With Star Wars launching into the new Legacy of Vader comic series exploring Kylo Ren’s character arc in-between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, we are taking a look at some other notable moments from his life that the films didn’t explore. Today, we’re looking at a time where Kylo defeated one of the most formidable creatures we’ve seen in Star Wars.
Kylo Ren has long been haunted by his past, and the legacy of his family – most notably, his grandfather. Long before Charles Soule’s Legacy of Vader comic released, another comic told of Kylo trying to follow Vader’s footsteps.
A few years ago, in Age of Resistance – Kylo Ren, Tom Taylor told the story of when Kylo Ren led First Order forces to Benath, a planet in Wild Space. The story is set a year before the events of The Force Awakens, but calls back on a time where Darth Vader led Imperial forces to the planet – portraying Kylo as re-tracing his grandfather’s footsteps.
Kylo demanded that the Benathy people stop their multi-planetary military expansion, but after they refused, he killed their king – just like Vader had done decades earlier. This sparked a war between the First Order troopers and the Benathy, just like the Empire had fought them. But Vader’s forces were decimated by the Benathy’s ‘god’, which the Dark Lord of the Sith had not been able to defeat. The ‘god’ reared its head again in this conflict, revealing itself to be a Zillo Beast. Kylo boarded his shuttle and leaped out of it, right into the mouth of the beast. His men figured him dead, but Kylo used his lightsaber to kill it from within. With the Zillo dead, Kylo cut his way out, prompting the immediate cease-fire for the Bethany, who revered him for slaying their ‘god’.
The Zillo Beast was a creature of legend with incredibly thick skin, which couldn’t be affected by lightsabers or most other weapons (thus the reason Kylo had to strike from the inside). Anakin Skywalker faced one during The Clone Wars on Malastare, when the Republic awoke the beast. They managed to subdue it and transport it to Coruscant for study, where it broke free and marched on the Senate building. The Republic killed the beast, but Chancellor Palpatine secretly ordered it to be cloned. One clone was taken to Mount Tantiss, the site of other cloning experiments, as seen in The Bad Batch.
Given how difficult the creatures were to defeat, it’s easy to see why the Benathy would view it as a god, and it makes it all the more impressive that Kylo managed to defeat it.
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