[psmith2.0]

I enjoyed this one better than the last one...it sets the table nicely.

- Reva, stop yelling. Not even four minutes in and she's already screaming. STFU already. Another character even touches on how her rage has become "tiresome". I was nodding like a fiend. "Tell it like it is!" - Flashbacks throughout to younger Obi-Wan and Anakin practicing their lightsaber fighting, with bearing on how things turned out (strategies/weaknesses that still exist in Vader that Obi-Wan was able to exploit). - We finally got the Reva backstory, and it's as many suspected. That was her amongst those younglings at the start of the first episode, in the Jedi temple. She saw the newly-christened Vader enter the temple and slaughter younglings. Her anger toward him, Obi-Wan, etc. is as many had speculated. - A bowcaster! Not used by Chewie, but the leader of that underground movement (who is Ice Cube's son in real life). It might not be the exact model of Chewie's rifle, but it certainly had those front "wings"/crossbow bars on it. Pretty obvious/blatant. - Tense in places. - Reva is conflicted, and has no love for Vader, the Inquisitors, her gig in general, etc. as I pointed out about three episodes ago upthread. - Lots of Anakin and Vader in this one. - Poor Tala; but I figured that was her arc. - Thermal detonator! I like how these shows will use objects and devices from the feature films, and because we already know what they are/do, no time has to be wasted on someone saying what they are. We all already know. Nice to see those little touches of familiar items popping up at times. - Vader vs. Reva; not sure what she thought she was going to accomplish, but she let loose and had a go at him. - The ending, where it seems Reva is piecing together just who Leia (and "the boy") are, was a bit of good drama. It appears, despite being injured (but not killed) by Vader, she's made her way back to Tatooine, to the Lars homestead (it looked like her silhouette walking around the farm at night). Last shot of the episode was a sleeping Luke. Not sure if she's working with/for Vader anymore, trying to redeem herself (she was left for dead, "in the gutter, where we found you"), or she's out for herself. Vader knows now he can't trust her (and she tried to kill him), so I don't know if there's any coming back from that. She must be doing this for her own reasons. She now seems to realize who the kids belong to, so, to her, they're fair game? - I may finally get my wish that things wind up back on Tatooine in the final episode. Obi-Wan seems to sense that Reva has put some things together about the identity of the twins. - Stormtroopers truly can't shoot for shit. It seems they have to be about 4-5 feet from their target, and even then there's no real guarantee. You'll see...dozens of them, firing into a crowd of people and barely any of them were hit. Just a handful (lucky shots). I think these shows are all actively trolling/commenting on this bit of Star Wars lore, because in nearly every scene with these doofs, they can't hit anything they shoot at! Any other show/property, that rag-tag crowd of civilians and families would've been decimated by a halfway competent army. It was their good fortune that it was a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers they faced. 98% of them survived! The Rebellion, and all that came after, seems to be solely due to the Empire's inability to properly shoot/kill their adversaries on any sort of reliable, consistent basis. Somebody make a show about that. - The weight of the world is on poor Obi-Wan. The man needs a break from Leia, Vader, Bail, Reva, etc. - Those flashback scenes of Anakin and Obi-Wan appear to be set more in the timeframe of Attack of the Clones, as Obi-Wan still has that righteous mullet and Anakin has the shorter hair and braid he had in that movie. But even then, in the period before long-haired Anakin in Revenge fo the Sith, Obi-Wan seemed to have his number. Anakin's desire to win at all cost, to prove himself, the aggression and arrogance, etc. were all starting to appear in Obi-Wan's padawn. Looks like some digital de-aging work was done on both McGregor and Christensen in these sequences. Quite ballsy, in that it was full-on daylight/brightly-lit environs. This is Lucasfilm saying "if we can bring back ROTJ-era Luke Skywalker in a convincing way, we sure as hell can erase a few crow's feet around the eyes of actors playing younger versions of themselves!" - Quite a bit of Hayden Christensen here, sans scar makeup, as both padawan Anakin and pre-armor Vader (in the Jedi temple, offing younglings). - Probably the least Leia so far, but I was totally okay with it. Let the grown-ups play for a while. I swear, If Andor and Ahsoka wind up having a young and/or cute sidekick, out of nowhere, I’m gonna know these shows are working off a template. - Based on all that seems cued up at this point - some sort of final showdown/encounter on Tatooine and maybe young Luke getting a minute or three of FaceTime after five episodes of wall-to-wall Leia - next week's finale will either be a nice, longer (55-minute?) episode, or deliberately planned/shot to end in some sort of cliffhanger because they knew all along that a second season was going to be part of it. I don't see how next week could be a 39-minute, unless they just really zoom through some stuff! - It does appear Tatooine will bookend the series, so that's nice. No more planet-hopping to places that aren't Tatooine. At last! - The audio in this episode seemed to be muffled or odd at times (the volume, clarity, etc.). I lie in bed and watch on my MacBook with my earbuds connected so I can get the full boomy sound (blasters, dialogue and all the good sound Star Wars is known for). But on about five occasions in this episode, primarily Bail's little hologram voicemail to Obi-Wan, I couldn’t clearly hear the exact words being said. Something about Tatooine. I've not had this issue on any of the other four installments.

Update/additional thoughts...

My concern I spoke about upthread may be unfolding. This show, like the Boba Fett one, seemed content to screw around/draw out for 2-3 episodes - meandering, taking detours, etc. - to where they've now got to cram in everything into two final episodes - well, one now. They teased the whole Reva thing in the opening seconds of the very first episode five weeks ago, and are only now coming back to it. And, frankly, in the time between they've done all they could to make me really not give a shit about the character. As I talked about a few posts up, it's the writing on this show where any of my beefs lie. A lot of it just comes across like standard network fare - dragging things out, chain-yanking, endless teases that take forever, if ever, to pay off, really implausible scenarios and interactions between some characters, by-the-numbers plotting, etc. - and I find that so strange in a show that shouldn't have to be constrained by, or adhere to, any of that. I think that's going to be my problem with streaming content in general. They're not bound by the traditional network definition of a "season". No 26 episodes, where 25% (or more) can get away with being filler or "a very special episode" or whatever. These streaming shows can set their own rules on that, but they still do the meandering, filler stuff, which I thought wouldn't be necessary. If you've got six episodes to tell a story about a particular character we're all fond of/invested in, and you proceed to screw around and waste time for a good two or more of those episodes, that's very frustrating. And with all the other stuff tossed in - Inquistors, Leia, etc. - they've essentially made Obi-Wan a co-star in his own show. In my opinion, the man has not been front-and-center as you would think. I wanted to love this show. As it is, I merely "like it okay". And it's 100% in the writing/plotting/pacing.