YMMV / The Callista Trilogy

• Bizarro Episode: Planet of Twilight in pretty much its entirety. No matter how you approach it, even if you like the atmosphere and characters, this book is just plain odd.
• Complete Monster: Dzym, from Planet of Twilight, is an enigmatic member of the Rationalist Party on Nam Chorios. An evolved and cannibalistic Droch seeking to feed on the entire galaxy, Dzym was originally prepared as nothing more than a genetically modified appetizer for Beldorion the Hutt before achieving superior intelligence, killing his creator and allowing the exiled Seti Ashgad to take over by leeching off Beldorion's strength. As Ashgad's mysterious secretary, Dzym used him as an "enslaved front man" for his nefarious agenda, unleashing the Death Seed plague throughout the Meridian Sector of the galaxy and coordinating the deadly disease as a bioweapon, killing a majority of the population in Cybloc XII and a vast number of New Republic personnel. Stocking multiple containers of Droch within the Reliant, Dzym's ultimate plan was to spread them across the galaxy, infecting planet after planet and ruining everything in his path until there was no space civilization left for him to consume.
• Die for Our Ship: Callista's major fault is that she's not Mara Jade. At one point, Barbara Hambly was quoted as saying that "in Children of the Jedi, [she] was hired to write the perfect love interest for Luke, and in Planet of Twilight, [she] was to write her out."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Go here.
• Fridge Brilliance: Bevel Lemelisk's characterization goes a long way towards explaining why Imperial superweapons are so ludicrously over-the-top: they're basically a combination of Lemelisk's wildest mental flights of fancy (the man designed WMD's for fun), married to the gargantuan resources and budget the Empire had access to. The times that he did have to cut back on resource expenditure resulted in the far more efficient (at least on paper) models like the Darksaber and the Sun Crusher.
• Fridge Logic: So, Jedi like Callista can transfer their minds into computers, then into bodies that aren't their own, even if that means getting cut off from the Light Side of the Force. Why is Callista the only one who did this? Couldn't Obi-Wan have helped Luke and the Rebel Alliance more if he had, say, transferred his mind into the Death Star?
  • Probably because Callista's ship didn't have Darth Vader on it, who would have likely sensed his continued presence. Though the idea of an old priest and a young priest... *ahem* I mean, the Emperor and his apprentice purging the Death Star does appeal somewhat.
  • It's also indicated that this was an ability few Force users mastered. Specifically, two others try it, and find out it doesn't work. That's the very reason why Cray is willing to lease out her body to Callista, after all.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
• Narm:
  • The Hutt Death Star. Whether it was intended to be a joke is unclear, but between the ridiculously inept procurement officer, the Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! workers, the Hutt overlord who thinks he can just order things to be done and doesn't realise his forces are a bunch of ragtag misfits compared to the Empire, and the chief engineer who flees (with good reason, it turns out) when he realises that the Hutt actually plans to fire the thing, it degenerates into a farce. Only the death of Crix Madine feels especially meaningful.
  • Callista angsting over losing her powers.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Everything Palpatine does to Lemelisk in the flashbacks. Suffice to say that with cloning technology, Can't Kill You, Still Need You did not apply.
  • The description of Dorsk 81's body after his Heroic Sacrifice is not pleasant.
  • Nasdra Magrody's fate as a Kidnapped Scientist whose family were either killed or kept hostage is either this, a Tear Jerker, or both.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Daala and Pellaeon are (presumably) merely meant to professionally respect each other but it's very easy to read an element of sexual tension between them. This may have been intended however.
• Squick: Huttese pornography. You may now clean up your lunch.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Most fans agree that Children of the Jedi actually starts off with some good and vivid introduced storylines, but (with the possible exception of Han and Chewie's search for the mysterious abandoned Jedi safehouse Plett's Well), they gradually lose steam due to seeming weird and illogical after more careful thought, receiving too little page-time, or being built up and drawn out until the reader expects more than the conclusion of the book could offer all feel like they could have been better done in a multi-book story arc or a story that had been planned out a little more in advance.
  • Children of former Jedi coming out of hiding to join Luke's academy and having had their own Jedi Purge survival arc is mostly dropped (both in this book and later in the series) after Nichos fades Out of Focus as this story progresses.
  • A Dark Jedi who can control technology, claims to be Palpatine's son, has Jedi relatives, and has Leia kidnapped doesn't show up until more than halfway through the book.
  • Mixed with They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, one of Luke's apprentices, Cray Mingla, is a scientific prodigy (and one whose mentor was a Reluctant Mad Scientist Death Star designer and who has an uneasy relationship with Leia) trying to save her fellow Jedi lover from a fatal disease by transferring his mind into a human replica droid while wondering if he is truly still alive or is just an AI parroting old memories. Her relationship with her old mentor isn't important to the plot; she gets few notable combat scenes, and her best scientific accomplishments are mostly offscreen before she becomes a Damsel in Distress who only has a few scenes with her lover.
  • Brainwashed aliens become stormtroopers as an automated superweapon abducts them during stops on its way to carry out a mission of destruction. It could have been an epic stoyline if it didn't focus so much on the kidnapped Gammoreans (who are entertaining at first but can lose their novelty as the book continues). Additionally, the whole setup can come across as Stupid Evil at its finest, given the logistical and tactical fallacies involved.
  • Jedi Master Plett's whereabouts after he left the planet Belavis to protect many younger Jedi but continued helping it out from other worlds feels like the beginnings of a big subplot but is ultimately forgotten about.