…So you shouldn’t care about any of my opinions on it.
Ten minutes into the new Obi-Wan Kenobi show, during a scene featuring ten-year-old Leia set to a soundtrack taken directly from a Hallmark TV movie, I stopped watching. So, there’s really no point in reading the rest of this article if you want a nuanced analysis of the show.
It started alarmingly with a “Previously On…” summary of all three Prequel films. I am not a fan of the Prequel trilogy, so this immediately had me worried about the tone of the new show.
This concern grew more deeply rooted when I found myself giggling at the first sight of the series antagonists, the Inquisitors. They look like a cosplay group. I did not like the silly hat, the baggy trousers, or their resemblance to a PG-13 depiction of the Cenobites.
Their introductory scene did little to redeem them. The Big Inquisitor (I don’t know his name and will never find out, so I will simply refer to him as “The Big One” because he is the leader, and therefore the biggest) attempted to intimidate a small-time bartender, seemingly to also bait a hidden Jedi into revealing themselves. But The Big One keeps endlessly talking about who the Inquisitors are and how to hunt Jedi to the point that it gives him an aura of insecurity. He seems less like a ruthless hunter with nothing to prove and more like that guy at a Magic: The Gathering tournament whose entire ego hangs from the thread of being known as “smart” and whose bum wriggles with excitement when he’s about to play a big “gotcha” card combo.
Then his subordinate openly disobeys him and he bickers with her publicly, which really makes this whole operation look like an amateur affair.
I want to take an aside here to talk about the ship. The Inquisitors’ ship. It flies overhead and everyone on Tatooine seems to instantly know that this ship is trouble. Except that it’s just a regular ship, it’s pretty nondescript by Star Wars standards. It isn’t a TIE Fighter or a Lambda-class shuttle or anything. It’s just a ship. But everyone knows that it’s trouble, which means everyone knows what an Inquisitorial ship looks like. This suggests that the Inquisitors have spent the last ten years killing Jedi so publicly that their vessels are known to poor townsfolk on a backwards planet like Tatooine. This suggests a few possibilities:
- There are so many Jedi still hanging around after Order 66 that the Inquisition has made multiple trips to the same tiny town on Tatooine over the last ten years.
- The Jedi never played Sardines during their extensive training, and so all keep hiding together in large groups in the same spot.
- The Inquisition regularly stops by this little town to scare the locals in case there are any Jedi hiding in it. They presumably do this to every little town on every little planet in the galaxy.
- The Inquisition are so bad at their job that they keep having to come back to the same town to try and catch the Jedi that they missed last time.
Any of these possibilities is extremely funny to me, so I’m just going to randomly pick one to treat as canon from now on.
I’m going with Sardine Jedi.
We finally meet Jean Luc Kenobi himself at a meat-packing plant in the desert. I’m calling him “Jean Luc Kenobi” because, much like Jean Luc Picard, this seems to be an utterly defeated version of Obi-Wan who has given up on all of his convictions and has succumbed entirely to pessimism. This isn’t a problem in its own right, but it is a bit of a tired trope at this point.
We also find out that Obi-Wan is friends with a friendly local Jawa, and we get to see a Jawa’s dialogue subtitled for what I believe is the first time ever. Presumably, Jawas are massive Joss Whedon fans because they talk exactly like characters written by Joss Whedon.
Disney, I beg of you, do not subtitle any more Jawas.
The quipping Jawa sells Obi-Wan a toy plane and it turns out that this is the same toy plane that we see Luke playing with in the first-ever Star Wars film! I’m personally thrilled that the mystery of where the toy plane came from has finally been answered, it really ties the story together in a compelling, satisfying way.
Although… we never see where the Jawa found the toy plane. This troubles me. Was the toy plane from a secret Sith temple? Or maybe it was constructed by the first-ever Jedi, and harbours the essence of all Jedi who have held it since? Perhaps the toy plane is secretly the key to all this, and hides the means to end the Sith once and for all and bring balance to the Force? I’m hoping this gets answered in Season 2.
We see a young Luke Skywalker disobeying his uncle like the Rebel he is, so we know that Luke Skywalker is in this show, which is good because so far the only things I’ve recognised from my childhood have been lightsabers, Jedi, droids, Tatooine, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jawas and toy planes, so it’s good to know that there’s literally no part of A New Hope that won’t be referenced, therefore my childhood is validated.
Speaking of which, we then get to see how Princess Leia is doing on her home planet of Alderaan. Apparently, she’s doing fine. This was the point that I stopped watching.
When one of the trailers for The Rise Of Skywalker featured Palpatine’s laughter, I got worried. When a later trailer featured clips of the Blockade Runner from A New Hope and a series of other direct references to the Original Trilogy, I gave up altogether. I still haven’t seen The Rise Of Skywalker and I feel no need to do so. One of the exciting elements of the Sequel Trilogy was a new Star Wars for a new generation, with new characters and stories to be explored. When it became just a series of callbacks to forty-year-old movies, I realised that it had nothing worthwhile to offer.
As for the Prequel Trilogy, starting with The Phantom Menace, I don’t believe that they are particularly good films, from the writing to the editing to the self-indulgence of their creator. But some amount of credit has to be paid to Lucas for at least trying to make the Star Wars galaxy seem bigger and fuller. An attempt was made to expand Star Wars.
The latest instalments all serve only to contract Star Wars. With each new story beat that brings back yet another familiar character or location, more and more it seems as though Star Wars is set in a Galaxy with a maximum population of about 100 spread over six planets.
I loved The Mandalorian because every episode of the first season (bar one) took us to a new planet with new characters and cultures. There were certainly a lot of familiarities, but each new instalment expanded the Star Wars horizon. It was also exceptionally well made and tightly written.
The Book Of Boba Fett was just another story set on Tatooine, that famous backwater planet where 30 per cent of the most important events in the galaxy have occurred. The Book Of Boba Fett revived characters, monsters, ships and locations that we had already seen, and what little was original was arguably pretty embarrassing (I am, of course, referring to the cyberpunk mods).
If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a series setting itself up to use the titular Jedi as merely an audience avatar with which to explore the rest of the galaxy, I might have given it more of a chance to prove itself. But if in the first ten minutes the only original element it can bring is the bickering, cosplaying Inquisitors, then this really isn’t a journey I’m keen to spectate.
This is a shame because I really want to know where that Jawa found the toy plane.
