Obi Wan Season 1: Review

I’m finally catching up with some of the different shows I’ve been missing out on for the last ever, so I assume most people who wanted to watch Obi Wan have already watched it. But for those of you who might have been on the fence and still haven’t pulled the trigger, allow me to save you some time. Overall, I found it better than Boba Fett, but still leaving much to be desired.

The sad thing is that there are some genuinely cool moments sprinkled throughout the series. Some really great lightsaber duels and force battles, but in between is just a bunch of padding that goes nowhere.

With that said, I’m going to head into some spoilers now to discuss just what went wrong for me. If you want to avoid them, stop reading here.

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Okay, so here’s a quick rundown of the bad of the series:

• Leia’s whole plot line is way too contrived. She doesn’t come across as a character, she comes across as a device. A reason to get Obi Wan into trouble. She’s being chased by the bad guys, and she randomly does things like run away from Obi Wan for no real reason. Some of this is probably from the fact that getting a solid acting performance from someone so young is very difficult. No one expects much out of Baby Yoda. Little Leia has a higher bar to get over.
• The Force is wildly inconsistent across Star Wars canon at this point. Darth Vader basically yoinks a spaceship from the sky without breaking a sweat, but then moments later he lets another one go. The first one posed no problem. Why did the second one trip him up? Often the Force comes across as “let’s have some cool special effects now,” without any real rhyme or reason. That’s wearing thin.
• Weak Obi Wan is just . . . not that fun to watch, it turns out. Some of that might be because when he tried to get his powers back, he always was able to do just enough to do whatever he wanted to do. That’s not really failing, so it never felt like it was a true struggle for him. Yes, he had a showdown with Vader early on that he soundly lost, but he didn’t lose it to any disastrous length. The stakes never felt that big.
• The inquisitors all felt pretty toothless, with no real character development. So instead it was “weird guy who speaks low and wears a funny hat” and “strange woman with a pointy face.” So what? They made some effort with Reva, but even then, her story was just too little substance to carry what the show seemed to be trying to pull off. Maybe a little less Obi Wan cutting up meat and a little more developing her backstory would have helped?
• While I’m at it, I’m wondering why in the world stabbing people through the stomach with a lightsaber is even a thing in Star Wars. It doesn’t do a blessed thing to the person, apparently, except slow them down for a while. So if you’re an evil Sith or whatever, wouldn’t you take a moment to lightsaber their face in half, just to be thorough? Seriously. They ought to have a class on that in Sith school and everything.
• They missed the set up of all time. Obi Wan’s in a pit, and Darth comes to stand over him and stare down. This is where Darth should have said, “It’s over Obi Wan. I have the high ground.” Instead, he just dumps rocks on top of him and walks away, because Darth apparently skipped “how to effectively kill your nemesis” class as well. Sigh.

It was a frustrating show, and after each episode, we generally talked about all the things that irritated us about it. That’s a bad sign. I have higher hopes for Andor, but we’ll see how that goes. Overall, this one was a 4/10. The cool scenes just aren’t enough to make it worth while. Maybe there’s an hour long highlight edit out there that would be awesome . . .

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