Obi-Wan Kenobi Parts I & II Review (Patreon)

For a hastily rewritten spinoff show with more prestige than it deserves, Obi-Wan Kenobi is pretty good. It's tempting to write this off for succeeding on those standards, and I'm going to do that, but firstly let's be clear this is better than it should be. It looks good, it's well-acted, and understands the pleasures of Star Wars while seeking angles on its subject matter only TV can explore.

The high point is of course Ewan fucking McGregor reprising Obi-Wan fucking Kenobi. He's brilliant as always, but more significantly he's brilliant in different ways than he is in the prequels. There's a moment in Part II where, while he's talking to Leia (more on that below), he makes several weighty performance decisions in a seconds-long shot. He evokes the trauma and shakiness of a man who hasn't spoken to anyone in years in an extremely COVID-appropriate way.

In every other respect, this is Star Wars: a trad serialized space opera with a penchant for saccharine nostalgia and over-saturated iconography. It explores some interesting places with that: Moses Ingram's Reva is a genuinely distinctive Star Wars villain (who, with a better script, would threaten to be Kylo Ren-tier), and Part II features several affecting sequences that only work as TV. But the show's rewrites become evident whenever it swerves back to its main plot, which inexplicably pairs Ewan McGregor with a 10-year-old Princess Leia.

The tonal swerves between approaches are severe. The points where original writer Hossein Amini's thoughtful meditation on aging and refugees ends and showrunner Joby Harold's iconography fetishism begins are so overt you could chart them with a Joseph Campbellian-style roadmap. The show's best moments are, fittingly, when it evokes Attack of the Clones' noir subplot and has Obi-Wan investigate a plot in an alien world. Elsewhere, we get girlboss!Leia in a fit of white feminist reductionism and some villain from the Star Wars cartoons I won't watch because I've had sex.

To be clear, I'm broadly enjoying Obi-Wan Kenobi. I'm Star Wars trash with too much time for this silly, reactionary franchise (and others of its kind). This is a fun mess that gives me more of my childhood hero performing some fun dramatic beats, sci-fi mystery solving, and swashbuckling. It's nowhere near as reactionary as it could have been. But the moments where Obi-Wan Kenobi dares to be something better are in many ways its greatest weakness. If it were consistently mediocre, I could go back to ignoring it like I ignore The Mandalorian. Let's hope it picks up this week, or trails off altogether.