Last time, we visited the planet of the Blade Runners and saw some shit Borg.
Given the nature of the show, being an inherently superfluous chapter inserted into what is really a closed story, it’s considerably easier to list the negatives than to be positive. The Clone Wars series slid into a gap opened up for it by Lucas trimming the first half of Episode 3 off and starting that film with the story already in motion. The space Obi-wan fills was intentionally left blank. From the off, then, there’s an air of being an off-brand refill about everything, a Seven-Per-Cent Solution for the character originated by Alec Guinness in 1979. A brand expert at Disney might be horrified by this notion, but there’s a liberating potential to the idea: What if Obi-wan hadn’t just hid, and had had to go on an adventure with tiny Leia that would bring him face-to-face with his oldest friend, without the years of reflection and confidence he faced Vader down with in that first film?
We may have expected the climactic encounter to happen at the end of the series, rather than in the third episode. Perhaps there will yet be another encounter. As with many things in the first two episodes, the broad strokes of what’s here contain some fascinating ideas: a Vader at the height of his powers and a panicked Obi-wan lost in despair face off, not surrounded by luminous magma but in the dark and the sand, illuminated by only their lightsabers, George Luca’s mantra of expressing conflict through the motion of bars of light flipped so that the people fighting are themselves monochromatic columns on a black background. Eventually wreathed in fire, Obi-wan is saved only by chance, or perhaps the mysteries of the force.
The details conspire to bog everything down. The grand duel in Revenge of the Sith continues for many minutes through a series of incredible set-pieces, the high drama of the confrontation expressed in magnificent landscape, the clash of swords and bursts of lava. Here, Vader and Obi-wan fight up a dusty path to a sand square. The fire that separates them both looks like you might fly past it on a thrilling rollercoaster. And crucially, while McGregor continues to portray a despairing Obi-wan with panache, Vader is malformed.
Is he the impassioned, erratic hothead of the prequels? Or the brooding, decisive enigma of the original trilogy — who upon meeting Obi-wan for the first time in many years announces that of the two, he is now the master? The answer is both and neither, in a way that only has the smallest glimpses of promise. Vader looks ridiculous first and foremost, his LED light show chest-plate and belt beaming off the screen in a distracting fashion. Lucas took care to keep Vader well-lit, so that his imposing black outfit could soak up the light around him. Here he skulks, melting into backgrounds and emerging from shadows, which is surprising but also makes him look small. Illuminated in flames at the episode’s climax, he looks limp and ineffectual.
Vader has the controlled mannerisms of his original appearances but engages in arbitrary cruelty. Gone are both the leader who punishes failure in his leadership harsher than all else, and the follower so committed to his friend and chancellor that he will take orders he knows are wrong. They’re replaced with an erratic, sadistic murderer, unrecognisable as the character.
In positives, the episode opens with a reworking of Vader’s birth scene by way of Robocop (2014), all limbs and body horror. It wouldn’t fit in Episode 3 but it works here. The Mustafar temple set we briefly see is very cool, although somewhat bafflingly Vader attempts to march forcefully away from the only chair in the room. Zach Braff’s Empire-supporting alien gopher is fun, although surely Obi-wan didn’t need to redress his robes quite that often. A petty complaint for sure, but one I kept thinking.
The writing is again a weak point, with the seams between a number of drafts readily on show, between Obi-wan shooting some Stormtroopers to be captured at gunpoint seconds later by others, Indira Varma’s fun proto-rebel making the reprehensible choice to abandon a child in an underground tunnel to go speculatively rescue a middle-aged man, and Vader being eluded by a short jog and then six feet of flames.
The specious references to how the Empire is hunting down “anyone force-sensitive” could be a catastrophic misreading of the much-maligned midichlorians or they could be a reaction again it. The result in either case is a mis-step: where the Empire was previously such an indomitable power that they could sweep the Jedi order aside with the stroke of a space-pen, now the Imperial officers are reduced to mucking about in the sand to sift out any lost protagonists they might have mislaid. The Jedi become X-Men, oppressed as well as eradicated. The emphasis in the episode on the Imperial and Rebel insignias has an uncomfortable marketing-lead smell about it.
I was quite surprised to discover that Obi-wan is only six episodes long; a longer series might be more easily forgiven a pair of episodes like the first two, meandering and a little unfocused but warming up the characters and setting. This third episode does not have those flaws, however disappointing I found it. We now know what the show is about: a reimagining and re-contextualising of the climactic sword-fights of Episodes 3 & 4, a new take where instead of refusing the fight he won twenty years ago, Obi-wan is committing himself to the fate he knows is coming. Where the show is faltering, aside from the painfully unpolished script, is failing to match the visuals and locations to this lofty goal.
Ranking, best to worst:
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