see him become a formidable foil to the crew of the Ghost in the early days of the rebellion. As I noted in my review of Zahn's novel Thrawn, "if you squint a little, this book could easily be a predecessor for both the new canon, as well as that of the expanded universe."

Indeed, that was the goal: Zahn told me in an interview that it wasn't hard to bring Thrawn back into the fold: "I’d never written Thrawn in this part of the Star Wars timeline, so it was simply a matter of bringing him into the Empire and chronicling his rise through the ranks," something that he'd teased out in the earlier books. "[He's] still the same character as in the 1990s books, just a decade or two younger and in a very different military and political environment ... It's like I never left. I’ve written about him so much over the years that he’s like an old friend who I understand completely."

Zahn went on to continue the story of Thrawn: he followed up Thrawn with Thrawn: Alliances and Thrawn: Treason which chronicled his time as a young Imperial officer prior to Rebels, and then another, earlier trilogy that explored his earlier life in the Chiss Ascendency (Chaos Rising, Greater Good, and Lesser Evil), fleshing out the character a bit more.

When Rebels came to an end in 2018, it left fans with a bit of a cliffhanger: Thrawn and Ezra Bridger were sucked out into another galaxy, leaving the rest of the rebellion to fight on without them. It led to plenty of speculation as to what had happened to the characters, and how they might return down the line.

The first hint of Thrawn's return to the post-Return of the Jedi franchise was a bombshell at the end of The Mandalorian's season 2 episode "The Jedi". The episode had already brought in another formerly-animated character, Ahsoka Tano, who name-dropped Thrawn after winner a dramatic lightsaber fight. When Lucasfilm announced that it was bringing Ahsoka back to headline her own series, it became readily apparent that the blue-skinned tactician would take on a prominent role in the franchise moving forward.

The moment that many fans had been awaiting for decades arrived halfway through the season, when Ahsoka and her allies traverse the space between galaxies to find the place where Thrawn and Ezra had ended up. Thrawn makes a grand entrance past rows of battered stormtroopers. "What was first just a dream has become a frightening reality." It's a powerful scene, one that befits a character of Thrawn's stature, and it's a good reminder that the EU that he came from has some good material to mine for other parts of the new canon.

Indeed, there have been hints that we could be seeing more from Zahn's Heir to the Empire in stories to come. The animated series Bad Batch brought the heroes to Mount Tantiss, a prominent location in Zahn's trilogy, Admiral Gilad Pellaeon popped up in The Mandalorian's third season, and Ahsoka shows that Thrawn has some grand plans for the New Republic upon his return to his home galaxy. Dave Filoni, one of the architects of the Mando-verse and earlier animated shows, is set to direct a new Star Wars film in the near future, fueling some speculation that they're headed toward an actual adaptation of Zahn's novels, or at least incorporating some elements of them together.

Now that Thrawn's made his improbable route from words on a page to live-action, it's worth sitting back and asking if that journey has been worth it. We've seen Thrawn in flesh and blood (played by Lars Mikkelsen), but the mere presence of him in the medium isn't an indication of quality, just of longevity, buoyed by a long-simmering appreciation from Star Wars fandom.

I'll admit that I'm a little conflicted here. I enjoyed Zahn's novel Thrawn a great deal – it lined up nicely with the books that I fell in love with as a kid, and seeing the character step out from the shadows was a great moment.

But it's not all great or noteworthy: I thought that Zahn's recent Thrawn novels were a bit ... lacking. Thrawn is a well-defined character: he's brilliant, understands how a culture's art provides clues to how they think and reason, and uses outthinks his opponents, time and time again. When Zahn returned to the character, he brought back a Thrawn that we knew – I never got the sense that we saw a character grow or change. If Thrawn challenged the original trilogy's heroes by forcing them to confront a threat that they hadn't faced before, he never really faced a challenge that he couldn't beat by being smart.

This is the challenge that I see for the character moving forward: how do you utilize him in a way that advances the story in a meaningful way? Certainly, he's someone who can present a formidable challenge to the New Republic, and we're starting to see some clues about what the environment looks like through glimpses in shows like The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka. As a friend of mine noted, it's easy to fall back on the quirks that he's known for: he can look at a piece of art, and connect that to an enemy's tactics. It's a lot harder to show how Thrawn plans his strategy, builds coalitions of allies, and undermines an enemy's strengths.

Ahsoka wasn't really the show to demonstrate all of that, and the entire Mandoverse tonally doesn't really feel suited for this either – it's a sub-franchise that has found its happy space being the space-western, science fantasy adventure show where we're bombing around the Outer Rim fighting the remnants of the Empire. Moff Gideon was great here: bombastic and a little over the top, and clearly out to carve out his own niche in the galaxy.

Thrawn's really not that type of villain, and Zahn understood that early on when he wrote Heir to the Empire. The books are a bit of a slow burn that involves some space weirdness (there are clones, weird anti-Force lizards, etc.) but also quite a bit of politics and galactic positioning as the New Republic went about figuring out how to take over from the Empire. There are elements of that in Ahsoka (and a bit in The Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett), but where Thrawn would best be suited would be a series along the lines of Andor, where the show's creators are given a lot of time to carefully lay out the story and world in a way that would really showcase Thrawn's strategic brilliance.

I think that's sort of what's tripped me up a bit: by showcasing Thrawn as a leader who happens to have a Star Destroyer with a bunch of broken down troopers, some space witches, and a reputation, we're not really seeing his abilities demonstrated. We're just sort of told that he's a big threat, and have to go along with that. A show that's paced out a bit deliberately would go a long way there.

And maybe we'll see more of that: I have to assume that a Season 2 is in order, and that Thrawn will play a bigger role whenever that ends up dropping. We'll have to see, and it might be a while. The next batch of shows will be The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew (another Mandoverse show), Bad Batch Season 3, and (hopefully) Andor Season 2.

May be an image of text that says 'THE REIGN OF MARVEL STUDIOS MCU JOANNA ROBINSON, ROBIN DAVE GONZALES, AND GAVIN EDWARDS' — Image: Andrew Liptak

Currently reading

Guh, what have I been reading? Not much: I've been in such a bad headspace lately that I've been content to just sit and scroll through videos or binge watch The Big Bang Theory.

But I have been picking away at a handful of books, and I'm starting to carve out more time for them. Now that the museum in Montpelier is open, I'm commuting again, which means it's easier for me to throw on an audiobook.

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards. I picked this up the other day, and it's one of the ones that I've been anticipating this year. It's a deep dive into the history of how the MCU came to be. There aren't a ton of surprises that I've gotten to yet (I'm up to the point where they're working on the first Captain America and Thor films, but it's a decent overview so far.
Eon by Greg Bear. I've been largely listening to the audiobook of this one, and the narrator isn't the greatest. But it's an interesting story.
Contact by Carl Sagan. Picking away at this one little by little. Also interesting.
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I started this a while back, reading to my son before bed, but we fell out of that habit. This has been another audiobook listen, and I'm enjoying revisiting this world.
The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn. Audiobook listen, and man, the narrator isn't good. Otherwise, I'd be done with it – it's a fun story.

Currently reading

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