fevered.earth

Tag: Television

  • Ando Calrissian (Andor Episodes 1, 2, 3)

    Last time turmoil engulfed the Galactic Republic as we discussed episode -3 of Obi-wan, The Phantom Menace.

    They better not try and make a big thing out of that Quake logo Rebel Alliance symbol again. I will snap.

    So once again we return to these damn Star Wars. It does feel like a joke. Following Obi-wan I swore blind that I was done dipping my toes in the Disney Star War pool, the life-giving waters were certainly all dried up and gone by the time I watched Kenobi face Vader on the exceedingly dark planet of the stalagmites. The problem — it seemed — was that there was simply nothing more to say on the subject of Star Wars. You can pass some time making do-overs, like the sequel trilogy, you can last a while doodling in the gaps as with Solo and Rogue One, and Mandalorian probably warranted a look-in from me eventually but there’s an awful lot of it. Disney’s four-billion-dollar purchase was running along on borrowed time. At some point they were going to try something — like interpolating an alternative follow-up to the prequel trilogy where Vader has some kind of evil daughter who menaces baby Luke — and have it just not work. And so it was.

    I found Andor to be a baffling announcement for a series anyway, in the fashion of Michael Bluth hearing about his son’s girlfriend. Really? Him? Don’t get me wrong, Diego Luna was perfectly pleasant in Rogue One, his chemistry with protagonist Felicity Jones papering over any number of cracks in the shooting script. Despite that, he wasn’t an obvious candidate for the extended universe treatment, not just because — spoilers abound — he pops his clogs in the climax of that film, sacrificing himself to the rebel cause. There’s little obvious scope for expanding his story in preference to any of the rest of that cast, many of who were underserved in Rogue One. It almost seemed ridiculous to hope that, even absent the pressure of dealing with a prominent legacy character like Ben Kenobi, the series might flourish. The most we could hope for was that in a post-Obi-wan world, it might be a safer bet to take on characters and relationships that aren’t dripping with potential — if only to save us all the heartbreak.

    Him?

    I speculated in writing on that series that Obi-wan was an attempt to make a new sequel to Revenge of the Sith in the way that Rogue One had been an attempt to make a new prequel to A New Hope. The insertion of Andor into this genealogy forces us to consider Rogue One instead as a new Return of the Jedi, the terminal end of a series that’s about to be filled in backwards. This is, inarguably, a George Lucas move. From the prequels to the Clone Wars to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas loves nothing more than starting a series in the middle somewhere. Could this be an authentically positive omen for Andor?

    Getting it out of the way straight off, it’s good. I hate it and I wish it weren’t the case but it’s really good. The genius of Andor, at least in this first trilogy of episodes, is that it doesn’t even try. It’s barely Star Wars. Where it could reference Star Wars it often doesn’t — when antagonist Arnold Rimmer addresses a crack team of extremely unpleasant security agents in the second episode, it could be a pastiche of Darth Vader addressing the bounty hunters in Empire Strikes Back, but it isn’t. Instead its Lieutenant Gorman from Aliens trying to give a pep talk to the cops from The Fifth Element. The first episode opens with the titular Cassian Andor (last seen sleepwalking through that terrible reshoot scene for Rogue One where he lets a man climb halfway up a wall before shooting him) in a greasy, grimy neon city that’s Blade Runner by way of Attack of the Clones but separate and distinct from both.

    This feels mean.

    It seems implausible that we actually see less of this future neon city than we do the party drug planet from Obi-wan given how much more vibrant and coherent it feels — in what will become a running mark of quality, there’s an extended scene of the club bouncer patting Andor down and giving him the house rules before he heads in. These small moments and subtle characters count tenfold in making the setting compelling, and Andor has them in spades: the busybody on the space transport who thinks everything’s crooked, the town bellringer who takes immense pride in his work without saying a single word, the guy who Cassian owes money to who has hired a local shark man to lightly menace him (yes, a loan-shark). These things could all easily be on the cutting room floor, and a persistent complaint I had about Obi-wan was that they invariably were, giving the impression of a world where people only ever talked when they wanted to muse about starting a rebellion.

    This is just Wall-E.

    The introduction sequence ends with the inciting incident for the plot of this run of three episodes: Andor shoots first. Framed for a crime he totally committed, he desperately tries to get off-planet while paying his debts and looking after his suspiciously sassy mother. A droid that looks like Wall-E to such an extent that Disney would surely sue if this weren’t being made by Disney pleads with him to stay, but no dice, he’s getting his friend who works on pod race engines to ring up Stellen Skarsgård immediately. Interspersed are flashback scenes in which we see that Andor himself comes from a tribe of presumably-indigenous humanoid scavengers on an Imperial planet. That is to say, he is an Ewok.

    The antagonism is provided by Inspector Karn, who as I’ve mentioned draws on no-one so much as Red Dwarf’s Arnold Rimmer, a cripplingly insecure, incredibly tedious busybody who serves as deputy inspector for the sub-Imperial corporate police force. He is an absolute delight in every scene, especially once paired with Alex Fern’s toadying fascist sergeant. I can only assume we’re going to see him get promoted to the highest ranks in the course of his Javert-like pursuit of Andor (who, I should note again, is totally guilty).

    Boo! Hiss!

    It’s not all roses (well, it’s mostly roses). The 40-minute episode format, while I personally prefer it to the prestige TV standard hour makes little sense for a set of three episodes that feel like nothing more than an episode of Sherlock, a show that hugely benefitted from its feature-length runtime. The ending of the second episode is particularly odd, showcasing some dramatic walking that has the air of being test footage. I’m going to try and consider the show to be a run of movies as best as I can, a series of four features. If they’d released it all at once I’d probably have gone back to my old tricks and started at the end.

    The action sequence that takes up most of the third episode falls a little flat in places, such as the multiple uses of “a rope coil has suddenly detached from a pillar” maybe making sense from a logical point of view but perhaps not a dramatic one. Much in the tradition of classic Doctor Who however, the bread and butter of the acting is just good enough to make up for it. Watching Skarsgård and Luna bicker over who gets to be mysterious and aloof to who is well worth the price of entry.

    Not another one!

    The ending of the third episode, where Andor leaves with Skarsgård, is somewhat muted only because we’re having such a great time with the characters established on Ferrix (the name of the planet). I didn’t want to see them go, but I also can’t see how the plot could return to Ferrix without being contrived. We’ll see. Plenty of time to mull things over in the weeks to come.

    The tricky thing with Star Wars is, everyone wants to have a lightsaber. You want to have a lightsaber. I want to have a lightsaber. The people making Andor want to have a lightsaber. How long can they maintain the trapeze act of making Star Wars that isn’t primarily influenced by Star Wars? That’s what we’re going to find out, I guess.

    Up next:

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. The Phantom Menace
    2. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    3. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    7. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    8. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    9. 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.

  • 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.