Posted by Just when I thought Kenobi couldn’t reach any lower in sheer fumb-duckery of storytelling incompetence…. MAN, I need to write more because professionals are making six figures peddling this horse shit and getting paid. I am ALREADY doing better than this! I have been doing better than this for over a DECADE! Ye gods and little fishes, it is almost enough to make be believe there is a fumb-duckery prize pool in the Disney+ writer’s room and someone just won the pot. [The finale comes pre-spoiled. Rant below.]
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1] A beat-up civilian space cruiser takes 3x the beating of the military corvette Tantive IV because… PLOT ARMOR. Nope. They’re all dead in the first two minutes.
2] The Senator who has been successfully running the largest Rebellion cell in the Galaxy is such a SIGINT (signals intelligence) incompetence that he broadcasts the location of Luke on an open channel…. TO SOMEONE WHO ALREADY KNOWS WHERE LUKE IS!!! He has also broadcast his alliance to a known and convicted-in-absentia Jedi traitor, because successful rebellion leaders shout their complicity in capital crimes over the interwebs. Heaven knows the Empire has neither probe droids and DOESN’T RUN THE HOLONET ITSELF. It *certainly* does not wire-tap the communications of leaders of the opposition in the Senate.
3] Vader had a hyper-capable shuttle that is military-grade. He could follow Obi-Wan AND let the High Inquisitor Shrugs-Off-Lightsabers-To-The-Heart-And-Lungs take the Star Destroyer to continue on and vaporize the Space Ford Pinto as it carries an entire network of Rebel refugees.
4] REEEVA, the most beautiful and bold inquisitor, with no medical explanation at all, access to bacta tanks, droid replacement organs, or… hell… explanation, is bantam-strutting around Tatooine. Who knew that you could make hyperspace jumps from abandoned Rebel bases in your hyperdrive-equipped Dark-Side long-underwear while mortally wounded. I mean, she didn’t fly in on her shuttle. If she did, I’m pretty sure that cost money and the Inquistors aren’t going to just leave her ride in case she shrugs off fried organs. We watched Vader rip the only remaining spacecraft on the planet to pieces. But we are not the most beautiful and brave inquisitor of all intersectional power. Time and space itself will part before the power of African-descended ovaries!!! If you recognize the plot hole the size of a krayt dragon, that is because you are a racist mysogynist, and probably a homophobe, too.
5] Beautiful and Bold Leia, who is using the Force all the time to read emotions at age ten unlike her stupid, incompetent, ToXiC mAsCuLiNiTy-riddled, differently-abled twin brother who becomes a Jedi Master… just the memory of Leias beautiful, brave, and bold (not at all entitled, spoiled, manipulative, and rebellious) face is what is needed to unlock Obi-Wan’s super powers so he can defeat Vader and overcome all of his PTSD, guilt, and shame! I mean… if only Obi-Wan had been exposed to a helpless child WORTH protecting and caring about… unlike said yucky sticky boy who breaks all his uncles things and does nothing good on screen ever… he might have been healed YEARS AGO!
Interjection: I KNEW IT! The moment Leia was kidnapped in a Disney+ production that Obi-Wan would come to rescue her, fail again and again because he has penis parts, unlike the beautiful and bold runs-like-a-kindergartener super-sleuth princess, and SHE would SAVE HIM. It was INEVITABLE. I just didn’t realize how nauseating she would be by inspiring him and healing his every inner hurt with the medicinal light of her beautiful-and-bold smile. No, not her smile, or her support… just the memory of her super-enlightening smile saved him. She didn’t even need to be on the same PLANET to save Obi-Wan Kenobi, and thus… the universe.
6] Obi-Wan defeats Vader, acknowledges that Anakin is dead…. and… SPARES VADER. I mean, 10 years of genocode and a temple full of dead younglings… you pray for Anakin’s soul and lop Vader’s head off. But you walk away and let the greatest active force for evil in the galaxy live for… what reason? No. Up yours, Obi-Wan. Every death on Alderaan and all of the countless of millions Vader enslaved, butchered, killed, or tortured in the 9 years between this sword fight and the original movie are entirely on you being written by liberal pieces of brain-death, who, ironically, are the same lib-zombies who were shouting “punch a Nazi” at the top of their lungs before the ‘Rona. You punch this space Nazi’s ticket, the children are safe for the rest of their lives, your life’s mission is accomplished, you can train Luke at your leisure and you won’t be forced to space-ghost before you turn 60. But… nooo….. (Fortunately, the ongoing Star Wars Disney fans don’t do things like think or process logic in their fiction, so you’re going to get away with this.)
7] Lars and Beru are not dead the moment they open fire on REEEEEEVA the Most Beautiful and Bold Inquisitor EEEEVER. She can shrug off lightsabers to the heart and lungs (a common inquisitorial skill, it turns out) without medical treatment of any kind, but she can’t master the basic Jedi Knight skill of bouncing blaster bolts back into the person shooting you. Hell… Obi-Wan was doing that to battle droids BEFORE he became a Jedi Knight. Pay no attention to the fact that REEEVA the most intersectional and stunning inquisitor of all time is supposed to have hunted actual Jedi Knights at least once or twice since the rise of the Empire, without being able to perform the first second-tier skill that Jedi manifest as they approach knighthood.
8] We see Luke IN THE SAME ROOM as REEEVA, the most amazing and stunning inquistor ever, as she is swinging a lightsaber AT AUNT BERU after the whole farm is filled with blaster fire. 10-year-old natives of Tatooine can’t tell the difference between iron-age Tuscan Raiders and galactic-technology lightsaber-wielding intersectional force godesses. Luke is MALE after all, and this makes him a complete fool, unlike his sister the all-perceptive inspiration princess who has already saved the galaxy before turning 11 or learning how to run.
9] REEVA the intersecutal inquistorial goddess has the TK powers to throw presumably very heavy solid objects at Owen and Beru with the force, hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth of force, but she cannot reach out and grab a sixty-pound pre-adolescent farm-boy running in front of her on a flat slab of desert with no cover, who (as an incompetent penis-person) does not have the brains or panic to even dodge or look over his shoulder.
10] Luke is hiding in rocks. It’s a good thing that the Force is not generated by all living beings, which would make the boy who would grow up to be the most powerful Force user in the history of the galaxy TOTALLY NOT glow like a neon flare in the Force senses of a professional hunter of Force-users…. because…. shut up, racist! There is no thinking allowed. You must allow REEEVA the most beautiful and brave to fail and suddenly break character whenever she wants… bigot!
11] Darth Vader will die without his life-support suit… except when Obi-Wan has broken the suit and opened his helmet to the outside air which will kill him… except now the outside air isn’t going to kill him because it’s barely an inconviencience, not much more damaging than a lightsaber to the heart and lungs! And even though we know Darth Vader can speak, he does not signal his ship to have it vaporize the Space Pinto Junior the moment it clears the planets atmosphere. I mean, I can understand wanting the personal vengeance of killing Obi-Wan in person, but after Obi-Wan waffle-stomps you into a shuddering mess using the Inspirational Power of Leia (trademark pending), there comes a point when you have no more fluffs to give, and you can look up at the sky and admire how your mentor has just turned into a smear of superheated plasma in the night sky. Shouldn’t have brought a lightsaber to a capital ship fight, Master! (or… not…)
12] Obi-Wan leaves the hyperspace-capable Imperial shuttle to get back into Space Pinto Junior… which suddenly has a hyperdrive that functions perfectly the moment that REEEVA the intersectional Force goddess remembers that she can reach out and grab things with that Force she heard of the one time.
I honestly don’t know where to start with this. We can begin with… REEEVA the intersectional Froce goddess could have reached out and plucked Luke off the ladder in the farmstead where she had a clear line of sight and broken his neck with the Force in an instant. Vader even showed her how a few episodes ago, so she would only be improving on the tactics of an inferior penis-person to accomplish the goal she has lived for ever since she had all her internal organs fried and then shrugged it off with intersectional Force powers.
Of course, the Space Ford Pinto Junior had a FUNCTIONING HYPERDRIVE! This is DISNEY STAR WARS! Obi-Wan programs it to hypserspace ram Vader’s star destroyer, and two of the most deadly Dark Siders in the galaxy get turned into glowing white special-effects dust as all the rebels limp home in perfect safety as the credits roll. (Suck it, JJ Abrams. You made the plot hole and Disney defended it, so now you have to live with that mechanic forever, as does the entire coven of Disney+ writing hacks shoveling this schlock.)
Even better, possessing a functioning short-term memory, and being more than twenty minutes old, I am old enough to remember when there was an entire transport full of rebel heroes who were going to get vaporized by a Star Destroyer because their transport’s hyperdrive had a bad part. I mean… imagine if we had spent the eight minutes of moralizing pulling that part out of the perfectly functional hyperdrive in the back and sticking it in the hyperdrive up front. Why… the pilot pushes the go-lever, the transport leaps into hyperspece where it cannot be tracked, and Obi-Wan gets to Tatooine almost as fast as REEEVA the intersectional Force goddess when she uses her hyperspace-capable Dark Underoos of Doom (patent pending). Lord love a duck, even the fricking plot holes of this crap-fest have plot holes. There really, truly, has to have been a shitty-writing-raffle going on in the Disney+ writer’s room: One plot hole per entry, enter as many times as you like. Disney Star Wars Fans will never call you on it and as long as you sneak a few lesbian cuddling sessions in the background you will never get fired.
Crap. There is that analytical thinking pattern again. I am such a bigot.
13] The audience is expected to believe that REEVA, the most important intersectional paragon of beauty, boldness, and hairdos that you cannot shampoo ever, SUDDENLY realizes that she has become the equivalent of vader. B—, please. She knowingly forged herself into this instrument of hate to kill him, and she lives in the Fortress Inquisitorious, where they never change their security arrangements for years after Cal Kestis swims in the back door, but they hang Jedi younglings in amber on the ever-loving walls! There is NO way that Reeva has been stomping past younglings the age that she was, wearing the clothes that she was, wearing the helmet that she wore, with their dead eyes half open in their amber graves, and not deal with this already. Luke doesn’t have one tenth the mnemonic triggers that Youngling 2.0, The Wall Hanging presented, and that shit decorated her homeroom hallway for the past DECADE. I call bullshit. I call major league recycled Texas farm grass with some hay and grain thrown in on the side.
14] In the amount of time it takes REEEVA, the intersectional Force goddess (RTIFG), to have an inner conflict, Obi-Wan flies out of one planet, hops into hyperspace, flies to Tatooine, and enters the atmosphere. Even short hyperspace hops are matters of hours. You cannot tell me that RTIFG had her inner conflict moment for no reason for hours without one or more of the following happening:
- Owen and Beru, having rifles and not being dead, recover enough to track her across the wide-open plain and shoot her a whole bunch from several hundred meters away. (They’re called rifles. They shoot far. If Disney+ authors had even met someone who touched a gun other than their security guards, they might learn this.)
- The ten-year-old boy who was knocked out when he fell regains consciousness, sceams, runs away, or shatters her hours-long inner montage trance and she kills him.
- The ten-year-old boy who is in a coma to be unconcious that long passes away from subdural hematoma due to traumatic brain injury. Roll credits. The Empire will have no trouble until the Yuuzhan Vong invasion in a generation, at which point the Emperor will have a small fleet of Death Stars and blow their world-ships to atoms.
- The sun comes up and Tuscan Raiders jump RTIFG and she kills them all, and then kills Luke on sheer momentum.
- RTIFG realizes that her internal organs are incinerated and keels over from heat stroke, because her body decides enough is freaking enough.
- RTIFG freaking gets over it and cuts Luke in half.
Not worth a number but a minor editing point of BS. I will mention it because Disney+ had to spend at least five thousand dollars on the five seconds of this mistake: Obi-Wan clearly flies to the light side of the planet but when he lands it is (still) night Chez Owen and Beru.
15] Obi-Wan lands and Owen and Beru are standing in the middle of the darkness shouting at the air. They haven’t seen the Space Pinto Junior screaming through the atmosphere and rushed to see who it was. They haven’t taken cover because RTIFG must have reinforcements. They don’t run to Obi-Wan for help. They stay rooted in the middle of the night shouting for their ten-year-old adopted son to come jogging back to them after he single-handedly defeats the intersectional Force goddess who just beat them both half to death. Pay no attention to the fact that they have speeders. No parent in the world would go find their child no matter what the risk to their lives when they can stand there being helpless. Disney+ writers clearly don’t reproduce or associate with anyone who does. This would explain their shamelessness promoting their “not-so-secret gay agenda” with a straight face and no expectiation of public backlash, I guess.
For that matter… they can’t find Luke. I mean… no one leaves tracks in a desert! Particuarly not kids running as fast as they can (major impacts) or a grown warrior wearing combat boots! What do you think this is, Last of the Mohicans? Mankind hasn’t been tracking prey by sight since neolithic era. Space farmers don’t have night vision goggles or… heck… a portable light source to see the obviously visible tracks they both would have left on Planet Dustbowl. Owen and Beru are as stupid as the writers believe the audience is.
16] RTIFG who could barely stand with her fried internal organs does not just stand, she hikes for kilometers carrying a seventy-pound boy… because… No. Nope. Uh-uh. This is her ghost because she would be dead hours ago from the exertion, and if the kid hasn’t woken up by now, he pretty much isn’t going to, ever. See above.
17] RTIFG, who this very series has stated has been hunting and murdering men, women, and children for years, who lives with dead middle-graders on her walls, and who forged herself into a weapon of vengeance… defeats herself for no significant reason. Characterization is for loosers. THIS scene, she has a conscience. Pay no attention to the heroic intersectional resistance fighter who can girly-slap stormtrooeprs to death, whose entire reason for working for the rebellion is because of Reeva’s unrepentant evil. Reeva wasn’t there when Reeva was killing children before. She is Schroedinger’s Inquisitor.
This has got to be the biggest pile of shit I have read since David Weber’s latest collaboration about the space invasion and vampires. Both times, the writers put themselves into huge corners in the final scenes, shrugged, said “fuck it” and turned around and walked out of the room. I mean, figuring out a justification or EARNING a change in character would be work. Woke writers don’t work. They only come up with intersectional Force goddesses.
18] Owen and Beru, whom RTIFG tried to murder a few minutes/hours/clocks-are-a-tool-of-the-patriarchy ago, see Reeva returning with the apparently dead body of their adopted son, and they haven’t shot her. For that matter, as they were standing around screaming uselessly into the night, the night in which a murderous Force witch was hunting their kid, they decided that they needed to do it unarmed, because Space Columbine, gun control, and unicorn farts. Nope. Sorry. They would be armed to the teeth and as soon as RTIFG showed up holding Dead Luke, they would have shot her to death. For that matter, once she put Luke’s apparent body down on the ground in front of them, pretty much every parent I have ever met would have shot her dead just for terrorizing them with the idea that their child might be dead. Nope. REEVA the intersectional Force goddess tried to kill them and Luke, but Owen and Beru were apprently Space Amish (who knew?!) and they became pacifist Christians in the ten minutes/six hours/two scenes they were standing around not even holding hands and shouting uselessly into the darkness waiting for someone with motivation to get in a vehicle and freaking look for Luke.
I’m going to leave that pile of six or seven story-breaking plot holes tangled right there. I don’t want to get any of that on my hands. I will repeat that not only have none of the LGBT+~*/2 thought zombies at the Disney+ writer’s pool never had a child of their own (ew… heteronormativity) but they wouldn’t stoop to associate with anyone who breeds. So, this lack of human experience might just mean that this passes for logic among the poser class.
19] Well… shit. RTIFG is weeping in self-pity. She isn’t saying that she is sorry for trying to murder Owen and Beru. She isn’t weeping that she tried to kill Luke. She isn’t weeping for trying to kill Obi-Wan. She isn’t expressing remorce for being about to torture Leia until Obi-Wan stopped her. She isn’t remorseful for maiming a woman’s hand. She is feeling sorry for herself because She. Couldn’t. Kill. Luke.
THOSE are the tears that RTIFG are weeping as she crumbles in front of Kenobi. Folks, I run a prison ministry, and I volunteered with prisoners for years before that. Tears are not exceptions to criminal life. They are the standard. When someone who has done bad is about to face some bad consequences for the evil they have done, they weep about it. That is normal. They may even be more remorseful for the harm that they have done than they are about the pain they are about to experience through incarceration, the loss of public respect, et cetera. That doesn’t change the fact that their victims are still victims, that society has still be betrayed, and that they still have a debt to society that needs paying if society is going to continue to function. God loves both mercy and justice.
The truth is, though, that I am fond of Obi-Wan’s mercy. I like mercy just fine, but you don’t pardon a mass-murderer because they’re crying. You don’t spare someone who smiles while they torture children two days ago because they are crying. You kill them or imprison them, and while they are incarcerated or awaiting execution, then you show them all the compassion you can for as long as you can until they tell you not to or they are rendered room temperature.
Repentance is great. Mercy is great. Evil without consequences is as stupid as the secular trope that “all repentant villains must die”.
For a really good read about showing mercy to those who really, really deserve to die, I recommend the book Mission at Nuremerg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis. It is available from Amazon.com and Audible.com.
20] “Now you’re free. We both are.” Obi-Wan says, as Owen, who has carried Luke inside and fetched his rifle, shoots her dead. “I’m not a Jedi.” he says, and goes back into the house.
“Now you’re free. We both are.” Obi-Wan says, as Owen, who has carried Luke inside and fetched his rifle, shoots her dead. “I’m not a Jedi.” he says, and goes back into the house.
“Now you’re free. We both are.” Obi-Wan says, “Now the Dark Side will try to consume you for the rest of your life. You must learn to fight it.” There. We have avoided the repentant-bad-guys-must-die trope AND the a-woman-cried-it-isn’t-her-fault law of woke writing. There is a conflict and a battle ahead and it MIGHT be interesting if RTIFG develops a personality gear other than self-pity and snarl-on-command. Both of those gears are sort of played out.
“Now you’re free. We both are.” Obi-Wan says, and as dawn breaks and she staggers back into town, Jabba the Hutt (who is no respecter of Jedi) and a few hundred enforcers would like to talk to her about what she’s going to do to pay him back for violating his territory.
The possibilities of good storytelling here are endless. They are also completely abandoned.
alas…
21] Not only have the writers of Kenobi never watched Revenge of the Sith, they haven’t watched ANY Star Wars. For proof:
Vader: “The probes are tracking every system within range. We will destroy everything in our path until he is found.”
Sorry, posers, this isn’t Star Trek: Voyager. This is Star Wars. You can get from the Outer Rim to Coruscant on a single tank of gas and about two day’s flight with a halfway-decent hyperdrive. The Space Pinto Junior could be anywhere within a quarter of the galaxy, or even the quarter of the galaxy no one explores. This is pointless drivel written by someone who hasn’t familiarized themselves with a basic mechanic of the lore. Going from Tatooine to Alderaan and then on to Yavin 4 (the trip from the original movie) involves flying the effective length of the entire galaxy, if you stretched the path out straight, and the Millenium Falcon did that in a few days. The entire galaxy is “in range,” posers. Of course, it would take fifteen minutes on woookiepedia or hiring an intern to do an hour’s work to keep from putting your foot in your ear, again, this episode.
Writer’s like this ought to be banned from fondling anyone else’s intellectual property.
22] Vader goes from “I will destroy Kenobi at all costs.” to “Kenobi is nothing. I serve only you, my Master.” in less than an actual minute. …and folks wonder why Disney+ stock is cratering like the moon in a meteor shower.
Characterization is clearly an attribute of the patriarchy, and Disney has rejected it.
23] Nothing says “We must keep our connection secret as you are a wanted traitor” like having the wanted fugitive meet your family at a state occasion on an open helipad in broad daylight in your planetary capital. NO ONE in the Empire is an informant. That never happens in authoritarian regimes.
Any silly little twit who greets her droid before the man who laid down his life to save her, more than once, in the past week, was worth saving in the first place. She certainly wasn’t inspirational enough to save the galaxy by psychically healing all of Obi-Wan’s trauma and crippling doubt with the power of the memory of her smile.
Also, FFS, can someone at least get the entitled little brat a squirt gun, or a sparkle gun, or a toy to put in the empty holster? This is just sad.
24] “We can never repay you.”
Obi-Wan: She has already done that.
Someone shoot me. At the end of the story we realize that Beautiful and Brave Leia has saved Obi-Wan from a fate worse than death: the memory of a life in which almost every act he has ever taken has been the most honorable one possible.
…and she is still ignoring her actual savior to cuddle her droid.
Shoot me twice. Put me out of my misery. Wait… I have books to write and I realize I am already doing a dozen times better than Disney’s massive writing budget can provide.
25] “Princess Leia Organa, you are wise, discerning, [and] kind-hearted. These are qualities that came from your mother. But you are also passionate, and fearless, forthright, and these are gifts from your father.”
Are you kidding me? Padme had every one of those qualities. She stared down loaded guns, refused to bow to assassins, repeated rushed into battlefields all across the Clone Wars, and more.
I’m failing to see how having a secret affair, secretly colluding with Darth Sidious, and butchering a few hundred younglings for dark power are fearless OR forthright.
26] “We must be caeful. No one must know, or it could endanger us both.”
Dude… you’re still in the middle of an open airfield in the middle of the day in the middle of a planetary capital, with both the senator, his wife, their guards, anyone in or around any of the starships in the background, and anyone living in the top half of the city of towers can plainly see. Your concept of careful is woefully underdeveloped, oh Jedi Master of subtlety.
27] The day after Luke’s near-death experience at the hand of a Sith assassin, an assassing whom Beru and Owen were completely powerless to stop, both Ben and Owen have concret proof that Luke can be found and the Lars family can do absolutely jack to stop them when they do. So, naturally, neither the bodyguard nor the feckless adoptive parents are going to change their lives in the slightest to make Luke even a bit more secure…. because “he just needs to be a boy.”
28] “The only protection he needs now, Owen, is you and Beru.”
This line is a crime against intellect. Owen just got his ass handed to him by a mortally wounded Sith woman. We know exactly how well he and Beru managed against a squad of Stormtroopers who will char them to skeletons and burn the house around them. Luke needs far more protection than Owen. He needs it soon and he needs it now. Looking at how quickly Luke developed in the Force at eighteen, with maybe two or three days of training, and how quickly he became close to a Jedi in skill with a few months of training with Yoda on Dagobah, he could probably have saved Owen and Beru with ease with his father’s lightsaber and nine YEARS of Jedi training when the droids show up.
Owen promises to take good care of Luke while still wearing the bruises from getting his ass kicked by RTIFG, and he promises to “take care” of Luke. Not only does Luke lack a functioning memory, but so do Owen and Beru.
29] Anyone care to posit a theory why Luke doesn’t remember the very traumatic image of his adoptive parents nearly dying at the hands of a lightsaber-wielding maniac at a very formative age that produces vivid life-long memories, and running for his life? The writer does not bother. A day or two after nearly getting murdered and nearly seeing his folks killed, Luke is right as rain. Children who survive traumatic events are always right as rain immediately after.
Consistency, characterization, and the ability to maintain in-house canon are requirements for the suspension of disbelief. You can’t keep doing stuff like this and expect your audience to be able to believe your impossible story is real, not when your own story doesn’t treat its events as real.
The moral of the finale: Everyone who dies in A New Hope was clearly too stupid to survive in any universe. Vader doesn’t know how travel works as he spends his life traveling. Owen and Beru take their complete incompetence at home defense in stride without asking the professional warrior to be part of their life, help them improve, or, say, teach their adopted son who they failed to save from near-death yesterday night to defend himself with the power they know he has. Obi-Wan does not insist on training Luke up to full Jedi powers far before the droids arrive, though he clearly has the skill and Luke has the aptitude. The Organas make no attempted to conceal their involvement with one of the most wanted men in the galaxy, because windows don’t exist on Alderaan on those towers shown covered with windows.
I mean, the Emperor isn’t remotely disturbed that the most famous Jedi from the Clone Wars just waffle-stomped his inquistors, walked in and out of one of the most critical Force domains in his Empire, and only spared his chief enforcer and embodiment of his life’s work out of a failure to think clearly. That said, the Emperor doesn’t die the first time for another two novels, so he is the technical exception to the list of idiots whose decisions guaranteed their deaths nine years later.
All right. I have done it. I have gained an informed opinion on the Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi series. It has to be one of the most encouraging experiences of the past few years. I haven’t felt this comfortably superior to a professional writer or director since one of my alleged friends convinced me that I needed to watch The Room. The fact that someone paid for this, and it is at least a decade behind my writing level, gives me great hope for my professional future. The fact that millions of fans think this travesty against thought qualifies as good makes me weep for humanity.
Well, it is almost the weekend. I will have days and days to show them up.
Again.
#amwriting.
Lagrandil 