Recently I had a chance to watch Obi-Wan Kenobi thanks to another Disney dump of streaming material to home video. Being one of the genuine fans of the prequel trilogy, this was particularly a big deal for me, with Ewan McGregor reprising the title role, and Joel Edgerton in a supporting role once again as Owen Lars (back in 2002-2005, he was still struggling to make a name for himself in Hollywood, but his career took dramatic swings upward in the years that followed), not to mention Hayden Christensen in one of his several recent revivals of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
Set a decade after Revenge of the Sith, Kenobi is still reeling from not only the loss of the whole Jedi Order but his friend Skywalker. In fact he has no idea Skywalker survived the duel on Mustafar. He eeks out a meager existence on Tatooine, kept a formal distance from young Luke by Lars, unwilling to let a man who failed his own friend have any responsibility over the boy he's taken into his care.
The remaining Jedi are still being hunted, this time by a band of Inquisitors, one of whom we eventually learn has a considerable secret, a parallel narrative that dovetails nicely with the unlikely and yet compelling reunion between Kenobi and Skywalker. Right off the bat the stakes change dramatically when Leia is kidnapped from Alderaan, and Kenobi is asked for the first time to rescue her.
The results could've been better, they could've been worse.
The acting from unestablished actors can be spotty, no real attempt at quality control apparently made in the rush to get through production, which began life as a film but reverted to a TV show when Solo underperformed at the box office. Like Star Trek sticking to familiar formulas, these Disney+ shows have begun to stick to predictable beats, and you either accept that or you don't, the bad guys keeping the good guys on the run and frequently resorting to backwater worlds that are always this side of sci-fi Western towns in need of some kind of rescue.
Obviously the whole Leia affair is a retcon, one solved in the traditional "we promise not to bring it up in the material that follows but was filmed long before" manner, and even Kenobi and Vader having an epic confrontation of any kind before the Death Star is a stretch, but a more acceptable one. They likely chose Leia over Luke for the arc in the interests of going for the unexpected, but at least it gives us a little more Bail Organa (once more played by Jimmy Smits) and fleshing out the world of Alderaan.
That the show brought back Edgerton but essentially had nothing for him to do except deliver a few pithy lines early on and then late in the show indulge in the kind of redeeming action sequences he clearly outgrew later, is the most mystifying thing about it. I've been a huge fan of his for more than a decade at this point, and he's long since proven his exceptional acting skills. The Leia heist robbed him, most of all, of quality material.
Little enough is asked of McGregor, too, but given the nature of his arc it's more understandable. He and Christensen get to indulge in the best lightsaber sequences since their heyday, and that alone was surely worth the price of admission. By the time we catch presumably our last glimpse of Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, the whole thing has proven worth it. It's decent material. I don't know how much it matters to an increasingly restless fanbase who never warmed to the prequels much less sequels, and hypocritically fell in love with goofy animated shows and Baby Yoda after devoting all their time to demonizing Jar Jar Binks. And truthfully I don't care.
