I'm back from holiday and while away I managed to finish the last episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Do I have to specify that I'm talking about season one? There currently don't seem to be any plans for a season two and I don't think we need one either; the way it ended was fine.
Teaser art from starwars.com
In a nutshell, it was an enjoyable little series. It didn't blow me away, but I had a good time with every episode. There were occasional moments of "ehh, I'm not sure about that" where things felt a little awkward or didn't entirely make sense to me, but like in The Mandalorian, I was sufficiently invested in the overall narrative to give these small issues a pass.
After Book of Boba Fett it was particularly nice to see a Star Wars production give its main protagonist room to breathe and time to show character development again. I guess the producers didn't have much of a choice to do anything else in this case, considering that Obi-Wan Kenobi is about a major character's life between two of the franchise's main films and he's supposed to have lived a hermit's life during most of that time, so we effectively knew the story's end point: that he wasn't going to get up to anything too attention-grabbing and that neither Obi-Wan nor Vader were going to die. The question was how certain relationships got to where they were in A New Hope, and this show actually did some interesting work with that which seemed to mesh well enough with existing canon.
That said, I've got to admit I'm starting to experience a certain amount of fatigue with all this Star Wars content coming out so rapidly and how it all seems to focus on the same era and characters. There do seem to be some signs of Disney wanting to diversify into different eras and genres, but we'll see how well that goes.
Given both Star Wars and Marvel being given the "push out all the things!" Disney treatment, I guess it's not a surprise that people would get tired of it all. Disney has always known how to make a cheap buck, but their problem has been working with making quality movies that are farther apart than a season (or a year).
ReplyDeleteI really feel like the era right around the original trilogy has been a bit mined out, unless they want to focus on completely new characters (ala Rebels for example).
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think the next shows in the release pipeline are Andor and Ahsoka, which both have the potential to do at least something slightly different, but at the same time are also at risk of just giving us more of the same.
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