“Anakin Skywalker is alive.”
The news hits Obi-Wan Kenobi like a ton of bricks. It’s a taunt from Reva, the Fifth Sister, an Imperial Inquisitor whose hunt for Obi-Wan is obviously very personal; indeed, she stabs her nominal boss the Grand Inquisitor for getting in the way of the hunt.
Exactly how Obi-Wan connects Reva’s initial mention of “Lord Vader” to the name of his old pupil is unclear—if he recognizes the name, wouldn’t that mean he’s known about Vader’s existence and identity all along? But once that proper name Anakin Skywalker is dropped, you can see years of guilt, pain, and regret filter across actor Ewan McGregor’s face. (It’s an echo of the Return of the Jedi close-up on Luke when he learns Darth Vader knows Leia is his twin sister.) Obi-Wan’s greatest failure is alive and well and very, very evil. As much as he regrets their bitter parting, he may well regret sparing his old apprentice’s life when he had the chance to end it most of all.
There’s still a lot of Obi-Wan Kenobi left in which the titular Jedi’s feelings about his old friend, and vice versa, can be explored. For now, as of this second episode, what we have on our hands is a good old-fashioned bounty-hunting adventure, in which everyone and their grandmother seems to be in on the chase after Kenobi and Princess Leia Organa, the child kidnapped on the Fifth Sister’s orders so as to lure Obi-Wan out of hiding.
And the plan works rather well. Following Leia’s father Bail’s instructions, Obi-Wan travels to the urbanized port-city planet of Daiyu—a sort of outer-space Hong Kong—where he almost immediately gains the help of a con man named Haja Estree, who pretends to be a Jedi both to help people and to pump them for cash. (“The Force is so strong with you!” marvels one defrauded client; “Yeah, I know,” comes the funny reply.)
After sneaking through what looks like an alien meth lab, Obi-Wan has a Marvel/Netflix style hallway fight with some goons, then saves Leia from the bounty hunter Vecht and his minions. Vecht is later tormented by the Grand Inquisitor, who wants Obi-Wan’s location, and to thwart his truculent Sister’s monomaniacal quest for the old Jedi.
As for the relationship between Obi-Wan and Leia, it’s very reminiscent of the restless, mouthy pupil vs. flummoxed older warrior dynamics that recurred throughout the prequel trilogy. Obi-Wan tells Leia he reminds her of…well, he doesn’t and can’t say it directly, but he’s talking about Leia’s late mother, Queen Padmé Amidala. But child actor Vivien Lyra Blair’s precocious rebelliousness reminded me a lot of young actor Jake Lloyd’s interactions as young Anakin Skywalker with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, or Hayden Christensen’s teenaged Anakin with McGregor’s young Master Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones. (Presumably, that’s Christensen under the burn-victim Vader makeup at the end of the episode.) Like I’ve said before, this series is leaning way hard into the prequels, in both plot and tone.
…With one major exception. What we’ve got in this episode amounts to a fairly serious retcon of the relationship between Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Previously, he was simply the legendary warrior to whom a desperate Leia reached out for help as Darth Vader’s forces attacked her ship. Thanks to the event of this episode, though, he’s now a person she would remember, recognize, and most likely treasure for rescuing her as a kid. You can probably square this away with how Leia reacts to his presence in A New Hope—her excited cry of “Ben Kenobi?!?” when Luke tells her the old Jedi is on the Death Star with them now feels more justified, for example—but speaking personally, I’d have kept him an aloof and mysterious figure. This feels a little like how the prequels randomly made C-3PO a creation of Anakin Skywalker. Like, okay, but…why?
That’s the problem with prequels and interquels, I guess: They provide answers for questions no one asked, or make connections where connections aren’t necessary. On the other hand, they give us Obi-Wan Kenobi walloping goons in a hallway like he’s Daredevil, and show us an Imperial Inquisitor parkouring her way across the rooftops like Catwoman, and, most importantly, give you a little jolt of Star Wars-iness you can consume in well under an hour, even if it’s best understood as glorified fanfiction rather than part of the seminal original series of films. Your Disney+ subscription? In this case, I’d say it’s worth the credits.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.