From Mav: It’s been a whole since we did and episode on Star Wars. So, tonight is the season finale of Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and I’ve really been enjoying it. In fact, I’m loving it. I haven’t talked about it much online, but I have a lot to say about it. I will say that I wasn’t really looking forward to the show. That’s not to say that I thought it would be bad. It’s more that given the concept as pitched — Obi-Wan Kenobi’s life between episodes III and IV of Star Wars — my gut reaction was “who fucking cares? I mean, I guess I’ll watch it eventually.” I was wrong. The show is great. But, there’s a specific reason that I haven’t talked about it more than that… because talking about what’s great about the show… necessarily involves spoilers to the show!
One of the things that I’ve found amazing about the show is how incredibly reserved the Internet has been about not spoiling the show. Disney has been pretty good about not spoiling Star Wars content. They basically sat out on a fortune of Baby Yoda merchandise before the first season The Mandalorian just to keep spoilers secret. They’re doing it again. The spoiler that I’m obviously occluding is not only in the pre-release promotional material, it has not been mentioned in any of the episode write-ups even after it was given away on the show. It does not appear in the thumbnails. If you’ve seen the show, I’m certain you know what I’m talking about and you’re thinking to yourself “damn, you know it has been hard to keep this secret for the last month!” I haven’t really seen memes. People aren’t tweeting it. I mostly not seen cleverly worded “technically spoiler free but not really” headlines. People are just respecting the spoiler.
In fact, people are respecting the spoiler so much that even all of the racist “fuck this show for being too woke” headlines are ALSO not talking about the spoiler! They’re being complete dumbshits about their racism… as always. But they’re not talking about the thing that I’m not mentioning. Maybe some of them aren’t watching the show and are just complaining because they know there’s a black woman in it. But you have to figure some of them HAVE watched the show and know the spoiler and not one of them is giving it away. For those of you who have watched the show, think about it… and you’re going to say “Holy Shit! He’s right!”
But anyway, that can’t keep going on. The final episode of Kenobi is tonight, and I feel like I want to do a recap show on it. I want to talk about the show and I want to talk about the concept of spoilers in regards to Star Wars. I want to talk about how the thing we’re not mentioning affects our view of what Star Wars is both overall and in respect to what the show is doing. I want to talk about… a lot. The rub is… it’s super hard to talk about what I want to talk about without spoilers!
So … uh yeah… without spoiling Kenobi (and we will on the show)… who has thoughts? What do you want to hear us talk about?
Wow… that was hard to write!
I loved it too! I wasn’t a huge fan of the first episode simply because it had so much catching up to do, getting us out of the end of the prequels and into the show, but I saw the bones of something good and it turned out great I thought.
I do think that they did a disservice to the character of Reva – not in that the actress didn’t do a good job, she was phenomenal, but in that it’s a pretty archetypal character of pulp fiction and I just felt like they didn’t hit the beats of her plot well. I can’t really get into detail without getting into spoilers, but there are some elements of the type that were just absent, and I missed them and would’ve loved to see what the actor could’ve done with them. I hope we get her in more SW media so we can get more story.
I really, really didn’t get the protests about power levels and Force minutiae. That’s always been made of handwavium and no amount of midochlorians will ever change that.
And I dearly hope we get more from the actor who played Young Leia. She was PHENOMENAL, doing what Grogu did, but backwards and in high heels.