f13.net

Teaser released today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWTfhyvzTx0

May 2527

Edit: moved to Friday May 27

Edit: May 4th trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yh_6_zItPU

I see they are getting some extra use of those Tattooine sets from Mando/Boba Fett.

Otherwise, I doubt there's really a story that's worth telling here, but I'll likely watch it anyway.

Prequels of stories we've already had completely told are sort of, well, hm. But I have to admit there is something in here that's puzzling that's worth thinking about IF they have a good idea for it. Why did Luke need Obi-Wan to watch over him at all? We know by the time Luke is a young adult that Obi-Wan has had nearly zero role in his life that Luke knows of. Since the new comics are canon, we know that Obi-Wan has protected him a few times but also decided to keep his distance. What exactly is Kenobi protecting Luke from and how does he do it without being obvious? Why is he just a "hermit who lives out at the Dune Sea"? Why doesn't he just do what Ahsoka does, since she helps found the Rebellion and survives intact all through the wars against the Empire (notably without actually being part of the Rebellion's command structure in the period of the main trilogy)?

Either this turns out to be a bunch of dumb shitty narrative leftovers that anybody in their right mind should have stayed away from or it's going to make a ton of sense and explain some things that are otherwise inexplicable.

I would recommend not watching it, you're just going to hate it and bitch about it.

Trailer was amazing. Looking forward to some cool sith assassin bullshit going down. I hope he has a nice couple episodes with the sand people just to get more good ol tattooine sand in your jays.

 :grin:

Sign me up.  I was hooked just by hearing Duel of the Fates.  Guess he is going to be fighting off inquisitors.

You know, for some folks, loving a thing means thinking about it and holding it to tough standards.

I'm not sure what you're looking for on a message board devoted to a show or franchise if all you want is "you have to love it just as it is and that's all". Like, if you're there already, why go looking to see what other people think?

Yep, that's my guess.  He's probably there on Tatooine to be bait for the inquisitors.  Someone feels a strong force signature on the planet, finds Obi Wan, figures they found the source.  Overlooking the Skywalker over there on the moisture farm.

That's leaving aside that the rational repose if you found Kenobi would be to radio it in to the Empire so they could drop a couple of brigades of troops on Kenobi's head if you faile at killing him. So they have to handwave away the enemy being utterly stupid.

Ya this is Star Wars, that goes with the territory.

That part sort of makes sense--the Emperor is satisfied that his Order 66 masterstroke basically worked, he's got Vader and the Inquisitors on the mop-up job, and the general way that evil Force users deal with good Force users is to go at them with lightsabers, treachery and bravado. Plus Obi-Wan has managed to deal with or get away from bunches of troops on many occasions.

I really like the idea that Vader and Obi-Wan had one more major confrontation in between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, at any rate--it completely makes sense in terms of their conversation on the Death Star except for the "when I left you I was but the learner, now I am the master" bit. Maybe this whole series is about Obi-Wan trying to give Vader and the Emperor the impression that he's dead--or it might also be that he needs to get them off someone else's trail (Ahsoka, Yoda) or keep them from looking too closely at Tatooine given that Luke was actually living with Owen and Beru.

Ewan McGregor.  :heart:

Really, that's all I needed to know.  I might have to talk to the husband about finally subscribing.

Delayed 2 days to May 27th but the first two episodes will be available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEuirQWecEw

May 4th trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yh_6_zItPU

Looks pretty great!

It was good. Was disappointed in the music.Heroine was new york sassy and I like the cut of her jib.

Did not expect to see a Chili pepper, or that girl. Also I have really no clue how old kids are any more, I would have guessed that girl was around 5 not 10.

They should be 10. I liked it. Little Leia is already giving us hints of her older self. Third sister is the right kind of mustache twirly.

I thought it was fine? Not great. L'il Leia is too little and she runs like a little kid, not like some speed demon who outmaneuvers adults on two planets.

I'm more struck that the consistent problem of many D+ Star Wars series continues: they have REAL problems doing anything that feels like intense, extended action scenes. The Mandalorian managed that very well but I don't think the others have at all. There's a lot of atmospheric tension but most of the action in the first two episodes involves slow-as-molasses chase scenes with Toddler Leia. The Inquisitor doing the Batman moves across the rooftops was ok, but everything felt out of sync--she sees the gun battle, it's not really very far from where she is, Obi-Wan is not going very fast to get away from the bounty hunters, and yet by the time she gets there Obi-Wan has somehow dropped to the alley, collected Leia, made a deal with Funny Fake Jedi Scoundrel Guy, and is on his way to the freighter.

Action is bad when the time sequencing of actions that are separate from one another don't seem at all to be happening in the same place/situation. Everything feels slow in both episodes--much as in the Boba Fett series. I don't know if that's being cheap or it's just not getting people who can do fast, kinetic action scenes.

The Director of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Deborah Chow, directed a couple of episodes of The Mandalorian season one (#3 & #7). Presumably they liked her work there enough to let her direct the entirety of Obi-Wan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Chow#Filmography

Yeah sounds like a wait till the season is over and than see if anyone says anything interesting kinda thing.

McGregor is great as always though.

It does make me think a bit about the whole situation.

Yoda's gone to ground by this point--we assume on Dagobah but not necessarily, I suppose. Obi-Wan is waiting for Luke to grow up (and just seems to think Leia is already unimportant, which is weird--why not plan on training her, too?) He doesn't know about Darth Vader up until this moment, so he and Yoda must have been thinking just that Luke would be able to overthrow the Emperor because? the prophecy of the Chosen One, which they previously thought was Anakin?

Yoda's obviously not on Force Phone with Obi-Wan (and neither, at this point, is Qui-Gon, though I think the fact that they started with that makes me think we'll be seeing his Force Ghost before the end). Obi-Wan's been completely alone and intensely focused on Luke. He's clearly aware that any use of the Force might alert the Inquisitors so he's let his abilities atrophy and his training fade.

Anakin as Darth Vader, in the meantime, has been pretty active, as we saw in Rebels, including fighting with Ahsoka Tano. Ahsoka is only one of several Force users/former Jedi who've helped to form the nascent Rebellion. We're now also clear in the post-EU canon that other Jedi survived Order 66 and are continuing to hide or evade the Inquisitors. I don't think we've seen what, if anything, the Emperor and Vader are doing with new Force sensitives as they appear; presumably most people know that if their kid is showing signs of having a way with the Force that you suppress that, except for places where the Empire doesn't hold power, maybe.

I guess I don't quite get why Yoda and Obi-Wan are so sold on this play. Why not gather up surviving Jedi one at a time and take them to the Outer Rim or Wild Space? It worked for the Sith, after all. Take Luke and Leia with you when you go. I mean, Obi-Wan is actually risking Luke's discovery by being there all this time. He's not protecting him--he can't. If he's sure that Luke is the Chosen One and all that, go hide on some other planet and come back when Luke is 16 or something, since he can't train him right now at this age.

I could buy it if Qui-Gon kept appearing and saying "no, you have to stay here, I've seen it in a vision, just don't do Jedi shit and stay hidden". But Obi-Wan hasn't had any vision or prophecy, so the fact that he's stuck it out for ten years seems not just forlorn (McGregor sells that wonderfully) but kind of inexplicable.

This is before Rebels.

None of the stuff you mentioned is a problem with this series. Episode III set up this situation because that's how it started in A New Hope. It's not like they can suddenly be like "Hey, you know how A New Hope started 40+ years ago? Yeah. None of that happened, we're changing everything."

I can answer a few of your questions just for the Hell of it though.

A) Leah: This is exactly how Obi-Wan acts about Leah in the OT. Yoda is the one who points out to him that if Luke dies Leah is still there as another hope. Some of that is because Lucas made it up as he went along. Still, it doesn't reflect very well on Obi-Wan and the best excuse I have for him is that Leah doesn't seem to be as strong in the Force as Luke is judging purely by the movies. I think that watching over Luke all those years also probably made him quite biased.

B) Why not gather up the other Jedi and hide? The best answer is because they were scattered all over the galaxy and Obi-Wan and Yoda had no idea if they were alive or not. That was, in large part, the entire point of the Clone Wars. Scatter the Jedi, whittle their numbers down, distract them, then have the clones kill all of them at once.

C) Obi-Wan's attitude/force atrophy. I think part of this is indeed fear of the Inquisitors and he is proven right when the other Jedi is killed. But the other part of it is that Obi-Wan clearly has severe PTSD and has lost confidence in himself. The first two episodes make a very convincing case for this at least twice.

D) Bonus answer: Yoda not being on the "force phone". It doesn't work like that other than Luke projecting himself across the galaxy for a brief time then dying. Even Vader could only use telepathy to talk to Luke when his Star Destroyer was practically right on top of the Falcon. We never see Luke on another planet and Vader going "So you know I'm your dad right?" in his head.

Look, you really just have to not think about any of this stuff or try to make it make sense.  If you went by the original trilogy, you could assume that Vader had no idea that he had kids at all, he'd never met Owen, and maybe Luke's mother was Owen's sister that he'd knocked up and abandoned before she started to show.  He would therefore have no way to know of Luke's existence until Luke just happened to show up to thwart his plans.

The prequels' need to tie everything together, though, makes it impossible to reconcile everyone's actions.  Owen has known ties to Anakin (one of the most important people in the imperial hierarchy) and Obi-Wan (public enemy number one) -- there is no way that he wouldn't be under constant surveillance, and that the fact that he has a nephew with the last name "Skywalker" wouldn't have been discovered instantly.  

Even if he weren't under surveillance, everyone with a brain should assume that he would be.  Owen should never have even told Luke the name "Skywalker" and should have just raised him as his own kid.  I mean, fuckin' duh.  To explain this away and make the events of the OT work, every single person involved (Owen, Obi-Wan, Vader, everyone who works for Vader who knows that Obi-Wan is alive and that Owen exists, everyone in contact with Obi-Wan who knows what's going on and that Luke exists) needs to have actual brain damage to not put any of these pieces together over the course of twenty fuckin' years.

Also, Obi-Wan is apparently shit at hiding if that dumbass Jedi twerp was able to find him in a day.  The Inquisitors have force powers, so it's not like the Jedi had a special advantage either.  Since Luke knew Obi-Wan as "Ben Kenobi" I think we can just assume that the Jedi twerp looked up "Kenobi" in the Tattooine phone book and put 2 and 2 together.  Again, the "everyone has brain damage" explanation fixes this, but it's really the only thing that does.

Funny how kid-Leia comes off as in some ways more wise-beyond-her-years than OT-Leia, who always came off as more of a sassy action heroine than a psychic diplomat.

Anyway, this is all stuff that I notice and then banish from my thoughts so I can enjoy it as dumb entertainment.  Part of what made the Mandalorian work so well is that it told its own stories and didn't have to reconcile any of the fucking stupid lore.  I wish they'd stick with that.  Oh well.

This was amazing. Should've expected Leia, great idea to give her some love. I'm not normally a plucky kid fan, but it worked for me here because I'm invested in /this/ plucky kid.

I was worried about the 2 kinda weak designs on the Inqs, but the GI actor was great and the not-evil-Wong had such an amazing voice effect that it just made him cool af anyway. And bad Inq is bad, loved the interplay between her and the GI as classic dark force user drama. I don't think any of the movie trilogies have gotten that internal strife across very well, this may be the best (if you'll excuse the reference) example in live-action of the Lawful Evil vs Chaotic Evil schism of the dark side. The movies have mostly focused on the struggle of light v dark, internally and externally, rather than the nuances within each. I look forward to more of that in Ahsoka.

Ewan has just become Obi Wan at this point. He nailed the time period and character in defeat without hope. Already feels like his performance here both continues his work but also hits nice echoes for Sir Alec when Bail is entreating him 'one last time'. He crushed so many scenes, but they also set him up to do so. That scene when he was watching Luke and it echoed Qui-Gon seeing Anakin, small touch but really powerfully done. The way they did the repetition of the work day he's had for ten years is portrayed well, even in such a short span of film thus far. Sorry to fanooy a bit, but I didn't really expect him to so perfectly nail Obi Wan without humor or hope so well, as he was always the character with a wry line or hopeful outlook. Really sold this interim period of the Skywalker saga.

My biggest complaint is that this episode felt ripped from the Fallen Order game....but I fucking loved that game and the story, so....my complaint is actually a compliment because it was amazing seeing that cool story brought to life with arguably the best actor still alive in the interim period (other than the McDiarmid).

Already feels like the best D+ content for Lucasfilm. It seems almost wasteful to do movies now, I hope they can focus on the longer format ~6 hour thing. Even the final Skywalker trilogy movies, with their clear lack of story and leadership, would've been better as 3 6-hour seasons on D+, fleshing out some stuff they didn't have time to linger on or even add at all. But that's said as someone who has always hated movie theaters, I know they're not giving up that cash cow for a while yet.

Yes, I'm continually taken out of this show simply because of how much you have to stretch your believability to fit it into the continuity from the original Star Wars. It's bad enough when Obi-Wan doesn't seem like he even knows C-3PO or R2D2 in Star Wars, but now Leia doesn't even fucking know who he is despite the events of just the 2nd episode of this show? And that's not even getting into the problem I have where every single thing about the setting is so at odds with just about everything else. Even the slightest bit of scrutiny of just "how things fit together" makes zero fucking sense - politically, logistically, legally, socially, technology. It's a trainwreck.

Only thing that really bugged me about Luke and Leia was Leia seemed too young for how old she should have been. She didn't act like it, but just looked around 6. Other than that... not sure how I felt about Reva. She didn't quite fit the Star Wars villain for me... too over the top. Maybe I prefer the Darth Maul types rather than a strong arm thug, but I guess it fits with the inquisitor role? That said, nice to see Moses getting more roles - liked her in Queen's Gambit and was pleasantly surprised to see her here... just unfortunate I didn't take to her character.

She's simply not a 10-year old.

And quite aside from the lore, the two "let's chase the little girl" scenes are staged horribly. They feel like Sid and Marty Krofft with better costuming.

Reva is plainly going to be a Person With A Surprising Connection to The Protagonist, which is probably also how she knows Anakin is Darth Vader. Strong money down on her being a youngling who survived.

You know, it's odd in terms of what Samwise observed, but this is the first time I've even noticed that Owen and Beru use a different last name than Luke. I feel really stupid. Is ten-year old Luke going to Tatooine Primary School as "Luke Skywalker"? I guess so. He even tells people his dad was...a pilot on a spice freighter? Wait, considering what we just saw in Boba Fett, that is either a genius fake-out or kind of weird, it means he's telling his pals his dad was a criminal. But he's still using the name Skywalker, which doesn't seem very common. That sort of worked when Darth Vader and the Empire were incredibly distant, remote, etc. and Tatooine the ass-end of the universe but fuck, the Inquisitors were just swarming all over Tatooine and they've got a strong credible spotting of Obi-Wan there. I mean, ANAKIN/Vader certainly knows he's from Tatooine and he certainly knows that Owen still lives there with his wife Beru, even the slightest hint that Owen is raising a kid named Skywalker should be game over.

 

These bits are good and I appreciate their work, but I really wish we could just move to a whole new time in the SW saga. Old Republic, whatever. Just stop redoing existing work and create new stuff. The beats are all there, we just need new people and stories.

I think you guys are forgetting Carrie Fisher was 5'1". A ten year old Fisher probably could have passed for an oddly mature 6 when height was literally the only clue.

--Dave

The actress is 9 so it's not like she's the wrong age even. She still looks and runs like a toddler to me though.

The "Actual 9 year old doing her own stunt work isn't believable as an action star" is certainly a take.

--Dave

Yes, I guess no other child actor of this approximate age has ever been in a suspenseful, well-shot, tautly directed action scene or chase ever in the history of television or film. What were we thinking?

I point to Firestarter. Not every child actress is going to be Chloe Grace Moretz, able to carry both the drama and the action. Just because the acting has flaws, doesn't mean it isn't impressive for an actual child.

--Dave

Um? What? If you're talking about A New Hope she specifically goes to ask him for help and when Luke rescues her from her cell she's sort of suspicious until he says "I'm here with Ben Kenobi!" and she responds "Ben Kenobi? Where is he?" and runs out of the cell. It's quite clear she knows who he is in A New Hope though the movie never explains how she knows him both by his actual name and his "hiding on Tatooine" name.

She knows who Kenobi is but I always had the impression she never met him in the flesh. Whatever I'm not going to worry about it too much.

I do want them to move on from this time period.

I want to third the concept that "holy shit Star Wars needs to stop dry humping this very tiny set of characters we have." Even if you count all the animated shows, the D+ shows, and the movies, there is literally about a 50 year span in a galaxy of billions/trillions of planets with a civilization spanning thousands of years. Do something else, FFS.

I always got the impression in A New Hope that Leia only knew of Kenobi by reputation and not personally, but I've probably forgotten more about those movies than I can remember. My Star Wars fandom really crashed about the time of Attack of the Clones and has only had momentary resurgences around the decent projects (Rogue One and Mando).

As soon as Anakin first met Owen in whichever movie that was (I think Ep 3), I immediately recognized it as a severe mistake from the perspective of making the overall narrative make any kind of sense, but didn't bother to actually work through the consequences because so much else was going on in that movie that I didn't have time to focus on any one part of it.  This series really brings all of the narrative seams between Ep 3 and 4 into view though, and the more stuff you try to pile onto it to try to stitch the story together, the more of a mess it becomes.

Oh well.  These are not the plot holes you're looking for.  Remember when Obi-Wan did that in episode 4???    :why_so_serious:

In the hologram she sort of gives that impression. But when Luke mentions his name she is super excited and instantly trusts Luke. It's not really a big deal I was simply saying that one part of Haemish's post didn't jive with my impression of the movies.


I guess it's open to interpretation. I think it's a bit odd how she knows him by both names and seems formal in the hologram but excited on the Death Star when Luke says he's with Ben Kenobi. No biggy but I don't view this particular thing as an incongruity between Obi-Wan and A New Hope.

And I very much agree with you on your point about just revisiting the same characters and times over and over. I'm giving it a pass with Obi-Wan because he's probably one of my favorite characters in the whole saga but I'd really like them to explore other stuff. Lucas already made the galaxy small by making everyone know everyone else down to Anakin building 3p0 in his bedroom instead of 3p0 just being a droid that Leah's dad bought her at a showroom one day.

OTOH, I suspect a lot of this has to do with the fans. They've got that High Republic thing which is, I think, 1,000 years or so in the past but it doesn't seem to have drawn very much interest. You can go to Youtube and find 10,000 videos about what Yoda did in his hut on Dagobah but you'd have to look very hard to find anything about the High Republic aside from "Kathleen Kennedy's new project is failing because she sucks!"

Good news, Disney just released some new information on a Tales of The Jedi D+ series, a title some might remember from a series of comics focusing on ancient Jedi (and Sith).

Oh wait, bad news, this is an animated 6 episode thing focusing on prequel era characters like (yawn) Ahsoka and Count Dooku.


Jesus... this fucking guy.

They also announced the kid-focused Young Jedi Adventures, set during the High Republic, as well Skeleton Crew, starring Jude Law and taking place at some point after RotJ (so roughly around the time of Mandalorian). The Acolyte, which was announced a couple years back, and is being run by the creator of Russian Doll also takes place during the High Republic era.

The only real bright spot is that the next movie is supposed to be the one Taika is doing which is currently scheduled to release next year.

The one thing you have to give the animateds credit for is that they've made some new characters stick and they've made some prequel characters better. Ahsoka is the best example of that.

But they really need to create a story-telling setting where none of the familiar characters matter except maybe in a brief opening handoff (sort of like Doctor McCoy in the first episode of TNG) that can buoy up a bunch of fundamentally new characters in some fundamentally new situations.

Nar Shadda/underworld stuff is one possibility. Solo could have been an entry point to that but it wasn't.
Dathomir could be interesting. Force powers without Jedi or Sith, intrigue, complicated culture.
I dunno. Something.

I also think they've got to either put a premium on getting better action scenes from the directors they're working with or they've got to identify what's holding them back. If it's money, that's just stupid--this is going to eventually cost them viewers and peel people away from the franchise overall. If it's interference from the top--which I think seemed to be going on w/Book of Boba Fett--then that needs fixing too. I think it's fine for Star Wars to be kid-friendly but there's a way to do that which draws more effectively from ANH and ESB and less from fart jokes and Anakin pod racing in TPM. In Book of Boba Fett and this so far it seems closer to TPM, gruesomely executed Jedi notwithstanding.

They have dozens of settings. The prequel through to R1 era is chock full of interesting settings that don't have to focus on existing characters.

Whether they will write anything without existing characters is another matter.

Rebels did well on that front.

Agree with you on the action though.

Having not watched most of the animated stuff, I guess I remain to be convinced there. I had to test run the Clone Wars animated movie where she was introduced as the most cliched and annoying sassy kid sidekick, and have seen her in the Mandalorian where she felt largely out of place, but was vaguely tolerable because I like Rosario Dawson. Aside from that she seems to get positioned as a super-important character who somehow never gets so much as a single mention in any of the movies. Not since Bendis and Jessica Jones have I seen someone so enamored of their own creation that they retconned into the history of an established setting.

As far as Obi Wan goes, the pluses are Ewan McGregor, Han from the Fast and Furious movies playing one of the Inquisitors, and... I really wanted to find a third thing but can't come up with one. I guess, at least it's a character that you could theoretically build some interesting story around rather than the upcoming Andor series. This series is just bland rather than offensively bad, which for SW is a plus I suppose. As a side note, whenever Kumail Nanjiani appears in something these days it always feels like he just wandered onto the set playing himself and it's starting to become clear why The Big Sick has been his only standout non-Silicon Valley role.

In regards to the action I don't know if some of it is due to the various shows' use of the Volume tech (no idea how much it's been used in any of the action scenes). I think there was a handful of good action scenes in the Mandalorian at least.

Ahsoka in the Clone Wars animated movie is simply awful. But by the time the series ended, she was a really good, rounded character and about the only one who seemed to have an astute understanding of the Jedi's weaknesses (and Anakin's inner turmoil, well, her and Palpatine). She was also very good in Rebels.

I suppose you could say she didn't come up in the main trilogy because whatever she was up to at that point, it wasn't at the heart of the Rebel Alliance's command structure. Maybe she's running missions for Yoda that had to remain very hush-hush. Maybe she had to go to ground herself for some other reason. Now, as to why she's not around for the sequel series, I think that might be as simple as "she died in between the events of The Book of Boba Fett and The Force Awakens".

Agree on Nanjiani--some director needs to sit down with him and say 'hey maybe it's time for you to try a different approach if you get cast in a franchise again'.

The other potential asset with Obi-Wan is Hayden Christiansen if they can stage something around him. He's certainly going to be motivated to demonstrate that he wasn't the problem with the prequels, it was how Lucas directed him.

I'm curious what Hayden will actually get to do in this series. It doesn't look like anybody has said one way or the other if James Earl Jones is back to voice Vader.

Fuck me. JUST STOP. There is absolutely nothing interesting or necessary about that story.

I agree about Nanjiani - it really felt like "I want to be in a Star Wars joint" so they shoehorned him into something that let him play his character from Silicon Valley only with Jedi robes.

Another thing that bugged me is how bad the CGI was on the little lizard camel Obi-Wan was riding in Ep1. It was BAD. Bad frame rates, bad seaming, everything. I read an article on Defector recently asking why so much CGI has been bad lately and it's because there's so much shit being created for streaming that all the CGI houses are having to rush shit out the door without any time to make the stuff great. I can 100% see that as the case here. I also agree with Khaldun that the action scenes were not very good.

I'm a big McGregor fan but I feel like he's never been given much good to work with as Obi-Wan. That feeling hasn't really changed here. PTSD Kenobi has plenty of pathos, but I just don't feel like it's much help to this character or the story.

Ahsoka is awful in the Clone Wars movie but by the end of the Clone Wars cartoon which is arguably one of the top 3 best things ever done with the IP she is amazing and one of the best characters made in that universe. How they took her from annoying sidekick to "come on Ahsoka, you can do it, survive!" is a great example of how to actually build a character in a franchise.

Now, about Obi-Wan, I had this vague feeling of unease when I heard Deborah Chow was directing all of it and was unsure why. Then I remembered that I wasn't a big fan of her action directing in any episodes she directed. It's hard to put my finger on but something about her action directing feels very stiff and sucks the life out of action scenes IMO.

Absolutely, the way they turned the Ahsoka character around is just pure genius. The Clone Wars has A LOT of dumb filler episodes but when it's good it's the best stuff done with the IP. The final four episodes are better than the majority of the movies and Disney + shows.

In the original animated movie, Ahsoka isn't just bad, she's borderline creepy in a kind of anime-pedophile way--big eyes, exposed midriff, 14-year old energy. But absolutely by the end of the original series, she's as textured and interesting as any character in Star Wars, arguably the most textured (she's the only person who has been deeply committed to the Jedi who seems in canon and on screen to have some realization of what they're doing wrong and why she can't remain with them).

That's partly why I just fucking hated her showing up in The Book of Boba Fett as Luke's partner in restarting the Jedi Academy--she should be the one taking the lead, not Luke; she should at least have some damn opinions about how not to make the same mistakes all over again.

She wasn't there as his partner, she was there to check he wasn't like daddy. She bailed as soon as she figured he was ok.

Seems like maybe one Galactic Civil War late to be checking up on this sort of thing.

Thus the danger of retconning new characters into an existing continuity - you have to continually ask "but why wasn't [insert important character name here] involved in [insert galaxy-spanning event of import here]?"

I have no issue with Ahsoka having been off doing her own thing from her last appearance on Rebels to her first appearance in The Mandalorian. There's a million stories in there and most of them are good and exciting and can be used to build out more storytelling platforms. But if she's going to show up as Luke's maitre'd or whatever she was doing in The Book of Boba Fett, she's either there because she's like "yes, it's time, let's make a new Jedi Academy" (momentous decision!) or because she's "Hey Luke I have some concerns about how you're doing this..." (interesting story! say more!) or because she's like "I need you to understand what went wrong with your father, so let's talk in between you fucking up this Yoda kid" (also interesting story! but just hint at it and tell it later!)

Unfortunately they did nothing of the sort and just showed Luke kind of pathetically flailing around trying to reproduce Yoda's training methods (which aren't really anything like the Jedi standard AND were done under complaint by Yoda who pretty much fucking thought it was all a bad idea and said so repeatedly) without any hint of Luke having thought about what went wrong back then despite having his DAD's APPRENTICE right there to talk to. Like, that is the fastest move from OH FUCK LOOK AT LUKE HE'S FUCKING GREAT at the end of the previous Mandalorian season to "Luke is a second-year graduate student in military engineering who has just been asked to teach cutting-edge quantum physics/Buddhist philosophy to a new student".

Nobody's thinking this shit through. The Jedi and the Force are the central animating IDEA of Star Wars and the people in charge don't even have the slightest clue what to think about them or how to translate them into action and narrative on screen.

The people in charge creatively are fanbois who grew up watching what is essentially young adult pew pew fiction and making up their own head canon around the sparse bits of world building that George Lucas managed to do in between revolutionizing special effects. The prequels proved that almost zero thought went into creating a coherent universe, which was probably to the original trilogy's benefit because HOOO BOY did he not have a fucking clue how to craft a story above a grade school level's worth of depth and complexity. Every time anyone tries to add depth or complexity to the universe, it ends in tears and the barren stare of mental defective. Doing more and more stories in the same time period, with many of the same characters is just exacerbating the situation because none of it makes any sense or fits together. That Kathleen Kennedy is a moron who shouldn't be given control of kid's puppet show much less a multi-billion dollar property is another problem because it really does appear that at times, she just can't help but interfere and I've not seen any indication her interference has helped ever.

You could tell a shitload of stories in the universe, at all sorts of different times with only vaguely connecting threads, and each story would be better off for it. I don't see that happening though, because the overarching directive seems to be "exploit the bits and bobs of this particular IP until there is nothing left but a cold, dead husk."

I kind of wish they were fanbois in the sense that Feige is, which is a) I know this material and b) I know how to make it work in a different medium and time and c) I know how to hire some people who can stretch and do things that I couldn't ever imagine.

I don't really feel that anybody but Filoni knows the material and I think his instincts on it are uneven; b) I don't think there's anybody in charge of this property who has good instincts for cinema or television or if they do their instincts are being fucked with or cancelled out by cynical assholes like Abrams; c) they're completely scared of anything that the people at the top think of as off-brand.

Marvel has 27,000+ comics to pull from and virtually every top creator in comics has written something for Marvel at some point. SW for a long time remained largely the brainchild of one man with movies that were clearly canon, and then a bunch of supplementary material in books, comics, games, etc... that all amounted to fan fiction, and most of it of dubious quality. It says something that one of the franchise's biggest gets was the time R. A. fucking Salvatore came on board to write some shitty books.

Filoni being a fanboi means he's spent over a decade trying to convince people that the prequels weren't steaming piles of shit, but aside from that there's not really a cohesive franchise or setting for anyone to be a fanboi of. I'd say at this point they need almost the opposite of Feige when it comes to embracing the material. They need people who can get creative and original with the setting.

The Skywalker saga is galaxy-spanning and decades long. You have to either go (way) back before or (way) after to really be original. Or you can write smaller stories with new characters in that shared time period a la Jon Favreau and The Mandalorian.

The problem with the latter is that they clearly can't help themselves when it comes to stuff like having Luke show up in the Mandalorian. Going way back or way ahead seems like the way to go.

First off, they should stop making everything a galactic level crisis.

Secondly, same answer that applies in every MCU project. The answer is because this isn't their show/movie so they are busy, now shut up.

MCU is (mostly) one planet and there's sorcerers who can teleport people around if need be, so the question feels a bit more pertinent. But even there you can solve the problem narratively: there wasn't time to call people, the problem at hand is for some sort of specialist (sorcerers, say), the useful people you might call are busy right now, the people in the situation are embarrassed/feeling kind of private about the situation they're in, the character involved is an egomaniac of some kind or another and thinks he/she can handle it, the system for calling people has broken down/doesn't work any more (that's pretty much the current MCU), you hate or mistrust the person you might call or vice-versa.

Star Wars is a huge damn galaxy and there's not actually anyone who can just by themselves change the situation once we're post-Order 66. Plus, if you ignore the sequels, especially Abrams' films, the SW galaxy is still a fairly big place. We don't know exactly how long it took to go from Tatooine to Alderaan but there's plausible mise-en-scene clues to argue it took several days. It's not terribly consistent, I know--some jumps that look long on a galaxy map have to have been fairly short in that there's no room in an X-Wing cockpit to take a shit etc. and we see small fighters going all over the place. I think you have to imagine that there are 'routes' in hyperspace that make some places that are seemingly far away relatively quick hops while also making some places that seem close to be very long trips, it's the only way to explain why some planets seem 'remote' and others 'central'. I think we also have to imagine the interdictors that the EU wrote in, so that you have to worry sometimes about coming into a situation that you can't get advance intelligence on because there's a risk that you can't get out of it. Meaning, you can't just zip into every situation every single time somebody yells for help. There's plenty of room in Star Wars for very consequential adventures to have happened far away from the 'main saga' without any of the 'main saga' people getting involved. The Rebellion is only one example--I mean, there HAVE to have been important missions that none of the established characters got involved with or knew about.

What I think they really need is some disciplined, organized Force users who are neither Jedi nor Sith to enter the picture. Different ones--Dathomir witches, cults who are sort of like druids, monks who've wholly withdrawn from the affairs of the galaxy to engage in contemplation, fierce protectors of one culture or planet, you name it. Plop most of them down on the unused left side of the galaxy. They need some new cultures/aliens who represent archetypes they haven't done much with so far--berserker warriors, parasites/symbiotes, empaths/therapists, scientists/rationalists, etc.

Star Wars needs to go 1000000 years into the future because there have been plenty of stories of the past, just enough to entice people to lock in on characters from bad video games.

Plenty of shit to go off on - no more jedi/sith - travel is localized no more light speed or make it limited in some faction. - post society galaxy or whatever. Almost anything would be more interesting than what's on TV/movies now.

I would argue Star Wars without the Jedi / Sith, or at least the Force, is no longer Star Wars.

You need the Force. You need to either have a central showdown with the problem of "are the Jedi a mistake or not?" or you need to answer it softly and indirectly by introducing "good guys" who use the Force who aren't Jedi particularly. They can't keep fucking around the edges of this issue. Whatever else you think about "The Last Jedi", it tried to make reckoning and I think did pretty well. And then got stuffed down the Abrams Well.

I started watching and turned it off when they got to Leia.  Either the writing for her character is bad, the young actress is bad, or both.  Maybe I'll watch more later. 

Still have the force, just Jedi vs Sith don't exist as groups. I dunno make up some bullshit story about how the force died out or sentient beings stopped having midiclorians or whatever. Then plop the story down somewhere in the future where force sensative or force wielding people started showing up again and how that impacts the galaxy.

Katherine Kurtz' Deryni novels always make me think about Jedi. The basic gimmick is "once upon a time there were very very powerful Deryni who were also scholars who understood their powers (and how they aligned with faith in God)", then "something mysteriously bad happened and we lost a lot of their knowledge" (basically, given Kurtz' set up, read that as "the fall of Rome") then "we are rebuilding the knowledge and finding amazing scraps of what our people once knew and look what we can do" then "oh fuck the humans hate us because there were cruel Deryni on the throne and oh god now they're killing us, go into hiding" then "slow rebirth/rediscovery by people who know absolutely nothing about Deryni learning and have to be really careful not to trigger persecution" but also "there's still learned Deryni in hiding but they also have lost sight of some of what they once knew".

The end result is a new human/Deryni reconciliation but also a sense that the old learning doesn't cover a lot of the new circumstances.

Wheel of StarWars

There was a pretty good Buffy the Vampire Comic that had a similar storyline. It was set in the future and now new Slayers had been around for like 200 years then one was "called." She had no backup and didn't understand what was going on and it was a neat riff on that universe. You could probably do something similar.

That said, I think lightsabers and Jedi are a pretty iconic part of the IP at this point.

As much as I am slightly more of a Star Wars fan and Obi-wan in my favorite Star Wars character I find myself looking forward more to Strange New Worlds next episode than the next episode of this, for what it's worth.

Never forget that originally the Jedi HAD been a relic from a long forgotten age. Without the prequel retcon that is exactly the setting as envisioned.

Yeah, that's one of the continuity things that doesn't really line up very well. Obi-Wan is talking like the Jedi were a distant memory from his youth, and while it's plain Luke has heard of them, they obviously seem mythic to him. (Well, maybe Uncle Owen has been controlling the flow of information in his household a bit aggressively.) Han Solo talks like the Jedi are some ridiculous fake thing but come on, there were thousands of them. Vader has to force-choke a bitch who clearly has no reason to think Vader can do anything of the sort (which makes me think Vader has not interacted a ton with the Imperial Navy up to this point; it actually raises some interesting questions about what it actually is that Vader does most of the time which "Rebels" doesn't entirely answer.) 

Obviously on planets heavily controlled by the Empire, it's unhealthy to even talk about the Jedi, so you can work your way around to explaining why they seem so completely forgotten. (Also, the prequels gave off a vague impression that even with the Jedi being plentiful the chances of interacting with one in a huge galaxy were still pretty low and that ordinary people didn't have an entirely favorable impression of the Jedi anyway.)

I always figured that once the emperor took control of the senate, he controlled the messaging thru out the galaxy from that point on. Not surprising that those born on or around the time of the emperor's ascension grew up under the message that the Jedi were myth... which would have happened around the time when the New Hope characters were all kids.

But that is as far down the theory-hole I am willing to think about it.

Really would have worked better if the Jedi had already largely faded into obscurity by the time of the prequels. 

They hinted that they were "losing their ability to use the Force", but we never actually saw that, other than their total inability to sense Palpatine's plan.  Move that "the Force is fading" plotline back in time about a hundred years, and by the time of the prequels the Jedi Order maybe stiill exists but mostly doesn't have any powers, doesn't operate as a black ops government agency, and is just considered a weird religion.  The few Jedi that do have notable Force abilities (like Obi-Wan and Yoda) don't make a habit of showing them off in public, so people have heard of Jedi and many people believe in the Force but the majority of people don't believe that Force powers are a real thing because they've never seen them. 

Anakin would therefore naturally be a really big deal (without any need for vague "prophecies") because he's obviously very strong with the Force in a time where almost nobody else is, so of course Obi-Wan and Yoda are eager to train him up even if there are a bunch of red flags.  Now the stage is set for that to backfire spectacularly, and now it's plausible that when Anakin and the Emperor come after the Jedi, they're able to purge them to the extent that after a couple of decades almost nobody believes that force-wielding Jedi were ever a real thing.

But if they'd done that, we wouldn't have gotten nearly as many scenes with dozens of people waving lightsabers in the air at once, so their way was probably better.   :grin:

I don't really see a problem with the way the Jedi where viewed. There are what, thousands of planets in the galaxy? trillions of people? there were a few thousand Jedi. For the overwhelming majority of people and aliens they would be a myth even at their absolute peak.

I always hand waved the Jedi as a weird religious order that everyone heard of but since there's like 10 force sensitive people per planet and most of the time someone as strong as Anakin wouldn't manifest any real psychic abilities without training, it was easy for people to forget, about them.... though I have to question the prevelance of public education in the galaxy because the Jedi fought several wars on behalf of the republic for like thousands of years  :oh_i_see:

Yeah, the two things don't work together. They basically were both the historic military commanders in multiple wars and the FBI/diplomatic corps  of the Republic, that is not something you forget existed 20 years later.

Man, I like Samwise's version a ton. There's a Jedi Temple and a Jedi Academy and it really is mostly religious. (Kind of like the guy in Rogue One). People who believe in the Living Force as a concept, some people who are vaguely Force-sensitive at the level of "I have a vague bad feeling about this" (two minutes later falling down the stairs and breaking their leg). People who train in martial arts and believe in the ideas of Jedi non-attachment, who are trusted as military and security advisors in the Republic because they're relatively apolitical and know quite a lot about fighting. But yeah, the Force is fading--the Jedi have records of the Old Republic that make it clear that once upon a time there were thousands and thousands of very strong Force-wielders, both Sith and Jedi. Yoda, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Mace Windu and maybe ten or fifteen other Jedi actually have enough affinity for the Force to use it powerfully and to wield lightsabers.

Then there's a prophecy of the Chosen One who will restore not *balance* to the Force but who will "awaken" it. The leaders of the Jedi Order schism over whether to trust the prophecy and what to do about it; Qui-Gon is one of the "searcher" Jedi, whereas the others favor remaining on Coruscant and using the vast resources of the Temple to sift for information and to trust in the Force to provide guidance. So QG and Obi-Wan end up at Naboo because QG has an intuition that Naboo is important. In the meantime Palpatine is also searching because he's heard the same prophecy and wants to control the Chosen One; he's sent Maul to follow QG and OW at a safe distance.

Totally works. Ah well.

The problem with this, its kinda the exact of the popular lore going all the back to the old republic to the new republic. Where the explanation for the Jedi seeming more powerful in the old days versus the new days is that Jedi were actively fighting a war with the sith, and the new republic hasn't seen large scale war with other force users in a hundreds of years. The lack of competition with the sith made the jedi default to be more diplomats and occassional peacekeepers than force empowered soldiers. Granted the Jedi did fight in "other" wars after the sith stopped showing up but the those wars were... skirmishes in comparison.

In movie (prequels) the issue the Jedi were having with the force has more to do with their inability to see the future, which was kinda important due to fact that they used that power to advise the senate. Which is where Palpatine comes into play because he was supposedly so power that his very presence caused a shadow in the force~~ As much as that makes sense.  So its not that they couldn't use their powers, its just that the one power very useful in times of peace and even more important now with a brewing galactic war was useless.

I continue to be unimpressed with Deborah Chow's action directing. Big duel in this last episode and it just felt flat to me. I'm not even sure what it is about her directing that makes it not work for me. (It could be something in the editing as well but it feels more like directing choices.) Something about how she shoots action just sucks all of the energy out of it.

In this instance it was more of a horror setup as opposed to an action one.

I always thought the KOTOR games did a good idea of fleshing out the alternate timelines and side stories, and exploring how the Force was powerful, yet also had a big downside in that it made users susceptible to influence.  It brought in the 'Grey Jedi' line where there are force users who 'balance' the force by adopting both the light and dark sides, much like a 'True Neutral' Druid in DnD who strives to keep balance between good and evil, even if it means doing evil deeds on the side when following with a 'good' party.

It feels like a lot of Chow's action is continuous with the non-action--it doesn't have its own rhythm or look. So everything is sort of flat--the shot selection is the same, mostly medium-distance and shots of around the same length. I'd have to rewatch to be sure I'm right about this but that's how it feels. Most good action directors change the pacing, shot selection and shot type as they move into an action scene.

Think about in terms of contrast the scene in ESB when Luke is starting to run out of steam against Vader and is realizing that he's in way over his head. The mix of shots there--the jump scare unheralded by music where Vader leaps out at Luke, the fast cuts and changes in shot distance and camera location as they duel, the tension generated as Vader slows down and gets ready to start flinging shit at Luke (backed up by the music), the mix of close-ups and medium shots.

You could feel Obi-Wan's dread and helplessness well enough, and in terms of images, being dragged helplessly into the fire was properly terrifying, but none of it felt as taut or tense as it should have been, I think.

It can't feel taut or tense, we know nothing is going to happen to him. That's an impossible task, if they wanted it to feel scary it should have been the Indira Varma character.

You didn't think Luke was going to die in ESB either, did you? But that scene sure felt taut and tense.

You never think James Bond is going to die but there's quite a few Bond action scenes that are great and full of tension.

Did you think Captain America was going to die in the elevator fight?

If you'd read Lord of the Rings, you knew Theoden was going to die in the Battle of the Pelennor and not at Helm's Deep. Were you thinking ho-hum, there's no tension here when he rides out at Helm's Deep?

You know they get the plans for the Death Star somehow in Rogue One, so you can just fast-forward through the action, it can't possibly be interesting.

This is actually a pretty good description of it. The shots and editing don't change at all for fight scenes. It's the exact same if two people are walking down a hallway or Obi-Wan is running for his life from Vader. Thank you Khaldun. I could sense it but couldn't quite put my finger on the issue.

Man I was like five when I watched ESB, when that hand went flying I didn't know what was going to happen.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the direction is bad. Also the speed of the action feels so *wrong* - people can move to some places like they have a teleport, other times can't catch someone clearly moving SLOWER and places that are supposed to block someone moving past clearly are shot at too wide an angle and you can see how the exit can clearly be walked around with ease.

Yeah, that's another issue. Think about how Obi-Wan moved from the building into the street (good) to the edge of the village (good) to wherever it was that the fire scene happened. How far away is that? Does he have any chance of getting away from there or hiding? Hard to say (yeah, we know Vader is sensing him anyway, so that's not really an option, but he's also not going slowly just to make a stand, he honestly wants to get away.) How does Indira Varma's character get up on a high spot for sniping that seems to be on the other side of that clearing from where Obi-Wan entered so quickly without being seen or crossing paths with Stormtroopers? She was halfway down the secret tunnel when she turned around. How does the droid get there without being seen and almost as quickly? How does the Inquisitor discover the secret door, read the Jedi messages and get down the tunnel ahead of Leia without being seen by Leia, all *after* Indira Varma has left the tunnel and building? The sense of time and distance that's really important to staging action is just really out of whack. You can play with that a bit on purpose to create tension and dynamism--speed things up, slow things down, make spaces seem smaller or larger than they are, but it takes good direction and editing to do that well.

Very good points. I'll continue to watch the show mostly because I like the characters in it but I wish they had chosen a different director. I'm probably going to avoid further work by this woman if at all possible.

It has George Lucas level direction and it's missing his wife's editing abilities.


How Star Wars of them.

Seriously. So many Star Wars fans forget how much difference she made (and with Raiders of the Lost Ark, too) with some basic human-connection stuff.

This episode was bad and boring. I'm not really sure what they are trying to achieve with this show. Obi-Wan is mostly useless, he barely uses the Force which I guess they are saying is a result of his guilt? I don't know, not only is it not clear, it's infuriating because the whole time things are happening I'm thinking "He just needs to Jedi his way out of this" and then he pulls out a blaster and punches Stormtroopers. The whole scene with Vader I realize they were trying to kind of ape the cat and mouse part of the Luke/Vader fight in ESB, but I kept thinking "Where the fuck did Vader go? Is he really just toying with him?" If that's what they were going for, it was dumb as hell and didn't work. The fire scene somehow preventing Vader from crossing over and I don't know, force-choking a bitch is bad and somebody should have told them so along the way. The entire staging of the action scenes is either boring or nonsensical.

Not at all. George Lucas wasn't very good at the "human" stuff in his directing mostly because I don't think he understood how to give actors directions on the emotion of a scene. But he was much much better than this woman at the action directing. His wife's editing helped a lot but even in the prequels his action direction was much better than what we've seen in Obi-wan and she was long gone by that time. Haemish and others are right. The action scenes are poorly staged and lack "energy" because of how they are framed. Say what you will about Lucas but even in the Phantom Menace people were like "That lightsaber duel was awesome!"

Ok, the third episode was bad.  Pretty much hated everything about it.  The show was already iffy for the reasons outlined in this thread, but this one just doubled down on all of it.  Leans into the laziest forms of script writing with the teleporting characters and other magical conveniences.  The Leia kid is becoming more annoying and stupid as the show goes on. 

And doing sad afraid useless old man Kenobi is just boring and pretty annoying to sit through.  This series basically should have been the Star Wars version of the first John Wick movie.  Obi-Wan is pulled out of hiding/retirement to do this critical job.  Breaks out the old gear, and then proceeds to ruthlessly and effectively destroy every obstacle and enemy he comes across with out much trouble.  If you're going to include Vader in this, have him kick the shit out of Vader every single time they meet.  Dog keeps catching the car, but the dog keeps trying because it has so much hate.  Obi-Wan beat Anakin before, and he'll keep doing it, which lines up exactly with their final meeting in the first film.   Instead we have is sad silly boring shit to sit through.

I'm looking forward to the next Special Edition of ANH where they overdub the "When I left you I was but the learner" conversation between Obi-Wan and Vader so that it references the events of this show instead.

I honestly thought maybe in that twenty year gap Obi-Wan could have some adventures that didn't touch anything in the main movie continuity, but these guys just can't resist fucking things up , can they.   :drill:

"When I left you, Greedo shot first, but now it is Han who shoots him."

I kind of like Teleku's version: Obi-Wan has been contemplating, hiding, practicing obsessively, feels incredibly limited by his vow to protect Luke when he thinks he could do more, is super-happy to be tempted by Bail Organa to get back in the fight, destroys the fuck out of Stormtroopers and Inquisitors and then is aghast because he realizes he's drawn this new Sith Lord out and discovers he's Anakin--he realizes that he's put Leia AND Luke at risk just so he could do some Jedi Mastering again and then has to come up with a plan that makes Anakin/Vader think he's died and puts him off of thinking about Bail Organa or Tatooine. That would be more fun and more exciting. It's hard to see how this gets in three episodes to Obi-Wan being in the masterful, calm, totally Jedi state of mind we see him in "Rebels" and the original Star Wars.

My RL friends who have all watched (and loved) Rebels and the Clone Wars animated series are absolutely pissed about this show, from their killing of the Grand Inquisitor to the bullshit of this past episode. Their attempts to use the unnamed proto-Rebel to show how the Rebellion gets started would be something worth exploring if they had made any attempt at that. However, she was merely a plot device to somehow get Kenobi from one point to the next, regardless of how little sense any of it made. I'm still just floored by the fire scene. Like, we've just seen Vader force choke the shit out of a bunch of villagers, why couldn't he do the same to her? Is fire somehow some magical Force resistant thing? None of that entire fight scene made any fucking sense.

Ahhh! The fire has made me unable to see the Rebel sniper who is not very far away AND made me unable to see a huge droid dragging Obi-Wan out of the fire!

I could actually buy it if they'd done a bit of "I'm using fire to kill Obi-Wan but actually now that I'm doing it I'm remembering that I'm actually kind of afraid of fire myself, I'm going to back up a bit".

They made it painfully clear he was treating Obi-Wan that way specifically because of what happened on Mustafar. If they were really trying to intimate that Vader was somehow scared of the fire because of that, I don't think they know how to display that subtly.

He has made a point of having his personal fortress ON Mustafar after all.

You know, watching the last episode I was thinking "that guy is just literally a giant mole who sounds like Seth Rogen*, could they get any lazier with their character design", but in thinking back over it I remembered that the ANH cantina clientele included an elephant, a fruit bat, and a guy in a Spirit Halloween devil mask.  So I have to give them points for being consistent with Lucas's original vision.

*spoilers: it was actually Scrubs

Yeah, this is something you just have to accept about Star Wars from the first movie onward. There's gonna be cheeseball aliens and there's gonna be characters named Greedo and Sleezebaggano.

I sort of remember seeing somewhere that there was enormous resistance in ESB to Admiral Akbar's character on the grounds that he was too silly, and that just seems completely idiotic--he's one of the few "that kind of makes sense" looking characters (along with the ships) except for the ohmigod name of his species.

So...the tracker is on Leia's droid, which should've gone straight to Alderaan and then fucked off forever, right?

Yeah. That woulda been my plan. But…plot.

This show just cannot rise past the level of dull, drab and boring.

Meh. I'm liking it. Obi-Wan actually starting to get a feel for the badass he once was in this episode wasn't bad. Echoes of him and Qui-Gon vs the battle droids in Ep One. Though, I thought him in the bacta tank was going to be a potential nod to Jedi Survivor.

I've liked the series overall.

I mean... same. Because I understood long ago that ALL Star Wars is severely flawed and nitpicking one part of it for things that ALL of it gets wrong is silly. Star Wars is entertaining crap, it's ALWAYS been entertaining crap. I understand people who hate all of it, I am always confused by people who think some of it is great and some of it is trash.

The last episode was the best of the series but still not as good as the worst episode of the Mandalorian. Even the fight against the stormtroopers felt a bit...off. If I didn't know how excited Ewan McGregor was to be playing Obi-Wan again I'd say he was just going through the motions during the fight but I think instead it comes back to the directing sucking the energy out of these scenes.

I thought Vader was pretty intimidating in Ep 3 while he was going around the village casually slaughtering innocents with hardly any effort. It was his fight with Obi Wan that kinda ruined the effect.

There will always be people that just get too far into it and can't have a good time just with it.  Disney is going to Milk the IP for all it's worth, and if you can't enjoy the ride it's probably time to get off.

The only thing that's bugged me outside of the lack of planning for the final Skywalker trilogy was the scooter kids. The other stuff you can nitpick but they just stood out as so completely outside anything Star Wars that it kept breaking the moment for me.

Stupid stuff like Trejo's flowing locks, I love it.

I'm trying to will up the energy to binge it once all the episodes are out but I'm afraid I'm gonna forget this show even existed.

It's not good. They get some bonus points for their turn with 3rd Sister in the 5th episode, but at no time during the series have I wanted to immediately watch another episode.

Still liking it.

Loved the last episode, especially the end with Vader. Pretty good star wars.

Agreed that episode 5 was pretty good.  I haven't cared for the rest of the show much so far, but this was the standout for the season so far.

The last two episodes have generally been pretty good. This one was also good though 3rd sister made me roll my eyes a bit. Her revelation was predictable since episode 1 and she went about it in the stupidest way possible. I did however like the powerful Vader we got to see in this episode and the general ESB vibes on a TV budget was pretty good. I pretty much know how the last episode will go already but am curious if they'll surprise me. *shakes 8 ball* Signs point to no.

They really couldn't be bothered with any de-aging bullshit on Christensen I guess.

Just about everything to do with the effects on this episode were really bad, which includes the decision not to de-age Christensen.

I don't nit-pick much but the volume needs more nits. It's cropped up in any of the Tatooine-based scenes but it was pretty dramatically demonstrated in the scene with the Inq standing with the troopers outside the rebel hideout. The Volume in the back looked like a 1950s projection screen background, pretty jarring even for someone who has mostly turned off my 'what is real and what is volume' sensor when enjoying these shows.

And yeah, the Anakin thing was weird, mostly because it confused when that duel was supposed to be taking place. He has his padawan hairdo, but yeah....odd choices.

That said, those are not a huge problem for me and I've been enjoying the hell out of this one.

On the effects, we need to stop expecting the effects in star wars shows to be better than say, Doctor Who.

Because they've been very much TV show quality through out all these shows. The big background screen thing that actors love, it might give better performances, it might be cheaper, but it looks like 20 year old cgi. Tbh I'm fine with this.

Will say the action choreography in this seems less leaden footed than in mando and Boba Fett. It still isn't great. The running and jumping is pretty bad. But the punching and pew pewing is quite a bit better. Probably on account of costumes being less bonkers.

Despite this. Show seems good. I've just started binging it. But seems good.

Boba Fett gave us a perfect young Luke though, if going full CGI gets you better results than having the actual actor maybe stick to that.

The pacing still seems off to me--characters don't seem to be moving in simultaneous time, the size and feeling of the spaces they are in seems off. Some of that is the bad greenscreening/set designs we've referred to a bit.

I also think the scripts are just not great. There has to have been a better way for Third Sister to have found out Tatooine and all that than Bail Organa transmitting a revealing message that could just be left on the ground somewhere. I mean, we know that at this point the Rebellion already has an intelligence operation that is pretty ruthless when it needs to be (and there's an extremist faction that is even more ruthless) and I have a hard time believing that Bail Organa isn't involved with them somehow. Hell, he has the most to lose on multiple grounds from being stupidly careless.

Also, how much does it cost to hire some basic, decent orchestral composer to do some music to up the intensity. They should have milked Tala dying for every drop of pathos with big music and slo-mo, etc.

The interesting thing about Disney so far is that there is one thing that they handle beautifully in every respect--action, intensity, tautness of situation, etc. and that's Darth Vader--games, movies, animated, TV--they do right by Vader. That's interesting. Best scene in this whole thing so far is Vader fighting the Sister without even using a lightsaber.

If I was going to do a flashback scene with Obi-Wan and Anakin, I think I would have picked something besides the two of them dueling like that, even though it was intended to frame the story-telling in this episode and did a fairly good job of it. Honestly, if I were Hayden I would have asked the showrunners to specifically look at the last two seasons of Clone Wars and say, "Look, ok, Clone Wars did a pretty good job of showing Anakin's turn to the Dark Side in a much deeper and more convincing way than the third prequel film--do you think you could do at least one flashback scene that takes its cues from that?"

Not one scene has managed to convince me the actors are outside, except for those inexplicably set in California. It quite often looks like stage acting rather than TV/movie acting.

And you are right about the music.

But.

This is a TV show not a movie. I think a huge part of why we notice this is that it is star wars.

And we notice it even more here than in mando because it has Kenobi in it.

I could say all of the above about every star trek, BSG, Orville, Who etc.

I'm not that bothered about visual standards. The writing could use a few more passes, but I'm still enjoying it.

Probably the real mistake made here is having vader and leia too central to the story. Its just too much time the viewer spends mentally compering everything to every prior bit of content.

Sure, but perfect luke standing still and almost expressionless in uncomplicated lighting.

I dunno, think about:

BSG, "33". That's TV but fuck me if the music isn't perfect and the whole thing is crackling with intensity.

Take maybe the top 5-10 nuWhos and they've all got strong performances, tight scripts, great music, memorable scenes with quotable dialogue.

At least a few of the Trek episodes in recent years stick with you, and the production values have generally been good even on the iffier ones.

Babylon 5 is long in the tooth but it had a good 10-15 episodes that had scope and intensity with memorable dialogue and strong performances.

There's a kind of bigotry of soft expectations here going up against the over-judgmental attitude I'm voicing. Sure, it's TV, but I think they can do better even in that context. I mean, this is a premiere franchise character played by a well-loved actor in a story that people are genuinely curious about. If there was ever a time to really put some money on the table and to demand the best work, this is it. So far there's almost nothing really memorable in this. Nothing as painful as the worst of the prequels or the sequels, but there's just nothing iconic that is going to stick with anybody in a year or two, unlike Mandalorian, which did really pull that off a few times.

This is Disney. They literally have infinity bucks if they really felt it necessary to put money into a streaming TV show. They have no excuse for how shitty some of the CGI in this looks, nor how bad the direction and writing is.

I literally have to think hard to remember anything in this except the scene with Vader easily owning the Third Sister. There hasn't been a quotable line or a memorable scene. Maybe Obi-Wan wrapping up the meat at his horrible Tatooine job, that had a pretty strong emotional feel to it. There isn't a single line of dialogue or a single scene that really sticks with me otherwise, compared to The Mandalorian giving me a good 4-5 episodes I can remember strongly, a good 6-8 iconically memorable bits, some genuine curiosity about where some plots are going, etc.

It's like watching two top soccer teams play in a match where nobody wants to win, they already know they're going for the draw.

Show should not have been dragged out as long as it was.

Watched it all this week and I enjoyed it, but I think much better as a binge. It is longer than it needed to be. Very obviously this is a film treatment that they just didn't bother to edit down.

Reva was great. Obiwan's re-emergence was great. The Ben/Owen relationship was great.

I was surprised they leaned so heavily into what is one of worst executed moments in episode 3, and even more surprised they made it work for them.

The action was far better than mandolorian.

Leia was a huge risk that they got away with. Vader was fine. But the show would have been better if Reva and Indira Varma weren't the only new characters in the whole show. Their fate kind of underlines why you need more characters like them.

The effects were bad. But 'star wars uses practical effects' is their brand now. And guess what CGI is going to be better on average and certainly on TV budget. I think it added something once you get adjusted to it.

Despite enjoying the show, I do agree on the writing.

I think the reason we notice the production compromises is that the writing isn't tight enough to hold attention.

I can't even. The action directing in this show is for the most part awful. Everytime a fight scene happens it feels listless and uninspired. Well, almost every time. The fight with Vader vs the 3rd sister was pretty cool. And the 2nd half of the Obi-wan and Vader duel in the finale was pretty good too.

I haven't watched every episode, but I did watch the first two and was raging at the TV when Obiwan was on the roof getting shot at by the bounty hunters. They were literally standing in the complete open and "general" Kenobi couldn't shoot a laser gun and hit either one from behind cover? That really put me off.

Yeah yeah jedi and swords but you can't tell me he is that terrible of a shot. The one with the chaingun was literally just standing full frontal. Irked the shit out of me.

I can't even remember the episode you are talking about - the whole show just dissolves into a boring blur. Absolutely unnecessary on every level. None of the fight scenes were any good. I literally fell asleep during both the Vader/Obi-Won duel in the finale, and Reva's final scene. I'm not even sure what the point of her character was, unless it was to build a spinoff.

The only problem I would accept with Reva is how much she stands out because she is the only new character in the show afforded her own story. I guess you could also say they back loaded too much of her story, if we knew more earlier it might have made the earlier scenes more interesting.

She and 2nd sister from Fallen order are a vast improvement on the concept Filoni created.

Saw this elsewhere and it pretty much describes my feelings on it.

"It just feels passionless. It lacks the epic feel that made the original films so unique. As great as Ewan McGregor is as Obi-Wan, he can't save a story that features genuinely uninspired direction."

This is the scene, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qkoqo80NA0#t=4m50s


starts at 4:50 if the youtube link is borked. Whole fight is stormtrooper level dumb.

Dude, it's literally canon.

There are a couple of other mistakes in ANH they'll need to overdub now, I guess:

 - General Kenobi. Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.
   obviously ignores the canonical events of this show, and should be AI-overdubbed with something like: Obi-Wan.  Years ago you rescued me from the Empire...

 - Luke: What is it?  Obi-Wan: Your father's "light saber".
   needs another line from Luke along the lines of oh yeah, I remember being chased around the farm by one of these when I was a kid

(edit) I honestly don't think the writers of this show remember ANH at all.  I only kind of vaguely remembered those scenes, and I went back to find clips so I could get the exact quotes, and hearing the actual lines made the continuity breaks so much more obvious.  There's just no way they'd have written this dumb story if any of that had been in their minds to any degree.

That said, the fight between Obi-Wan and Vader was cool if you just watch it as its own thing -- but boy howdy I'm not even going to go back and rewatch the same duel playing out again nine years later in ANH for comparison.  The gap between III and IV only kind of works if you're very forgiving and you imagine Obi-Wan hasn't picked up a weapon in twenty years.

Paraphrased: "will we see each other again" "maybe, but we will need to be very careful". There is also a vast tonal shift between "General Kenobi, years ago you served my father blah blah blah" and "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope".


He never saw it. She didn't use the lightsaber in front of Luke until he was knocked out.

They actually fixed some of the mistakes they had introduced in the prequels by Obi describing Padme in the exact words Leia uses to describe her to Luke in ROTJ.

What Threash said. Some of you are just complaining to complain. It actually seems at least this was planned from the start to be as lore-compatible as possible, with all the faults it has otherwise.

Can I do without most of the non Kenobi/Vader contest of the series? Yes, but the core premise of the series fits very well into the existing canon. They even found a way to make Vader an unparalleled badass in his encounters with everybody but Obi Wan Kenobi, to a point where the Emperor even scolded him for his performance issues.

I can make Leia's line recorded on R2 work out fine. She's better at message discipline than her fucking dad is in this miniseries--she's recording a message where she cannot be entirely sure who else will see it before it gets to its intended recipient or who might be in the room when Kenobi does see it. It's even possible that it will get intercepted, though if that happens she's fucked and so is the Rebellion given that the message does disclose that she had the Death Star plans and that she's put them in R2.

This even makes Leia's excited "Ben Kenobi? Where?" response to Luke on the Death Star make so much more sense.

We've been living with stuff that makes far less sense in continuity terms for a long time when it comes to Star Wars. Far more notable is Obi-Wan saying he can't remember owning a droid before when he's not only owned a droid, he specifically knows these two droids quite intensely. (So does Vader; it's possible that Vader never saw C-3PO on Bespin and it was just Boba Fett that blew him up, but once C-3PO shows up on Chewbacca's back at the end of ESB, Vader should be really interested in how the hell he got there.) Nothing about any of the history of those two droids has ever made sense in this respect.

I just kind of wish the whole thing had stayed away from Tatooine, though, after Obi-Wan leaves in search of Leia. The only way the entire thing works in that sense is that Vader doesn't realize until after ANH that there is any reason whatsoever to pay attention to Tatooine, to Owen and Beru, etc.

Not to pick on you or single this out, but this line of thinking always drives me nuts. Nobody when watching ANH was wondering why she'd be excited that the person she had sent a message to asking for help was there attempting to help. Nobody was wondering why she'd send a message to Obi-Wan in the first place (she states exactly why in the message). Nobody watched ANH thinking "ok, all of this would make sense, but like... how did they get the Death Star plans in the first place?" and then almost 40 years later Rogue One comes out and finally the series makes sense to them. I think the one bit of backstory people wanted filled in when watching the OT was finding out about the Clone Wars and Anakin's turn to evil, and that turned out to be a massive disappointment. Every other prequel-related thing they've put out hasn't been to explain stuff that needs explaining, it's because a lot of the people working on SW completely lack imagination and hey, here's an increasingly small period of time between the prequels and the OT that hasn't been fleshed out yet.

Can't wait to see the vital lines of dialogue the upcoming Andor series explains.

The continuity in this one was just about as interesting as explaining how Han Solo got his name in Solo. I think a number of the writers think this is fan service when it's just needless wankery about nitpicked details.

This show's biggest problem wasn't continuity issues (though holy shit, did it seem to have way too many). It's that it went absolutely nowhere but took 6 hours to do it and they were super boring hours. The only new character had her story arc just end so abruptly that her very existence introduces huge glaring errors in the rest of the series. Vader and the Inquisitor just leaving Reva to die without, I don't know, dropping a tracker on her in case she somehow survives and finds Kenobi? The whole ridiculous "I'll sacrifice myself so this ship can get away" trope was also infuriating. Was someone on that ship supposed to be important later? *shrugs*

Disney seems to want to treat Star Wars like the MCU, in that it will reference little things on other shows/properties and expect that everyone watching will know who that is (like the bounty hunter that killed Tim Olyphant's character in Book of Boba Fett). The problem is there is so much Star Wars content, much of which is bad (or animated) that these crossovers just lack context for people who aren't painfully aware of them.

yes, that is indeed why her being coy makes less than zero sense compared to the simpler explanation of "the writers made a fucky wucky"

Perhaps but didn't stop him from 1-shotting Grievous, so the man knows how to use it and guess just got a lucky shot off in Revenge?

And I don't put a lot of stock in Star Wars canon considering how it has evolved.

This is geek hermeneutics. It's what people used to get a No-Prize for in Marvel Comics letter columns: you found an elegant way to explain why something that not only looked like a ridiculous goof-up but WAS a ridiculous goof-up still somehow could be made to make sense. "Tony Stark redesigned the Iron Man helmet with a nose early on because, um, he was warned about his heart by Don Blake and other doctors and decided that he needed a secure respiratory system that would provide him with sufficient air even if there was a malfunction of the armor. Yeah, that's it, it's not George Tuska just going weirdly off-model and suddenly drawing a nose for a while."

In geek hermeneutics, the bad thing is when writers or editors so thoroughly fuck up that someone in charge just has to plain old disavow an old story and say it never happened. Read the old Marvel Universe entries and every once in a while you'd see an editor saying "that story where X does Y? It didn't happen, because it can't". Like "Hey that story where the Angel flew around the world in six hours way back in the early X-Men or whatever? actually he just attached himself to a plane with a cable and took a nap, sorry for the confusion".

So you're really happy when a line of dialogue or a situation that was in NO WAY INTENDED to reference a later story turns out to be perfectly compatible with it. That's candy! It's fun! Yay! Nobody is stupid enough to think that was part of the plan. I mean, fucking Star Wars, I don't even remotely believe that George Lucas ever ever ever thought Darth Vader was Luke's father or that Leia was Luke's sister when he was making the first movie. Any time he claims it, I know he's just stroking his fake Joseph Campbell peen. The idea was entirely post-the first movie. But it's still fun to go back to the first movie and think well, that's interesting, Darth Vader is torturing someone who turns out to be his DAUGHTER. That's not one of those "editor's notes: it never happened" things but it does change the meaning of what you're seeing a bit. Which is fine.

It's just that sometimes shit simply doesn't add up no matter how hard you try, and I honestly believe the job of franchise management is to avoid that to the extent possible, because it is suspension-of-disbelief breaking when it's especially bad.

But it's not that. Nobody thought that Leia being excited by Obi-Wan being on the Death Star was a goof-up or something needing to be explained. It's already explained in that very movie. This is an example of trying to explain something that already made sense with something that makes a little less sense.

I didn't have a problem with them leaving Reva. I got the feeling it was Vader and the Inquisitor basically enjoying that she'd live in misery and failure. It just seemed like a final "fuck you" from both of them and made total sense to me. As for the ship at the end, the dialogue on the bridge when Darth Vader wants to break off and go after Obi-Wan strongly implies, to me at least, that those people were intended to be some of the earliest members of the rebellion. There's a strong hint from the Inquisitor that if they ignore Obi-wan they'll squash it right there and then. In fact, I actually thought the person on the ship on Alderaan in the end was going to be Mon Mothma to tie all that together and not Obi-wan.


Dude, Grevious was like 5 feet away, standing still and raised both arms to hit him with that staff thingy. I've never been on a firing range in my life but even I could probably make that shot.

No, it's ADDING sense to something that already made sense. Geezus, don't be such a buzzkill.

Dude, you're the same guy who partly blamed Rise of Skywalker's failure on fans wanting too much backstory and having everything explained, and now you're going to bat for a 6 episode miniseries explaining Leia's reaction to “I’m here with Ben Kenobi”.

Edit: Also the thing I was responding to, which I quoted and I'll quote again right now for emphasis was: "explain why something that not only looked like a ridiculous goof-up but WAS a ridiculous goof-up still somehow could be made to make sense."

So you tell me, what was the the ridiculous goof-up being explained here?

Why does Leia's message act like she's never heard of the dude she's contacting?

And then when Luke said, "I'm here with Ben Kenobi" during her Death Star rescue, she sounded like she knew him. my head canon on that was that her message was formal in case someone else found R2 and got him to play the whole thing.

edit: Bleh, skipped half a page.

She explained in the message exactly how she had heard of Kenobi:

"General Kenobi: Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars; now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person; but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to Alderaan has failed. I've placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope."

There's nothing in the movie that gives any indication that they have any shared history beyond being someone that her dad was entrusting to help them. When Obi-Wan dies she doesn't have any real reaction to it other than telling Luke that there wasn't anything he could have done. There's no "yeah I feel bad too, we saved each other's lives a few times back when I was 9". Any surprise in her voice at hearing the Kenobi is on the Death Star is likely due to the fact that there was no expectation that the person she asked to deliver droids to her dad was going end up on the planet destroying battle station aiding in her rescue. Hell, up until the point that she hears Kenobi is there, she can't even be sure the droids that escaped podded out of the ship onto some backwater planet while carrying vital information the Empire is desperate to retrieve ever even made it to Kenobi.

You're basically agreeing with me? E.g., this is a problem if you are troubled by such things, after the events of this miniseries. But the "Ben Kenobi? Where is he?" is a lifeline: her message was formal and third-personish for some reason, but her reaction to Luke indicates that no, she knows Ben Kenobi quite well and is very excited that this stupid goober who has arrived to rescue her is working with him. Further evidence? Who else knows that Obi-Wan is called Ben? Well, after this miniseries, Leia does. She doesn't look puzzled at the mention of a "Ben", she recognizes the name instantly--and we've already heard Owen and Beru acting as if Ben and "Obi-Wan", are very different people. (And for that matter Obi-Wan acting like that name is something he's not heard in a long time, etc.)

You can either go "wtf, this series is violating all of this continuity" or you can go "hey wait how cool that's why Leia says 'Ben Kenobi?' with such excitement". Not because you're stupid enough to think Lucas somehow meant that back then but because you're grasping at interpretative straws to make something old take on a new meaning. That's what people DO with culture. It's not even geeky per se. All those phrases that people think are Shakespeare being so fucking amazingly elegant and imaginative with his English? Some are, sure. Some are just typical Elizabethean street argot or common turns of phrase that just happen to survive primarily in Shakespeare, so we give him the credit for them as if he thought them up on his own. This is what interpretation does--it finds new meanings in old things that are not really meanings that could have been there in the first place.

I would agree with you that I don't think the problem with this series was that it somehow fucked up continuity more. Aside from the sequel trilogy and Mandalorian, the franchise has been non-stop retcon since Episode 1 came out and Obi-Wan isn't any more egregious in that respect than anything else has been. I just find it odd when people pull out the "but this explains [insert thing that didn't need explaining]" stuff. My main issue with the series is that it was largely forgettable, and I don't know that it ultimately added much to any of the characters involved. Getting Ewan back to play Obi-Wan again is a fair enough idea but I don't think the writers were able to crack what to do with him.

Well, this was supposed to be a movie, I guess thats why it has about enough material for a good movie and the rest is padding. Once you have that in mind it cleary shows.

To me, this story fits the 3 times leia refers to Kenobi much better than the continuity does without it.

She leaves a fairly formal message that you can interpret any way you like.

She reacts to Luke being here with 'Ben Kenobi' clearly having confidence he's a useful person to have when being rescued from an imperial fortress. Ben Kenobi is of course a name that Bail did not know obi wan by in the prequels.

She names her first born child after him, and specifically the 'Ben' persona.

I also think this story is only time I've ever seen star wars media even try to deal with the Vader/Anakin identity.

And Reva does a good job of making the inquisitor concept less of a pantomime, I really liked the idea of her hunting vader using the idea that jedi hunt themselves. Just a shame it lasted for less than an hour of screen time.

Nothing here felt like the retcon I feared it would be when I heard leia and vader were in it. The concepts here are fine and a good addition to the canon.


That said, I'd accept the writing is patchy, and it does suffer from too much of this story being reflections on other parts of the IP.

But this is much more ambitious than Mandalorian, and I enjoyed it more. Mandalorian tails off after exploring the premise. This wobbles at the start and gets its shit together by the end.

Sure, obviously no one was thinking this.

Mostly because for the purpose of ANH it doesn't matter how well leia knew kenobi.

And also because star wars is full of moments where it appears characters must have been reading the script but the story carries you past it, so it is fine.

But that doesn't mean anything in ANH supports the assumption than Leia and Ben had definitely never met.

Ben and Leia having had an adventure together 10 years ago seems fine tbh.

Would I have tried to do to write this show without Leia? Yep. But not because of what the existing canon says. Just because the show would have more room to breathe without her.

Pretty much. I'd rather that Kenobi had been called off-world for something else urgent. Maybe Bail Organa sends him a genuinely secure, secret message that he's worried that one of the Inquisitors is asking questions that imply a knowledge of Anakin's children. After all, it's not just Yoda and Obi-Wan who were in that room where the twins were born, and at least a few other people saw Padme come onto the medical ship still alive. So maybe it's a doctor or a medical droid or something that made the mistake of partially spilling the beans to someone and Third Sister has picked up on it; since she knows Vader is Anakin, she's thinking this is leverage that she can use to set him up for a kill. So then you get something that's a bit more tense--Obi-Wan is racing to find the doctor/droid before the Inquisitor while trying not to get killed himself. Maybe he does and the doctor/droid gets killed or destroyed in the process of the chase or some kind of fight, and now Obi-Wan himself is desperately on the run as per the series. Then you can do a lot of the same story beats without the cute-kid elements. The only scene where I thought Leia really worked was the one where Obi-Wan comes close to telling her about her real mom, in the Seth Molerogan's truck.

Maybe someone else in this thread already pointed it out and I missed it, but I just now realized that Vader's "I killed him" line was there solely to satisfy people who are mad that Obi-Wan lied to Luke ("from a certain point of view") about Vader having killed Anakin.  I guess Vader feeding the line to him ten years previously makes it better.

 :uhrr:

Really the best way to make this show would be to have not made it.  I tried to think of "what would I have had Obi-Wan doing on a show set during this time period" and the answer is "nothing".  Nothing you could have him do makes for a good show while also adding to the overall canon instead of making it stupider.  So I have a little more sympathy for the writers, because they were given an impossible task by people who wanted to sell more toys.

In leia's defence, once you get past the decision to use her at all, the actor was good and they used her pretty well.

There were a bunch of times I felt they were writing her as a seven year old not a ten year old. But whether this is set seven or ten years after the prequels makes no real difference.

I mean, sure, it isn't a co-incidence.

But that scene was pretty good. They managed to present a character that was 100% Anakin and 100% vader, which they haven't achieved before.

I will give them that, yeah.  It was kind of amazing how badly Ep 3 botched the task of bridging the Anakin and Vader characters, given that "show how Anakin becomes Vader" was literally the entire reason to make that movie at all.  If they'd just done their job maybe this show wouldn't have had to exist.

Yeah. When you think about it, the major reason for the prequels to exist at all, besides making money, was:

a) the tragedy of the fall of the Republic and the Jedi and the audience's curiosity about how that came to pass
b) the parallel fall of Anakin Skywalker from being a "cunning warrior and a good friend" into being the most sinister and dangerous person in the galaxy--and yet still being redeemable.

I'm not even sure Lucas realized (or realizes even now) that the story he managed to tell about 1) was that the Jedi Order had become too complacent and static, too far from the Force, to realize the danger they were in--and were thus corrupted into becoming weapons in a murky, incoherent war plotted by a Sith and 2) that the Republic had become too bureaucratic, bloated and unresponsive to command the loyalty of its members. And nobody after him really wanted to sharpen or clarify that this was the story they'd actually told.

On b), we all know Lucas screwed the pooch, both with the midichlorians/young Anakin stuff in the first movie and then with the undermotivated, underimagined turn to the Dark Side in the second and third movies.

This probably contributed to the sequels being as bad overall as they were--if the story of the fall of the Jedi and the Republic had been told more sharply, then the story of the rise of something else could have been matched to that more coherently, with the middle movies basically serving as the climax point of the whole saga.

So yes, anything that gets shoehorned into the already fucked-up narrative and thematic structure of the whole thing is going to struggle for coherence and relevance. But even given that, I think this is was a lot weaker than it could have been.

I just assumed this show was made because so many people simp Ewan McGregor's Obi Wan. But maybe I spend too much time on reddit.

I kept thinking about the final episode, which was really pretty decent, and it felt to me like it did to some of you--the second half of a 2-hour movie that was left pretty intact while the first act was blown up into a bunch of Scooby-Doo antics.

I liked the whole thing start to finish. It was great.