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Commentary
What an exciting episode! It ran from november 1st to december 1st, which put me under an extremely tight schedule – in fact, I posted my finished episode less than five minutes before the deadline ended.
The mission was to portray the Rebel Alliance hunting down Black Sun agents. I would have preferred to stay on Commenor for this to bring the beginning chapter there to a more organic close, but the mission required that I would build on Mon Calamari, since our team had six planets assigned to build on in order to get a higher score. Since Commenor wasn't an option, I settled for Mon Calamari as I've wanted to build a beach/bay scene ever since the first Rogue One trailers. Still, having Ruw Zabro established as being involved with Black Sun (who was behind the attempt on Luke's life), it still worked out, but it required me to do more extensive space shots than I had anticipated. As you can probably tell, I wasn't able to build a second spaceship for the villain, which would have been a waste of time anyway since it has so little screentime and gets destroyed in the story right away, so I kinda copped out with just a miniature and afterwards some engine parts as a wreckage of some sort. Sorry!
Last, the name. As you may or may not have noticed by now, I try to replicate a kinda classic 50s-movie vibe with Startales' presentation all around, which includes the episode titles. I like the theatralic approach of advertisement and filmposters of that time, especially horrormovies, and I want to give a similar feeling here. Another big part in naming my content is references und subtle meanings. For example, my first episode, Den Of The Dragon, is a direct reference to the brilliant webcomic Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew (number #626, to be exact. If you read it, you will know why). Ruw Zabro's appearance and wording, specifically in the last panel, is based on the black dragon appearing in that webcomic strip. Aaaand the characters have entered Zabro's warehouse in that episode, so that's where the "Den Of The Dragon" comes from.
This time, the name is again a popcultural reference, however a more mainstream one than Rich's webcomic (which I still highly recommend to read, it is excellent!). The mission's parameter suggested that the rebels might be forced to get their hands a little dirty on this job, as assassination is usually not the kind of behaviour we expect to see from the Alliance depicted in Star Wars (except for that one time when they explicitly planned an attempt on the Emperor's life over Endor, but whatever). So, I wanted to display a certain amount of grittiness and violence this time, which comes into effect when Alia is drowning her opponent with her bare hands. I think the bright sunlight setting at the beach in an actually beautiful, almost vacation-like location also serves as an excellent contrast to the brutality going on at the shores. In the panel with the three shots of Alia's face (which one might think is three times the same image zoomed in, but it is in fact three different photos), I originally planned to do a back-and-forth-cut between her face and the drowning Black Sun agent, accompanied by air bubbles at the water surface becoming fewer and fewer as he's running out of breath. But this was when I planned to do the water with a smooth surface of studless bricks, which I ended up replacing with loose 1x1 round plates of trans-blue and clear instead. So, the bubbles didn't work anymore the way I would have liked them to and I ended up forgoing that part and just concentrating on Alia in this shot. The inspiration for the whole drowning maneuver, however, was a scene in 2006's James Bond: Casino Royale, in which Bond cruelly strangles an opponent after a fistfight. This was a new kind of Bond-movie, very realistic and pretty gritty with scenes like that, so that was kind of what I was going for in this episode. So, I thought that a name referencing Daniel Craig's gritty Bond character would be a nice idea, and since Casino Royale didn't exactly allow for a very clever play of words, I settled for Quantum of Solace. With the sunrise in my title being, of course, the rise of a new, bright sun after the Setting of the Black Sun (this episode's mission title in the Eurobricks forum!).
Can I reasonably expect someone to understand these references without further explanation? Perhaps not. But then again, I do it mainly for my own entertainment, and as little nods of respect towards the works that inspired or influenced me in one way or another, and I think I will continue to do it that way.
Oh, and Part XII-I: Sowing The Seed is no reference to any outer work at all. It's merely foreshadowing for the role Ruw Zabro will play in the future.