Last time, I talked a lot about how it wasn’t going to matter how good this episode is.
Heaven help us, there were at least twenty of minutes of gripping television in this. Beyond promising and into interesting — even if some of the most exhilarating moments in this and the last episode owe a little debt to the action sequences in the video game Jedi: Fallen Order. When Obi-wan announced that he wanted to talk to Reva, I felt sure that he’d read my post about Episode 4.
The triumph of the episode is the twin duels, Anakin versus Obi-wan and Vader versus Reva (ah, I see what they did there). In the first, the young padawan apparently overwhelms the master training him, but even a disarmed Obi-wan is skilful enough to beat Anakin. The lesson, not to become complacent and dependent on raw power, is lost on Anakin. Perhaps taking his master’s instruction that “this weapon is your life” too literally, he considers the disarmed Obi-wan to be a defeated Obi-wan, paralleling their eventual final showdown in A New Hope.
This is a mildly fascinating and indeed uncovered thread of the two characters’ relationship, left implicit in the gaps between the three prequels: how Anakin was trained, and what lessons he took from that training. Cut through the episode, the duel recalls most if not all of the grandiosity of the Jedi regime in the prequels, the distractingly shiny floor and the vague feeling of emptiness to the set minor distractions from the two characters going at it in an ivory tower overlooking the government planet. The marble floors recur in the temple massacre flashback, Anakin’s practiced duelling put to work.
And the mirror image of the Obi-wan/Anakin fight is the Vader/Reva fight. Vader starts with no weapon and ostensibly no power, disarms Reva, rearms Reva, and murders Reva. It’s a tour-de-force and considerably more effective than Vader’s lurch into slasher villain in the third episode. All Vader has is power. All Vader needs is power. What he took away from the duel with Obi-wan was that he needed to continue to have overwhelming force even when disarmed. Nothing can get in the way of using power to make the world function in an ordered and fair manner. The Inquisitors, in all their backstabbing glory, are ultimately insignificant compared to the power of the force. This is the first episode of Obi-wan that has felt like it understands Vader as a character at all.
Reva also gets a better showing here than she has done, even if her motivations continue to be contradictory and vague once we know her backstory. “You have no idea what I’ve done alone” is finally a banger of a threat from a character who has spoken little else, as is her sudden decision to use her lightsaber to do anything at all useful.
There is a fly in the ointment here, which is that the dramatic tension in all this is tied, in the fashion of a lead balloon, to the series’ overarching indulgence into the massacre at the template and Anakin killing the younglings. This is an indigestible foodstuff. It can’t be made threatening, it can’t be made dramatic. The purpose it serves is to say conclusively that Anakin has lost it in a fashion that has no end, no comeback from. It would have been better to patch it and say that all the younglings in fact became grody Inquisitor types, or else avoid it entirely, rather than this dithering on it as something Anakin might get some ‘just deserts’ for; the point is that there is no amount of just desert that can make it okay.
The most obvious gap in the episode is the poorly exposited sequence in which Reva possibly implicitly deliberately lets Obi-wan go, where he effectively walks out of one frame in chains and appears in the next a free man who’s about to board a secret second ship. The second ship subplot could be better refined than it is — perhaps more plausible for Vader to be at the wrong pad entirely rather than be caught off guard by a ship that from his perspective he can probably see, but that’s nit-picking. It makes a loose thematic sense though: Vader’s raw power means he can miss a second ship, or not care that his new grand inquisitor is an assassin, because he’s a dark wizard who you cannot kill.
Spare a thought for poor Tala, who goes out with a bang as the series’ best individual contribution to the Wookiepedia character list, even if she’s lumped here with more oppression of Jedi-types waffle. Why would an ex-Imperial Officer, even one turned pseudo-Nazi hunter, count the number of Imperial Officers killed? You have to believe in the possibility of redemption for Imperial Officers, you were one.
The Grand Inquisitor is back, and in his time off he’s practised making an arch, cod-intellectual speech that doesn’t suck. Good for him.
So where does that leave us with Obi-wan? As I said last episode, a barnstormer of a finale will not be enough to redeem the series, and this is only just about half of one. If anything, the dense collection of actually interesting scenes in this episode continues to point in favour of this being a better movie than it is TV series. Still, it is pleasant to have got to the end of an episode not just tolerant, but eager to see more. We will see what next week brings.
Ranking, best to worst:
- Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
- Obi-wan: Episode 5
- Obi-wan: Episode 3
- Obi-wan: Episode 1
- Obi-wan: Episode 4
- Obi-wan: Episode 2
If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Invincible’, in reverse order.
