fevered.earth

Tag: Media Criticism

  • Obi-wan (Episode 6)

    Last time was unexpectedly pretty good.

    It’s a little murky but if you squint you might be able to make out the shape of a man whom wars are currently making great.

    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!

    I don’t know why Watto is giving the tips. What does Watto know about laser sword combat.

    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.

    Moses Ingram brought a modicum of intensity even to scenes that were completely ridiculous but in the end, I did not like pain.

    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

    We could have had two victories by now, Obi-wan, if you could finish a job.

    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.

    There is an obvious thematic content here to Anakin crawling his way out of the dirt with his mechanical hand. Vaders gets to return the favour in Obi-wan, burying Kenobi under a mountain of dirt. Kenobi bursts his way out in an explosion of love.

    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.

    This was a neat visual, but it’s extremely similar to what I noted as a neat visual in Episode 3. Were there always two duels in the script, one wonders?

    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

    Did this series have heroes on both sides? Was Reva heroic?

    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.

    “Only a master of evil, Darth!”

    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.

    Vader has his own ivory tower on his own Coruscant.

    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.

    Sorry kid, this just ain’t your story.

    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.

    Look at this! It’s a laser light show, not a great duel of the masters! Please Disney, Lucasfilm, ILM, anyone?!

    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:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    7. 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.

  • Obi-wan (Episode 5)

    Last time, I talked a lot about how it wasn’t going to matter how good this episode is.

    Enjoyed the Vader-imagery in this opening sequence, even if the blocking on those Stormtroopers was frankly embarrassing.

    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.

    The opulence of the prequel Republic is represented well enough, even if we could do with a referee-droid or some such filling up the backgrounds.

    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.

    It struggles to carry in a still image but there was a real weight behind Vader in this sequence.

    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.

    This was almost a callback to Empire Strikes Back Vader catching a laser blast with his hand.

    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.

    Tatooine is so blue at this time of year.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    6. 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.

  • Obi-wan (Episode 4)

    Last time, we got a little worried about Vader’s character assassination.

    Cool starfish monster hidden in the shadows as Obi-wan goes into the Inquisitor base. No idea why it’s there.

    Ah, they put in Obi-wan’s little rebreather thing! Now that’s the kind of pleasing callback I can really sink my teeth into.

    Otherwise it’s another frustrating week on the television front, with Obi-wan continuing to threaten and not deliver a really good time. Without competition, the high point here is Tala’s “you will address me as ‘Sir’” conversation when passing the security checkpoint at the Inquisitor base. The Empire is a model of technocratic bureaucracy and the weakness of such systems is deference to hierarchy and unwillingness to shake the boat. All that plus it gives us a proper insight to how Tala has maintained her cover as an Imperial Officer who can both walk the walk and talk the talk. Tala also has a good showing in her scene opposite Reva.

    StarWars.com identifies it as the “Jedi Breathing Device”. Suspect Lucas didn’t have a hand in that one.

    I could continue in this vein — I’ve got notes for the rest of the episode, things I liked and things I didn’t, little moments to love (mostly Tala) and little moments to laugh at (dead Jedi frozen in amber for), but the jig really is up at this point. Four episodes into the six episode run of Obi-wan we can say that — even assuming a two-part finale of ferocious individual success, which seems improbable — this has largely been a waste of time. Would I have been better off writing up the first season of The Mandolorian?

    Obi-wan has shown promise throughout, but ~3 hours of television with only promise to show for it is not a success. The concept was originally for an Obi-wan film in the vein of Solo, before that film underperformed and the idea of minor Star Wars films was written off. This story seems like it would have worked better as a film. Or rather, the shape of the film this story used to be is readily apparent: Leia is kidnapped, Obi-wan is enlisted to find her, he rescues her from Imperial custody and in the process comes face-to-face with his old friend, now unrecognisable. Uncertain and defeatist at first, Obi-wan cowers before Vader and his hot-headed new apprentice, but the nascent rebellion and plucky young Leia inspire him to see off a pursuing Vader in a way that appropriately tarnishes the Emperor’s lap-dog for the status quo of A New Hope. Obi-wan retreats back into the shadows, convinced that Luke and Leia can bring the Empire down when the time comes.

    Obi-wan, retreating into a shadow.

    This film would not have been groundbreaking, even in the limited sphere of Star Wars media. It is wholly made up of the kind of A->B plotting between existing states that caused Lucas to leave the first half of Revenge of the Sith on the drawing board. It’s enough to know that Obi-wan ran, bode his time, isolated, and struck when the time was right. Those events are described in the existing films and the story between them is superfluous. But it would function on a basic story level and crucially, the neat details that prove to be the enduring charm of Obi-wan would maybe tide it over to some success. A single film, received as one experience, can lean harder on the appeal of Obi-wan’s Jedi Breathing Device. It can lean harder on the surprise of young Leia. And tedious characters like the non-Reva inquisitors and also Reva the inquisitor can fade into the background easier.

    Obi-wan suffers hugely from the sensation of returning to the same limited buffet every week. The treats are always the same. References to the original series. References to the prequels. References to the TV shows. Ewan McGregor. The weaknesses fester: the aforementioned Inquisitors, the warped characterisation of Vader, the curious cheapness to what is undoubtedly a very expensive show.

    Ouch.

    Worse, some of the elements on offer go away. No more Jimmy Smits or Joel Edgerton to sweeten the deal. The limited set of episodes means that despite being a decompressed film, nothing has time to develop. The moment with Tala asserting rank stands out not only because it’s an audacious, charismatic move that hasn’t been telegraphed in advance, but because there are precious few scenes in this show where people hold a basic conversation. Last week’s episode had a similar drip-feed, with Leia asking if Obi-wan was her real father. What a concept! But alas, there is no time for such frippery when we can be staring at woodcuttings of the Rebel alliance branding set.

    Everyone’s always very busy making things move along, but the things that happen are on loop. Ambush, kidnapping, stealthy escape. The last-minute confrontation that goes unresolved. Cells of downtrodden rebels experience heartbreak. Ewan McGregor is mirrored with Vader in some odd way — he looks ridiculous coming out of that fish tank, by the way. Extending the show from a film to a series, although it probably gave us that fun sequence where Zack Braff is a weasly empire guy, ultimately turns these irritations into turn-offs.

    Just by way of example, consider the exchange of dialogue from before the final duel in Revenge of the Sith:

    Obi-wan: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.

    Anakin: I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over.

    Obi-wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!

    Anakin: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

    Obi-wan: Then you are lost!

    Now, Shakespeare this is not. Lucas only cares about establishing the broad strokes of the conflict here: Anakin and Obi-wan hold two different views that are incompatible. Anakin’s being a real idiot but also Obi-wan is quick to write him off.

    Take the dialogue from before and during episode 3 of Obi-wan:

    Darth Vader: You cannot run, Obi-Wan.

    Obi-wan: What have you become?

    Darth Vader: I am what you made me.

    Darth Vader: The years have made you weak.

    Darth Vader: You should’ve killed me when you had the chance.

    Darth Vader: Now you will suffer, Obi-Wan.

    Darth Vader: Your pain has just begun.

    Again, it’s not Shakespeare — and it doesn’t have to be — but where it’s really struggling is that the two characters aren’t really talking at all. Vader is narrating the scene to the audience and Obi-wan basically isn’t saying anything at all. Why does Vader care if the years have made Obi-wan weak? Why does Vader want Obi-wan to suffer? These are not obvious conclusions to draw and the show gives no indication as to how we should interpret these statements other than as part of a generic video-game-boss villainy on Vader’s part. “From my point of view the Jedi are evil” is a famous all-time clunker. No-one is going to remember “Your pain has just begun.”

    This line was incredible though. No complaints about this one.

    I am, or was, a big fan of classic Doctor Who. The strength of that show, and the strength of cheapo British TV through the ages, is finding good actors and good scripts and that being enough. Obi-wan has the actors, and for brief moments it has the scripts. But there’s precious little time spared for the cheapest, most compelling moments.

    The rebels and their whole deal with anti-Jedi prejudice is still a terrible fit for Star Wars. It’s like watching a show centred on Constantine the Great’s anti-Praetorian-Guard prejudice. The force is meant to flow through everyone! It doesn’t manifest in an ability to make rocks float! The making rocks float is actually a very small part of it!

    I’m still hoping for a high end point for the Obi-wan series. The ultimate frustration, as I said right back at the start, is that after four out of six episodes there’s still promise.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. 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.

  • Obi-wan (Episode 3)

    Last time, we visited the planet of the Blade Runners and saw some shit Borg.

    Ewan McGregor continues to excel.

    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.

    There’s a panache to this minimalism. Obi-wan vs Vader as star-crossed lovers, their personal dispute minute against the vast expanse.

    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.

    Vader’s chest lights are not iconic.

    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 concept is outstanding but the execution here just misses the mark.

    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.

    Yeah, they’re still in it.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    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.