Obi-wan Kenobi 1x05
Sep. 14th, 2022 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsThis...is less a review than a collection of half-baked plot bunnies. It is more interesting that way.
Obi-wan Kenobi 1x05
That episode was…not good. I’m leaning into bad territory in fact.
At heart it comes back to what this show has had me talking about. As a first draft/outline, there is material here that someone could do something this. It might not be the best use of one’s time, but I’m a fic writer so I can’t throw stones as a concept. The problem is that the writers here didn’t really go past the outline stage; they realized a few places where they needed to shove in some way to get from one plot point to the next and filled it in with the first idea that came to them without making any of it make sense.
There is so much this episode could do if it would take a second to be about anything but spectacle and the next set piece/plot point. Obi-wan is back fighting a war, maybe we should see a little of the grand general in how he acts? Maybe he starts treating the civilian refugees like they’re soldiers under his command and has to see how different this war is. Maybe he freaks out seeing the stormtroopers, because they more or less look like clone troopers, who were his friends (so maybe he doesn’t want to kill them) and then tried to kill him (so maybe he is scared to fight them). I though Kanan’s feelings deserved more exploration; Obi-wan’s feelings don’t get any.
Or maybe we could have done something with this group apparently having Force sensitive children in it. Obi-wan could think that it’s his duty to protect them when he failed to save so many. He could have some reflection on what could happen to Leia (and Luke) if he fails to protect them from being discovered by the Empire. We could have Leia bonding with another Force sensitive child; I’m not sure what to do with it, but there was room to do something that developed her as a character, but they’re not doing it.
I found myself again inventing a different situation in my head, where we had bits of Obi-wan bonding with another person in the camp, and then either Reva or Vader himself having hold of that person, and it being Satine’s death again. Vader would know what he was doing even, which makes it crueler, but since Obi-wan has to get away it might need to be Reva. I’m not sure how it could be Leia they’re holding, but there would be a case to be made for letting Obi-wan succeed in saving someone in that position this time. Also it would have to be Reva in that case, since I don’t think Leia and Vader should have been in life and death conflict before. But they wouldn’t even really need to explain why putting Obi-wan in that spot is especially cruel, it would be harrowing enough without knowing what it echoes/rhymes with, but if you know then it hits harder.
(Hmm, make it a blonde teenage girl who’s trying to keep people fed and secure the wounded during the evacuation. She can be young-Satine in his eyes. Fuck it, use Korkie…that would require more explanation though.)
It would have needed a fair bit of work to make Tala stand in as the sacrifice in that position. Because, in loo of having time to meaningfully bond Obi-wan with someone, having it be someone with Force capability or someone so clearly an innocent would be the one way to short-cut it. Actually, they might have been able to do it with Tala last episode, that she had put herself on the line for the mission to rescue Leia and ended up being killed because Obi-wan couldn’t stop it. Her death in this episode doesn’t work much at all, since it feels so…mandatory.
Actually, combining a couple ideas, have Leia bonding with another child (maybe a bit older than her), who she’s working with on the base-mechanics to get the evacuation going. It gives us more insight into Leia too, rather than just having her able to do plot relevant stuff because the plot says she can. Then that child, that we in the audience have gotten to know, gets in the wrong place at the wrong time. Depending on whose plot we’re focused on, maybe this kid is a little reminiscent of Luke or of Reva as a youngling. Either way, it ends up saying something about the characters involved.
I’m just spit-balling here, I didn’t have a plan, but you can damn well bet if I was trying to write it, I would put more thought into how it could play out the way I want/need it to.
I wish I could say the flashbacks worked. I can see what they were going for…kind of, but the parallels don’t quite work. Partially because Obi-wan’s lesson makes very little sense. But he attempts at it being a parallel don’t really work either. And also because it really doesn’t speak to how these old friends know each other so well that they’re planning strategies around what they know of the other’s moves. Because the one thing Obi-wan tries to take from it is ‘Vader will expect me to surrender…And that’s just what I’ll do.’ If it’s going to be anything it should be, ‘he knows how I think, so I need to think about this in a different way.’ For either of them. And then they should be tying themselves in knots trying to figure out whether the other can predict this or that move.
On top of that being how this episode should work, it should have to have been how the whole series worked. It would have had to be cat and mouse between Vader and Obi-wan all along. Each episode should have had a different flashback to how well they know each other’s moves that reflects the current circumstances in some way. Obi-wan knowing how Anakin thinks, but not quite able to predict what he can do with all he has now (power-wise and position-wise). Vader trying to figure out just what Obi-wan’s present goal is, but in most situations is able to call Obi-wan is most likely to do. (Strategy vs. tactics, that kind of thing.) This would put the writing in a bit of a bind, as the way out of the current trap would be for Obi-wan to think differently, and Obi-wan is supposed to be such a representative of the right way for a Jedi to be, for him to change how he thinks could be a danger to that. But as usual, get a writer who wants to put in the work of making it work, and it could be done.
I’m not even going to get into the stupidity of Bail’s message. Everything to do with it is dumb. That he would send it, that Obi-wan wouldn’t do a better job hiding it, that Reva would immediately find the communicator sitting of the ground. Yeah I kind of like the idea of Bail going to keep watch over Luke, but the message is dumb.
Obi-wan Kenobi 1x05
That episode was…not good. I’m leaning into bad territory in fact.
At heart it comes back to what this show has had me talking about. As a first draft/outline, there is material here that someone could do something this. It might not be the best use of one’s time, but I’m a fic writer so I can’t throw stones as a concept. The problem is that the writers here didn’t really go past the outline stage; they realized a few places where they needed to shove in some way to get from one plot point to the next and filled it in with the first idea that came to them without making any of it make sense.
There is so much this episode could do if it would take a second to be about anything but spectacle and the next set piece/plot point. Obi-wan is back fighting a war, maybe we should see a little of the grand general in how he acts? Maybe he starts treating the civilian refugees like they’re soldiers under his command and has to see how different this war is. Maybe he freaks out seeing the stormtroopers, because they more or less look like clone troopers, who were his friends (so maybe he doesn’t want to kill them) and then tried to kill him (so maybe he is scared to fight them). I though Kanan’s feelings deserved more exploration; Obi-wan’s feelings don’t get any.
Or maybe we could have done something with this group apparently having Force sensitive children in it. Obi-wan could think that it’s his duty to protect them when he failed to save so many. He could have some reflection on what could happen to Leia (and Luke) if he fails to protect them from being discovered by the Empire. We could have Leia bonding with another Force sensitive child; I’m not sure what to do with it, but there was room to do something that developed her as a character, but they’re not doing it.
I found myself again inventing a different situation in my head, where we had bits of Obi-wan bonding with another person in the camp, and then either Reva or Vader himself having hold of that person, and it being Satine’s death again. Vader would know what he was doing even, which makes it crueler, but since Obi-wan has to get away it might need to be Reva. I’m not sure how it could be Leia they’re holding, but there would be a case to be made for letting Obi-wan succeed in saving someone in that position this time. Also it would have to be Reva in that case, since I don’t think Leia and Vader should have been in life and death conflict before. But they wouldn’t even really need to explain why putting Obi-wan in that spot is especially cruel, it would be harrowing enough without knowing what it echoes/rhymes with, but if you know then it hits harder.
(Hmm, make it a blonde teenage girl who’s trying to keep people fed and secure the wounded during the evacuation. She can be young-Satine in his eyes. Fuck it, use Korkie…that would require more explanation though.)
It would have needed a fair bit of work to make Tala stand in as the sacrifice in that position. Because, in loo of having time to meaningfully bond Obi-wan with someone, having it be someone with Force capability or someone so clearly an innocent would be the one way to short-cut it. Actually, they might have been able to do it with Tala last episode, that she had put herself on the line for the mission to rescue Leia and ended up being killed because Obi-wan couldn’t stop it. Her death in this episode doesn’t work much at all, since it feels so…mandatory.
Actually, combining a couple ideas, have Leia bonding with another child (maybe a bit older than her), who she’s working with on the base-mechanics to get the evacuation going. It gives us more insight into Leia too, rather than just having her able to do plot relevant stuff because the plot says she can. Then that child, that we in the audience have gotten to know, gets in the wrong place at the wrong time. Depending on whose plot we’re focused on, maybe this kid is a little reminiscent of Luke or of Reva as a youngling. Either way, it ends up saying something about the characters involved.
I’m just spit-balling here, I didn’t have a plan, but you can damn well bet if I was trying to write it, I would put more thought into how it could play out the way I want/need it to.
I wish I could say the flashbacks worked. I can see what they were going for…kind of, but the parallels don’t quite work. Partially because Obi-wan’s lesson makes very little sense. But he attempts at it being a parallel don’t really work either. And also because it really doesn’t speak to how these old friends know each other so well that they’re planning strategies around what they know of the other’s moves. Because the one thing Obi-wan tries to take from it is ‘Vader will expect me to surrender…And that’s just what I’ll do.’ If it’s going to be anything it should be, ‘he knows how I think, so I need to think about this in a different way.’ For either of them. And then they should be tying themselves in knots trying to figure out whether the other can predict this or that move.
On top of that being how this episode should work, it should have to have been how the whole series worked. It would have had to be cat and mouse between Vader and Obi-wan all along. Each episode should have had a different flashback to how well they know each other’s moves that reflects the current circumstances in some way. Obi-wan knowing how Anakin thinks, but not quite able to predict what he can do with all he has now (power-wise and position-wise). Vader trying to figure out just what Obi-wan’s present goal is, but in most situations is able to call Obi-wan is most likely to do. (Strategy vs. tactics, that kind of thing.) This would put the writing in a bit of a bind, as the way out of the current trap would be for Obi-wan to think differently, and Obi-wan is supposed to be such a representative of the right way for a Jedi to be, for him to change how he thinks could be a danger to that. But as usual, get a writer who wants to put in the work of making it work, and it could be done.
I’m not even going to get into the stupidity of Bail’s message. Everything to do with it is dumb. That he would send it, that Obi-wan wouldn’t do a better job hiding it, that Reva would immediately find the communicator sitting of the ground. Yeah I kind of like the idea of Bail going to keep watch over Luke, but the message is dumb.
