Obi-Wan Kenobi (Part 1)

Hello, everyone.  Welcome to Part 1 of Missed the Mark: Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Yes, I did post Part 0 mere minutes ago.  Much like Disney+ with the Neilsen numbers, I am not above cheap tricks to gimmick the apparent amount of activity on my site.  Please validate my underhanded tactics by reviewing Part 0 before getting into this one.  (More seriously, I do recommend that you check out Part 0 if you haven’t already.  It covers my views and biases for certain aspects of Star Wars lore that will be relevant to this series.)

For those who don’t feel like doubling back, fear not.  I will be reiterating key points from Part 0 here so that things roll forward smoothly.

A Fundamentally Broken Story with Broken Characters

Obi-Wan Kenobi (hereafter referred to as Kenobi, while the character shall be referred to as Obi-Wan) is a Disney+ series that had massive potential.  Much like Paramount’s Picard series before it, this show represented a chase to win back a jaded fanbase and reignite passion in a franchise that had been poorly handled for years.  Instead, the creators doubled down and smashed the series headlong into the ground, assassinating a beloved icon of a character in the process.

Death of a Character (Arc)

I do have some empathy for the creators on this show.  They wanted to make Obi-Wan a dynamic character with an arc.  However, they horrendously Missed the Mark.  This story was effectively filler: we know Obi-Wan’s starting point at the end of Revenge of the Sith, and we know his end point at the start of A New Hope.  There is very little room for any sort of character development within this gap.  The fact that the creators went all-out and pulled a Jake Skywalker with him is utterly insulting.

If the creators wanted to give Obi-Wan an arc, they should have focused on something that was a logical progression from where Obi-Wan was at the end of Revenge of the Sith but which wouldn’t need to be completely undone for A New Hope to make sense.  As I discussed in Part 0, focusing on Obi-Wan losing faith in being a Jedi was the wrong choice.  Instead, they should have explored the failures of the Jedi Order as a whole.

The Real Main Characters

Another glaring flaw with this story is that it is blatantly obvious that Obi-Wan is not the main character.  His name in the title and his physical presence are merely nostalgia bait to lure in audiences who wouldn’t be interested in the actual main characters of the show.

Reva, the Third Sister

Oh, boy. Reva.

When I first saw promotional images for Reva, I was excited.  I thought she looked quite imposing in the promotional images.  She seemed like a ruthless badass who would test Obi-Wan’s limits.  Sure, the odds were good that she’d be dead by the end of the series, perhaps executed by Obi-Wan to protect Luke’s secret, but I held out a glimmer of hope.

Then the show came out.

This show was the Reva show.  She drove the story.  Time and again, she was handed abilities and accomplishments when she should have failed or disciplined.  Most galling of all, however, is that after being shown that she was a rabid dog even among the violent Dark Side sect that is the Inquisitors, ready to inflict violence and cruelty on random people at a whim, the show tries to redeem her.  Not wanting to torture and murder kids because she see herself in them in an insultingly low moral bar that does not make us forget how she sliced a hand off a random woman, threw a knife at a bartender with the intent of forcing a Jedi to save him, kidnapped (and actually did try to torture, even if she felt bad about it) Leia, and tried to wipe out a refugee network merely so that she could murder the boss who provided her with access to him already.

It’s blatantly clear that the creators want Reva to be a new character for audiences to embrace – a second stab at Rey, so to speak.  Wanting to create new characters is an admirable goal.  If the goal was to give Reva a TV show, they should have just made that show.  Call it The Inquisitors.  I personally could get behind a show about the Third Sister character navigating the treacherous internal politics of the Inquisitors while hunting random Jedi.  However, a show dedicated to a beloved icon is not the time or place to force a new protagonist into place.

(While this is not a writing problem, I also don’t like how Moses Ingram handled the character.  She was a loud, irritating, bland caricature every time she opened her mouth.  I don’t blame Ingram for this, though.  Going back to the promotional material, I did think that she had the look and body language down, so I suspect the horrific line delivery was a consequence of poor direction.)

Leia

I think that the creators of Kenobi fundamentally misunderstood who Leia is, and their effort to reframe her only robbed her of the qualities that made her appealing.  They took a strong, inspiring, iconic female character and turned her into the cliché of a Strong Female Character.

Was Leia smart and full of sass? Absolutely.  However, she was not a creepy 30-year-old man in the body of a 10-year-old girl, dropping platitudes and psycho-analyzing the characters around her before reverting to naivete more befitting a 6-year-old.

Was Leia a badass action girl who thought quickly on her feet? Absolutely.  However, she was not Usain Bolt, and her combat prowess boiled down to being a decent shot and being creative with the tools at her disposal.

What’s frustrating about this is that, again, this didn’t need to happen.  The creators seemed fixated on showing us the Leia was as important as Luke, but I don’t know anyone who ever doubted that fact.  If it was so important to tell a story about Leia, she should have gotten her own series.  I think that there’s potential for a fun children’s show for girls wherein we see Leia growing into the revolutionary leader we all love.

Also, having Leia in a Kenobi show breaks canon.  It would not be impossible to incorporate her without doing this, but the writers made the worst possible decision at nearly every turn.  Thanks to the events of this show, the Empire knows that Bail Organa is a Rebel sympathizer with ties to a Jedi Master.  They probably know Leia is Force-sensitive based on her ability to resist Reva’s Force mind probe.  The Organa family should have been arrested and taken out of the equation long before A New Hope, thereby making Leia’s established story impossible.  Then there is the matter of that Leia knows Obi-Wan.  I’m not saying you can’t paint over this plot hole by going the Discovery route and saying, “The characters just don’t talk about it,” but I am saying that it is incredibly lazy writing that acknowledges a gaping problem without putting in the effort to fix it.

(Actually, “the characters don’t talk about it,” doesn’t even work in this situation.  Leia’s reaction to seeing Obi-Wan’s death in A New Hope really doesn’t line up with her knowing and trusting him for years.  Why was she continuing to pretend she didn’t know him after her whole planet had already been wiped out, she had already been labeled an enemy of the Empire, and he was already dead? There was no longer any point by then, and she is smart enough that she would know that Obi-Wan hadn’t meant her to keep the secret once there was no longer any point.)

Vader

Including Vader in this show was a severe mistake.

Some people have argued that his encounters with Obi-Wan in this show devalue their reunion in A New Hope.  I see the merits of this argument, but it is not what really bothers me here.  Outside of nostalgia bait, what is the point of including Vader at all?

First, Obi-Wan knew Vader and Anakin were the same person, and unless he went out of his way to not listen to galactic news, he surely would have heard about Darth Vader roaming around.  There’s no meaningful emotional impact here from learning that Anakin is still alive during this show.  Second, it’s not like the story really explores the emotional impact of Anakin’s transformation on Obi-Wan.  If the show had been focused solely upon this revelation, maybe it could have worked.  What we got was barely an acknowledgement, and it simply wasn’t enough.

When I heard about their little back-and-forth conversation during the final duel, I got a little excited – that, “You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker. I did,” line sounded promising.  However, then I saw a clip of the discussion, I was appalled.  It feels very tonally dissonant to me.  I can’t tell whether Vader is openly expressing remorse or cackling like a psychopath.  Either way, it doesn’t really fit his character at this stage in his arc or the context of Kenobi.  There’s also the matter that Rebels already did this same thing better with Vader and Ahsoka.  There, Vader’s rejection of his old identity felt defensive.  He was confronted by someone who raised the ghosts of his past, and he was planting his feet and asserting himself as a show of strength in the face of someone whom he knew could hurt him emotionally.

And, of course, there are the fights themselves.  The first fight has Vader just allow Obi-Wan to get away, despite wanting to torture and kill Obi-Wan moments earlier and having the power to capture Obi-Wan.  The second fight has Obi-Wan spare Vader for no reason.  I realize that the topic of whether Jedi should kill a defeated opponent is one with a lot of nuance and emotion behind it, but this is another case where we need only look at what is shown on-screen.  Obi-Wan has every reason to believe that sparing Vader a second time will resort in many more people being killed, and it’s not like he had any mean to prevent this by detaining Vader.  The show couldn’t even be bothered to show Obi-Wan getting some vision from the Force to convince him that Vader must be spared.  At the end of the fight, Obi-Wan simply doesn’t have a good reason to not finish the job.

The long and short of it is that Vader and Obi-Wan shouldn’t have been brought into direct contact, especially not in the way that the show handled it.  It would have better to avoid the messy fallout entirely than to have to engineer a scenario that would allow both characters to survive.

Anakin

Yes, I am treating Anakin as a separate character from Vader for this analysis.  There actually was value to having Anakin in this show.  There was so much potential that could have been derived from flashbacks of Obi-Wan with a pre-Vader Anakin or visions of Anakin as Obi-Wan imagined he would be now.  Instead, Lucasfilm brought back Hayden Christensen just to squander him.  A brief Prequel-era training duel with copious (and questionable) CGI de-aging was one of the most pointless options possible, especially when it only established a character trait of Vader’s that those of us who saw the Prequels would already know.

Luke

I wonder if Luke is going to remember the magical Inquisitor lady with the red lightsaber who assaulted his home and chased him across the desert when Obi-Wan tells him about the Force and Jedi in another decade?

Nah. Not that memorable. I’m sure he got amnesia about the whole thing, anyway.

Sarcasm aside, there is even less wiggle room for Luke than Leia in a Kenobi show.  The whole point of Luke’s introduction in A New Hope is that he was living an utterly mundane life and was incredibly bored by it.  Any sort of adventures beyond generic farmboy activities create plot holes.  If Luke was going to be included, it should have solely been for quieter moments that build a bond between him and the “crazy old wizard” – stuff like the “Hello there” moment (though, given how the moment we got was cringeworthy, we don’t want something exactly like that moment).

Plot

I’ve spent more than 2,000 words going on about mishandled characters without even touching on plot.

Many fans will point out that there shouldn’t have been a plot, unless it was one of the character study variety.  The whole point of Obi-Wan’s exile to Tatooine is that he is watching Luke and growing spiritually.  Sure, stories can happen in this time frame and setting, but anything that happens should be isolated and small-scale so as to not disrupt the trajectory of any character outside of Obi-Wan.  He can battle gangsters, monsters, Sand People, or random Force-sensitives whom he encounters during his exile (or, in the case of A’Sharad Hett in Legends, a Sand Person who is also a Force-sensitive), but all of it should be framed around his spiritual journey.

I honestly agree with this assessment.  The most epic and high-stakes that Kenobi should have gotten should have been a Star Wars version of Last Days in the Desert.  Just edit out the Christian references from that script and tell Ewan McGregor to play it as Obi-Wan instead of Jesus.

However, I understand why Disney wanted Obi-Wan to travel across the galaxy.  They have oversaturated Star Wars with stories set on desert planets.  The audience needs a breather.  They created a problem for themselves and did their best to fix it.

Strange as it may sound, given all my earlier criticisms, I think that the rough skeleton of the plot we got could work, at least if the smaller, more spiritual plot is (forcibly knocked) off the table.  The only good reason for Obi-Wan to leave Tatooine is if it was the only option to protect Anakin’s children.  While abandoning Luke is a terrible idea, I could see a scenario where he was Leia’s only hope and accepted a quest to bring her back home.

And thus, we tie back into how the creators Missed the Mark.  Their plot might still have worked if they had shown greater respect and faithfulness to the characters as they were established.  It is my hope that, by reframing Obi-Wan’s character arc, we can flesh out and update the plot into something that will better resonate with the entire fanbase.

A New Hope (for Kenobi)

Now that we’ve gotten our fill of pessimism, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

My objective for this series is to do smaller, more regular releases.  Therefore, Part 2 will release on September 12th, with Parts 3 through 6 released weekly as the month progresses.  Part 2 will lay the groundwork for the rewrite.  Parts 3 through 6 will then walk us through the revised treatment episode by episode.

I thank you all for your patience.  I’m hoping we can all have a good time with this.  See you all next week.