There is nothing Star Wars canon loves more than relentlessly filling in the gaps between the movies. But sometimes there are pretty big questions left by the films that need explaining… like Marvel’s latest comic answering how Phasma survived being tossed in the garbage on the exploding Starkiller Base to appear in The Last Jedi.
Image: Marvel Comics. Art by Marco Checchetto and Andres Mossa.
Today sees the release of Captain Phasma #1 — by Kelly Thompson, Marco Checchetto, Andres Mossa and Clayton Cowles — the latest Marvel Star Wars miniseries and part of the “Journey to The Last Jedi” initiative. Although it’s the length of your average comic book, the timeframe it takes place over is a meagre six minutes within The Force Awakens‘ finale. Specifically, the six minutes before this happens:
That framing makes Phasma’s journey from out of the trash compactor Han, Chewie and Finn chucked her into and off Starkiller Base all the more wildly absurd, because a lot happens in that six minutes. Seriously, an alarming amount, at an alarming speed. First, she gets out of the compactor thanks to the Resistance’s bombing runs blowing a hole in the side of it.
Then, she wipes the record of her using her security codes to disable Starkiller Base’s shields at Finn’s request. Then she has time to double back and check to see if anyone else recently accessed the shield systems — and would have seen her authorisation codes — so she can actually blame them for the base’s destruction. Luckily, she finds someone in the form of a Lieutenant named Sol Rivas who did just that.
What happens next — which, it must be stated again, takes place over the course of six minutes — is so jam packed it almost needs the Benny Hill theme laid over it. Phasma darts through the exploding bowels of the base, trying to hunt Rivas down (who, like everyone else with a brain, is trying to get off the soon-to-be-itty-bitty-bits planet) while also throwing herself around explosions and ziplining across chasms like the action hero she never got to be in the movie.
In a hilariously cruel moment, she orders a bunch of Stormtroopers to stay at their posts until they’re ordered otherwise, condeming them to their deaths. As she treks out across the snowy surface, she also just happens to casually witness the climax of Rey and Kylo Ren’s duel, giving zero shits about what’s happening, and then trekking on after making a mental note for her reports.
Phasma can’t catch her quarry before he flees in a TIE Fighter though, so she commandeers one of her own with a pilot still working to repair his, where a newly familiar face crops up: What appears to be BB-9E, the “evil” BB-Unit we officially met in the new Last Jedi toys revealed last week.
And there you have it. Six minutes after the issue began, Captain Phasma has ziplined, rolled, leapt and ran from a literal pile of garbage, across the surface of Starkiller base, past a goddamn lightsaber duel, and to a TIE Fighter — off in pursuit of the man she’s now attempting to persecute for the treachery she committed.
What an delightfully silly, ruthlessly efficient addition to Star Wars canon. And yet somehow still only half as weird as that time we learned how C-3PO got his red arm.
Comments
8 responses to “Now We Know How Captain Phasma Escaped Starkiller Base At The End Of The Force Awakens: Very Quickly”
I have a question. Why wasn’t she interesting in the movie?
Silver is interesting!
Ooooh….shiny!
They wanted the mysterious ruthless soldier type left empty by Boba Fett… but then pretty much due to time or scripting the character development got cut.
Seriously…I gave her a better origin in short fiction. Parents evacuating children on transports prior to the destruction of Alderaan, unfortunately her transport is picked up by imperials and the children indoctrinated into the empire.
Why do they say it took her six minutes? Seemed like there was more time than six minutes between throwing her in the garbage chute and starting the lightsaber fight.
Why? oh god why! does she need to see the fight between Kylo and Rey!? This is why the comics suck 101, it doesn’t need to namedrop and it doesn’t add anything to the story you’re trying to tell.
I agree that they also never needed to stipulate a time frame as it didn’t matter how long it took the point was she got out.
For all you writers out there ask yourself “is this the most exciting thing the character has done” if not why aren’t you writing about that?
One more thing. why not make her the bad guy, establishing that she spend the time hunting down the only other person who knows the truth, get her to shoot them straight up. I assume now the entire series is going to be cat and mouse games of a supposed mean person being one step behind, leading to an ultimate meaningless death as nothing about this book will be mention in the next movie.
Yawn. Fucking snore character comes back for another shot at not being snorey because the characters acted out-of-character by tossing her in a garbage compactor because if they’d just shot her like every other storm trooper they killed, then they wouldn’t have been able to make yet another cringe-worthy reference to the first movies. Fuck’s sake. How the HELL can people think TFA was better than Rogue One for this crap?
My issue is that I always just took the trash compactor line to be a joke (*wink* remember that happening in A New Hope *wink*). We never actually see Phasma being dropped into the compactor/any chutes and so they very easily could’ve written anything to explain her survival. Like Han and Finn just knock her out and leave her in the security room. She wakes up, sees things going to shit and buggers off. Phasma then defects from the First Order due to the shame of her betrayal, and makes it her own personal mission of redemption to hunt down Finn, not some random introduced in the comics. Instant potential for character development for both Phasma AND Finn. It also allows Phasma to become the roguish-bounty hunter parallel to Boba Fett that Disney so clearly wanted her to be.