Part Five of Obi-Wan Kenobi is so much better than last week’s episode, and it still doesn’t feel like the episode before a finale.
Sword fights, revenge, true love, it’s all in there. It was very engaging. And when it was over, Mrs. Know-It-All turned to me and said that did not feel like that episode. The penultimate one. Her favorite saying is “I’m new, I’m looking for that big thing,” and she didn’t feel like she got it. It wasn’t bad. The story’s good. We’re just not wowed by all of it yet.
A little housekeeping, because you should know how we watched this. About halfway through the episode the internet went out here at the house, so we finished the back half on my phone. An iPhone 13 Pro, so it wasn’t terrible, but that’s where we were. I do take notes, but I have ADD, and shock of shocks, I get sucked into the episode. Twenty minutes in I’m taking notes. Then I look down and we’re 45 minutes in and the notes have just faded out. Dang it. And we recorded this at about four in the morning, so if a name escapes me, that’s why.
Still Waiting on the Wow
What kills me is a lot of people are going to compare Obi-Wan Kenobi to The Book of Boba Fett, because there were a lot of folks on the internet who didn’t like Book of Boba Fett. It was purposefully paced, and you can go back and watch my reviews, I was still engaged at every level.
This one, I think fans just wanted Obi-Wan Kenobi back. That’s why everybody went, oh, Kenobi. But at the end of the day I don’t know that I was ever pining for this. I don’t know that I needed an Obi-Wan Kenobi series to do what this one’s doing. Then again, who needs any of these things? I don’t mind it. I like it, because we’re seeing young Leia and now we’re going to see young Luke.
Mrs. Know-It-All had a better way of putting it than I did. She’s not getting the action, but she loves the story, and she thinks that’s because it’s a story she’s never known or thought about. Later on I brought up Lord of the Rings and she ran with it. She’s watched them all, and watched them all again with me, and that’s a great story that isn’t wall to wall action either. She said that’s why she likes Obi-Wan: not a lot of action, a whole lot of story. The way her brain works, she’s trying to piece the timeline together. This story goes here, The Mandalorian goes here, Book of Boba Fett goes here. That’s been so much fun for her.
She’ll be disappointed if we don’t get a huge action-packed finale next week. But it was still a really good story.
Her one real complaint is Leia. They started her so strong, and then they just get rid of her for half the episode.
The Climb Back to Being Obi-Wan
First, a correction, because I got something wrong last week. I thought they’d already arrived at Jabiim, and that it was the planet you leave from. I was wrong. Last week was the path to get to Jabiim. Jabiim is where they take you someplace else, and that’s where we are in this episode.
What we get on Jabiim is a really engaging look at Obi-Wan beginning, and I don’t want to say his turn, because turn sounds bad. He’s begun his climb back to being Obi-Wan. He finds this box of lightsabers that have been left behind, and other Jedi stuff. So what does he do? He puts on the brown robe vest that we know, and he’s starting to feel more like Obi-Wan. He sees people panicking, he stops everyone, and he starts telling them how they’re going to get through this.
And I looked over and said, dude, he was a general of the Republic during the Clone Wars. The man knows how to strategize. Immediately everybody falls in line, even the guy running the place, and gosh, I can’t remember his name and I didn’t have IMDb in front of me. I like that he’s taking charge. Mrs. Know-It-All does too. We’re starting to see the Obi-Wan we know and love. It’s the beginning of it.
For those of you playing at home who haven’t seen the episode (and what the heck are you reading this for, go watch the episode), the Empire shows up. They’ve tracked them down, the whole nine yards. It turns out little Lola was Reva’s spy, with a tracker on her that turned her little eye red. Lola goes up into the controls for the big doors that open and close and burns them out. The guy says he can’t get up there and fix it, it’s too small. And Leia just starts walking. I got this. I’m going to need a ladder.
What I thought was really cool is Obi-Wan says, do what she says. He already knew this was a very bright child. This is him accepting it, after years of being blind to things because he pushed everything from the Force down after what happened.
Mrs. Know-It-All thinks the real moment comes with the transmission from Senator Organa. He comes up and says, more or less, I haven’t heard from you, you’ve been too silent, even though we said silence. Go back to Tatooine and protect the boy. She thinks that’s when the light clicked on for Obi-Wan. We have a problem, because this is Anakin’s son and we all know what happened with Vader. He’s got to get back to Tatooine.
I agree with her, and I don’t think the idea of a disillusioned Obi-Wan is unrealistic. It’s going to be about 20 years from Episode III to when he finally meets Luke on Tatooine. We’re maybe nine or ten years into that here. He’s had all that time to think, to regret, to want to hide. I don’t care who you are. You hold the line for a decade by yourself, you get depressed. That’s rough.
Order 66 Still Shouldn’t Have Worked
Watching him take over that room brought back a problem I’ve always had, and there are tons of videos on the internet about it. Order 66 should not have wiped out the Jedi.
There are books. For those of you who are going to tell me it’s explained in this one book, fine. The Jedi Temple was built on top of a Sith whatever the heck. It’s such a stupid answer, and to me that’s just bad writing.
Bottom line, I don’t care how capable the clone soldiers are. I don’t care how many more of them there were than Jedi. I refuse to believe the Sith were able to put the dark side over the entire galaxy. I’m sorry, I refuse. Individually, I think the Jedi would’ve dealt with the scenario they were in. Ki-Adi-Mundi shouldn’t have been ambushed.
How Yoda handled it is how all the other Jedi should’ve handled it. Think about the blue Twi’lek Jedi, and I can’t remember her name, as I sit here throwing names around like I know everything about Star Wars. She’s under those giant mushroom things in Episode III and all of a sudden she gets attacked. You’re telling me she felt nothing? Meanwhile Yoda is standing there looking over the battle on Kashyyyk. The two guys come up behind him, and he just jumps up, does his thing and takes their heads. You can see it in his eyes. He knew. He felt something.
One Flashback, Two Memories
I want to talk a little technical. The flashback is split so that we see it from Vader and from Obi-Wan, and I thought that was pretty good storytelling.
We get a de-aged, only slightly de-aged, Hayden Christensen as Anakin. And it’s not Clone Wars Anakin, a little older with the longer hair and the scar on his face. This is Padawan Anakin, the end of Episode I to the beginning of Episode II. He looked a little stockier, because Hayden Christensen has obviously gotten a little stockier. Other than that, I liked the parallels.
Obi-Wan is playing a chess game. He’s seeing himself and Anakin in a fight from when they were younger, and he’s playing the same game today, working out what each of them learned in that moment. They both go back to the same scene, and it’s Obi-Wan telling him that his need to always prove himself is what’s blinding him. With the Vader we have now, that struck a nerve. Absolutely.
Reva Wants Vader
I like the confrontation between Reva and Obi-Wan, and so does Mrs. Know-It-All, because it’s an aha moment. I don’t think Reva has turned back to the light at all. I think this is all very self-centered, and I think she’s still very upset with Obi-Wan.
The good thing about this episode is we finally learn what happened. Reva and Anakin were face to face, and she survived it, for the most part. She was underneath the bodies. She felt them all.
There were folks pointing out that back in Part One, when they showed the little group of younglings practicing with that one Jedi before all hell broke loose, there’s one Black girl in the group. That’s confirmed this episode. That was her.
She’s named Grand Inquisitor at the very outset of this episode, so you figure she’s going to flex a little bit. But I don’t think she’s looking for Obi-Wan anymore. Her revenge is Vader, just in a different light than Vader’s revenge on Obi-Wan.
That’s what’s interesting to me, because the dark side normally eats its own tail. The point of the Sith is that only the strong survive, by strength of will. That’s why you have a master and an apprentice, and that’s it. Reva has no designs on being a Sith. She just wants revenge. What this episode tells us is she never actually betrayed the Jedi. She’s been chasing her own revenge the whole time.
So Reva lays out her history with Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan very much tries to use it. He’s going to show up here. He’s going to kill everybody. Are you going to let all those people die this time, again? A repeat of what happened to her when she was a very young Padawan. She gets mad, she cuts the lock they’d put on the door, she yanks him out and catches him. And then she sends him back inside with two stormtroopers.
How I Think This Ends
Mrs. Know-It-All asked me what I thought when Reva saw the transmission about Tatooine, so let me let everybody behind the curtain. I follow a few spoiler people on purpose. Rumor people. I’ve seen what they said was an early draft outline, so I don’t think it’s a hundred percent accurate. But everything so far has happened the way it said: Obi-Wan leaves Tatooine and everything happens off of Tatooine. We weren’t getting the Tatooine series we all assumed we were getting off that poster of him walking in the desert.
The outline says Reva goes back and finds Luke. When the dust settles, Obi-Wan comes back and she faces him. It’s similar to Rebels, where Darth Maul shows up, he and Obi-Wan have their last tussle, and at some point he works out the same thing. Is he the one?
If that’s how they wrote it, I think it’s smart. And I don’t think it’s a face off. I think it’s a breaking moment for her. Who is this? What is this? And he tells her this is our hope, this is what we have, and I have to watch him until he comes of age. Mrs. Know-It-All thinks Reva may end up with a place alongside Obi-Wan after that. Could be. I don’t know.
I don’t think the final confrontation with Vader happens on Tatooine, because Vader never goes back there until much later. Mrs. Know-It-All doesn’t think we get another Vader and Obi-Wan fight at all, and she’s okay with that. I think you get another encounter. I don’t think you get another fight. We’ve seen all the fighting we’re going to get.
There’s one thing they haven’t fulfilled yet. It’s the line from the movies where Vader tells Luke that Obi-Wan once thought as he does. When did that happen? At some point Obi-Wan had to say, I feel the good in you, you can come back. I think this is going to be that. Obi-Wan finally tries to reach Anakin in a way he didn’t at the beginning. Anakin says no, rejects it, and goes to strike him down.
And that’s when I think Qui-Gon shows up. We still haven’t seen him, and allegedly Liam Neeson is supposed to be on the show. We all expected some lofty conversation between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan by now. They’re always trying to subvert our expectations, so I think what we get instead is a quick cameo. Think Gandalf in The Two Towers, at Helm’s Deep, when it’s a really low moment and all of a sudden there’s that shining light and he’s on the hill. Qui-Gon appears and says something big and deep to Anakin. I don’t think Anakin is swayed by Qui-Gon. I think he’s stalled by him, and that’s how Obi-Wan gets away. That’s the last time they see each other until Episode IV.
That’s me. There’s no evidence to that effect. I’m thinking like a writer.
Then Mrs. Know-It-All said, what if it’s Reva and not Qui-Gon? I think Reva’s the second storyline. She heads to Tatooine because she wants to know what the heck this is about, and she’s waiting when he comes back. He’s going to think it’s a confrontation. She probably even lights her lightsaber up just to get his attention, and then it’s, look, I don’t really want to fight.
The Show Is Called Obi-Wan Kenobi
I kind of like the way the Reva story is starting to go. It feels like it’s now a story of Obi-Wan and Reva, and I like that.
The woke Star Wars haters are going to say they’re baiting and switching us like Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe, and it’s all going to end up being Reva’s story. Bro, we’ve spent every episode with Obi-Wan. I don’t know what anybody’s talking about. Mrs. Know-It-All watched Masters with me, and she remembers me telling her about that whole thing.
Moses Ingram is an excellent, excellent co-star. She’s doing a wonderful job. But this show is literally called Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I do feel like there’ve probably been a couple of filler episodes in here somewhere, and for six episodes, why would you need filler? But I like the journey he’s been on so far. And all of this is getting so close to Rogue One that I kind of want to watch it again. Once we’re done with Obi-Wan, we’re watching Rogue One.
The Verdict
Obi-Wan Kenobi Part 5 gets two numbers on the Know-It-All Index: an 8.5 out of 10 from Mrs. Know-It-All and an 8 out of 10 from me.
She went first, and she knows what you’re thinking, because she opened by saying it wasn’t loaded with action. But the more she thought about it, the more she really does like this story. Her comparison was that it’d be a rough movie if you had to watch this whole thing at once. Maybe it’s because all the pieces are falling into place. All she knows is she really did like this episode, and she thinks it’s one of the better ones.
I went as high as an 8. I think we’re starting to see more of the Obi-Wan we want to see. Next week’s episode will either make or break my rating for the entire series so far. So next week we’ll rate Part Six, and then we’ll do the full series rating as well.
We’re still working on a plan for a live show of some sort, probably starting with Star Trek and eventually Star Wars too. Mrs. Know-It-All wants a Star Wars talk Thursday. I wanted to call it Star Talks, until she pointed out Neil deGrasse Tyson already has StarTalk. We’ll figure it out.
Your turn. Tell us what you thought about Part Five, and tell us who shows up to stall Vader next week: Qui-Gon, Reva, or nobody at all. We’d love to answer some of your questions. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.
