Notes: Rebel in the Ranks, Pt. 3

Adapting a TV episode for the page, and other challenges

WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Rebel in the Ranks. If you haven’t read it, stop and go here.

(Here’s the first part of the notes, and the second.)

Moving right along….

Part 3: Infiltration

In Part 3 Dev Morgan arrives and we’re soon into narrative territory covered by the Star Wars: Rebels episode “Breaking Ranks.” To fight the Empire, turns out Dev Morgan and Merei Spanjaf need the same McGuffin.

It might seem odd that the events of “Breaking Ranks” don’t begin until page 125 of Rebel in the Ranks, but it makes sense (or at least I hope it does) if you look at Servants of the Empire as a whole. Both Rebel in the Ranks and Edge of the Galaxy “work backwards” from the events of the episode, and the theft of Agent Kallus’s ZX-5 decoder is the turning point in the series. After that theft, Zare Leonis knows what happened to Dhara and where she is, and Merei finds she’s gone too far in opposing the Empire to easily turn back.

In approaching the adaptation itself, the biggest challenge was point of view. “Breaking Ranks” is Ezra Bridger’s story, but Rebel in the Ranks is Zare’s and Merei’s – they’re the only two point-of-view characters in the book. So if Zare didn’t witness something at the Academy, I couldn’t show it in telling his part of the story. On the other hand, there was no reason I couldn’t keep the cameras rolling, so to speak, after a scene ended – or start “filming” before that scene started.

That meant rethinking some scenes. Instead of Ezra swiping Kallus’s decoder from his office and being interrupted by Zare, the reader would see Zare follow “Dev” and gain some satisfaction from finally catching the new cadet off-guard. Ezra overhearing the Inquisitor’s plans for him and Jai Kell would happen off-screen, but readers would get something Rebels viewers didn’t: Zare confronting Ezra and demanding to know how he managed to levitate Kallus’s decoder off his desk, and why the Inquisitor wants him and Jai – a discovery with enormous implications for Zare.

A challenge in this section was how to make Merei’s quest dovetail with Zare’s. A couple of opportunities presented themselves. One was the order of podracing parts that Zare uses to distract Kallus from Ezra’s theft, which Story Group suggested could be Merei’s handiwork. Explaining how that order got into the Imperial data network would have slowed down the show, but it was a useful plot point for the book.

The decoder, of course, was the second opportunity. Merei needing it gave Zare and Ezra different reasons for needing the same device, and a very real source of potential conflict. It also let Merei interact with Zeb and Sabine, which was both fun and useful in setting up the endgame for the series.

Notes for Part 3:

• Fans often ask how writing Star Wars is different now that Story Group exists, and are variously relieved/surprised/disappointed when I tell them it really isn’t. But here’s one thing that has changed: better access. I adapted episodes of The Clone Wars episodes into a pair of books – Bounty Hunter and Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy – but only had scripts to work from. For Rebel in the Ranks, I was able to see the actual episode. That was an enormous help – the script for “Breaking Ranks,” for instance, tells you relatively little about the great scene with the Inquisitor in Kallus’s office. What makes that scene work is the moonlight, the Inquisitor’s posture, and everyone exchanging nervous looks. Getting to actually see what I was adapting made a big difference.
  

• We get the payoff of Dhara and Zare discussing Imperial security measures in Edge of the Galaxy – Zare knows taking the decoder out through the door of Kallus’s office will set off alarms. Imagine if Ezra hadn’t known that….
  

• I don’t think an adaptation should try to subvert what it’s adapting or provide a radically different take on it. That can be fun, but the result is no longer an adaptation, and can easily become a tedious meta-narrative that targets a small slice of the audience at the expense of everyone else. That said, I risked it in one place: when Aresko asks the cadets if they’re ready to become stormtroopers. A literal reading of that felt wrong to me – all four of Unit Aurek’s cadets are smarter and more capable than stormtroopers, not to mention better shots. If Imperial academies are turning smart kids into dolts who can’t shoot straight, something’s gone really wrong. Starting with Edge of the Galaxy, I’d portrayed the Academy as an officer-training school where the cadets who perform poorly get shunted onto the stormtrooper track. So I turned Aresko’s question into a challenge of sorts – a not-bad motivational technique.
  

• A key extended scene comes after the theft of the decoder, when Zare confronts Dev. Their showdown was Story Group’s suggestion, and delivers two powerful moments, with Zare all but threatening Ezra and then being thunderstruck by the revelation that Dhara is Force-sensitive. That moment was set up in Edge of the Galaxy: Dhara’s odd ability to sense where Zare is and what he’s thinking now take on new meaning, as does her joking claim that “I’m a sorceress.”
  

• Turning to Merei’s story, in the treatment she activated her new Imperial Security Bureau ID and immediately had to sit through “a dull training segment” for new employees, one that included a primer on data security. Story Group made the sensible request that this not actually be dull, which led me to the sensible decision not to write it at all.
  

• Merei discovers Beck Ollet was found guilty by an Imperial tribunal and handed off to something called Project Unity. Looking ahead to the series’ endgame, I decided that Merei wouldn’t tell Zare about this discovery for fear of adding to his worries. Which is fine, except as events begin accelerating she forgets – it’s up to the reader to remember the significance of that name in The Secret Academy. I wanted to experiment with letting stories be a bit messy, with minor plot strands left to dangle and characters making the kind of mistakes we all make.
  

• Note that Zare’s guess about Dev and Chopper – that Dev’s getting information about the assessments from the droid – is perfectly logical given what he’s seen so far and his lack of awareness about the Force.
  

• A tricky thing in the scene with Merei, Zeb and Sabine was the need to get Merei “offstage” while Zeb and Sabine have the discussion we see in “Breaking Ranks.” The way I did it feels a bit stage-managed, and I don’t like such maneuvering – I think it risks violating the rule against subverting the core material. But I’d decided that Dev and Merei were chasing the same McGuffin and didn’t see a better way to handle the scene, so I convinced myself that the payoff was worth it. Or perhaps I mostly convinced myself.
  

Epilogue

Confession time: I like cliffhangers and playing with readers’ emotions. If that sounds mean, well, it’s an author’s job to inspire excitement, joy, worry, fright and even anger. A cliffhanger’s just an extreme technique for that – not only have I made you go OH MY GOD but you’ll have to wait to resolve that feeling. At the end of Rebel in the Ranks I got to do that twice in 11 pages, which was particularly gratifying.

The key scene is Zare’s interrogation by the Inquisitor. We see the setup for that scene in “Breaking Ranks,” with the Inquisitor telling Zare he wants to know everything about his former friends. I pondered how that conversation would play out and realized the key to it was Zare’s motivation. At first Zare tries desperately to deflect the Inquisitor’s interest in him, but then he has a grim realization: The key to finding Dhara is keeping the terrifying Imperial agent’s interest. And so Zare risks his life on a triple gamble: pretending to be Force-sensitive, pretending he doesn’t know what being Force-sensitive is, and claiming to know Dhara’s alive.

That scene took me hours to get right – I kept rearranging and resculpting it, because I knew how critical it was to the series. What Zare does is remarkably brave: he escapes the Inquisitor’s interest, then works to get it back. Thinking about what might go wrong, my mind kept returning to the quietly terrifying 1988 Dutch film The Vanishing. (Avoid the disastrous U.S. remake by the same director.) No wonder Zare’s so tired when he finally gets to talk with Merei.

Merei also thinks she’s escaped danger, but then discovers that one of her snooper programs failed to delete itself as instructed. That means she can be traced by a skilled sleuth – and the investigator on her tail is none other than her own mother. Jessa vows that the intruder will be found and discover what it means to face the wrath of the Empire.

BOOM! SEE YOU IN FOUR MONTHS, READERS! HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

Quick notes:

• I liked the detail that Chiron and Aresko are both kind to Zare while he waits to speak with the Inquisitor. I thought that made the interview even more frightening.
  

• Originally Merei discovered that Dhara had been turned over to something called Project Harvester in Edge of the Galaxy. But it was a better reveal here. The name was my own, which I thought appropriately pulpy.
  

• That business about midyear transfers between academies sets up Imperial Justice. Plus it immediately showed the reader that Zare was trying to make things happen instead of waiting around. By now I knew that Zare being stuck was going to be a problem in Imperial Justice, so I did everything I could to remedy it.
  

• A key question in the epilogue and the rest of the series is whether the Inquisitor is actually fooled by Zare’s ruse, or goes along with it in hopes of discovering Zare’s connection to Ezra and the other rebels. I left it ambiguous because it was more frightening that way – it let me draw their uneasy confrontation out over the rest of the series.
  

That’s it – hope you’ve enjoyed these notes. See you soon(ish) to talk Imperial Justice!