“Better, but subpar Star Wars…”
Looks like two more episodes of “Obi-Wan Kenobi” have premiered since my last review. If you read my take on Part III, I’m sure you aren’t surprised I chose to take a week off reviewing this series. Honestly, I didn’t even want to talk about Obi-Wan Kenobi for a while after that episode. Fortunately, Parts IV and V are both a little better than Part III, although they still have a variety of problems that need to be addressed here. Unlike last week’s post, I’ll try to keep this review (relatively) brief and mostly spoiler free, at least for Parts IV and V.
Part IV begins with Obi-Wan trying to infiltrate the headquarters of the Inquisitors, working together with the leaders of “The Path” to rescue a lost comrade who is now in Inquisitor Reva’s hands. This episode was very… “blah” for me. If it had frustrated me as much as Part III, I would have written a review on it immediately to vent (despite being burned out by the previous week’s show), and, similarly, I would have written something immediately to celebrate if Part IV had been great. Instead, it was just a marginal improvement over the previous week’s outing – the good moments weren’t clever enough to impress me and the bad moments weren’t stupid enough to infuriate me, although there were unsurprisingly a lot more idiotic moments than genuinely good ones. The only way I can describe the show at this point is that it’s ambitious, but also just dumb. There are some actual good ideas here in the show’s plot, but every single one of them is executed in ways that just don’t make sense. They violate the lore of the Star Wars universe, defy the laws of physics, clash with characters’ motives and abilities, and, on top of that, are all written in amateurish ways that only aggravate these “suspension of disbelief” problems instead of alleviating them. Very little in the show really makes sense if you think about it for more than two seconds, and the writers seemed darned and determined to focus your attention on that fact instead of hiding it. I would personally do the exact opposite if I was writing a show full of plot holes, but that’s just me.
Part V is a little better than Part IV, but still very mediocre. By this point, I am so sick of Leia, I cringe every single time she is on screen. I’m so sick of this ten-year-old super genius who can identify different types of starships, resist Force manipulation, stay resolute in the face of interrogation and torture, repair the wiring of massive military bunkers, psychologically dissect those around her, lie convincingly without forgetting any important details of her story, tell when people are hiding things from her, nearly escape on foot from a full team of mercenaries, etc., etc., etc. Why does anyone else in the Star Wars universe even need to exist when Leia is a thing? Star Wars fans online may complain about Reva, but I honestly don’t mind her character. She’s clever and powerful, but not unrealistically so. I do feel her personality is a bit of a one note (in Reva’s case, mostly ambition/anger), but that seems to be the case with every single character in this show, especially the female ones. Reva’s actions are generally consistent, and some of the details of her goals and motivations revealed in Part V were somewhat interesting. I still don’t understand why the writers won’t let her actually fight with Obi-Wan Kenobi, but, again, the show is not written very well so I’m not too shocked by those kinds of obvious oversights anymore. In a show full of lightsaber combat involving Jedi, why have the show’s two main characters actually have a lightsaber battle? Instead, let’s make Obi-Wan have a horribly one-sided battle with Darth Vader, and show Reva doing parkour, jumping and backflipping around on Tatooine buildings like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader using the Force.
While I think it is an exaggeration, I definitely understand the feelings of those who feel Obi-Wan is getting “The Last Jedi” treatment here and being degraded as a character like Luke Skywalker was in the Sequel Trilogy. It is frustrating watching him, four episodes into this six episode series, still struggling to fight a small number of Stormtroopers, his lightsaber apparently now taking up to three or four hits on their armor to kill them (instead of just cleaving straight through them like it should), whereas other characters like Tala can just hit the stormtroopers with a quick strike of their fists and it seems to hurt them significantly through the same level of armor. Obi-Wan apparently cannot use the Force almost at all, but can still deflect blaster bolts with his lightsaber… how do the writers think that Jedi do this? I’m pretty sure that’s why non-Jedi don’t use lightsabers. They can’t sense incoming threats with the Force to block blaster fire and would just get mowed down by their enemies from a distance. It’s very clear to me that no one with any real Star Wars knowledge is getting any final word on the scripts of these episodes, nor is anyone with any real writing talent, for that matter.
I’ll go ahead and wrap things up here before I end up in another rant. I give Part IV of Obi-Wan Kenobi a meager 6.5/10 – “blah and uninteresting”, and Part V a vaguely respectable 7/10 – “entertaining, but just barely so”. As a reminder to those keeping score at home, I gave Parts I-III an 8/10, 7/10, and 6/10, respectively, so we’re at least swinging upwards in quality a little now, which is very much a good thing. Hopefully, Part VI will be halfway decent and leave the show with a tolerable ending. My final thoughts on these two episodes are below:
“The Obi-Wan Kenobi show continues to have subpar writing and unrealistic characters that take away from what could otherwise be a very interesting outing into a relatively unexplored part of the Star Wars timeline. Numerous logical inconsistencies and plot holes, sometimes laughably obvious ones, take away from genuinely endearing moments, and leave the show on the bargain bin of science fiction entertainment. Overall, these episodes are better than Part III, but still subpar Star Wars.”