'Obi-Wan Kenobi' Reminds Us That The Jedi Are Awful At Their Job
This article contains SPOILERS for the most recent episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
This week’s episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi was a thrilling adventure full of twists, turns, and Senator Bail Organa sending Ben a hologram full of specific secrets he’s supposed to be guarding with his life at all costs. It wasn’t even password protected or anything? What the hell, Bail? While we’re reasonably sure that his holo-blabbing about a child hidden on Tatooine won’t end up leading to the violent death of a 10-year-old Luke Skywalker, it does set the stage for a dramatic showdown in the finale.
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Obi-Wan Kenobi’s penultimate chapter seemingly confirmed our theory that each episode of the show mirrors its numerically corresponding “Skywalker Saga” movie because episode five feels very similar to The Empire Strikes Back; the show begins with Darth Vader skulking at the window of his Star Destroyer, followed by an Imperial attack on a Rebel base, and ultimately culminates with a character losing a duel to Vader.
We also get a dramatic revelation; Reva, as many suspected, was once a Jedi youngling – but she’s secretly working on a plan to exact her revenge against Vader, who murdered all of her classmates back in Revenge of the Sith – a movie which very nearly complimented all of its horrible tragedies with this:
Positioning Reva as a sympathetic villain also underscores the ultimate theme of the prequels, which, as we’ve talked about before, is that kidnapping children from their homes is a terrible idea that never ends well. Revenge of the Sith makes it clear that children belong with families, not creepy space-cults. Reva’s turn to the Dark Side was facilitated by both the Empire and the Jedi; she’s equally mad at Obi-Wan for his part in what happened to her friends, and his failure to prevent it. Making the Jedi’s failure the engine that drives the antagonist is a great way to build on what the prequels were arguably trying to say – and to do it without farting CGI monsters or monologues about the discomfort of sand, is even better.
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Top Image: Lucasfilm
