![]() (No bacta tank required.) Anakin, still wearing his Padawan braid, gazes at the Coruscant skyline-toward a building that looks like Padmé’s-practicing the pose Vader will one day employ to survey the view from his fortress on Mustafar and from his flagship’s bridge. Even before Reva’s audience with Vader, the episode opens with a long-awaited flashback. As General Rieekan-Roken? Rieekan? Eh?-once said, “Prepare for ground assault.”īut this week’s chapter doesn’t only look forward it also looks back. At the dark lord’s behest, Lola sabotages the base’s hangar doors and prevents the good guys from evacuating, which sets the stage for the Empire to take the fight to them. Vader, on the bridge of the Devastator-the same Star Destroyer he’ll later take to Hoth-pins a Grand Inquisitor insignia on Reva’s chest, an ostensible reward for finding the hideout. (NED-B, Haja, and Corran-the kid Haja helped make a costly escape from Daiyu-are also on the scene.) The Empire, following a signal sent from Leia’s restraining-bolted droid Lola, is hot on their hyperdrive. Obi-Wan, Leia, and Tala-plus last week’s hastily introduced Path representatives, Roken and Sully-have flown back to the base on Jabiim. This week, we might as well be back on Hoth, albeit with a warmer climate. The third episode’s Obi-Wan–Vader reunion borrowed beats from their Mustafar matchup and the Luke-Vader meeting on Bespin, while last week’s infiltration of and escape from Fortress Inquisitorius echoed (and foreshadowed) Episode IV’s Death Star sequence. Not content with merely mining its surrounding Star Wars trilogies for characters and themes, Obi-Wan Kenobi has repeatedly stolen their set pieces. Questions including: What’s Reva’s deal? Will the real Grand Inquisitor please stand up? And the big one: Was casting Hayden Christensen mostly a marketing move, or would he actually be seen outside of the suit, sans prosthetics? But amid its homage to The Empire Strikes Back, the penultimate chapter-credited to showrunner Joby Harold and Andrew Stanton, with no trace of original writer Hossein Amini-gets around to revealing the answers to questions that the series has slow-walked for the past few weeks. The structure of Episode 5 of Obi-Wan apes the setup for Episode V of the Skywalker saga. It can’t quite make us forget that everything will work out in the long run, but it provides plenty of diversions, because in the short term, things are far from OK. ![]() This week’s follow-up fares a bit better. ![]() Last week’s episode was the season’s low-water mark (so to speak), as a slapdash, abbreviated visit to a partly flooded Fortress Inquisitorius exposed the seams in a project that’s morphed from a film to a miniseries and seen its scripts marked up by a multitude of pens. ![]() This delicate trick hasn’t always worked. From the start, Lucasfilm’s latest series has tried to thread a Stone Needle by conspicuously evoking classic Star Wars films while simultaneously obscuring the ways in which their existence dramatically lowers the stakes of Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s not news to us we’ve seen the original trilogy. “Is everything OK?” Imperial defector turned resistance fighter Tala asks Obi-Wan Kenobi in the fifth episode of the latter’s eponymous series. ![]()
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