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“Obi-Wan Kenobi” - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
On his Twitter feed, Guardians of the Galaxy writer and director James Gunn repeatedly counsels aspiring filmmakers to “spend as much time working on the third act [of their movies] as you do on the first and second act combined.”
That’s advice the showrunners of Obi-Wan Kenobi could have used when crafting their own recently concluded six-episode limited series on Disney Plus. While the show very much sticks its landing in its final episode and lead actor Ewan McGregor delivers an impressive performance as the title character, the series belabors its very shaggy story and takes much too long to reach an otherwise excellent climax.
Obi-Wan Kenobi would undoubtedly have been served better by a shorter and more cohesive format. Its narrative was originally conceived for a feature film, and it shows in the strung out and sluggishly paced end product. Otherwise creditable themes threaten to evaporate in the resulting miasma, leaving the series to founder before rediscovering its reason for being at the last possible moment.
As a movie or a three-episode miniseries, Obi-Wan Kenobi would have packed an even stronger emotional punch. Slack narrative elements would have been tightened considerably or removed altogether in order to keep the story moving along at the speed required of a shorter format. For all its shortcomings, however, Obi-Wan Kenobi gets enough right - and delivers when it really counts.
The Good
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s strengths start with Ewan McGregor, wielding a lightsaber as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi for the first time in two decades. Always the standout performer in the otherwise stiffly acted Star Wars prequels, McGregor brings a distinct pathos to a character who has tasted the bitterest of failures. When we first encounter Obi-Wan in the series, he’s a supremely disillusioned and demoralized figure unwilling to do much other than eke out a meager living on the desert planet Tatooine and watch over a ten-year-old Luke Skywalker from afar. Over the course of the show, however, he embarks on an adventure that brings him back into the world and leaves him with renewed hope for the future.
McGregor shines whenever Obi-Wan confronts his deepest emotional wound and most profound failure: the fall of his friend and former apprentice Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader) to the dark side of the Force. After a harrowing lightsaber duel with Vader in the show’s final episode, Obi-Wan finally closes the emotional book on his relationship with Anakin – or at least puts it into better perspective. He’s now quite literally ready to move on with his life, looking to what lays ahead instead of wallowing in the sorrows of the past.
Obi-Wan Kenobi also handles Vader himself quite well, with the character now closer to the sinister and intimidating villain audiences first encountered in the original Star Wars trilogy. Picking up from his brief but frightening appearance at the end of Rogue One, the show demonstrates just how powerful and menacing Vader really is – he pulls a starship out of the sky just as it lifts off in the penultimate episode, for instance, then stone-cold puts down newly-introduced series antagonist Reva (herself a Force- and lightsaber-wielding Jedi-hunter known as an Inquisitor). He tosses boulders at Obi-Wan with ease during their final confrontation before cracking open the ground and burying Kenobi alive.
Hayden Christiansen puts in a striking turn as Vader, one that’s all the more surprising given his stilted and much-criticized performances as Anakin in the prequel trilogy. With the left-hand side of Vader’s mask sliced off during his duel with Obi-Wan, Christiansen delivers his lines with a cold malevolence and barely-suppressed anger – along with a touch of madness born of an obsession with destroying his former master.
Finally, the climactic battle between Obi-Wan and Vader more than lives up to expectations and delivers everything Star Wars aficionados hoped for when the show was first announced way back in 2019. It’s well-acted and shockingly well done, at least given the shaky and sometimes downright bad direction of the show’s earlier episodes. The last two minutes or so of dialogue between Vader and Obi-Wan at the denouement of their duel are Star Wars at its best, emotionally powerful and entirely satisfying – especially for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the wider Star Wars mythos. That’s thanks mostly to McGregor’s reliably superb acting, as well as Christiansen’s brief but compelling performance.
The Bad
Neither a stellar climax nor McGregor’s fine acting can conceal Obi-Wan Kenobi’s flaws, however. That starts with Reva: as with much else in the show, she’s not a bad antagonist in concept. Actress Moses Ingram portrays Reva well enough, but she and her character are let down by the show’s overlong narrative structure. It’s not exactly hard for viewers to piece things together and surmise that Reva was one of the Jedi younglings we glimpse in the show’s very first, or that she seeks revenge against Darth Vader under the pretense of serving him as an Inquisitor. But it’s not until midway through the show’s penultimate episode that Reva’s goals and motivations are made explicit. Keeping them under wraps for so long undercuts her character, making her actions far less explicable than they might have been in a movie or miniseries.
Then there’s the show’s consistently lackluster direction. It’s not as if series director Deborah Chow isn’t up to the job; she handles the duel between Obi-Wan and Vader fairly well, for instance. But the preceding five episodes are for the most part clumsy and listless, with a forest chase scene in the show’s very first episode particularly noteworthy for its awfulness. The show’s overlong format does Chow no favors, and she might have done better had she been able to give the rest of the series even half the attention she does to its climax.
The Ugly
Nothing drags down Obi-Wan Kenobi more than its basic story structure and narrative format. It forces the show to drag out its early acts, spinning its wheels before getting straight to the point – and what we all hoped to see – in the last episode. As enjoyable as it may be to watch Ewan McGregor reprise the character of Obi-Wan for six episodes, the show’s extended presentation did not serve its own story or characters well. Compounding this problem, the show released its episodes over the course of five weeks – making its initial entries feel even more distended than they might have if, say, released for binge viewing.
Looking back over Obi-Wan Kenobi as a whole, it’s clear that the show had its roots in a much tighter sort of narrative required for a feature film. As it stands, however, the series lets scenes and sequences remain that would have been excised either in a movie or a shorter format television production. None of the ideas or characters introduced in Obi-Wan Kenobi are inherently bad or unworkable, and none of the show’s existing shortcomings should be considered necessarily fatal to the entire enterprise. But these flaws and defects arise largely due to the need to stretch the show’s narrative out across six episodes.
That said, there are a number of nice touches scattered throughout Obi-Wan Kenobi. A destitute clone trooper in the second episode, for instance, or strong if too-brief performances by Kumail Nanjiani as a fraudulent Jedi and Joel Edgerton as Luke’s uncle Owen Lars. But it’s Obi-Wan himself and Ewan McGregor that make the show work in the end, building to a climax that ought to move anyone who’s ever watched any Star Wars movie or television show.
Hopefully we’ll get more of McGregor’s Obi-Wan in the future. But even if we don’t, we can rest satisfied with what Obi-Wan Kenobi gave us in the end.