Star Wars: Phasma’s summary has us salivating for September 1

With the new summary of Phasma, Star Wars sounds like it’s more than happy to tell us everything we want to know about her before The Last Jedi.

Star Wars has a ton of book titles that we want to read — From a Certain Point of View and Leia, Princess of Alderaan come to mind — but perhaps the most opaque novel so far has been what kind of seems like the inevitable follow-up to books like Thrawn from earlier this year or even books like Tarkin. 

In other words, Star Wars has always let its antagonists take the stage in novels of their own, giving them the chance to tell their own stories in their own way. But even so, the upcoming Phasma looks like it’s not going to have the captain actually do the telling. That’s according to the summary of the novel released by Del Rey and found, with a tip of the hat, by Star Wars News Net. 

Strap yourselves in, because we’re going to pull out some key sentences from each paragraph of the summary.

"“But for all her renown, Phasma remains [..] virtually unknown […] Now, an adversary is bent on unearthing her mysterious origins—and exposing a secret she guards…”"

The fact that Phasma is canonically as much a mystery as we the fans find her is equal parts hilarious and fitting. In that way, really, Phasma almost takes her cues from Darth Vader. After all, prior to the discovery that Vader is Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back, he was just a Force-using terror who also happened to wear a helmet that hid his own face. In fact, in the currently canonical universe of Star Wars, people also didn’t find out about Vader having kids until Bloodline, with that parentage being used as a weapon against Leia in particular. (Warning: spoilers in the link.)

Say what you will about Kylo Ren — and we’ve said a lot about Kylo Ren — but Star Wars isn’t really letting him take on the full-blown Vader mantle. That’s a good thing.

Here’s part two of the synopsis:

"“Deep inside the Battlecruiser Absolution, a captured Resistance spy endures brutal interrogation at the hands of a crimson-armored stormtrooper—Cardinal.”"

We’re just going to come out and say it: Cardinal is not as cool a name as Phasma, because it’s literally a word for the color of armor he wears. Also, a red-armored stormtrooper? The use of the word definitely suggests they mean a stormtrooper and not, say, someone in Snoke’s Praetorian Guard, as Entertainment Weekly explicitly quotes Rian Johnson as saying they are “bodyguards,” not presumably those who would go try and break a member of the Resistance. It just seems a little bit below their pay grade, you know?

(Additional question: What exactly are the pay grades of the First Order? Do they get paid? It doesn’t seem like Finn really did, but he was a low-level stormtrooper. It’s just a little world-building thing. I fully expect that I won’t get an answer on this ever, except maybe buried in one of the visual dictionaries.)

Anyway, the final bit of the synopsis looks like this:

"“What the mysterious stormtrooper wants is Phasma’s past […] His prisoner has what Cardinal so desperately seeks, but she won’t surrender it easily. […] But this knowledge may prove more than just dangerous once Cardinal possesses it—and once his adversary unleashes the full measure of her fury.”"

It sounds like only part of the novel will focus on Phasma’s story. “Full measure of her fury” implies pretty strongly that Phasma finds out what Cardinal is up to and decides to teach him a lesson about what happens when you cross her. It is, presumably, not pretty. Is the secret some tie to the Resistance, maybe? That’d certainly be the kind of thing a First Order member would like to hide, wouldn’t you say?

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Additionally, if this takes place between the events of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, the Phasma we see in the latter film might be coming off of whatever she does to Cardinal, and will probably still be very angry about anyone even coming close to taking her down. Gwendoline Christie has hinted that The Last Jedi will give us more Phasma.

Hopefully we’ll get more angry Phasma.

“What the mysterious stormtrooper wants is Phasma’s past […] His prisoner has what Cardinal so desperately seeks, but she won’t surrender it easily. […] But this knowledge may prove more than just dangerous once Cardinal possesses it—and once his adversary unleashes the full measure of her fury.”