Last week saw the release of the second issue of the Star Wars: Inquisitors miniseries from Marvel Comics, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
Inquisitors #2 begins with the Fifth Brother (a character created for the Star Wars Rebels animated series but who has appeared in a variety of media since then) arriving on the planet Gerrigon, which was evidently once a center of commerce– its streets look like an abandoned modern-day metropolis– but now lies desolate in the wake of a civil war. He receives a holo-transmission from his boss’s boss Darth Vader, who gives him a bit of a pep talk to prepare him for his hunt for Jedi Knight Tensu Run, but also reminds him of the consequences of failure. The Fifth Brother is accompanied by a talking probe droid that fills him in on the history of the planet as he walks through the grown-over streets, and then writer Rodney Barnes cuts to Vader’s castle on the lava planet of Mustafar, where the Sith Lord meets with the Grand Inquisitor for a debriefing on why he failed to capture Run in the previous issue.
Vader promises that the Inquisitors’ “suffering will be legendary” if they continue to botch their mission, and then we see the Fifth Brother ambushed by a bunch of security droids when he accidentally triggers an alarm on Gerrigon. Then it’s revealed that Tensu Run is not present on the planet at all, but instead is represented by another hologram. But the Jedi offers to confront the Inquisitor face-to-face, and then Barnes and his artist Ramon Rosanas give us a flashback to Tensu and his master Elan sometime after the Jedi Purge. Elan talks his apprentice out of acting too rashly and taking revenge against the Empire, and then we cut to a different encounter between Run and a sloth-like bounty hunter named Pii-lor intent on capturing the wayward Jedi for the money. Run makes the difficult decision to destroy Pii-lor’s ship, killing him in the process, and then turns his attention toward the Fifth Brother.
Here we get an intriguing hint of the Fifth Brother’s past and the revelation that he may have killed his own master after he was turned from Jedi Padawan into the dark-side Inquisitor he is in the present of this story. The third act of this issue mostly deals with a duel between Tensu Run and the Fifth Brother, culminating with the Jedi letting the Inquisitor live after cutting off his arm and telling him to “tell your master that Tensu Run still lives.” I enjoyed this issue overall, even though it didn’t necessarily move the overarching plot forward a whole lot. It’s mostly a lot of backstory (which I appreciated) and an excuse to bring the Fifth Brother into the mix, though probably temporarily considering the outcome. I wonder if this installment is setting up a pattern of throwing the various Inquisitors at Tensu only to come up short in their quest, but then again this is only a four-issue miniseries so that can’t possibly go on for very long. On the whole Inquisitors #2 definitely feels like a middle chapter, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just has me looking forward to meatier installments later on in the run.
Star Wars: Inquisitors #2 is available now wherever comic books are sold.