Planetary Analysis: Telos

Telos, the ice planet housing the self-styled “Last of the Jedi” is a cold world. The introductory sequence begins with a crash landing, then the realisation that the killer droid you encountered within Pelagus is an entire army. The sickly yellow lenses and plain silver of three droids, boasting before attempting to kill you drives home the dawning realisation just how nihilistic and bleak KOTOR II’s story and repurposed setting is. And the delve deeper, seeing the cruel shift in Kreia attacking your other companion’s mind without his permission (and your character being entirely unaware of the exchange), and the denouncement of Atris present one of the more hostile means to deliver a main quest’s sense of direction I have ever seen.

For some reason I find it the most poignant setting in the game. There is nothing like it I can think of save Shadow of the Colossus, or Dark Souls’s Ash Lake. Calm, you hear people even mentioning calm but also a sense of primal power. A thing lost that may be reborn again. It’s a metaphor for the entire story, a song either being heard again, or perilously close to guttering out entirely. Evoking feelings of loss and wonder, furtiveness to preserve that keeps it in the mind.

I like the word telos, and its meaning. The Latin word for ‘Ending’ is a little unsubtle when you think about it, but that kind of clear bookend suits a story that is often unconventional, anchors like Atris being a clear hate sync avoid the grey and the heavy philosophical conversations becoming too much. Endings, culmination, through the discussion of death and psychological transformation utterly permeates KOTOR II’s story, with little else being present in its focus, humorous interludes or other key themes all but absent within a short game dedicated to subverting, bending, and presenting the darkest possible presentation of death and finality in-setting. It is important to establish the stakes and constantly desperate atmosphere for the story.

Little in terms of environment is more fitting to show this death then, than a frozen wasteland, a science fiction Hel, somewhere lacking gigantic populations of plant or human life as Star Wars employs near constantly, save the planet of Hoth, itself a callback to the film’s sobering tone and decimation of the formerly triumphant rebel forces.

Much like the lack of colour, locked doors make their own point, much as from the start the companions point out what is not present or on display is curious. The lack of Forceful beings, and a rather brilliant Easter Egg is that if one uses Kreia’s Force Sight, we see a glimpse of something much later.

A bloody red visual against the white, a symbolic representation of the truth. Kreia can perceive Atris’s red Dark Side Aura, and looking through the door, proving her point about not being limited by eyes she can also see the Sith Holocrons which further the corruption of this sanctimonious and hollowed out antagonist.

Telos is a beginning for The Exile, a character born and thriving upon consumption, death, moral decay (as a deliberate antithesis of Revan, whose identity was tied into the quest reveal); yet like the story’s focus on the unwholesome and the broken, it  makes for a hostile point within a hostile story. To deal with enduring hostility, confusion, ignorance makes one stronger -if embittered- and Telos is certainly a necessary planet setting for a story about to branch in many directions. Many enemies stand at the height of their mystery and deviousness, but by the penultimate mission returning to the planet, culmination and hostility can arrive to all factions. In time the HK-50s, Atris, and Kreia’s antagonism lead to their destruction, and Telos’s single facility to an ignominious end.

Reference:

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Obsidian Entertainment. 2004.