The Inquisitors are also great because they’re motivated by the best driving force for any bad guy in the Star Wars universe. That’s right, impressing your boss and getting a promotion at the expense of your colleagues.
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Apropos of nothing the preponderance of Inquisitors made me wonder how they gel with the whole ‘Rule of Two’ thing and I didn’t realise that they, and even Ventress, aren’t strictly speaking Sith. They are Dark side, but not inducted into the secrets of the Sith.
Probably old news to most people but I’m a pretty shallow fan of Star Wars so I found that interesting.
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I have to get off of Tik Tok as I’m getting the whole discourse surrounding Kenobi - from the praise to the awful vitriolic anger against it. One of the takes seems to be hey there’s 6 episodes of the show JUST like there are 6 episodes of star wars films (they don’t count the sequel trilogy obviously), each episode repeating events of each film episode. The links are very tenuous. So Episode 1 is set on Tatooine… Episode 2 has a clone in it… Episode 3 had Vader vs Kenobi again and Episode 4 is belly of the beast - infiltrate the bad guy base… VERY tenuous these links. We can probably expect a big family revelation in Episode 5 - or y’know just snow… and maybe ewoks for 6?
I just… do you get Star Wars? Though it should be rich with creativity, a crucible for any story or characters you can imagine, as it has across other mediums in the past. The franchise is creatively limited serving up little bits of star wars schtick in televisual form, which I think is partly down to the whole hell discourse surrounding it. I have to get off tik tok.
I’m enjoying Kenobi each week, mostly for Ewan McGregor. Dude can act. I’d have been happy with a tv show about Obi Wan alone in his hut tending to his simple life while reminscing about the clone wars and not trying to think about Vader. Maybe he witnesses the injustices of the Empire around him but is unable to act as his inner thoughts are just propelling him into thinking he is doing the right thing moulding a young Luke Skywalker to one day kill his dad.
On the sub levels in Episode 4 with all the jedi preserved in amber (sorry, just seen Jurassic World so it’s fresh in my mind), I’m assuming they aren’t being kept as trophies but they are being mined for ‘force shit’ to power whatever dark science the sith are working on. Why does the youngling still have his training visor on?
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They aren’t capital-s Sith, no, but it’s longstanding tradition among the Sith that somebody breaks the Rule of Two to either overthrow the master or polish off an unruly apprentice, so who better to pull from than your own personal talent pool
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The way they shot those ambered Jedi in the basement made me feel like I should have recognized some of them. Are there any that we might know? If so then they all went over my head 
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I kept waiting to recognise one and uh… nope, not me anyway.
Yea makes sense, that also ties into (I guess I’ll spoiler tag this Clone Wars event in respect for anyone who still hadn’t watched) the logic of Sidious demanding the death of Ventress. She was getting powerful enough that she and Dooku would become a threat if he decided to start sharing secrets with her.
Oh and there was one fairly well known Jedi in the ‘Amber’
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I was hoping that Yaddle would be one of the Jedi in the amber. They really missed an opportunity to bring back Yaddle.
So, I think, if there’s a core problem for Obi-Wan the Series aside from the way in which the action sequences mostly don’t work and the scripts are shockingly wonky in terms of timing and continuity… it’s that what you just described would be a better series than what they’re doing, but they presumably feel constrained by “what Star Wars is” in preventing them from having a series like that.
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Oh noooo, not my Space Columbo D:
Anyway, finally saw the fourth episode and that all worked for me. Actually coherent fight geography thanks to the constrained space.
Episode 5 is a definite improvement overall.
Kudos to those who had Reva’s entire storyline all worked out by the end of the first Episode. And also for those of us who assumed that this was a stratagem by the Grand Inquisitor too.
I particularly liked the opening bits of the Vader / Reva fight - using the force to block lightsabers barehanded is something I wanted out of the (hugely disappointing) Yoda/Dooku fight in Attack of the Clones, rather than “bouncy Yoda”, so at least we got to see that style now canonised in an actual production
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No wonder they put a content warning in front of this one. Great episode though.
Best episode so far.
Yeah, this was good as hell. No notes.
I love the flashbacks of Obi-Wan vs Anakin fantastic fight, great character moments, glad to see those actors still got the chemistry and can do the things.
I just can’t get on board of this new trend in Star Wars media of “Darth Vader was so damn cool, we’re just gonna write scenes for him to be fucking cool”. It feels indulgent, like you didn’t think there was enough Vader action for some reason.
We had Vader, it happened. Can we move on? You can have some other guy be your ultimate badass ship breaking force user.
I guess they’re doing better with Cool Vader stuff than Cool Boba Fett or Cool Maul fan-service, the latter of which makes me wonder if those characters were ever cool.
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Honestly Vader never really landed for me as this terrifying character. He had some decent scenes in the OT, but he was primarily the guy Leia gave attitude and Luke’s absent father.
Rogue One and this are doing a good job, to me, of making clear how scary he is.
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That’s also due to different cinematic conventions though - the first three Star Wars movies (in production order) are very much following Lucas’ original “they should be like 30s adventure serials” theme for everything. Vader’s as threatening as a 30s adventure serial villain is allowed to be in them.
When he’s allowed to be represented in a different genre - like Rogue One - he becomes as threatening as that genre allows.
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I’m happy with Vader when he’s slow and lumbering but obviously incredibly powerful and they’re still broadly sticking to that. The Rogue One scene was even better because he is this horrifying murder machine but he still ultimately fails.
Rupert Friend is just great isn’t he? I could watch him ham it up all day.
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For me, Rogue One’s version of Vader is still the most compelling of his various cameos. Perhaps it is because none of the characters were Jedi; he feels like a truly unstoppable force against skilled but normal people. It never quite works when he’s against Obi-Wan for me because it feels more like a statement of how Obi-Wan’s lost his touch than how powerful Vader truly is (like, last time they fought, Anakin was decimated - worse than, in a literal sense), though it does work better in his scenes with Reva and others.
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