Xizor is a Falleen crime lord and the head of Black Sun, the largest criminal syndicate in the galaxy. He is the central antagonist of the 1996 multimedia project Shadows of the Empire, introduced in Steve Perry's novel for Bantam Spectra and carried across a Dark Horse comic series, a LucasArts video game, a Joel McNeely score, Kenner toys and Topps cards — a full film's worth of merchandising for a film that was never made.
A villain designed to fill a gap
The project's brief was to occupy the three-year hole between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and Xizor exists to give that gap a stake. He wants to kill Luke Skywalker in order to embarrass Darth Vader, discredit him with the Emperor, and take his place as the Emperor's second. It is a court-intrigue plot in a saga that rarely runs them, and it makes the Empire look, for once, like a government with factions.
Pheromones and the taste problem
Falleen physiology gives him pheromonal control over other species' responses, which he uses as an instrument of business and seduction, including on Princess Leia Organa. It is the single most 1990s thing in the Expanded Universe and the part of the character that has aged least well; it is also, in fairness, the reason he reads as genuinely dangerous rather than merely rich.
Black Sun as an institution
He runs the syndicate from a 102-storey palace in the Southern Underground of Coruscant, through lieutenants called Vigos drawn from many different species — a deliberately corporate structure that made Black Sun reusable long after Xizor was dead. The organisation outlived him in Legends and was carried into current canon, where it recurs from The Clone Wars through Rebels, employing hunters such as Ketsu Onyo.
Guri
His enforcer is Guri, a human replica droid built to be indistinguishable from a living woman and to serve as his personal assassin. She is the best invention in the project, and Dark Horse's sequel comic Shadows of the Empire: Evolution (1998) belongs to her rather than to him.
How it ends
Vader works out what Xizor has been doing and destroys his palace and then his escape vessel. The lesson the story draws is the one the Empire keeps teaching: an unaligned operator with money and leverage is still, ultimately, a civilian standing in front of a fleet.
Continuity note
Xizor is Legends. The novel, the comics and the game were all published before the 2014 reset and none of it is current canon; the character has not been reintroduced, though Black Sun itself has. Read him for the syndicate politics rather than for the timeline.
