Disney Archives - The Wide Screen

June 1, 2022June 2, 2022

“Obi-Wan Kenobi” Gets Off To A Slow Start With First 2 Episodes

**SPOILERS FOR KENOBI EPISODES ONE AND TWO AHEAD!**

If Lucasfilm plans to rely on Disney+ original series’ like The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, The Book Of Boba Fett, and now Obi-Wan Kenobi, to keep the Star Wars franchise fresh in peoples’ minds while they work out where to go with the films following the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga and the poor reception to The Rise Of Skywalker, then I’m going to need the writers and showrunners of these series’ to get some fresh ideas because I genuinely don’t know how many more world-weary middle-aged single father figures to rambunctious children I can take from a franchise that has literally all the space in the galaxy to do something different but won’t because it worked that one time in The Mandalorian.

And Pedro Pascal did it really well in The Mandalorian season one, to be fair, which is why we all fell in love with the trope in the first place and presumably why Pascal is now being typecast as world-weary middle-aged single father figures to rambunctious children even outside of Star Wars. But in the two years since The Mandalorian debuted, with the exception of The Clone Wars‘ final season, the anthology series Star Wars: Visions, and a couple of Lego holiday specials, Star Wars has shifted focus entirely to making stories about – and seemingly targeted at – middle-aged dads.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, of course not. It’s not even necessarily indicative of lazy storytelling, because there are many different types of middle-aged dads to be found in this world, and even more to be found amongst the stars, so it stands to reason that there should be a number of subtly different stories to be told about middle-aged dads, each one unique in its own way and worth telling. But I do think it’s worth examining why Star Wars has become…shall we say, a little bit obsessed with this trope recently, before I get into my thoughts on the first two episodes of Kenobi, specifically.

If Star Wars had a long history of telling stories about middle-aged dads/father figures with small children, it would be one thing, but discounting all of the Legends material that Disney decanonized and looking solely at the movies and series’ released prior to The Mandalorian in 2019, there really aren’t that many dads…in fact, absent fathers and the absence of fathers are two recurring themes in the Skywalker Saga, which begins with Anakin Skywalker being born out of a sci-fi Immaculate Conception, then becoming a remote and unapproachable figure in the lives of his children, then being exhumed by his grandson Ben as a stand-in father figure for Ben’s own neglectful father, Han Solo. The cycle theoretically breaks with Rey, an orphan who adopts the Skywalker name and becomes the spiritual descendant of Anakin Skywalker, but sadly we never learned enough about her as a character to say with certainty what she’d be like as a parent.

Then you’ve got the mentors like Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker, who will inevitably become the single most important person in the lives of their apprentices after about fifteen minutes of training before dying…but it’s hard to call any of these men (or in Yoda’s case, male-coded aliens) father figures. Maybe Qui-Gon Jinn, but even when Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) calls out to the Force-ghost of his former Jedi master in the first two episodes of Kenobi, I don’t hear the desperation of a son needing a father’s advice, but rather a student seeking the approval of a respected teacher.

After Qui-Gon’s death in A Phantom Menace, I think Obi-Wan tried to be both a mentor and a father figure to Anakin Skywalker, but he was never able to enforce the Jedi Code because of his own complicated relationship with the damn thing, and gradually Anakin started to regard him as a lenient older brother – one whom he loved deeply, but whose guidance he rarely ever felt he needed. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to extrapolate from this that Obi-Wan regarded Anakin’s son Luke as a nephew, especially when you look at their interactions in A New Hope. As for Luke, his relationship with his own students appears to have always been impersonal.

What was my point again? Oh yeah, dads don’t exist in Star Wars; at least as far as the Skywalkers are concerned (in case you’re wondering, moms do exist, but they either die in childbirth like Padmé Amidala or live long enough to become silent, stoic spectators in their sons’ lives, like Shmi Skywalker and even Leia Organa). But then The Mandalorian introduced Baby Yoda into our lives, and nothing has been the same since. Now, every middle-aged man in Star Wars has a child. Crucially, they’re never the biological fathers of these children – because Star Wars is about found-family, and there is something truly touching about characters from vastly different backgrounds forming profound emotional connections.

And for the most part, the trope has worked. I’ve made it clear in the past that, despite my gripes with The Mandalorian‘s sluggish pacing, I am deeply invested in the story of disillusioned bounty hunter Din Djarin coming to care for his pint-sized sidekick Grogu over the course of two seasons. I thought it was adorable when the battle-hardened clones of the Bad Batch adopted the experimental clone Omega and made her feel at home in their tight-knit family unit. I had far bigger issues with The Book Of Boba Fett than Fett randomly taking a teeny-bopper biker gang in off the streets of Mos Eisley (I never wrote about the show because, frankly, it bored me to death).

But my issues with Kenobi, while not limited to fatigue at the overuse of this trope, stem from the showrunners’ perplexing decision to put Kenobi through the single dad filter and saddle him with a small child – a ten-year old Princess Leia Organa (Vivien Lyra Blair), to be precise, kidnapped by mercenaries in the first episode and whisked away to a remote planet in an attempt to lure Kenobi out of hiding. That could have been a unique premise for some kind of sci-fi heist thriller, but Leia stays kidnapped for maybe twenty minutes total before Kenobi locates her in a storage unit, easily incapacitates her guards, and escapes.

Episode two concludes with the two characters returning to Alderaan, crisis seemingly averted, but it’s implied that they’ll get held up or forced to take a detour so that Obi-Wan Kenobi can learn an important life-lesson from Leia before they part ways – and so that Leia has a chance to meet her biological dad and Kenobi’s pursuer, Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen & James Earl Jones). She won’t be aware she’s just met her biological father, mind you, but fans will be and that’s all that really matters to Lucasfilm; at least based on the staggering number of thoroughly pointless callbacks and namedrops in these first two episodes.

Indeed, the stage is already set for just such an encounter, with ten-year old Leia struggling to reconcile her responsibilities as an Organa with her impulsivity, relentless curiosity, and recklessness – traits apparently common to all Skywalkers. She hates being cooped up in the royal palace, and frustrates her adoptive mother Breha (Simone Kessel) by skipping out on brunches with her cartoonishly pretentious cousins to go climb trees in the forest and watch starships all day, accompanied by an annoyingly cute droid that seems purposefully designed to sell merchandise. Every one of Leia’s scenes is written as if we don’t already know and weren’t literally just reminded in the recap preceding the episode that Leia is, in fact, still a Skywalker, but how could we forget when the characters stop dead in their tracks to tell us that Leia reminds them of someone (Anakin and Padmé. Don’t bother guessing or reading into it, it’s Anakin and Padmé).

Side-note, but there’s something extremely frustrating about the implication that most of Leia’s defining character traits come from her biological parents and not her adoptive parents who actually raised her, loved her, and gave her the life Anakin Skywalker was never going to be able to provide for her. Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) has a lovely little monologue in the first episode to the general effect of “family is the people you choose, not the people chosen for you”, but his words are undermined by all the callbacks to the Skywalkers that serve only to pull focus from his and his wife’s contributions to the making of Princess Leia as we know her.

Kenobi‘s premise allows its writers to indulge in the kind of incessant namedrops and thinly-veiled references to other movies that quickly become cringeworthy than cute, but the blatant abuse of nostalgia works if the end-goal is to force viewers to look past the poor pacing, lackluster dialogue, and other technical and story issues. Forget that you just watched the same long, slow montage of Obi-Wan Kenobi taking the bus home from work and feeding his alien camel three times – there’s Temuera Morrison, cameoing as a clone trooper of the 501st! There’s that toy starship that Luke Skywalker played with in A New Hope exactly once, and it even has a completely unnecessary backstory now! That guy’s the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) from Star Wars: Rebels!

Now, to be fair, I was excited for the Grand Inquisitor – even after the trailers gave it away that his distinctive character design hadn’t made the jump from animation to live-action particularly well. I was certainly not expecting his character to be rendered incompetent and seemingly killed off near the end of the second episode, several years before the events of Rebels season one. Regardless of whether he’s dead or alive, however, one thing became clear to me in the moment that Reva (Moses Ingram) impaled him and left his body on the floor of a cargo-bay; Kenobi is probably not aimed at fans of Rebels.

Nor is it designed to appeal to fans of the sequel trilogy. If I had to guess, I’d say that Kenobi is a last-ditch effort by Lucasfilm to try and win back the people most likely to have disliked Rebels and outright despised the sequel trilogy – middle-aged men, particularly those with strong emotional attachments to the characters and settings from the original trilogy and prequel trilogy we’ve seen popping up on Disney+ in all the aforementioned dad-centric Star Wars shows. How much of that is Favreau’s obsession with recapturing the original trilogy’s aesthetics and Filoni’s desire to redeem the public image of the prequels as part of a commitment to George Lucas, and how much of that is Lucasfilm learning all the wrong lessons from the poor reception to the sequel trilogy? I wish I knew.

Favreau and Filoni’s fingerprints are all over Kenobi, although they weren’t involved in the show until surprisingly late in the writing process. Ironically, it’s been confirmed that they were enlisted to tweak the show’s scripts after noticing troubling similarities to The Mandalorian, which raises the question of how much of a blatant Mandalorian rip-off Kenobi must have been that even its revised version still plays out like a Mandalorian rip-off, hitting most of the same beats and falling into all the same traps. Filoni also took the opportunity to insert the Grand Inquisitor, one of his own original characters, into the script (which, come to think of it, might explain why the writers killed him off first chance they got). And of course, Kenobi director Deborah Chow is one of Favreau and Filoni’s recruits, having worked on The Mandalorian season one.

It’s truly unfortunate that Chow and her talented cast are burdened with a writer’s room at war with itself, because here and there are glimmers of what Kenobi could be if it only knew what it was trying to be, and how to get to that point swiftly and directly. In Obi-Wan Kenobi’s self-imposed exile on Tatooine, I see the potential for a raw and unflinching character study, something wholly unlike anything we’ve seen before in Star Wars. You want to throw Darth Vader in there too, explore Kenobi’s guilt over losing his closest friend – his brother – to the Dark Side and the toll of isolation on a mind already fractured by that kind of anguish, sure! I’d be down for that.

Or…we could do another show about a grumpy middle-aged guy and a small child working together to fight bad guys while running around the galaxy. That works too, I guess. It’s just…not the kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi story I would have expected to be set after his self-imposed exile on Tatooine, that’s all. It makes you wonder why Kenobi would go back to Tatooine after this is over if he realizes now that Leia is every bit as important as Luke and requires the same constant surveillance to ensure that someone doesn’t…I don’t know, kidnap her again. Not like the high-profile daughter of a senator publicly opposed to the Empire’s authoritarianism might be in constant danger or anything.

I can nitpick stupid stuff like that, but we’d be here all day and it wouldn’t get us anywhere because ultimately, my problem with Kenobi is just that I’m not feeling the decision to make it another single dad story in the style of The Mandalorian, but I can’t fully explain why, even to myself. I just know it’s not working for me yet and I’m getting a bit tired of the trope, but if you enjoy all these stories about single dads, or if you can relate to them on an emotional level, or if you just think single dads are attractive, more power to you.

I debated publishing this post because I hate to be critical of something that people seem to be having a fun time with, especially when my issues with it aren’t concrete, but hey, it happens sometimes. I don’t like everything that Marvel’s been putting out lately, either, and it’s caused me to stop writing as frequently about either franchise.

Oh, one last thing before I go. I want to make it abundantly clear that regardless of your opinions on Kenobi, you should be able to express those opinions without resorting to racism, sexism, and other forms of bullying….and if, for whatever reason, you feel like you can’t, then there’s a better than even chance that you are a racist, a sexist, and a bully. And I will not tolerate the harassment of the show’s actors, who are just doing their jobs and putting in good performances, I might add, so if you’re tempted to spew that nonsense in my comments section, I will delete your comments and block you expeditiously.

Episode Rating: 5.5/10

April 12, 2022

“Percy Jackson” Casts Walker Scobell In Lead Role

As we’ve all learned the hard way from J.K. Rowling and the slow-motion train-wreck that is the Fantastic Beasts franchise, giving authors too much creative control over adaptations of their work can be…uh, risky. I say this as a writer who would very much like to be invited onto the hypothetical film set of any hypothetical adaptation of my own somewhat hypothetical fantasy novel, but the truth is that published authors can be a somewhat stubborn lot – convinced they know exactly what’s right for their story and characters, and unwilling to allow professional directors, screenwriters, and casting directors to do their thing.

It’s a good thing, then, that Rick Riordan appears to be the polar opposite of J.K. Rowling – in every way in which an author and a person can be. I try not to use the term “genuinely decent human being” of people I don’t actually know, but Riordan has minded his own business for as long as I’ve been following him on social media, and I appreciate that he seems to know when and how to properly utilize the power of his massive following, and when not to speak at all. That, and I guess the fact that he actually writes awesome queer and trans characters into his books and doesn’t wait for decades to have passed before ever retroactively confirming when a character is gay (I’m looking directly at you, Rowling).

I also appreciate that, while Riordan has made no secret of his disdain for the Percy Jackson films made between 2010 and 2013, and his negative reaction was not at all unwarranted given how badly those films butchered even the most basic themes of his books, he is coming into the new adaptation of Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief for Disney+ with the understanding that there are fundamental differences between writing books and writing for television, and that just because he knows the story better than anyone doesn’t mean he’s necessarily the best person to translate it into a visual medium. He has joined forces with some excellent writers and producers, including Black Sails‘ Jonathan E. Steinberg, Dan Shotz, and Daphne Olive, and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Monica Owusu-Breen, among several others.

The area in which I’m most pleased to see that Riordan is getting a say is casting – because if there was one thing about the 2010 Percy Jackson adaptation that ruined that movie for me and many other fans (it’s hard to limit it to just one thing, actually), it was the casting of actors in their late teens as characters depicted in the first book as twelve-year old children, completely altering the dynamics of their relationships with each other. Riordan was firmly opposed to the decision to “age up” his heroes, but had no power whatsoever over the production.

This time around, the mistakes that doomed the Percy Jackson film franchise to a swift death won’t be repeated, as Riordan has made the wise decision to look for age-appropriate actors who can grow into the key roles of Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood, alongside a new generation of fans. Yesterday, it was announced that thirteen-year old Walker Scobell of Netflix’s The Adam Project has joined the production in the role of Percy Jackson himself – and the enthusiastic response to the casting even from adult fans of the books is proof, if any was needed, that this was always the correct approach to take.

I suppose I ought to explain what the books are about. Percy Jackson is an urban-fantasy series that hinges on the intriguing premise that all of the gods and monsters of ancient Greek mythology are real and very much alive in the present day, where they take frequently amusing disguises. Percy Jackson himself is a demigod, the only known son of Poseidon, god of the sea. He gets mixed up in a war between the gods after being implicated in the theft of Zeus’ prized lightning bolt, and has to battle Medusa, the Minotaur, Ares, and other characters both iconic and obscure on his journey to Los Angeles to find the true Lightning Thief and clear his name.

Along the way, he’s joined by Annabeth Chase, a daughter of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Grover Underwood, a timid satyr tasked with protecting demigods from monsters. Annabeth and Grover have yet to be cast, but Riordan has promised that those and other announcements are not far off. Personally, I’m most interested to see the actors playing the Greek gods – something about the 2010 Percy Jackson film that bothered me to no end was how the director and writers took everything that was funny and clever about Rick Riordan’s descriptions of the gods and simply…stripped it all away.

As for whether Walker Scobell will make a good Percy Jackson, I finally started watching The Adam Project last night (Scobell’s only film to date, available on Netflix), and while Ryan Reynolds is every bit as grating as I usually find him to be, Scobell is honestly delightful as the younger version of Reynolds’ character – he’s snarky, funny, and expressive, with great comedic timing and a natural gift for monologuing. With slightly darker hair, that’s Percy Jackson right there.

I always worry for child actors joining major franchises and potentially becoming targets for bullying and harassment from adults, but for some reason I want to believe that the Percy Jackson fandom is…I don’t know, relatively more chill than other fandoms where this has been a problem. Despite having read all the books, I haven’t interacted with very many Percy Jackson fans, so I just don’t know, and at this point I’d be a little scared to dive in.

So anyway, what do you think of Walker Scobell’s casting, and how excited are you for the new Percy Jackson series? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

March 16, 2022

Vibrant First Trailer For “Ms. Marvel” Offers A New Look At Kamala’s Altered Powers

I have long been sick and tired of those people on social media (you know the ones) who seem to have nothing better to do in their lives than trash adaptations they feel are “bad” or “unfaithful” (usually for racist reasons), only to immediately turn around and idolize Marvel Studios for always “respecting the fans” and “honoring the source material”, but today I want to talk about them. Because now Marvel has released the first trailer for Ms. Marvel, an original series coming to Disney+ this June, and those people…those people are real quiet all of a sudden.

And I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that a lot of them were never gonna watch Ms. Marvel in the first place, because the concept of a brown Pakistani-American Muslim girl saving the world is just a little bit too much for them to handle, but we all know in the end most of them will cave and watch – and don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’ll complain about the show bitterly, but I’ll be very surprised if any of them call it out for being a “bad” adaptation even though, in this case, I think there’s a very convincing argument to be made for why this is, if not an bad adaptation (that word is strong, too strong for me to use in good faith before the show has aired a single episode), then at least a problematic one.

And it’s not like this is the first time Marvel has done this, either, but there’s always an excuse for why it’s okay in their case. To cite just one example out of many, Wanda Maximoff’s Romani and Jewish heritage, which is pretty integral to her character, was erased when she and her twin brother Pietro were introduced to the MCU in Age Of Ultron. The excuse at the time was that Marvel needed to give them both completely new backstories to avoid getting into trouble with 20th Century Fox, but Disney now owns Fox and has yet to fix or even address this problem. For some, it’s ceased to even be a problem, and that’s kinda sad.

With Ms. Marvel, the problem isn’t the casting of Kamala Khan. Newcomer Iman Vellani is instantly charismatic, leaning heavily into the side of Kamala that is colorful, quirky, and so wildly imaginative that, in the first half of this trailer at least, she’s surrounded by animated thought-bubbles and doodles like she’s in a comic-book herself. Obviously, that’s not the only side of Kamala’s character that this series ought to be exploring, but it’s the only one that this trailer really hones in on – and Vellani seems particularly well-cast as Kamala the fangirl, fan-artist, and fanfic-writer who desperately wants to be a superhero but is still shocked and slightly terrified when her wish comes true.

But here’s the problem. In the comics, it’s important – I’d argue crucial – to Kamala’s character arc that her superpowers, when they manifest, are neither pretty nor cool at first glance. She can’t fly, or glow, or shoot laser-beams from her eyes. Instead, by what seems like a cruel twist of fate, she discovers that she’s a polymorph with the ability to rearrange the molecules in her body, allowing her to stretch, shrink, grow, flatten, expand, and contort into various shapes. This is a big deal because when she realizes that she can use this power to look like different people, she initially chooses to take the form of her favorite superhero – Captain Marvel.

Kamala in the comics is deeply scared that unless she looks like the conventionally attractive white superheroes she’s grown up idolizing, people not only won’t see her as a superhero, but won’t even trust her to save them in a life-or-death situation. It’s really important to her character arc that her powers are something she could either choose to embrace or to be ashamed of, and that she chooses to embrace the parts of herself that might alienate other people – knowing full well that it means giving up her one shot to be what the media says a superhero “should” look like – because the “brown girls from Jersey City” deserve a superhero who looks like them.

But no, let’s give her a cute clip-on bracelet that glows and shoots sparkles instead.

I have no trouble understanding why this choice was made, so you can all save your prepared excuses. I’m obviously aware that elasticity is a weird superpower, one that tests how far audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief even when well-executed. Pixar’s The Incredibles proves that even back in 2004 it could be done in animation, but the live-action Fantastic Four movie that came out a year later conclusively proved that special effects technology had not yet caught up to the comics in regards to elasticity. Seventeen years and two more Fantastic Four movies later, that conclusion has yet to be refuted.

(Speaking of the Fantastic Four, I do not believe there is any truth to the theory that Kamala’s powers were altered so that Mr. Fantastic will stand out more when he makes his MCU debut, as this has never been a problem before. If there’s enough room for two archers named Hawkeye and at least eleven Eternals with slight variations on the same cosmic energy-based powers, I think Ms. Marvel and Mr. Fantastic could have peacefully co-existed in the same universe without anyone getting confused).

My issue, and the issue which many fans of Kamala Khan have with this change, is not that Kamala’s powers are different, but that changing them to be pretty and cool and “cosmic”, as Kamala excitedly whispers at one point in the trailer, fundamentally alters who she is. Her new powers, instead of causing her to question why she doesn’t look or feel like a superhero (and ultimately leading her to the realization that it’s the superhero media she consumes that put those doubts in her head), have the exact opposite effect – allowing her to live her dream-life as an easily merchandisable action figure on sale now at a Disney store near you!

And I’m sure that Ms. Marvel will have a sweet message about the importance of being yourself, but you can count on Disney to take a middle-of-the-road stance on pretty much everything, no matter how inoffensive it may seem. Be yourself…to a point. Don’t ever be so accepting of your differences that you accidentally step outside one of the studio’s target demographics – that would be radical.

Eh, maybe the cynic in me is just wary of all of Disney and Marvel’s attempts at representation following recent events. Trust me, I really want Ms. Marvel to surprise me, and I’d like nothing more than for there to be a twist near the end of the series where the magic bracelet is broken or lost or stolen by an antagonist, but it turns out that Kamala has actually had her comic-accurate polymorphic abilities the whole time and chooses to use those instead of the cool sparkly powers that her bracelet gave her. But at the end of the day, it’s easier to sell clip-on bracelets than Terrigen crystals that unlock latent Inhuman powers in humans, so I doubt any of that will pan out.

Unfortunately, the situation with Kamala’s powers isn’t the only controversy overshadowing the new series, though it might well be the most easily remediable in the long run. Amongst the supporting cast encircling Iman Vellani in Ms. Marvel we have Yasmeen Fletcher, a Christian actress significantly lighter-skinned than her character, Nakia Bahadir, who has been portrayed in the comics as a fairly unambiguously brown hijabi Muslim girl, and Zenobia Shroff, a non-Muslim Indian actress playing Kamala’s Pakistani Muslim mother. Several other casting announcements have additionally been criticized for perpetuating the trend of colorism in Hollywood.

I won’t lie, seeing the Ms. Marvel (2014) #5 comic-book cover recreated so faithfully on the first poster for this series and then again in the trailer itself was exciting, but the similarities can’t end there. I mean, they can – Marvel can technically just give us a completely different version of this beloved character and expect us to be okay with that, but it’s disappointing that they can get away with it so easily and that a lot of fans will brush aside any criticism as illegitimate or mean-spirited, even when it comes predominantly from the Muslim fans and fans of SWANA (Southwest Asian & North African) descent whom this character was originally made to represent.

Trailer Rating: 7.5/10

March 10, 2022

“Kenobi” 1st Teaser Trailer Takes The Hermit Hero On One Last Joyride

**SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS: REBELS AND JEDI: FALLEN ORDER AHEAD!**

An intergalactic manhunt is afoot in the first teaser trailer for Lucasfilm’s long-awaited Kenobi series, coming to Disney+ this May on the 45th anniversary of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s very first appearance in Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (at the time just Star Wars). Kenobi himself is one of the two primary targets of this manhunt, but the series looks to be so broad in scope from the trailer alone that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if several other Jedi show up – hiding in various far-flung corners of the galaxy, but leaving in their wake a “trail of compassion” that corrupted Jedi named Inquisitors know how to follow to its source.

This teaser trailer, with its heavy focus on the characters around Kenobi and their actions, gives me the distinct feeling that Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t the driving force behind most of the main events in this series, which doesn’t surprise me all that much. I mean, his name is in the title, so I have to assume he’s at least somewhat integral to the story Lucasfilm has chosen to tell through his unique viewpoint, but (a) they also marketed The Book Of Boba Fett as a Boba Fett show, and…that was a lie, and (b) it’s not like Kenobi is a character who can freely move around the galaxy the same way Din Djarin can in The Mandalorian.

I mean that literally (for Kenobi to leave Tatooine even briefly gives the Inquisitors so many opportunities to track him that it’s a risk he can surely only afford to take once or twice), but I also mean it in the sense that Kenobi’s place in the Star Wars canon is fixed, whereas Din Djarin’s is fluid. No matter what actions Kenobi takes, he will still need to end up back on Tatooine in hiding because…that’s where we meet him in A New Hope. Wherever his journey takes him, he’s tethered to Tatooine – as is the Star Wars franchise as a whole, but that’s a different conversation.

When the source material doesn’t provide a solution to this problem (and in this case there’s very little source material, and even less of it is still canon), the answer is always to create original characters who can move freely, and who aren’t quite as limited in what they can say or do. Kenobi gives us the Inquisitor Reva, seemingly an antagonist but one with her own point-of-view and a large role that transcends the action on Tatooine and at the Citadel Inquisitorius. That also puts her in a position where she could bridge the gap between Obi-Wan Kenobi and his nemesis Darth Vader without the two ever needing to interact onscreen.

I fear that the temptation to just go full fan-service will prove too strong for Star Wars to resist, and that Kenobi and Vader will actually clash in a lightsaber battle that might be epic to witness, but will be robbed of any stakes by the knowledge that both these characters walk away unscathed, physically and emotionally – because by the time of A New Hope, when Vader tells Kenobi that “when I left you, I was but the learner, now I am the master”, he’s explicitly referring to their duel in Revenge Of The Sith, and Kenobi doesn’t rebut that statement (well, he does, but only to tell Vader that he’s become a “master of evil”, not to remind him that they actually had some other duel the Sith lord has forgotten about).

So any fight scene inserted between the two films must ultimately make so little impact on the characters involved that they fail to even remember it a mere fifteen years later, which makes it unnecessary filler – worse than a retcon, as it literally adds nothing to their dynamic and would instead strip away a layer of what was already there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always down for a lightsaber battle, but if Kenobi has to fight anyone, I’d prefer it to be Reva or another Inquisitor – perhaps even the Grand Inquisitor.

Set to make his live-action debut in Kenobi after first appearing in the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, the Grand Inquisitor was a Pau’an Jedi Knight who turned to the Dark Side and assisted Darth Vader in hunting Jedi during the twenty years between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope. He ultimately killed himself after failing to capture the Jedi Kanan Jarrus, deeming that Vader’s wrath would be worse than death, but Kenobi catches up with him at the height of his reign of terror.

As Rebels fans have been quick to point out, he looks a bit…different. Not worse, necessarily, just…different. His head is more round than it is elongated, which has led to a lot of (probably unfair) comparisons to the live-action Pau’ans who appeared in Revenge Of The Sith with elongated heads and looked more like the Grand Inquisitor than Kenobi‘s version of the character. But what’s important to remember is that those Pau’ans were side characters who never did any fighting. I’m not a stunt choreographer, but I have a sneaking suspicion that top-heavy Pau’an heads, much like Togruta tendrils, aren’t exactly conducive to jumping and twirling and stunts in general.

Ultimately, as long as the Grand Inquisitor is appropriately terrifying in live-action, that’s all that really matters. On the flip-side, Kenobi has an opportunity to flesh out the Grand Inquisitor’s character – and all the Inquisitors, for that matter – in a way that Rebels never did. The Jedi: Fallen Order video game franchise has done slightly more in that regard, even featuring a morally conflicted Inquisitor named Trilla Suduri, but we still know surprisingly little about these former Jedi who chose to devote themselves to the task of hunting and killing people who used to be their friends, mentors, and apprentices.

The Grand Inquisitor, for instance, was a Jedi Temple Guard who fell to the dark side after witnessing the Jedi Order’s harsh treatment of Ahsoka Tano during the Clone Wars. His real name, the name of his Jedi master, and all details regarding his training are a mystery. Rebels‘ Seventh Sister and Fifth Brother, the latter of whom will reappear in Kenobi, are even more enigmatic. But the fact that Reva even has a name attached to her character, a name that represents a tangible attachment to her past life (one she’s perhaps unwilling to sever?), gives me hope that, like Trilla Suduri, she’ll be a three-dimensional character in stark contrast to her uniform Brothers and Sisters.

Pulling the strings behind all the Inquisitors is the shadowy figure of Darth Vader, whose true identity is still a mystery at this point in the timeline – one to which audiences already know the answer, mind you, but watching characters in-universe come to the same realization on their own never fails to make me emotional. And if Ahsoka’s reaction when she found out was devastating, then the mixture of guilt, anger, and heartbreak that Obi-Wan Kenobi is sure to feel when he first hears of the reappearance of Darth Vader and starts connecting dots is going to be…a lot.

Interestingly, the question of when and how Kenobi discovered that Anakin Skywalker was still alive following the events of Revenge Of The Sith has never properly been answered – not by the current Star Wars canon, at least. That offers the Kenobi series at least one key plot-point around which to construct an early episode, leaving several more in which the character can grapple with the ramifications of his discovery and ultimately make up his mind to seek out Darth Vader, who at this point in the timeline is still the stuff of rumors; the full extent of his power having not yet been revealed to the galaxy.

I know everyone is gearing up for the rematch of the century between Kenobi and Vader, and I also know that the discourse around this show will be unbearable because the two characters will either never meet, leading a certain demographic of fans to complain that their demands aren’t being met and that Star Wars (but like, especially Kathleen Kennedy) hates the fans, or they will meet, and it will create a whole bunch of weird plot-holes, or they’ll fight in some kind of vision and fans will be split down the middle on whether they’re satisfied by it. It’s gonna be a mess regardless.

But hey, I love a good mess. And frankly, without Jon Favreau attached in any capacity, I actually have higher hopes for Kenobi than for most of Lucasfilm’s other Disney+ series’, which have recently begun to suffer from their monotonous stylistic consistency and obsession with Tatooine, as evidenced by The Book Of Boba Fett‘s failure to hold audiences’ interest (including mine). Kenobi, ironically, is the one series that arguably ought to stick to a Tatooine setting but is instead choosing to take its famously cloistered protagonist on one last spin around the galaxy – and we’ll just have to wait and see whether this approach pays off.

Trailer Review: 8/10