Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t disappointing me. I had a lot going on the day Part IV dropped, so I only caught a few hints of what people were saying online before I sat down with it, and I’m a little confused by some of it. Somebody called this episode boring. This episode was anything but boring. It wasn’t the best episode of all time, but it was a good one, and it went fast too.

I’m joined, of course, by the lovely Twi’lek to my Jabba, Mrs. Know-It-All, who’s a harsher critic than I am sometimes. There are six of these. This is four. Next week is the penultimate episode, and the finale is the week after.

It’s not every day you find something that understands you and clearly doesn’t understand half the fans. I don’t know, the fans are crazy out there. People just want to be angry about stuff. Much like my beloved Star Trek, Star Wars fans are crazy, and I do my best to stay away from a lot of that drama.

The Discount Rebellion

Believe it or not, lil Leia’s attitude is growing on me. It was a little heavy-handed in previous episodes, and of course there was the whole thing of her being able to run away from grown men who are literally paid to hunt people. But I liked her this week, and I’ll come back to her, because she’s also my problem with the episode.

I really dug the discount rebellion. O’Shea Jackson plays Roken, Tala’s contact on Jabiim, and you find out that this whole thing is called the Path. The closest analogy I’ve got is the Underground Railroad. Black people were being hunted, and you had Harriet Tubman hiding people and moving them along. Same thing here, with Jedi and other people who are trying to avoid the Empire.

I liked it for several reasons. One of them is that Obi-Wan hears a name and it’s somebody he knows, and they tell him, oh yeah, they help us often, they help us move younglings. Because every now and again you still get former younglings coming through, and Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out that they’re moving Force-sensitive kids too.

I also liked the Inquisitorius, the Inquisitors’ base, and it’s in the Mustafar system. For those of you playing at home, Mustafar is where Darth Vader is located, and apparently that system has a few more planets than we knew about. I think it’s hilarious that there’s a fire planet and a water planet in the same system. The symmetry is just stupid. But I dug it.

The Star Wars Jailbreak Episode

What I told my wife is that this is the Star Wars equivalent of what Star Trek gave us a couple of episodes ago, which was the shore leave episode. This is the jailbreak episode. Everybody recognizes Han Solo escaping. We’re always seeing people escape in Star Wars, and this is exactly that.

Obi-Wan’s in a bacta tank. Tala takes him there and she’s attending to him, and he has these really bad dreams where it feels like his brain is synced with Vader’s and there’s a back and forth going on. I hadn’t given it much thought, but I think that’s definitely a thing. I think Obi-Wan was connected to Vader. Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out that we saw it in the sequel movies, where Rey and Ben have that long distance thing. So to me it’s not too far-fetched to have old Ben and Vader do it.

He wakes up, he freaks out, and he’s like, we’ve got to go find her, we’ve got to find her. They tell him there’s no way you can get in there, because of course it’s an impenetrable thing. You saw something similar in Rogue One. Oh, you’re going to tell me I can’t go somewhere? I’m going right there. And that’s exactly what he does.

Tala Stands Her Ground

Tala still has valid Empire credentials, so she saunters through like she owns the place, orders some folks around, and ends up at a station looking some stuff up. Her storyline isn’t a bad one. Later on, when she’s faced with Reva, she makes a bold move I didn’t expect. She stands her ground and she doesn’t back down.

I like Indira Varma, and I liked seeing her not being slimy or double-crossy or spy-like. I like seeing her play an honorable character. The thing she keeps holding to is that this isn’t the Empire she thought she was joining. She signed up for a different thing, and then it got bad.

That’s a side of Star Wars I don’t think anybody talks about much. Remember The Mandalorian season two, when they capture the Imperial ship and he and all the other Mandalorians are fighting their way to the front? You’ve got the one guy who says he had good friends who died on that Death Star. You don’t think about the fact that there are people in there. We just see the movies’ side of it. I like when you get to see the BTS of the Empire and the people who make it up, and they let you see the edges of it. Everything’s not what you thought it was. Tala is one of those people, and I love her storyline.

It’s Like Poetry

I had all day to think about this episode and I didn’t think about this until we sat down. Obi-Wan here looks a lot like himself, and by himself I mean old Obi-Wan. He’s hiding and moving back and forth through Imperial hallways, which is what we saw in A New Hope. There’s that one scene where the stormtroopers think they heard something, and he does his little Force deal, they go looking, and he moves his robe and slips by.

All of that is part of the visual language us Star Wars fans are used to seeing. I don’t mean the storylines or the plots, because people get those confused. It’s what George Lucas said: it’s like poetry. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

There are people out there freaking out that this breaks canon. What are you talking about? The story is the story. The Star Wars you see right this moment is our Star Wars right now. I don’t know why you’d want to be a fan of something you hate, because guess what, nobody’s taking the old stuff away. Go watch it. Enjoy your Star Wars. I play the ball where it lies. I like Star Wars where it is.

Vader, Raw as Can Be

Spoilers, obviously. Obi-Wan and Leia escape, and Leia’s a little badass. She faces Moses Ingram’s Reva straight up, and I was like, you’re a tough girl. Is it too much? I don’t necessarily know. I think it’s built into who the character is later, so I don’t have a problem with that part.

Then Vader shows up, and Vader is raw as can be. He bursts into the Inquisitorius command center and snatches Reva up, and I’m just like, oh my goodness. He behaved the way I’ve always imagined his interactions with subordinates going. Can you imagine working in that environment? Vader goes to the kitchen, opens things up, and it’s who ate the last of the donuts? Who drank my coffee and didn’t fill the Keurig up again? Some guy goes, that was my fault. Force choke. Mrs. Know-It-All’s point is that this is the younger Vader, not the older and wiser one, and she’s right.

And James Earl Jones still sounds like James Earl Jones. Vader sounds amazing.

Right after that, Reva tells him she put a tracker on the thing. I called it immediately. That stupid little robot, Lola.

I’m over it. It’s Star Wars all the time: I put a tracker on something, so everything gets tracked. We’re always letting people go because there’s a tracker on something. That trope is just old, and it almost takes you out of the story a little, because you sit there and go, okay, fine, whatever.

My Problem With Leia

What I didn’t like is that Leia feels just as capable now, at ten or nine years old or whatever age she’s supposed to be, as she does at 19 when we meet her in A New Hope. I feel like that’s a problem. It’s not the Mary Sue problem. We’re just not seeing her evolve.

Star Trek is doing a different thing. In Strange New Worlds we’re seeing Uhura and everybody else earlier, and you’re watching them learn to eventually become the characters we know. That’s a great place to be. Star Wars could do something very similar. We got a glimpse of it last week, when Leia was hardcore noticing Tala, peeping what she does. But we don’t see her evolving. We just see I’m the little cool kid who’s going to grow up to be a cool adult, and I’m like, where’s the learning process? Where’s the evolution?

We haven’t seen another person learn anything in Star Wars since Luke. We meet Luke, he’s whiny, he doesn’t know anything, and he has to learn. That’s the last time we went on a journey in Star Wars.

Mrs. Know-It-All offered up a what if. What if this is the turning point for little Leia? What if this is the inciting event that makes her eventually want to be in the rebellion, or at least think harder about what the Empire’s really made of? She liked the moment where Reva tells her, hey, we’re on the same side, and there’s a long pause, and Leia goes, well then I should call my dad, if we’re all on the same side. She knew better. Mrs. Know-It-All is fine with where Leia’s going.

I was going to try to explain it away. I might’ve even mansplained it away. But at the end of the day, no, I’ve got a problem with it, period. It’s the same issue I had with Rey in the sequels. I like the sequels as movies, as sci-fi, as whatever they are, and I don’t get lost in the canon conversation. But I’ll admit, like anybody should, that Rey didn’t have to learn anything. They tried to show us she trained with Leia. Okay, cool, but we didn’t go on that journey with her. So now we’re getting young Mary Sue teaching older Mary Sue. And I hate the phrase Mary Sue, because I think it’s inaccurate and I think it’s stupid.

How Obi-Wan Got His Groove Back

A guy online tried this as an insult, and I actually think it’s rather funny and clever: what we’re watching is how Obi-Wan got his groove back. I’m down. That’s the story I came to watch.

Somebody else said we should’ve gotten Obi-Wan on Tatooine doing favors for Jabba the Hutt, doing this and this and this. We already got that. It’s called The Book of Boba Fett. I don’t know why I need another one.

Since he got his butt handed to him last week, it feels like he’s learning how to become the older version of himself. I’ve heard people say you lose Force sensitivity the older you get. I remember a guy named Yoda who could literally pick up a spaceship. To me this is him stretching his muscles. A couple of times early in this episode he’s just playing with moving stuff, trying to get it right. Then during the escape, once they’ve alerted the droid, he’s got his lightsaber out and he’s blocking laser fire the way he always used to. Things are coming back to him.

What I absolutely loved was the moment the lights shut off in Leia’s room, all except the red, and a couple of stormtroopers are like, what? Out of the darkness this blue lightsaber shows up, then it disappears, and this guy’s going, what’s going on out there? You don’t see the shadow until it lights up again. Bro, give me Obi-Wan Kenobi on the sneak. I’m there.

Then there’s what he finds underneath the Inquisitorius. There seems to be some debate about whether they’re dead or in some crazy clear form of carbonite, almost like being in amber. A review I watched thought they were trophies. I didn’t get that. I thought they were being kept for a purpose, whether that’s to experiment on them, or to know where they are, or to find some way to break them. Mrs. Know-It-All could see the trophy read, because she can see this younger Vader being that way.

Standing With Moses Ingram

I don’t normally talk about negative things. There’s enough negativity in the world, and your feed is probably full of it, even when it’s got nothing to do with fandom. I can’t speak for Mrs. Know-It-All, she can speak for herself, but I very much feel like the world is full of so much darkness that I don’t need to go there. I like enjoying my fandom because it’s fun.

I’m saying all of that to say this is why I’m only now saying something. I’m saying something because it’s persisting, and it’s tired.

I don’t understand the inherent racism and sexism behind attacking Moses Ingram for being on this series. I see nothing wrong with the character she’s playing. I think Inquisitor Reva is great. I don’t carry any of those feelings from Rebels or anything earlier that would have me worried about an Inquisitor being this or that, or about her breaking canon.

And first off, Moses Ingram wasn’t doing any of those things. She’s an actress. She was hired to play a role, she’s doing what she’s told, and she’s doing an amazing job. She didn’t step in and start making decisions about Star Wars. So take it up with Dave Filoni, Kathleen Kennedy, Jon Favreau, whoever you want to talk about. Heck, George Lucas if you want.

The funny part is I sit here and go, I’d be scared of her character. So what Star Wars were you looking for? If the answer is the one in your head canon, well, that’s on you. Go make that movie. Get yourself a camera. Heck, use your phone these days.

I think attacking her is foolish and I think it’s silly. I stand with Moses Ingram, Mrs. Know-It-All concurs, and the Know-It-Alls stand with Moses Ingram.

The Verdict

Obi-Wan Kenobi Part IV gets two numbers on the Know-It-All Index: a 7 out of 10 from Mrs. Know-It-All and a 6 out of 10 from me.

Hers first. This wasn’t her favorite episode, and she was actually kind of let down by it. It was good, but she’s still looking for the wow factor, and she didn’t get it even when Reva threw the rebel symbol on the table to scare Leia. She loves Reva as a character. She’s a monster, she’s doing really good work, and she intimidated Leia, but Leia also knew better. Mrs. Know-It-All didn’t want to go much lower than a 7. Across the whole show so far, her word is okay. There’s a lot that has to happen in the next two episodes, and they need to pick it up a little. It’s a limited series, though because of the reception they’re talking about maybe one more season, and my feeling is there’s only so much story you can tell in this time frame. She likes where they’re going. She just wants to know if they can land the plane in two episodes.

I’m going one less than her. It earned every one of those six points. It was a lackluster episode, but it wasn’t bad. It was well executed, and you could definitely see the money on the screen. I’m not against what they’re doing. I’m enjoying the show and I’m entertained.

A lot of it for me is the rewatchability factor. You know how we go back and rewatch The Mandalorian? I’ve only rewatched one episode of this, and that was last week’s. I don’t know that I’ll rewatch this one, though I may.

Next week is the penultimate episode, and statistically speaking the second to last episode is normally a television series’ best. Two more weeks, two more episodes, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do.

Your turn. You should definitely watch it, and then tell us what you thought, because we’d love to have that discussion. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.