With the landmark return of the cast of the Prequel Trilogy, the long awaited Obi-Wan Kenobi solo outing sees Disney pulling their final card from the deck as they bank on nostalgia from the George Lucas heyday of Star Wars to inject some much-needed audience interest back into the brand. Yet, in the face of such a monumental opportunity, the series is ultimately a failure at every level; writing, direction and production all suffer from deep-rooted issues that barely allow the show to function in its own right, all the while wreaking havoc with the last four decades of Star Wars canon. Even the desperate final attempts to muster an emotionally charged ending fall flat; leaving Lucasfilm’s last best chance for redemption wasted on one of the worst television shows I’ve ever seen.

As you may remember, I wasn’t too thrilled with Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s prospects based on its first trailer (you can read that article here), thanks to some questionable design choices, the heavy focus on new characters, and the reliance on nostalgia for the Prequel Trilogy as its selling point. Compounding all this was Disney’s track record with the Star Wars brand weighing too far on the side of disappointing and downright terrible productions, especially coming off the back of the laughably bad Book of Boba Fett earlier this year (see my review here). I questioned whether it was worth maintaining any investment in Disney’s Star Wars, and truthfully I feel like my answer has been hinging on the outcome of this show, but despite remaining optimistic that they wouldn’t squander this historical opportunity, it’s with great discontent that I find Obi-Wan Kenobi has been far worse than I ever could’ve imagined.

Spoilers ahead!

The six-part season picks up with the titular Jedi Master (Ewan McGregor) ten years into his exile on Tatooine, where he begins the story in an understandably dark place – burdened by regret, plagued by nightmares, and cut off from the Force; Obi-Wan was primed for a potentially brilliant arc as the show looked to transform him into the wise and confident version of the character portrayed by Alec Guinness in A New Hope, but that potential unfortunately fails to manifest into anything tangible. Kenobi spends the vast majority of the show as a timid defeatist; fleeing from every conflict and constantly begrudging the responsibilities thrust upon him as he’s led around by far more capable characters. As far as it makes sense for him to be depressed and disillusioned on paper, in actuality the series portrays him as weak and pathetic, and with how it echoes the way that Disney-Lucasfilm has treated the likes of Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett, I have to wonder if this approach to legacy characters is coming from a place of malice. It seems like the show’s take on the character has hardly excited Ewan McGregor either, with his performance feeling consistently tired and half-hearted to the point where he barely even upholds the character’s accent in some moments. By the end, it’s nice to see that Kenobi does come across as more capable in his abilities and certainly far more hopeful in his outlook, but not only does it feel like too little too late after the entire series is spent with a neutered and unimpressive version of the character, but it also comes across as unearned when this change is sort of just dropped in at the end as the writers felt the need to wrap up the story.

What the writers decided to put to the screen in favour of a satisfying arc for Obi-Wan was a confoundingly stupid main plot that centres on a young Princess Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair), who is kidnapped with intention of drawing out the Jedi Master. It’s a blatant attempt to cash in on Leia’s name value that’s injected into the story in the most convoluted way possible, and undoubtedly as another way to bring a little extra “girl power” to the male-led show too, despite the fact it would’ve made infinitely more sense to use a young Luke in the story instead. Still, it would’ve made even more sense to just not use either character, given the fact that wedging this godawful plot behind the Original Trilogy is an egregious retcon of A New Hope, seeing how not once does Leia ever mention her long-winded, perilous adventure she had with Old Ben Kenobi when she was ten; making it ever clearer that this show amounts to nothing more than a lazily penned fan-fiction. It doesn’t help that the character is incredibly annoying; for one, she consistently causes problem after problem for Obi-Wan throughout the story, and for another, there’s an obvious attempt on the part of the writers to replicate the strong and sassy attitude of Carrie Fisher’s Leia, without any understanding of the nuance and charm that made that character work in the first place. Nevertheless, Obi-Wan’s quest to reunite Leia with her adoptive family is little more than a dry, overextended and unimaginative caper across the galaxy filled with extremely forgettable supporting characters, idiotic and contrived plot developments, and even a laughably poor allegory for Trump-supporting rednecks in the form of a giant truck-driving space mole with an Empire bumper sticker.

All the while, Obi-Wan is hunted by Imperial Inquisitors, specifically the show’s original character, Reva, or The Third Sister, (Moses Ingram), who has long obsessed over finding Kenobi. Despite any claims that the backlash to the character is nothing but racist trolling, the truth is that Reva is wholly unlikeable thanks to a concerted effort to inject her into the backstory of the Original Trilogy, that sees her given insane plot armour and a last-minute sympathetic turn, not to mention the fact that Ingram generally doesn’t give a very good performance during her scenes. After easily disposing of the show’s paltry attempt at recreating Rebels‘ Grand Inquisitor with the heavily miscast Rupert Friend, Reva eventually serves under Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) himself, who is eager to hunt down and exact revenge on his former Master. Unfortunately, Vader amounts to little more than set dressing; there’s no deeper examination of his character or reflection on his history, and the confrontations between Kenobi and Vader are void of any introspection or emotion beyond a blatant rip-off of a scene from Rebels where Vader’s mask is cut open and the use of a semi-decent flashback scene to frame their conflict. The show comes to a grinding halt as Vader just… gives up looking for Kenobi following their second duel, while Reva too gives up on her plan to kidnap the young Luke Skywalker (for whatever nebulous reason she was doing that anyway), further driving any sense of stakes into the ground. It’s an understatement to say that this was a disappointing waste of the immense potential that the showrunners had to work with, and I’m frankly baffled that both the scripts and completed episodes of this show passed through the hands of creatives and executives alike with no protest, despite being complete and utter dogshit.

It seems to me that the majority of Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s faults are owed to a poor standard of directorial oversight at virtually every level. Outside of an absolute failure to guide her writers room into shaping an engaging and competent script, Deborah Chow clearly hasn’t pushed her actors into giving it their all (or in many cases, giving it anything at all), and I honestly couldn’t identify a single aspect of the show that I thought was done well. The fight scenes are a far cry from the complex acrobatics of the Prequel Trilogy; whilst Vader and Kenobi haphazardly swing overly bright lightsabers at each other like baseball bat-sized glowsticks, background characters shoot at everything but the main characters, and one of the most ridiculous moments I’ve seen in all my years of media consumption came when Tala (Indira Varma) incapacitates a Stormtrooper by tapping the front of his helmet. Still, that’s nothing compared to the ending of Episode Four (which is already a cheap imitation of Jedi: Fallen Order‘s final mission), when Obi-Wan sneaks out of the Fortress Inquisitorius with Leia very obviously hiding under his jacket – at that point I began to wonder if this show might be this terrible by design; some sort of sick joke meant as a final “fuck you” to Star Wars fans. As you might expect, the special effects were serviceable enough, but the sheer insipidness of the set design was a huge let-down here too, with no end to the flat, colourless Volume-generated landscapes that the show takes place in, with nothing more unappealing about the first confrontation between Vader and Kenobi than the fact it takes place in a quarry. Still, combined with an equally bland soundtrack outside of John Williams main theme, and it’s perfectly befitting for the levels of creative bankruptcy across every other facet of the show.

In case you couldn’t tell by now, I did not enjoy Obi-Wan Kenobi very much at all. I’m quite confident in the rating I settled at, but I’ll have you know it was not far at all from hitting an even lower score. After taking my favourite character from the entire Prequel Trilogy, tacking him onto a story that treats Star Wars canon with the same respect a bull would afford to the proverbial china shop, and emasculating him to the point of ridicule, you’d think the series would be bad enough already, but this is dwarfed by the sheer incompetence of the show at every conceivable level; no doubt thanks to the directorial ineptitude of showrunner Deborah Chow. My once-unshakable faith in Star Wars has seen a steady decline over the last few years, no doubt about it, but I tell you now dear reader, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, Star Wars is well and truly dead.

2/10