Welcome to our eighth and final part of the Journey to Solo: A Star Wars Story series.
Today we're talking about Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn.
Released in 2013, it was one of the last Star Wars books written in Legends,
and it's about Han, Chewie, Lando, and a handful of friends pulling off an Ocean's Eleven style heist.
Since we know a heist plays into the upcoming film, I thought this could be interesting to cover,
even though it's not really about anyone's origin stories.
The book takes place very shortly after the events of A New Hope.
Han is out of credits, having lost his reward for rescuing Princess Leia to some pirates.
He's approached by a man claiming to have also been robbed of 163 million credits,
and promises to split it all with Han and Chewie and anyone else if they help get it back.
The only catch is he was robbed by Black Sun, so they put a crew together and planned the ultimate caper.
Lando joins them along with a handful of characters known throughout Star Wars Legends.
They ultimately pull one over on their enemies, but everyone's cut winds up being significantly less than the millions they were promised.
I won't go into the plot more than that, because the twists and the turns along the way are a lot of fun.
In the same way Zahn is able to write Thrawn's genius deductions,
he wrote a really cool heist story that very much feels like it's in the Star Wars universe.
So that's what I'll start with in regards to Solo: A Star Wars Story.
It's obvious the heist genre can be adapted for Star Wars very well if handled correctly.
Timothy Zahn made sure the technology of Star Wars never made things too easy for Han and his crew.
The assembling of a team all with varying skill sets that butt heads with each other while trying to achieve the same ambitious goal is almost always interesting.
Everyone wants their contribution to be seen as important
and if they don't feel that way they might do some rash things to even the scales.
I think the train heist we've seen in the trailers is going to be a more grand plan than what plays out in the book.
Scoundrels is more about conning their enemies rather than an outright attack.
I hope some of that is still present in the film because Lando does the smooth-talking so well.
But I think the team in Solo is going to rely more on surprise and bravado than deception.
I do have a feeling the job they pulled in the book
will turn out to be worth a lot more than the one in the movie, at least I kinda hope so.
I don't want Han to walk away with some life-altering amount of money at the end of Solo,
only to see him still struggling to get by in A New Hope.
But things could and probably will play out similarly, with a bit of betrayal thrown into the mix.
Beckett in the latest trailer even tells Han to always assume everyone is going to betray him,
and I very much expect someone will do just that.
Probably someone close to Han which will shatter his trust for years to come.
In the book, Lando comments that Han has a bad habit of placing his trust in the wrong people.
He's referring to Bria there in the events of the Han Solo trilogy
that are actually referenced often in Scoundrels, mostly by Lando.
He's still mad at Han about what happened on Ylesia in the book Rebel Dawn,
but he's working towards forgiveness which introduces an interesting conundrum.
It seems like in Legends every time Lando was written about with Han around
nobody knew if it would be the last time he and Han saw each other before The Empire Strikes Back.
So every story needed to have some event that would make Lando mad at Han.
In Ylesia, it was Bria's betrayal that left Lando high and dry.
There was another story told in the comics, and again in Scoundrels Lando has to end his story upset.
If Lucasfilm isn't careful we could wind up with something similar.
I fully expect Solo: A Star Wars Story will pit Han and Lando against each other a bit,
enough so that Lando will be believably mad when they meet again at Cloud City.
But there are rumors of potential sequels to Solo which honestly
I hope don't happen, but if those rumors turn out to be true and Donald Glover reprises his role,
they'll have to again set up a situation to make Lando mad at Han.
It's just like this repeated story element that can get old
only because nobody has decided that this time is definitely the last time Han and Lando see each other.
There was something else about the way Scoundrels was written that made me look at Solo a little differently.
We all know that Han and Chewie and Lando get out of of the story fine.
And I've been assuming that the heist doesn't go all that well since Han and Chewie aren't millionaires in the Original Trilogy.
I had similar assumptions about the book.
Mostly I thought, well the heist can't be successful because Han doesn't use the money to pay off Jabba,
and that's all he talks about doing.
Timothy Zahn gets around that by actually having everyone walk away with, not millions of credits, but a decent amount.
The only problem is, other events in the book caused Jabba to become even more angry with Han,
and he raises the level of Han's debt to half a million.
I thought that was a pretty clever way to keep us guessing,
and it's a satisfying answer as to why Han never paid the Hutt back in the movies.
I've got a couple more quick notes about the book before wrapping up.
Someone notes that Han and Chewie's friendship is very rare.
It's not common for a long-lasting relationship to develop in the criminal underworld that doesn't end violently.
There's a moment where Han is running away from a large, spherical rolling safe.
He's also holding an energy whip while he does it.
As a massive Indiana Jones fan that gave me a good chuckle.
And finally, even though I really like the Usual Suspects feel of the book cover,
I think that was a mistake, only because the cover alone put the movie and its twists in my head,
and one of the twists is lifted directly from the film.
I would have preferred to not see it coming, but oh well.
All in all I thought this was a really solid, self-contained story.
I liked it far more than the Millennium Falcon book and the Lando Calrissian Adventures,
but not quite as much as the Han Solo trilogy.
If you just want a fun caper to get you in the mood for Solo, this one will serve you well.
Also, since it came out so late in Legends it actually has a full, unabridged audio book on Audible.
If you're interested in listening to this story before the movie drops, you can get it for free by going to
www.audibletrial.com/starwarsexplained
or by following the link in the description.
But that's it for today.
Make sure you check out the rest of the Journey to Solo series to catch up on Han's Legends past.
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As always, thanks for watching, and may the Force be with you.