Kenobi SPOILER Season Review
Today the final episode of Kenobi has dropped and the show has concluded. So in typical fashion, here is my review of Kenobi. Let’s get started!
NOTE: As stated in the title of this post it will contain SPOILERS for the entire show. So if you are interested in checking this show out, watch this show then come back and read this.
The Good:
And for me the best thing about this season is Ewan McGregor. He is one of these guys that has been in Hollywood for almost 30 years and is still this A-list talent. And for all of the faults that the prequel trilogy has, Ewan McGregor is not one of them and for years people have been wanting him to return, I was one of them. And he is Obi-Wan Kenobi. He plays this character so well. You buy him as the mentor figure for Young Leia. But more importantly you buy him as this Jedi that saw everything he stood for just crumble. He had to nearly kill Anakin, his best friend and his brother. So he would be in a very different and dark place and Ewan McGregor just nailed playing that. And there are quite a few similarities between Kenobi in this show and Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, and I would say this show tackled that broken heroes arc better.
Tied to that there is something special about seeing Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen back in Star Wars as Kenobi and Darth Vader. Like I said, Ewan McGregor is a positive for the prequel trilogy. And so getting to see him back is just really cool, it’s something that fans wanted. Likewise, seeing Hayden Christensen and Darth Vader back is great. Darth Vader might be the greatest movie villain of all time so seeing Darth Vader go evil and menacing. And they use 21st century technology to bring Vader to life. And just getting to see a full on rematch between Kenobi and Darth Vader in this show is great. That was the thing that I most wanted to see going into this show, and we got it twice in this show.
We’ve come to the point in time where tv shows can look just as good as movies. And this show is an example of that. Where when they do space battles, lightsabers battles, or just having characters on planets it all looks believable. It all looks real and like they actually went to different planets. And you wouldn’t be able to do a tv show like this 10-15 years ago, you couldn’t even do this 5-10 years ago. So on a technical level this is a top notch production in my mind.
Finally, the score here is fantastic by Natalie Holt, she is the same composer for Loki which had a great score. And even though it’s not by John Williams, the score here is still fantastic. It still feels very much like a Star Wars score. But there is a Kenobi theme for this one that is by John Williams and whenever the music plays it just elevates the scene.
The Bad:
And this is a show where I think it has the typical and normal prequel problem. We know that Kenobi, Darth Vader, Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, Leia, and Luke all live because we’ve seen the original trilogy. So it does remove a lot of the stakes and tension of the show when several of our lead characters don’t die. We know that from the beginning that Kenobi is going to save Leia and return her home, so there isn’t that tension of will Kenobi complete his mission. Likewise we know that Kenobi isn’t going to kill Darth Vader or Darth Vader isn’t going to kill Kenobi. So there is a certain amount of tension lost because of that. It’s not really something that the show did wrong but it’s a typical problem when setting a story with familiar characters in between two installments.
Also while I liked getting to see Ewan McGregor back in the role, it was great to see him again. I didn’t feel like the show added much to the character of Kenobi. By the end of the show he was less cynical, he was more hopeful. But even his arc felt very rushed, it felt like his arc really happened in the finale. And tied to that, I didn’t feel like where Ewan McGregor’s Kenobi ended was the starting point for Alec Guiness’ Kenobi. I get there are still several years from when this ends to A New Hope. But I was kind of hoping that this show would be more of a bridge and give Kenobi more of an arc through-out this show.
Another problem is I think Reeva as a character was pretty underwhelming. I like the basic idea of the character but I don’t think the actress did a good job of portraying her. She seems like a good actress and a nice person. But the show needed her to be scary and intimidating and I never bought her like that. And the twist with her being one of the younglings that Anakin killed or thought to have killed wasn’t the most shocking. Pretty early on I felt like there was going to be a twist in her character and I think that the twist was predictable. It wasn’t this big shocking “oh wow” moment of the show.
Finally, Young Leia was not the best. She wasn’t a character that I ever felt connected to, and I thought the characterization of her was off. The actress was fine; she had that sassy spark that Carrie Fisher’s Leia had. But she’s portrayed as 10 year but looks 8 years old. And I never thought she was actually acting like a 10 year old. She felt like a 15 year old in a 10 year olds body.
Final Thoughts: This show seems to be pretty polarizing, some people are loving this show and think it’s the best that Disney Star Wars has done. And there are several people that were very disappointed by this show, they wanted something more and what they got was not that. As for me, I’m mixed positively on this one. I liked a lot of things about Ewan McGregor and it was great to see him back in this role. But it has a common prequel problem of knowing that these characters aren’t going to die so it removes all of the stakes. Reeva wasn’t a very good character and wasn’t portrayed very well. So all in all I was disappointed by this show.
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