Obi-Wan Kenobi

[Peelee]

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I, for one, am straight up flabbergasted that nobody has yet brought up the teleporting issue. My gast has been flabbered. What the hell is that tunnel design? How was the lady able to escape without running into the Third Sister? How was the Third Sister able to get to the landing pad ahead of Leia? Are there multiple paths? If there's a shorter path, why didn't they take that one to start with? For reals, I was all set up to expect the woman to die when she decided to try to save Kenobi, possibly giving Leia enough time to escape (hey, I realize you're a little girl, but you are fully aware she told you to run and you're not running. Death! Run away from death! This should not be a confusing concept!), but they just... pass each other without issue? And the Third Sister also passes Leia without issue?

... What the hell?

[ecarden]

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I, for one, am straight up flabbergasted that nobody has yet brought up the teleporting issue. My gast has been flabbered. What the hell is that tunnel design? How was the lady able to escape without running into the Third Sister? How was the Third Sister able to get to the landing pad ahead of Leia? Are there multiple paths? If there's a shorter path, why didn't they take that one to start with? For reals, I was all set up to expect the woman to die when she decided to try to save Kenobi, possibly giving Leia enough time to escape (hey, I realize you're a little girl, but you are fully aware she told you to run and you're not running. Death! Run away from death! This should not be a confusing concept!), but they just... pass each other without issue? And the Third Sister also passes Leia without issue?

... What the hell?

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I think the intent, though it's super misleadingly shot, is that realizing they went into a tunnel, she concludes it must be heading to the starport and somehow gets to the other end first (taking a speeder, or whatever). How she finds exactly where it comes out...the Force? Who knows? It was certainly pretty silly, though I suppose Third Sister might have been here before and gone through the Path, so she actually knew where it came out?

[Keltest]

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I think the intent, though it's super misleadingly shot, is that realizing they went into a tunnel, she concludes it must be heading to the starport and somehow gets to the other end first (taking a speeder, or whatever). How she finds exactly where it comes out...the Force? Who knows? It was certainly pretty silly, though I suppose Third Sister might have been here before and gone through the Path, so she actually knew where it came out?

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Maybe she just had a map? Its not like its some crazy outer rim world with 5 people on it.

[Thrudd]

Considering that the Original Trilogy is actually good whereas the Prequel and especially Sequel Trilogies really aren't and most of the rest of this stuff is at best mediocre, I would say that if anything 'needs' to be remade for consistency it's anything that isn't the Original Trilogy.

Trash piling up around a treasure is a reason to clear away the filth, not a reason to throw out the treasure.

Well of course, I'm not sure anybody could disagree. If I was king of the universe, I'd replace the prequels and sequels. Probably few or no elements of what's there now would remain.

Also...let's not deny that the OT has some internal problems as well. However, we can forgive them much more easily, partly due to nostalgia, but mostly because of strengths that make up for the problems. If someone would do the prequels and sequels correctly, those problems with the OT could be reduced even more.

[ecarden]

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Maybe she just had a map? Its not like its some crazy outer rim world with 5 people on it.

To be clear, the concern isn't

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that she found the starport, it's that she travelled the length of the tunnel, found the, presumably concealed, other end of the tunnel and killed the contact before Leia travelled the length of the tunnel. Speeder helps buy some time, but unless she somehow knew the end-point, or the Force guided her there somehow, it's hard to figure out how she managed that.

[Caledonian]

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Except there clearly isn't anything clever going on, because that requires that the writers think of something clever and ideally establish its potential beforehand.

Instead, the villains operate under (bad) slasher movie rules: the villain simply pops up to surprise the victim, no matter how improbable or impossible the villain's getting there would be.

That's one of the things I'm talking about when I complain about the bad writing.

[Thrudd]

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Except there clearly isn't anything clever going on, because that requires that the writers think of something clever and ideally establish its potential beforehand.

Instead, the villains operate under (bad) slasher movie rules: the villain simply pops up to surprise the victim, no matter how improbable or impossible the villain's getting there would be.

That's one of the things I'm talking about when I complain about the bad writing.

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Exactly. Things that could be solved so simply in some cases...just a short line of dialogue or a shot of exposition. 3rd Sister could have called on a communicator when she saw the tunnel and asked "tell me if there are any ships parked in sector 5...which pad?...bring me a speeder..." You are absolutely right about the writing on so many projects now.

[ecarden]

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Exactly. Things that could be solved so simply in some cases...just a short line of dialogue or a shot of exposition. 3rd Sister could have called on a communicator when she saw the tunnel and asked "tell me if there are any ships parked in sector 5...which pad?...bring me a speeder..." You are absolutely right about the writing on so many projects now.

So I think this actually depends on something I don't remember if we were told?

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How big is this place? I mean, she found the entrance to a tunnel, that doesn't give you much in the way of information on where it comes out. Guessing the starport is reasonable (though it also could have led to a safehouse, or place where forged identities and disguises would be provided, or whatever). But if the starport is small enough that she can reasonably find it this fast, then wouldn't it already be shut down? Vader's here and wants Obi Wan. Shutting down the way off planet is, like, step one? The Grand Inquisitor even tried and failed to do it on what looks like a much more populated planet last episode? So, I'm really unclear what's going on here.

[Thrudd]

So I think this actually depends on something I don't remember if we were told?

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How big is this place? I mean, she found the entrance to a tunnel, that doesn't give you much in the way of information on where it comes out. Guessing the starport is reasonable (though it also could have led to a safehouse, or place where forged identities and disguises would be provided, or whatever). But if the starport is small enough that she can reasonably find it this fast, then wouldn't it already be shut down? Vader's here and wants Obi Wan. Shutting down the way off planet is, like, step one? The Grand Inquisitor even tried and failed to do it on what looks like a much more populated planet last episode? So, I'm really unclear what's going on here.

true. I'm not saying the whole sequence wasn't poorly thought through. They just didn't even put in a tiny amount of effort to attempt an explanation, however shallow it would have been. This is evidence of the bad story writing we've all come to expect from big budget studios nowadays.

[Saintheart]

true. I'm not saying the whole sequence wasn't poorly thought through. They just didn't even put in a tiny amount of effort to attempt an explanation, however shallow it would have been. This is evidence of the bad story writing we've all come to expect from big budget studios nowadays.

It is contempt for the audience. I don't think there's any other way to describe it.

I'll give it this much sympathy: I have seen few shows climb successfully out of Development Hell. There's something about movie projects: when overcooked or undercooked, they suck on arrival. Various people - I suspect Ewan McGregor in particular for the continung dosh - have been trying to make an Obi-Wan movie since 2013 or so, back to Bob Iger back who gave the IP a mortal blow mistakenly believing that Solo was going to be a movie. Solo, of course, tanked, hard, and justifiably hard, and that was going to be the end of character-focused Star Wars films and shows.

What a missed opportunity. The Obi-Wan film, as envisioned back in 2013 or so, had Stephen Daldry attached as its director, and he'd called in Hossein Amini as the writer. Look at their filmographies and scripts and you see the sort of film we might have gotten: a serious take, a Billy Elliot, or The Hours, or The Reader sensibility applied to the IP, with a story from someone who'd been writing in Hollywood since 1989 and whose scripts might have been across a continuum of ****ty to great (47 Ronin and Drive are both amongst them) but still had at least a chance of being good. This was around the time Rogue One had surprised the snot out of everyone and actually was a passable film that dared to have a downer ending.

Amini's name is still on 4 of the 6 Kenobi scripts, but I think that's more to avoid Disney getting sued by the WGA than anything else. They ditched Amini in 2019-2020 and hired Joby Harold as the writer and showrunner, who, it would appear, applied himself to Amini's scripts with all the gentle, subtle touch of Conan the Barbarian's battleaxe. What, you don't know the name? For shame! Harold's massive writing resume dates back centuries! Back eons to the subprime crisis of 2007! Its magnificent pinnacle is ... the Guy Ritchie cowpat King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword.

And the reason for the shift in writer came down to, guess who, once more, the person most responsible for the appalling quality of the last ten years of Star Wars IP, Kathleen Kennedy ... because the feel of the show was apparently too similar to The Mandalorian. Which did not, all else being taken into account, suck. Her instruction to Harold was apparently to "go bigger" ... i.e. stay off the character-focused turf and the gentle father-son dynamics, that's Mando's place now, stop confusing the propellerheads who might go 'lol it's a Mandalorian retread'. And by the way, go bigger with only six miserable episodes and with, as Ryan Reynolds so eloquently put it recently, "the cocaine budget of Thor."

What's a hack to do when placed in such a situation?

Why, produce something like Kenobi. Produce a show which avoids treading on Ewan McGregor's ego, make a big-budget Star Wars spectacle without the budget or the spectcale or the careful storytelling, and try to hide the holes in it by shouting at the audience "Look, it's an episode 1 holoprojector! Look, we got Jimmy Smits back as Bail Organa! Look, Vader is mean and acting like he did in Rogue One! Look, lots of Star Wars Rebels references! Look how connected we are with all the stuff you 'member! ... just don't look too close at the story, you pathetic buyers of fake lightsabers and faker novels."

It's contempt for the audience, because the audience, in the main, is contemptible. It will eat up anything that looks like the IP because it's young and amazingly still has disposable income enough to buy all the useless stuff they put on display in the background of their youtube videos and will clap for anything that Disney puts out rather than subjecting the corporation to market forces and refusing to watch anything that isn't high quality.

Why should Disney try any harder, if its audience isn't going to require anything better of it?

[dancrilis]

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I, for one, am straight up flabbergasted that nobody has yet brought up the teleporting issue. My gast has been flabbered. What the hell is that tunnel design? How was the lady able to escape without running into the Third Sister? How was the Third Sister able to get to the landing pad ahead of Leia? Are there multiple paths? If there's a shorter path, why didn't they take that one to start with? For reals, I was all set up to expect the woman to die when she decided to try to save Kenobi, possibly giving Leia enough time to escape (hey, I realize you're a little girl, but you are fully aware she told you to run and you're not running. Death! Run away from death! This should not be a confusing concept!), but they just... pass each other without issue? And the Third Sister also passes Leia without issue?

... What the hell?

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I noticed but decided it was a tunnel network and that the small child moved slower then the adult (and they they used different routes which is why the two adults didn't meet).

But frankly I didn't really care about it as much as the Vader pieces - but now that we are on the topic of Leia:
I am not impressed that everyone knows Leia is adopted, Bail Organa's job was to hide her but instead of pretending she was his daughter he happened to adopt a new born child right as the empire was founded, then raised her in public to join the senate - ignore Vader this is placing her right under Palpatine's nose.
Then to make matters worse he is apparently known as a close friend of Kenobi (enough so that the third sister thinks kidnapping her might bring him out of retirement) - an autopsy might not reveal that Padme died of losing the will to live but it would show that there are no children inside her raising the question of where the unborn went - right at the time that her close friend Bail (also a close friend of Kenobi) adopted a child.
Vader didn't know (or care about) the Lars family and they might have been better calling the kid Luke Lars instead of Luke Skywalker but ultimately Vader had no reason to interact with them and neither did anyone else - Leia is front and center in galactic politics, there is a difference between hiding in plain sight and not hiding at all.

[Sapphire Guard]

It was Filoni and Favreau who said 'go bigger'.https://web.archive.org/web/20220314...ul-1235108192/

And if it was changed to be less like Mando, good grief, what did that original script look like? We already have 'grizzled veteran protects force sensitive child hunted by the empire while rediscovering his emotions'.

Disclaimer: I haven't watched this so far, I'm reading along to decide whether to bother.

[Anteros]

It's contempt for the audience, because the audience, in the main, is contemptible. It will eat up anything that looks like the IP because it's young and amazingly still has disposable income enough to buy all the useless stuff they put on display in the background of their youtube videos and will clap for anything that Disney puts out rather than subjecting the corporation to market forces and refusing to watch anything that isn't high quality.

Why should Disney try any harder, if its audience isn't going to require anything better of it?

Very much agree. Look no further than the fanboys on Reddit. They recently had a thread that literally said "Of course the writing is bad, it's Star Wars. Embrace it." 46,000 upvotes.

These people are consumer whores who will eat up literally any sort of trash as long as it has the right labels on it.

[The Glyphstone]

They should compare notes with the Sonic fan community. Seems like there is a shared spirit of resignation towards awful.

[Anteros]

They should compare notes with the Sonic fan community. Seems like there is a shared spirit of resignation towards awful.

Hey, that's not fair. I feel like Sonic's stuff has been rising in quality lately.

[The Glyphstone]

It's not about the product, it's the community attitude. Like Sonic fans, Star Wars fans just assume trash as the baseline output quality because they've been burned by it so many times, with actually good stuff standing out even more.

[Anteros]

It's not about the product, it's the community attitude. Like Sonic fans, Star Wars fans just assume trash as the baseline output quality because they've been burned by it so many times, with actually good stuff standing out even more.

I understand, I just think it's remarkable that we've reached a state where Sonic the Hedgehog's producers care more about their product than Star Wars.

[Imbalance]

This supposedly is part of a wider pivot away from binge-style presentation in streaming services. The weekly presentation is what allows the water cooler talk to happen. Gets more word of mouth happening than putting the whole series out at once.

I get that. But it's even more unusual for me, personally, to watch much TV at all whether it's current or not. The only reason I have the channel right now is because there was a bundle deal. Besides that, I'm an outlier that is unaffected by hype, and my point is that the quality of this show does nothing to overturn my general attitude toward the new hotness. For the first time in a long time, I will have access to the new episode as it airs, yet I don't really see the benefit to that and probably won't rush to watch it.

Further, this weekly presentation style seems to betray a lack of faith. It feels like they know the product is poor, so they're selling anticipation and out-of-character drama instead, like in the old days ("Who shot J.R.?").

[Saintheart]

Incidentally, folks, on my way to the fridge I asked myself ...

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...while we're on the subject of teleporting inquisitors or getting to Leia via round trips, can someone tell me why Obi-Wan shot the fence at all?



Because there's nothing the fence is actually connected to. It's just a freestanding laser gate to block traffic going through. Not a shimmer of a force field left or right, no pylons, nothing. You can see even in the shot itself that all Obi-Wan has to do is take about ten paces to the other end of the gate and walk right around it. And in the wider shot they could've just walked around the guard post on the other end and done the same damn thing.

They weren't bringing the truck through, which you would presumably need to shoot the fence to do. (There's actually enough room on the guard post side that they literally could have driven around it. Quite a meta moment, this may well be the first time we have literally seen a plothole big enough to drive a truck through it.) They took off running down the road immediately after going through the gate.

"Landmines." Has the Empire ever used them on screen before, and were we ever given an idea on the script that they were used here, especially with Obi and Leia wandering all over the landscape? But if so, okay, why not just vault over the gate's pylons themselves? Or anywhere the troopers had been walking before being inconveniently dead?

This is the same sort of odd **** that generated The Teleporting Second Sister and the awkward ending to the second episode. It felt similar to this scene: the writer scripted in a chokepoint, but the actual location and the way the scene was created doesn't actually give you the sense there is a chokepoint. It feels like one of those railroaded scenes in my DM failures where I think I've pushed the players into a one-of-two-choices encounters, and with two questions the players find a way to bypass the whole scene and blow my whole encounter up.

And really ... looking at that scene again, my stars, it's actually worse than when I first looked at it.

[warty goblin]

Well this was disappointing. Both the GF and I had liked the first two episodes; there were a few things I wasn't wild about like unneccessary chase sequences to pad the running time and some bad dialog for the ultra-not interesting Inqisitors, but I was basically good with it.

This one was plain bad. It had a few good moments, I thought Vader's reassembly was a decently done bit of body horror, albeit one we kinda already had in Episode 3, and a couple of Leia and Obi-Wan's scenes were good. Really as long as nobody was doing anything besides talking it was fine.

But the action beats were awful. Like every single one of them just sucked. Worse, they sucked in a way that undercut the story.

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Apparently Obi-Wan has completely forgotten how to lightsaber, but fortunately has learned gun-kata somewhere. This is dumb writing, it's well established that Obi-Wan hates blasters and is perfectly capable of tricking his way around stormtroopers and other flunkies. But that would require competent plot writing, and there isn't a ton of that going on.

And IF they were going to a direct confrontation between Vader and Obi-Wan (which I think they shouldn't have) it should be towards the end, not the middle. This gives the show nowhere to escalate to, because the standard mid-story defeat/low point can't be followed by a satisfactory victory later because that's just not possible in the overall story.

This is to say nothing of the host of dumb things like Vader not extinguishing the fire he could totally put out, apparently extra-dimemsional tunnel systems, easily bypassed laser walls, and so on.

Also the light-casting lightsabers suck for two reasons. Number one, it takes this mysterious, almost magical thing that glows but casts no light and turns it into a glowstick. Number two, it frequently looks like absolute crap. There were a couple bits in this episode that looked like old, over-conpressed cutscenes mid-budget videogames circa 2005.

Overall I'm really, really disappointed. This was the only SW thing coming up that I was actually excited for - I want to like this! - and kind of Disney's last chance to keep me engaged. But while McGregor is doing good work, this last episode felt like exactly the sort of flabby, badly written modern TV crap I was afraid it would be. Too much time to fill, too much reverence for itself, and lots of crappy, easy to avoid problems. Bleh.

[Saintheart]

Also the light-casting lightsabers suck for two reasons. Number one, it takes this mysterious, almost magical thing that glows but casts no light and turns it into a glowstick. Number two, it frequently looks like absolute crap. There were a couple bits in this episode that looked like old, over-conpressed cutscenes mid-budget videogames circa 2005.

Yeah, they used that same effect in Attack of the Clones, too, when Anakin and Dooku face off before Yoda shows up. Big ugly coloured glows all over Hayden Christensen and Christopher Lee's faces, and we were all very fortunate that the effect was only used for about 5 seconds or so, before Dooku cuts off Anakin's arm and Yoda shows up to turn the movie into a Road Runner cartoon. And it still looked better than this thing which felt and looked like a fan film ... circa 2005.

[The Glyphstone]

I understand, I just think it's remarkable that we've reached a state where Sonic the Hedgehog's producers care more about their product than Star Wars.

That is a very strange reversal indeed. I just wouldn't blame the fans for taking what they can get, when they've learned not to hold out for something better.

[warty goblin]

Yeah, they used that same effect in Attack of the Clones, too, when Anakin and Dooku face off before Yoda shows up. Big ugly coloured glows all over Hayden Christensen and Christopher Lee's faces, and we were all very fortunate that the effect was only used for about 5 seconds or so, before Dooku cuts off Anakin's arm and Yoda shows up to turn the movie into a Road Runner cartoon. And it still looked better than this thing which felt and looked like a fan film ... circa 2005.

I can't say it bothered me there, it's relatively minimal, doesn't wash out the entire scene - really it keeps the color palette vibrant even in low light - and marks a distinct phase of the combat, both in terms of cinematography and the flow of the scene. Dooku is clearly winning, Anakin is retreating (into the dark side of the room, naturally), and we get a lot of attention not to the overall choreography but the characters' faces. That makes things intense and personal. The movie has been in nonstop action mode for like twenty minutes at that point, all in full light, so the new style and use of shadow break things up nicely. In other words I thought it looked good and served a purpose.

I suppose you could say that the super washed out/over-exposed effect in the gravel pit fight in Obi-Wan served some purpose, making the fight seem desperate and panicked or something. It certainly wasn't subtle, but this was made by the same people who thought extreme Dutch angle parkour was a good idea, so maybe that was what they were going for. What they got was distractingly ugly and unfinished looking. I hope they don't do that again.

And as I said upthread, the whole series has looked washed out and bad in this weird very expensive but also carelessly cheap way.

[Noldo]

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I just cannot comprehend.

When I heard that they are going to have Vader in the Obi-wan series, I was intrigued how they can make him relevant and interesting while the main characters (Kenobi and Vader) never met as it is hard to see how their confrontation in New Hope could work if they have crossed paths in between.

But instead they provide us with this stupidity where Vader clearly overpowers Kenobi, making it clear that Vader has already surpassed him, at least in Vader’s mind. Thus completely destroying Vader’s comments in EP4 (although Vader’s and Kenobi’s battle in Revenge of Sith did weaken it already). The only hope now is that they could actually make their second confrontation in this series somehow believable and actually set up the relationship we see between Kenobi and Vader in the original trilogy.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Lets see if I can avoid spoilers....

It isn't about moisture farming thank goodness. Watch it when you are in the mood.

If you are in the mood to play a fantasy games with dragons and wizards and figure out how Fireball and Heat Metal work in game you'll love it.

If your are rather compulsive mood and want to count rivits on you HO locomotives to find mistakes, if you just shot down several minor image ideas your players tried with no roll, or if you want to argue with the guy down the street who has two kinds of fescue in his yard you will poke holes in this line by line in your MS Word copy of the script.

[Caledonian]

It is contempt for the audience. I don't think there's any other way to describe it.

It's a possibility, and a very likely one. The only alternative I can really think of is that the people involved truly don't understand why this is bad. It would be one thing is the creators wanted to make good project and bad ideas are imposed on them from executives on high. But most of this badness isn't about expensive special effects or saving time shooting or difficulty hiring a really skilled script writer. These things are bad in ways that are no cheaper than doing something good - or in some cases, are significantly MORE expensive than doing something better.

The alternative requires that they have no sense of what makes a story work, or what makes a character's behavior plausible, what makes even the rough sketch of a setting feel 'real'.

I don't know which possibility worries me more.

These people are consumer whores who will eat up literally any sort of trash as long as it has the right labels on it.

Whores debase themselves for money. These people are paying for the privilege of being degraded. And not even in a fun S&M way!

[Peelee]

I'm not huge on the idea of denigrating sex workers.

[Anteros]

I'm not huge on the idea of denigrating sex workers.

I believe the comment in question was directed more at the consumers than the workers, but point taken.

[Caledonian]

I'm not huge on the idea of denigrating sex workers.

Think of it a la Firefly, with the famous exchanges between Inara and Jayne.

[Thrudd]

I believe the comment in question was directed more at the consumers than the workers, but point taken.

Someone offering a service for money (like a sex worker) is actually in the opposite position of a consumer, aka. the person who pays for the service.

I'd say a closer analogy would be a drug-pusher and their customers. They give you just enough good stuff to get you hooked, and then can get away with cutting the product with more and more drek, and you'll keep buying because you're addicted.
The fans are addicts, and Disney are the drug pushers...but in this case, they've taken a product that a lot of people were already addicted to, and are doing their best to pump out just enough of the stuff to keep people hooked, as cheaply as possible. If there's something in there you recognize, some little bit of the feeling you got from the "good stuff", you'll keep coming back. You just need one more hit...just need to know what happened to Luke between the years of 5 ABY and 35 ABY...you know it's bad for you, but it's just one more hit...see Vader choke somebody one more time...it doesn't matter that everything surrounding the scene of Vader choking someone is nonsense, that one image is what you needed to keep you coming back for another show...