**SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched the Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series on Disney+, decide now if you want to proceed because I have no intention of holding back here on the basis of not spoiling anything. This review/blog post/soapbox-fanboy-speech is intended for those who have seen the series as well as at least Star Wars Episodes I – VI. Thank you and good night**

I’ll start by addressing the harsh and honest truth: nobody wanted an Obi-Wan show.

            To be sure, there are lots of things in the show that many fans (myself very much included) have long wanted to see: a true McGregor/Kenobi-versus-Darth Vader showdown; a more solid set-up for the Skywalker kids going into the original trilogy; some justice for Padme Amidala as said Skywalker kids’ mother, just to name a few. But no one was asking or even demanding a streaming show for Obi-Wan Kenobi, of all characters. To be sure, Episodes I – III of the Star Wars Skywalker Saga left quite a bit to be desired (more on that in a moment) along with a bad taste in the mouths of many a long time Star Wars fan. That said, I like to think most fans would agree that we neither needed nor expected any kind of major live-action production simply for the sake of correcting the aforementioned slights of the prequels.

            Yet, in Obi-Wan Kenobi – the recently completed six-part limited series on Disney+ – that is exactly what we got. And it is fantastic.

            For years, rumors had swirled about a potential spin-off movie – ala Solo or Rogue One -for Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan. The notion seemed to be that we would get some sort of exploration of Obi-Wan’s character during the roughly eighteen year period between Episodes III and IV, lending a bit more of a direct transition from McGregor’s performance to Alec Guinness’s. Reading several articles and op-eds on the subject at the time, it occurred to me that the only real positive interest around such a project was primarily rooted in excitement over seeing McGregor return to a role he had performed splendidly, despite much of what was around him in those three films sucking hard by comparison. Once you got past that exciting notion, the discussion very quickly turned into some version or another of “yeah, but, uh…what would the story even be? I mean…during that whole time, wasn’t Obi-Wan supposed to just be sitting around on Tatooine making sure Luke didn’t fall into a sarlacc pit or something?”

            So once the limited series was officially announced, there was immediate and expected excitement over the fact that Ewan McGregor would be returning. Simultaneously, I (and, it seems, many other fans) also felt a bit of dread about what this might turn out to be given there was no obvious story to be told here. Sure, any halfway talented writer could slap together some sort of adventure that forced Obi-Wan off Tatooine for a moment and then returned him right back, and maybe said writer would even be smart enough to write it in such a way that nothing happened to contradict the relatively airtight continuity of the Disney-Star Wars universe. But what would justify doing this as a live-action production with the original actors and quality special effects and the like? Why not do it as a Marvel comic or a novel or even a video game (much of which under the Disney regime has actually been surprisingly good)? Bottom line: beyond the joy of seeing the Return of the McGregor, why the hell should we care? And, by default, once you start discussing the kinds of epic things that must occur to make such a show worth watching, you end up on the other side of the same problem: if such major enough events occurred to force Obi-Wan into a whole epic adventure during his Tatooine sojourn, does that not immediately contradict the story as we’ve known it for decades?

            Speaking as a self-professed fanboy, I’ve been burned by such things before. It’s been pretty painful to watch the slow, sad disintegration of the Terminator franchise given that T2 was the first grown-up sci-fi film I ever became deeply attached to (a subject I plan to write an entirely separate article about). It doesn’t take much digging into the Terminator films past the second installment to realize what went wrong: from Rise of the Machines to Dark Fate, despite the fleeting merits they all contained, every single one of them was made in a studio-driven effort to milk a brand and lay a foundation from which to mount a larger franchise. Not one of them was made because someone – a writer, a director, whoever – legitimately had an inspired idea for a new story set in that world and/or using those characters. The filmmakers involved, to varying degrees of success, were clearly fans of the material with cool surface ideas to bring to the table, but there was nothing of passion at the cores of those stories. I’d even argue the same can be said of Episodes VII – IX of Star Wars (though I don’t loathe those films the way many do). But the point remains: for a story production of any kind to achieve any real quality, love for existing characters and worlds, however passionate, is not enough. There needs to be an inspired story worth telling; case in point, Rogue One very much fulfilled this requirement and it is easily one of the best Star Wars productions ever made. However much I wanted to see Ewan McGregor put the jedi robes on again (and I did), the idea of an Obi-Wan show reeked to me of nothing more than franchise-milking.

            Then came some key announcements: Deborah Chow, one of the inspired filmmakers most directly responsible for The Mandalorian’s greatness, would be running/directing the entire six-episode project. And then Hayden Christensen was announced as officially returning to the role of Darth Vader. Some bemoaned this as a pointless gesture given Vader’s suit keeps us from seeing – or, largely, caring – who is physically playing the part; as long as the legendary James Earl Jones is still voicing him, no one generally cares who is filling the suit. And yet, that decision said something to me about the direction Chow would be taking the show, and my suspicions were confirmed in the first few interviews she gave on the subject of the upcoming series. To paraphrase and distill her statements to basics: she wasn’t interested in doing a show about Obi-Wan going off on some cool adventure; she was interested in studying the love story between Obi-Wan and Anakin and the impact that said love story had on those it touched.

            THAT is a story worth telling. And that makes it a story worth bringing back key actors, building sets, utilizing the latest effects. That is a story worth watching.

            Of course, none of this automatically meant the execution would be any good; the proof of that particular pudding wouldn’t arrive until the actual watching of the show itself. But if you’ve gotten this far into my rambling then I think you realize that I wasn’t disappointed. The show wasn’t absolutely perfect, mainly because I’ve yet to see a production that is. But if I’m really fair about it, most of my gripes are less about any lack of quality storytelling and more mired in my own fan biases on things I personally wanted to see.

            Let’s start with Obi-Wan himself: one of the key reasons I ever felt excited about Ewan McGregor returning to the role (apart from the fact he was one of the few things I think all fans agree was great about the prequels) was that every time he has been asked in the last seventeen years, he has always expressed a readiness and a genuine sense of enthusiasm about coming back to Obi-Wan. In this series, it shows. I would argue he throws himself harder into the role in this series than he did the films, likely due to a combination of 1) the show’s focus being primarily on his character, and 2) that Deborah Chow seems a far better actor’s director than Lucas (all respect to the Star Wars Ultimate Creator) has ever been. Even more to the point, this show just flat out gives Obi-Wan more to do and more to emotionally deal with than anything that happened in the prequels, short of Episode III’s climax. As such, Ewan quietly chews up the scenery of every scene he’s in, with just enough reverence for the lead-up he’s building toward Alec Guinness’s classic performance without spilling over into flat out imitation. More to that, Ewan feels a lot looser and free in the role this time around. Some of that is due to the simple facts of where his character is both physically and emotionally at this point in the story: ten years on from slicing his apprentice/friend/surrogate-brother/surrogate-son’s limbs off and leaving him for dead on the shore of a lava river, he spends his days working a shit job for barely any pay while watching over said-apprentice’s son in exile and even then not really because the apprentice’s step-brother genuinely loves his nephew/adopted son and pretty justifiably wants him to have nothing to do with the world, people, and expectations that got the nephew/son’s father corrupted and supposedly killed in the first place. Add to that everything Obi-Wan was raised in/by and taught to believe and uphold has been destroyed, his believed-killing of his apprentice has seemingly done nothing to stop the onslaught and encroachment of the Empire (to say nothing of the evil apprentice not really being dead to begin with, and in fact having become a far worse level of monster) and the training he is supposed to have been receiving from the ghost of his long dead master Qui-Gon Jinn has still not begun, seemingly because Qui-Gon flat out refuses to respond. Kenobi is a character with little left to lose and not much driving him to try anymore. The fact he tries at all when adventure comes knocking is a testament to his in-born heroism, a brand of agony and a set of tough decision-making responses that Ewan plays up for maximum emotion, not to mention emotional stakes.

            On the other side of this: Darth Vader. Call it psychosomatic, but knowing Hayden was under that helmet made all the difference in the world to me. The series knows it, too, given how many opportunities it takes to show a heavily-scarred-up Christensen in bacta tanks, getting the suit assembled onto him, and finally shining one blazing eye through a Kenobi-inflicted crack in his mask. All hail James Earl Jones’s as-always-top-notch voicing of the arguably greatest cinema villain of all time, but it genuinely mattered that the rematch here was between Ewan and Hayden, not just one guy in jedi robes and another guy in a Vader suit. This was exactly why making a live-action production out of this was worthwhile: seeing these two actors – however hidden one of them may have been – face off with one another again on multiple levels in a perfectly balanced evolution of their relationship. One of my few criticisms of this show is that there was much more to dig into here that was left on the table: we got one neat flashback of the two of them in Anakin’s padawan days, but there could have and should have been more of this. The Clone Wars cartoon alone showcased how much nuanced and complex history these two characters have together (and, by the way, why the hell didn’t we get a Rosario Dawson cameo in a flashback to the height of the Clone Wars?! Am I the only one who thought that fan-service opportunity was natural and obvious?). Who knows if/when we’ll get these two actors together again to do any Star Wars project, in which case this really should have been treated as an all-or-nothing deal. With that in mind, the absolute necessities were achieved: the subtle plot-holes of Obi-Wan encountering Vader pre-Episode IV and Obi-Wan naturally reaching a perception og Vader as Anakin’s murderer (a point that hasn’t sat well with any Star Wars fan pretty much since Return of the Jedi) were addressed in excellent and appropriately emotional fashion. Hayden’s performance had everything to do with this, which is even more significant when taken into account against Episodes II and III. Much has been written about Hayden’s wooden and/or robotic performances in those films (“course and rough” you might say; sorry, I had to). Perhaps a more experienced actor would’ve done a better job, but I’ve always felt any failings regarding Hayden’s Anakin were less rooted in a lack of skill or talent and more to do with what the then-young man had to work with. Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman, themselves accomplished actors by that point, visibly struggled with much of their dialogue. Even veteran actors like Ian McDiarmid, Christopher Lee, and Sam Jackson had to make obvious effort to sell their lines. Add to that certain key moments such as Anakin’s nervous-breakdown-description to Padme of his Tusken Raider genocide, which perfectly displayed why Christensen was chosen for the role, and it’s clear the faults in his performance were unfairly laid at Hayden’s feet instead of on the screenwriter (*cough* Lucas *cough*). This show goes a long, long way toward giving the performances in the prequels justice, particularly in Hayden Christensen’s case.

            While we’re discussing this show’s deliverance of justice to actors and characters from the prequels, let’s talk about Jimmy Smits and Vivien Lyra Blair (Bail Organa and Young Princess Leia, respectively). Smits had slowly but surely been getting far better opportunities to expand on a character we knew of from the original Star Wars but had never seen until his brief showings in the prequels. Personally, I’ll watch Jimmy Smits in anything (his reformed gangbanger/ex-addict on Sons of Anarchy was one of the best characters on that show) but Bail Organa was a sterling example of an actor/character marriage that had a ton of potential that we simply were not shown in the films. The little bit of screentime he gets in this show finally grants Smits the opportunity to display just a small yet significant insight into the senator who fought side-by-side with Padme to save the Republic and, failing that, made it his mission to raise her daughter as his own. Smits’s characteristically subtle performance does an efficient and excellent job of showcasing how this quiet and intelligent man helped shape the most important leader of the Rebel Alliance and the future New Republic. Which leads me to Leia herself: whoever cast Blair in this role – tiny and adorable girl that she is – clearly had their priorities straight. Blair doesn’t bear a ton of obvious physical resemblance to Carrie Fisher, but holy shit does her performance align perfectly. Her attitude, her speech pattern, the narrowed eyes when she catches sight of something important, all of it harkens back to Fisher’s commanding yet quietly vulnerable embodiment of a woman who lost just about everything a person can lose and still feared nothing in her mission for justice across six films and four decades (right up to and beyond Fisher’s real-life passing). Even the way Blair walks in most of her scenes recalls Leia’s get-this-walking-carpet-out-of-my-way attitude circa 1977.

And as much as Blair’s performance shores up Fisher’s, the lesser-discussed performance she also supports is that of Natalie Portman. Speaking for myself: there is no actor or character more shafted in the prequels than the Portman/Padme union, given Portman’s level of skill and talent at such a young age, portraying a character previously referenced in barely ten seconds of Luke-and-Leia dialogue (Return of the Jedi) while being equally as important to their characters as Anakin/Vader. For all the cardboard-dialogue and bullshit midriff-display Portman was forced to endure in those films, she still spent Episodes I and II muscling forward with a character who not only won Anakin’s heart and mothered his children, but also saved her planet and worked desperately to save the Republic (and, in the worst scene-deleting decision-making I’ve ever seen, was also directly – and fittingly – involved in the initial roots of the Rebel Alliance). For all of that, Portman spent most of her time in Episode III crying over Anakin, which had to happen to a degree and wouldn’t have been so bad if she wasn’t a) sidelined from any other real impact in the film’s story, and b) then sent off to deliver the twins and die with a whimper as Lucas had no further use for her. It was a horrible misuse of a quality actress and a genuinely engaging character that Blair’s performance and embodiment of Leia does much to help course-correct. This is where the importance of how much Blair 100% sells her relationship with Obi-Wan comes into play, from initial distrust to ultimate friendship and respect, all of which throws an entirely different and much heavier weight behind those “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” moments from the original film. All of this to say nothing of the fact that no one went into this show expecting Leia of all characters to be the one Obi-Wan spent most of his time concerned with; we all expected Obi-Wan to be extremely Luke-focused (much the cause of fan concern for this series given that would almost certainly ruin who Luke was supposed to be and what he was supposed to know going into the original trilogy). Making Leia and, by extension, Bail Organa the characters pulling Obi-Wan back into the fight solved that problem handily while giving Ewan the opportunity to pay solid respect to Padme’s memory, which was especially poignant given we didn’t get much of their relationship in the prequel films either. All of this gave context to elements of the overall Skywalker-centric story we didn’t even know we wanted or needed.

            Which brings me to the Inquisitors, the Path, and the Lars family. Even a standalone film around Obi-Wan would have required some form or another of an expanded cast to make things interesting, but the job was better done here than any would have anticipated. No one asked for Moses Ingram’s Reva, but what a character they made out of her. Vader was always going to need allies around him beyond one-off Imperial officers to necessitate his dialogue and make things interesting, and of course Obi-Wan needed more to fight than Vader and a bunch of stormtroopers; all of that was necessary. What wasn’t obviously necessary – but certainly broadened and deepened the emotional stakes of the story – was a character that not only served a genuine threat to both principle characters, but tied directly back to their deepest history and had every reason to despise them both. Reva’s murky motivations (and Ingram’s genuinely sinister portrayal) kept viewers guessing the entire way, and by the time she was storming the Lars farmstead in the final act, we the audience had a difficult time deciding how to feel. No one wanted Luke to die (and obviously he was never going to), but there was also never a question why Reva felt justified to go on her murder mission. Her motivations for committing acts of evil were just as relatable as Vader’s, making her an equally compelling character, let alone villain. I’m genuinely interested to see what further Star Wars material she will show up in (as she must, because…Star Wars).

I felt a bit 50/50 about the show’s use of Owen and Beru Lars. To be fair, they were only in it as much as they absolutely needed to be, but once we got actual spoken lines from Beru – lines that made clear she is a Character with opinions and an individual perspective – I immediately wished we had gotten more time with these two. In the context of Star Wars, I’ve always felt like Owen and Beru were this world’s equivalent of Jonathan and Martha Kent, having raised a destined hero in an environment of deliberate obscurity and character-building manual labor, all the better to humble and prepare said hero for the history-making journey ahead. The same goes for Queen Breha, Bail Organa’s wife and Leia’s adopted mother. The moments she was given drew my interest, but there were so few of them for so very limited bits of time. I would have love to have gotten more time with Breha and the Larses in place of all the time spent on the members of The Path, the underground railroad of-sorts for surviving/on-the-run jedi still moving around ten years after Episode III/Order 66. While there is clearly greater franchise building/networking effort at work here (Cal Kestis’s video games come to mind), it seemed to me that the story purpose of the Path – beyond giving Obi-Wan some grown-up allies to muck about with – was to clue Obi-Wan directly into the burgeoning rebel forces throughout the galaxy that will later form up into the Rebel Alliance. There was an opportunity here to explore Obi-Wan’s direct involvement in the initial formation of the Alliance, and while time will tell if that was, in fact, the intention it was not made explicit in the least. Everyone from Kumail Nanjiani’s Haja to O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s Roken just sort of came and went; they gave Obi-Wan someone to talk to and fight side-by-side with, but they didn’t serve to do much beyond that. This would have been fine if they were left to be disparate characters Obi-Wan and Leia met along the way (such was the nature of Obi-Wan and Leia’s on-the-road adventure), but once they were banded together as a group, their intention as heftier characters without the substance to back it up shined through and diluted them somewhat. The only one I felt was genuinely interesting beyond initial gimmicks was Indira Varma’s Tala, an Imperial officer that became disillusioned with a system that put her to work under false pretenses. The very notion of a high-level Imperial turncoat working as an insider for the pre-rebellion was interesting on its own, and Varma sold the emotional weight of Tala’s bad decisions and where that weight had taken her. So, of course, she’s the one that dies.

            This is my one real gripe with the show that goes beyond personal bias/extras that I selfishly wished to see. Calling the show Obi-Wan Kenobi says to me that it is primarily concerned with performing a character study on Obi-Wan himself and partially doing so via characters in his immediate circle of effect and impact. While most of the characters in the show – up to and including Reva – serve that end and serve it well, the Path characters were mostly worthless and the ones who should’ve had more light thrown on them – namely the adopted parents – were given all-too-brief moments to shine. If the desire with the Path was to make Obi-Wan just a little more of an inspiration and an involved figure within the infancy of what would become the Rebel Alliance, the show should have made that crystal clear, hence giving that point its due weight. But with that point made, it does not ultimately serve to drag the show down by much, and as pointless as some characters may have felt, they were indeed derived out of story-telling necessity.

            I definitely enjoyed the show (as practically all of the above paragraphs make clear) and feel it earned its own value given it was a story no one was really asking for and yet absolutely benefits the Skywalker Saga as a whole. I never would have been down with a show or even a film being made simply to fix the problematic issues and missed opportunities of the prequel trilogy, but this series managed to do a lot (if not all) of that, too; it felt like Liam Neeson showed up as the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn at the end almost as if to put the definitive period on this exact point (I know I’m not the only one who wondered where the hell he was at the end of Episode III). I would have gladly traded the Path subplot for more Clone Wars-era flashbacks in a heartbeat, not just for the Ahsoka cameo that should have happened (this is 100% a hill I’m prepared to die on), but for the much deeper development of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen’s on-screen relationship that such flashbacks would have afforded. George Lucas always envisioned Star Wars as a glorification and mishmash of the sci-fi/fantasy/western/samurai serials he watched as a kid, so when people lament all these shows and whatnot cropping up within Star Wars as unnecessary exploitation of the franchise, I shake my head because the people doing the bitching just don’t get it. This fictional universe was always meant to be expanded and serialized. Say what you will about Lucasfilm and/or Disney’s business model, especially in the mega-franchise/streaming-service/media-heavy world we live in today, but it perfectly facilitates the kind of deep-dive and character-heavy adventure storytelling Lucas was initially shooting for. Obi-Wan Kenobi makes the just about the best use possible of this forum, in more ways than we had any right to expect.

            As for the future: I’ll probably be hated for saying this, but I do NOT want a season two. This show did what it needed to and more besides while playing very dangerously close to the continuity fire; it got away with its story and all of its indulgences in ways it never should have been able to. To do another season would push that flirtation into a full on clusterfuck that will only piss fans off. This series was very much a high-stakes gamble that Lucasfilm won against all odds, and with more reason, they need to take their winnings and quietly leave the table.

            BUT…

            At the risk of beating a dead metaphor: nothing says Lucasfilm can’t and/or should not take said winnings and simply sit at another table, and the most sensible table to play at next would be a Darth Vader limited series. Kept just as tight as Obi-Wan’s show at six episodes, we can get a deep-dive character exploration of Anakin and Vader, affording Hayden Christensen even more (and better) opportunity to fill out the character via flashbacks, dream sequences, and pow wows with Palpatine, all while searching fruitlessly for Obi-Wan (and I mean fruitlessly; they seriously need to leave the Vader vs Obi-Wan dynamic where it lies). So then, the obvious question: if Vader doesn’t find Obi-Wan, who’s he going to fight? Which leads to better questions: can’t Reva come back for more? Can’t Cameron Monaghan show up to have Cal Kestis cross Vader’s path again? And hell, while we’re at it, the always-awesome Samuel L. Jackson never actually stopped beating the drum of Episode III’s failure to show Mace Windu’s dead body. Could you imagine an older, bitter, cyber-handed Sam Jackson leading a group of renegade jedi on a witch hunt for Vader’s head?

            It would be a show no one was asking for, but definitely a story worth telling. And that will always earn my attention.