ALL HAIL XANATOS!

Unless you happen to be Roger Ebert, you probably found Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace to be at least a little bit disappointing.

However, it was still a Star Wars film, and that means merchandising, merchandising, merchandising! A veritable hurricane of video games, trading cards, toys, books, and almost humorously beautiful dresses flooded the market. Most of that stuff has now been forgotten (I challenge you to find one person who has actually played "The Gungan Frontier.") but there were a few diamonds in that ruff.

Most notable among them are the "Jedi Apprentice" books by Dave Wolverton and Jude Watson. I will properly review them when I have finished reading them. That will be a while, since there are twenty volumes and I have to buy them over mail-order. In the meantime, I want to talk to y'all about a funny little man named Xanatos Omega.

Xanatos first appeared in Jedi Apprentice #2: The Dark Rival in 1998 and was instantly awesome. In a bad way. Which is good because he is bad. Are you still following me?

Xanatos is, simply, the perfect villain.

Everywhere you look in the Star Wars universe, you will see a contradiction: the Jedi Knights are supposed to be keepers of the peace, and are to avoid violence whenever necessary, yet they are the heroes of a franchise with the word "Wars" in the title, and end up killing somebody in almost every movie, book, and video game they appear in.

This contradiction was clearly on Jude Watson's mind when she conceived of Xanatos, the primary antagonist of Jedi Apprentice.

Thus, Xanatos had to be a proactive villain. If he would just stop causing trouble, our heroes Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan could leave him be and continue their work as diplomats peacefully. However, Xanatos will never leave them alone. Jedi are supposed to be negotiators, but Xanatos is driven by straightforward hatred that can only be sated by violence. He can't be negotiated with. Thus, when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan clash with him, it doesn't create the same kind of dissonance that you find when Luke Skywalker cheers happily shooting down human soldiers. They are fighting Xanatos only because it is absolutely necessary.

Xanatos was born to be prince of the planet Telos. However, he was adopted into the Jedi Order as a child, and grew up to be Qui-Gon's apprentice. When he next met his father, years later, he and Qui-Gon found the King of Telos to be an evil man, a dictator whose despotic rule had led to an armed rebellion against him. Qui-Gon was forced to kill him, but Xanatos still identified the man as a father-figure. So, Xanatos swore revenge against Qui-Gon and left the Jedi Order, becoming a Dark Jedi. His reasons for fighting Qui-Gon are entirely personal. Qui-Gon cannot make peace with his enemy, because his enemy will never make peace with him.

Another thing that makes Xanatos a good villain is that he rarely engages the Jedi in a straightforward fight. He could, and maybe even wants to, but he cannot because he would simply lose. When he briefly skirmishes with Obi-Wan in The Dark Apprentice, Obi notices that he is "out of practice" when it comes to lightsaber dueling (which makes sense, since he's been away from any Jedi for years.) Instead, Xanatos follows his own motto of "Disruption+Demoralization+Distraction=Devastation." He causes trouble wherever he can, but he always avoids a proper fight to the death. Thus, the Jedi have to outsmart him rather than overpower him, making for some very interesting plots.

Also, since his turn to the Dark Side was a result of something that Qui-Gon did, and since it was Qui-Gon who raised the kid in the first place, Qui-Gon's psyche has been heavily effected by Xanatos's mere existence as a villain. Qui-Gon's own perceived failure colors the way he views himself and the way he treats Obi-Wan. Xanatos promotes character development and emotional complexity for one of the franchise's most underutilized characters just by being there.

What really makes Xanatos a great villain, though, is what he represents. Xanatos is corruption. Once, he was a Jedi, a symbol of peace and order, but now he is a disciple of the Dark Side. He runs the Offword Corporation, a mining company that poisons the natural environments of every planet it operates on, even to the point of turning the "sacred pools" of water on Telos into acidic pits of death. He infiltrates the Jedi Temple, the galaxy's most holy haven of goodness and truth, and messes with its security, plumbing, and elevator systems towards his own ends. He lures Bruk, a Jedi child not even old enough to be a padawan, to the Dark Side.

When Qui-Gon returns to Telos with Obi-Wan in order to confront Xanatos, he finds that the Dark Jedi has twisted Telosian culture itself into a corrupt mockery. Simply by investing money in the right places and being a good public speaker, Xanatos has turned a race of people known for their love of beauty and tranquility into decadent consumers, tricking them into funding the ruining of their own sacred grounds through lavish gambling and sports events.

Xanatos is more than a person; he is elemental, a force of evil that turns every good thing he touches into a perverse and evil mirror of itself. Xanatos defines everything that the Dark Side represents. That is what makes him one of the greatest villains I have ever read about.