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Out: Count Dooku. In: Baron Ünderbheit.
Darth Malak was once the apprentice of Darth Revan, a fallen Jedi turned Sith Lord who inspires terror at just the mention of the name. With Revan presumed dead, Malak embarked on his mission to conquer the galaxy on his own.
With the conceit of Knights of the Old Republic being that (spoiler warning) the mysterious missing Sith Lord everybody's worried about was you all along, the writers needed a reason you'd lost your powers and memory. And sure, getting bonked on the head in an exploding spaceship could suffice as explanation, but good writing is never accepting your first-pass idea. So, in need of an inciting incident, an antagonist, and a nod to Yoda's "always two there are" speech, BioWare just rolled all those needs into one and created Darth Malak.
I couldn't say for sure whether George Lucas likes KOTOR, but he should, considering its relationship to the original movies: it's like poetry; they rhyme. Not every character in the game's story has a one-to-one parallel in the Original Trilogy, but the inspiration behind a bald-headed Sith with a wounded face and a robot voice is pretty easy to decipher.
It isn't directly stated in the game, but at some point Malak decided Revan was weak, and so it was his time to take over. The two dueled, and Revan won with a move that sliced off his apprentice's entire jaw. Rather than let Malak die, Revan had him fitted with a vocabulator embedded in what was left of his face, and that was covered by an immobile metal prosthetic jaw. The jaw on this figure is removable, giving us a free look at his ruined flesh and the droid voice box jammed haphazardly behind his upper teeth. Hideous!
If there's one thing I'm good at, it's admitting when I'm wrong; and so now, it's time for a correction. In the Bastila Shan review, I said the hair was parted on the wrong side, and wondered how Hasbro has messed that up. Well, it turns out they apparently didn't. In 2021, a remake of KOTOR was announced; it's since been quietly shelved, but apparently at whatever stupid live-stream "event" announced both Bastila and Malak, Hasbro said the toy sculpts were based on the remake designs, meaning Bastila wasn't incorrect, she was just based on a source no one will ever see. Yay?
In the original game, Malak wore what basically looked like red bandages wrapped around him, with a slightly more detailed chest.
This design hints at that in the overlapping style of the sleeves, and what looks like a separate breastplate, but the overall look is more "military," with pants and a jacket that might as well have come from the Imperial tailors. Like what Captain Cardinal would wear to a formal event. A dark loincloth hangs from his belt, and a single-shoulder cape dangles from beneath his oversized metal collar.
No surprises with the articulation. Malak has a barbell head, barbell neck, pec hinges, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel/hinge elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, a balljointed chest, balljointed waist, balljointed hips, swivel thighs, swivel/hinge knees, and swivel/hinge ankles. He's armed with his lightsaber, which is imagined here with a pair of small metal blades alongside the emitter. The actual game model was in no way detailed enough to show anything like that in 2003. There's a loop on the back of the belt where the hilt can be carried when he's not using it.
As of last year, Embracer Group was still insisting the Knights of the Old Republic Remake would eventually be released, but at this point, it's like Duke Nukem Forever: whatever work has been completed would be outdated by the time the rest is ready, so it would need to be redone anyway. So it seems this Darth Malak is fated to be a rare little remnant, a piece of history that never came to be. The question now is whether fans of the game will be happy to get a nice Black Series figure of such an iconic character, or mad that he doesn't actually look like the game he's supposed to be from.
-- 01/27/24
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