Not The Jedi We Were Looking For

I am worried about the future of Star Wars under Disney and the current Lucasfilm leadership. There have been three live-action TV shows on Disney+ since that streaming service launched and only one of them has been any good.

Granted, The Mandalorian was very good—and the bits and pieces in The Book Of Boba Fett that focused on Mando were also quite good. But the rest? Boba Fett was a storytelling disaster. The show kept introducing cool stuff and then promptly sweeping it away.

Hey look, twin Hutts have arrived to take Jabba the Hutt’s massive galaxy-spanning crime organization as their own! Oh wait, nevermind they’re leaving because, uh, this crime syndicate of fish people want Jabba’s empire which, by the way, is just Mos Espa now or something.

Oh cool, we’re getting some interesting Dances With Wolves stuff with the Sand People and Boba Fett—nope, nevermind, they’re all dead now so that he can have some revenge motivation. Against the fish people.

And on and on like that. Boba Fett introduced neat ideas and dropped them just as quickly. Worse, it made the main character dull and uninspiring. Gone was the mysterious bounty hunter whose face you never saw. Boba Fett barely wore a helmet the entire series (like a certain Space Marine I can think of).

Now, in Disney’s third live-action Star Wars TV show, they’re making Obi-Wan as dull and useless as Boba Fett. Granted, he’s done a bit more over the past two episodes—he remembers how to swing a lightsaber, at least—but it’s not much.

In Episode 5 we have the Third Sister telling Darth Vader that the tracker she put on Leia’s droid has located the planet where Obi-Wan has fled to—presumably also where the fledgling rebel base is located. He tells her to kneel and refers to her as the Grand Inquisitor. I was immediately annoyed by this, but I’ll get to why my feelings about it changed (though remained in the ballpark of annoyance). At first, it just seemed way too easy for Reva to climb the ranks. She hasn’t captured Obi-Wan yet, she’s just tracked him somewhere. I was right—it was too easy. More on that in a minute.

Obi-Wan, Leia and Tala and the rest of the rebels show up at the base and Leia’s droid immediately goes and sabotages the hangar opening, trapping everyone inside. I guess the tracker is more than just a tracker. The reason they go here instead of Alderaan to return Leia is vague, but it’s mostly so they can recreate the final sequence of The Last Jedi, only worse.

Last week I pointed out that the show essentially copied both A New Hope (and the rescue of Leia from the Death Star) and the video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (and the final mission where Cal Kestis goes to the Fortress Inquisitorius)—only it made both sequences less fun and unique. One might argue that these were merely homages to previous Star Wars stories, but I think it went further than that, actually cribbing ideas from other movies/games rather than coming up with a more unique story.

Well, at the end of The Last Jedi we have Rey and Finn and Leia and the rest of the heroes trapped on a planet in a similar bunker with the forces of the First Order arrayed outside trying to get in. In Obi-Wan we get the exact same scene minus Kylo Renn’s formidable forces and the Force projection trick Luke plays on his nephew. It’s just a very watered down version. Later in the episode, as the rebels escape, we learn that their transport ship’s hyperdrive is busted, and the bad guys are following them. It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before they run out fuel! What heady drama!

Star Wars copies itself all the time—see, Death Star #1, #2 and Starkiller Base—but it’s just bizarre how much of it goes on in Obi-Wan. There are six short episodes to get through and so far almost none of it feels original in the slightest. Even Leia is just a second-hand Baby Yoda—but unlike Grogu, who mostly gets into trouble, Leia often saves the day despite being a tiny child.

In any case, the bad guys show up led by Reva and they start trying to get through the base door. It’s basically Reva, about 64 stormtroopers standing in ragged lines, and a couple heavy gunners with one heavy gun. Inside, in order to fix the hangar controls Leia has to climb up into the vent to save the day. Apparently none of the children or smaller aliens on this planet have ever been in the vents! Why are the breakers in the vents anyways?

Obi-Wan talks to Reva through the door and she reveals a shocking twist (that nobody could have predicted!) She was, in fact, one of the padawans that Anakin killed at the outset of Order 66 but she survived and somehow worked her way into their ranks in order to get revenge on Vader. This might all work if I found Reva at all convincing, but she’s not and she plays her cards way too soon.

Obi-Wan ends up turning himself over to Reva and basically tells her he’s bringing Vader to her, not having her bring him to Vader. She’ll have him right where she wants him or some such. Then, Obi-Wan gets away before Vader arrives and races back to the rebel transport.

Vader shows up and gets there just as the transport is taking it off, and like Rey in Rise of Skywalker, yanks it back down to the ground. He tears the sides of the ship off to find that it’s empty. Another ship takes off a second later—the one with everyone on it. Vader is too spent at this point to yank down a second ship, or something. I guess he also didn’t take time to reach out with the Force to see if Obi-Wan was actually on that ship or not. It’s cool to see Vader’s power on full display but much less cool to have it all be a trick.

Reva, at this point, walks up behind him and her red lightsaber springs into action. She swings but he easily stops her, with little more than the flick of his wrist. I’m not sure why she didn’t at least try to just pop the lightsaber up pressed against the back of his neck or skull, where it would have flashed right through him in a killing blow rather than alert him with the sound.

He probably would have stopped that, too. He’s Darth Vader! The following fight scene was good. Vader toys with Reva menacingly. She’s no much for him, not even close. He stabs her through the chest. The actual Grand Inquisitor shows up and mocks her, sneering that her thirst for revenge was useful before it became tiresome. I’m not sure how it was every particularly useful given they still haven’t found Obi-Wan but okay.

I’m also not sure why Reva would play such a long game and then throw it away. She could have struck while Vader was distracted yanking down the transport but she waited for no reason. She tossed a plan a decade in the making away. Also, why did they leave her alive? Surely the Inquisition would have taken her to be tortured and executed—not left to possibly recover and heal up.

Earlier I noted that making her Grand Inquisitor so quickly felt too easy. Well, this was all an elaborate trick they played on Reva so nevermind. It was too easy. But how could Reva herself not ever sense this or worry that she was being played like a fiddle? Surely by now she’d have some red flags popping up at just how fast she was elevated—only mere hours after she was almost killed.

At one point during all of this, Obi-Wan hands his blaster, lightsaber and the little holo-messenger thing to Haja—a character who feels written into this show just because at this point; there’s literally no reason for him to still be here cracking jokes though I wish they’d written it in a way that made sense—and later Haja drops the holo-messenger. Obi-Wan had gotten a message earlier from a concerned Bail Organa who mentions that he’s worried about “the children” in case “he finds out” and will go to Tatooine if he doesn’t hear back to check on the boy.

Well, Haja drops this and it’s damaged but not damaged enough to totally ruin the transmission, which a wounded Reva—left alive and kicking—is able ot play back. Obi-Wan senses this, but shakes it off as no big deal. Reva, however, seems to have other plans.

We get a long, slow shot of Luke’s farm on Tatooine and the boy laying in bed that’s all very ominous. But why? Reva is done. Her quest for revenge is over. She won’t be able to lure Darth Vader into a trap ever again, whether or not she has Luke. Why does she even think there’s more to this in the first place? How did she even find out that Obi-Wan had ties to Leia and hatch her little plan?

This show is so all over the place, so aimless. It feels like much of it was cobbled together at the last minute. The entire premise is a mess. It’s copied a bunch of other stuff that’s better, and the few moments of good Star Wars TV we’ve gotten—Vader toying with Reva, for example—are constantly overshadowed by the myriad irritating moments, like the ridiculous stormtrooper assault on the rebel base. Do they even have a fight choreographer?

I did enjoy one other thing: The flashbacks between Obi-Wan and Anakin of the two dueling back before Anakin went all psycho-killer. But even here, Hayden Christensen just looks way too old. The de-aging powers that Disney has showed off in Star Wars and the MCU are absent here. That would be a minor quibble in a good show. It becomes another stone on the cairn.

I have held out hope for this new era of Star Wars. I have enjoyed going to the movies with my kids even if, after that initial experience, almost all have them have soured as time passes (though I still genuinely like Rogue One and Solo).

I think we are seeing too much Star Wars content too fast. Instead of really digging into what works for this franchise, what stories would really fit the format, it feels like the powers that be, led by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, are simply trying to cash in. Obi-Wan Kenobi should have been a game-changer—a spare-no-expense tour de Force that gave us a really top-tier story, special effects and an exciting return of a fan favorite character played by Ewan McGregor. Instead, we have a show that feels cheaper and more unnecessary even than Book of Boba Fett.

I pin my hopes on Rogue One prequel, Andor, because rebellions are built on hope. And I have higher hopes still for whatever Taika Waititi comes up with for the next Star Wars film. But other than that, I find myself mourning what could have been, and remembering hopes dashed when, as a teenager, I showed up to the movie theaters to watch The Phantom Menace and could barely contain my excitement, only to discover, well, Jar Jar Binks.

We have one more episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi left. I have set my expectations accordingly.

Previous Obi-Wan Kenobi reviews and commentary from yours truly:

P.S. that last link is about rumors that Reva could get her own live-action series on Disney Plus. This seems more likely not that instead of killing her, Vader has left her alive. The man who had no compunction whatsoever about slaughtering children left a woman who just tried to kill him alive. I don’t get it.