Last time was unexpectedly pretty good.
Part 1: An episode
Obi-wan S01E06 was a typical 50 minutes for the series — I cannot lie, I breathed a sigh of relief on seeing that the final episode was a mere 50 minutes and not the rumoured ‘feature-length 1h:30’. Some scattered highs, considerable lows, a show still struggling to make an impression now that it’s gone. Ewan McGregor gets little serious work here, and Hayden Christensen also is poorly served — sandwiched as well between more of the recurring phenomenon of “Video Game Boss Vader”. Incapable of talking in complete statements to his old friend and master, looming over a Sarlaac pit death screen, Vader announces that “You could never have defeated me”. Reload, Obi-wan!
In this show Obi-wan and Vader have fought twice, in a flat quarry and in a rocky quarry, and while the thrill of the fact of it was enough to carry the scene the first time around, it’s just not enough to do so again.
Everything is just so very careless. Having spent the entire season hiding his identity and location, Kenobi spends this epilogue flitting between planets in his incongruously large escape pod, stopping off for a chit-chat session with Leia and Jimmy Smits. Look, I know this is petty, but Jimmy Smits announces to the audience that “Dark times are ahead. The Empire grows ever bolder.” Now, excuse me fellow. Excuse me Jimmy. You’re an Imperial Senator at the Imperial Senate. You can be as rebellion-sympathetic as you like, but you’re still part of the Empire. Your struggle is a power struggle within the Empire that is ultimately resolved by the Emperor dissolving the body you work for — which he can do because it’s part of the empire he leads. It’s just the general weakness of the script that’s been evident the whole series long, but it’s particularly painful here in the denouement. Vader asks pointedly “Have you come here to destroy me, Obi-wan?” when he himself just landed in his ship.
Reva’s plot wraps up here, a little pat in the resolution and not nearly enough made of the parallels to Vader she has following her injury in the previous episode. Give her an oxygen mask, General Grievous’s cough, anything. Reva’s story peaked last episode and this entire sequence, passable though it is, could have been replaced with a scene in which she stares long and hard at the hologram message she uncovered in the sand last time, then closes her eyes and puts it away. At least there’s no cheap death for the character who may as well have been the avatar of this show — full of promise and talent but more often than not reduced to saying “Hope you like pain!” to a child.
Bizarre that Owen has an about-face on letting Obi-wan interact with Luke, given everything. Owen and Beru doing their western homestead defence bit was pleasingly rough-and-ready though — taking a big metal pole to a lightsaber fight was neat. Again it would have been nice for Reva to be more of a mess here, to make their surviving the defence slightly more plausible.
And, well, that’s a wrap on Obi-wan season 1. I’m happy with my assessment at Episode 4 that the series would not meet expectations, the very essence of ‘about to get good’ for almost the entirely of the six-episode run. Episode 5 was the obvious highlight for me, with seemingly the entire character arcs for both Vader and Reva packed in there and every other major sequence in the show a pale reflection of those ones. Would I recommend watching it? Only to the most committed Star Wars appreciator, but then those people will likely watch it anyway. It’s nice to see all the classic prequel actors back on screen, especially as they’re all very talented. But is that enough? Perhaps someone will edit a tight 1h:30 tele-movie out of Obi-wan that will trim the fat and shave the rough edges. Perhaps not though.
Part 2: A prequel to A New Hope
The psychosexual desire to replace the prequels has long been noted by commentators. The fundamental thesis is that, corrupted by computers or sycophants or pure money, Lucas accidentally slipped on his ass and put out three entire films wrongly. And so when Lucas sold his golden child to Disney for uncountable megabucks, the idea started to be whispered in all the secret nooks and crannies where people discuss Star Wars in terrifying depth: What if they fix it?
Obi-wan is now the third Disney-developed prequel to Star Wars, and it is safe to say that none of the three efforts (Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story being the other two) have gone well or gone to plan. All three of these creations have been heavily edited late in the process, reformatted or had key figures drift in and out. But nonetheless, we now have three Disney prequels, which fill in the story that happened before the opening scenes of 1979’s A New Hope. We know what Han Solo was up too. We know what happened with the Death Star plans. And now we have seen the last time Obi-wan and Vader met… and it was to bicker in a rocky quarry and will-they-won’t-they over who gets to die. Whatever you think about his storytelling prowess, George Lucas had these characters clashing swords together over a lava-fall. In a grotesque metaphor for the events of the preceding film, their duel causes them to bump into a large button labelled “destroy society” that starts the process of plunging everything around them into fiery lava while they fight, oblivious.
In many ways the concerns of A New Hope are the concerns of Obi-wan. The venerable old master who gives up his life to save the nascent rebels would be recognisable to a viewer of the earlier film, given that Obi-wan tries to do little else here. Leia’s impassive reaction to his death less so. It’s easy to see the connection between Obi-wan learning here to put his faith in decent people across the galaxy and the potential of his young wards, and the character’s actions in A New Hope. It’s perhaps harder to understand Obi-wan’s statements, his commitment to spirituality, and his unceasingly misleading approach to Luke. Obi-wan isn’t spiritual here — he communes with the spirit of his dead master, but it’s almost slapstick, and perfunctory. The spirit of the ages is a force phone call.
Obi-wan learns the power of love here, but he doesn’t understand the power of love in A New Hope or the subsequent two films. His position there is that of the master who is stuck in his ways, who does not believe in universal salvation, who Luke ultimately surpasses. So a viewer only having seen the original trilogy would be very confused, because the power of love can’t help you beat Vader in a duel because beating Vader in a duel isn’t the way to beat Vader. The show understood this as recently as episode 5, but fails it in the final clash. And on a fundamental level, as the great backstory to the two masters clashing for the last time, this is just… dull.
As a prequel to A New Hope, the best thing you can say about Obi-wan is that it casts into sharp relief the necessity of the Star Wars prequels as a project, to avoid this wishy-washy nonsense where the Jedis are an oppressed people and the Empire consists of all the bad people and the Rebellion all the good people. Trade disputes and all that might be boring but they anchor the story in a material reality rather than vague sentiment and gesture, and Obi-wan can only offer the latter: Young Leia in a tiny Leia outfit, cute as a button, ready to grow up into the character we know and love. Young Luke in a tiny Luke output, cute as a button, ready to grow up into the character we know and love. Obi-wan, inspired to great power by his hope for the next generation of heroes, unrecognisable to us.
Part 3: A sequel to Revenge of the Sith
Halfway through episode 6, Obi-wan has a vision in which he hears a montage of Anakin lines and Vader lines, a fascinating little vignette — not least because even the most poignant selection of Anakin lines can’t disguise the bratty nature of his character, which is quite funny. It’s a marker though of the surfacing of the prequels into the Obi-wan series, which are ostensibly committed to the new-old aesthetic of Rogue One and Solo, a glossier overpaint of the aesthetic of the original three films.
McGregor’s Obi-wan though is an invention of the prequels —only one ‘Hello there’ is a meme, after all — as is Christensen’s Vader. And so what we perhaps get is a ‘new New Hope’, a sequel that picks up where Revenge of the Sith left off: Kenobi in hiding, Vader ascendent, children split up and hidden. And those are the concerns of Obi-wan, Reva even falling neatly into the prequel series mandate of a single new Sith villain to encounter and contend with on each outing.
So what would someone get if they watched a prequel quadrilogy that climaxed with Obi-wan? The impression, perhaps, that Vader and Kenobi are trapped in a stalemate, doomed to meet and fight inconclusively time and again, unable to kill each other due to their deep abiding connection. “You were my brother, Anakin!” Obi-wan yelled at his burning friend, and that brother here too casts his sibling into a fire, but cannot bring himself to kill. The Vader of A New Hope, who strikes his old master down without pause, would seem strange and alien.
The problem with having Obi-wan repeatedly disavow Vader’s humanity in this way is that it comes across like he doesn’t actually believe it. The Obi-wan of A New Hope arrogantly disavows his former pupil, and Luke later calls him out on it and his gives his infamously weak justification. That Obi-wan truly believes Vader to be inhuman because it allows him to cover his own failings — the Jedi weren’t corrupt or venal, and Obi-wan wasn’t too busy adventuring to see what was happening before his very eyes. It was Vader! He was inherently corrupt and he must be killed. It’s a self-serving myth. Kenobi here, staring tearfully at the ruin of his former friend, cannot possibly believe this.
This isn’t necessarily a complaint — it’s the nature of making a project like this that has a satisfactory self-contained narrative within a larger existing one that it’s going to give closure to the characters that they didn’t previously have, and that’s why we’re considering it in this way. But it’s a departure for the character of Obi-wan. Kenobi here, in a third series of Obi-wan that takes the place of Return of the Jedi, would be the one still insisting that Anakin is in there somewhere. He would be the one Vader intervenes to save from the Emperor. In this series, they truly are brothers.
Another prominent takeaway would be Vader’s Empire-building, pardoning the pun. Anakin in Obi-wan following Revenge is an Anakin who still seethes with the injustice of not being permitted a seat on the Jedi council, and he has constructed his own council with his own masters — and his own intrigues. From his Mustafar base he consolidates power against a skeptical Emperor. It is impossible to imagine him being dressed down by Grand Moff Tarkin — the Vader who has suppressed all emotion in his trauma is replaced by a hothead, firebrand Vader prone to irrational violence. Or to put it simpler, Vader here is a Kylo Ren figure.
Perhaps most cynically of all, I think a viewer of this fictional quadrilogy would see no end in sight. What are tiny Luke and tiny Leia, embroiled in adventure and plots amongst the stars from an early age, but photocopies of tiny Anakin and the mistakes in his care? Luke’s down-to-earth folksy wisdom in the original films guides him through the nonsensical Jedi creed to find his own values, his lack of experience in this world a boon rather than a drag. Who is he if he’s been fighting Imperial agents from an early age? Who is Leia? Who is Obi-wan if he never went into hiding, his adventures butting up right against a growing Luke? These are ultimately the concerns of the sequel trilogy, concerns about children making our own mistakes again. The New Hope was that Luke, separated from the Jedi and the Republic and all the failure, would be able to do something new. This Luke has lived his whole life running from the Empire, and will do so until he dies.
And so
That was Obi-wan. I’m just going to come out and say it, I don’t like they way they light the sword fights in this. It’s too much glow from the lightsabers. The effect is tacky and it looks so distracting for the user that it’s hard to imagine it being practical. My major problem was with the way they lit the sword fights, it was too much, I never got on with it. George Lucas was very subtle with the lightsaber glow! These things are like torches. Please Disney, fix this for me. Release a special edition of the Obi-wan series that fixes this for me.
Thank you for reading.
I have ranked the episodes but in the end I’d say the quality of the series was pretty consistent, with some variance in how much each episode felt like it was mostly filler.
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 6
- 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.
