Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) Premiere Review (Episodes 1 & 2) [SPOILERS]

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I am doing very very well for a rainy Friday morning. I have two reviews for you today. This is my review of the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and then later I'll have a review up for this weeks episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This review is going to be pretty spoiler heavy, so if you haven't watched the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi yet, please do so before you read this review. Let's get into it!

I think I've been saying this since the series was announced back in 2019, but this is the one Star Wars Disney+ series that I was excited about as soon as it was announced that Ewan McGregor was reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. As I've said in my pre-series thoughts post that I did on May the 4th, Obi-Wan Kenobi was one of my favourite parts of the Prequel Trilogy as McGregor made the character his own, while still making him believable as he got closer to the Sir Alec Guinness role in the Original Trilogy, and he didn't just ape what Guinness had done in the first three films. I was also one of the people who wanted a Kenobi spin-off film, IF Ewan McGregor came back to play the character and was disappointed when the movie was canceled in 2018 in the wake of the failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Then Disney+ and The Mandalorian happened and the movie was reworked into a limited series for the platform, and here we are. 

There were alot of surprises within these first two episodes and I was there for all of them. For example, I loved that Alderaan and the Organa Family, including Bail (played by Jimmy Smits), and a ten year old Princess Leia (played by Vivien Lyra Blair), were featured in these first two episodes. While Obi-Wan went to Tatooine in order to keep an eye on Luke, I always suspected that he also had a responsibility to Leia as well, given that Bail told Leia to deliver R2-D2 and the Death Star plans to Kenobi on Tatooine in A New Hope, and the novelization of Return of the Jedi has a passage where Ben explains to Luke that Bail had always told Leia to contact him on Tatooine if she needed help, though that's not stated in the final version of the movie. So it was cool to see that confirmed onscreen since we don't actually have a whole lot given to us about this particular period in the Star Wars timeline, in Legends or in Canon. 

I loved the fact that Obi-Wan leaves in an actual cave in this series. I never assumed that he simply found a hut out in the middle of the desert and lived there for 19 years. But I also didn't think he had a job either. In the first episode Obi-Wan reminded me of Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) in The Incredible Hulk (2008). Having a job that doesn't get you noticed, and hiding away because of the power he has. So I think that's interesting.

Like I said, I liked that we got to see Leia's life on Alderaan because anytime we've seen her it's been either in a direct prequel to A New Hope or an animated series (Rogue One and Rebels), or it's in the Skywalker Saga movies AFTER Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star. And even though she's younger, this version is definitely still the Princess Leia that we met in A New Hope, which is pretty awesome.

The Inquisitors are my biggest problem with these first two episodes. I just don't care about them. Sure they tried to make the Third Sister (Moses Ingram) interesting by having her have a personal vendetta against Obi-Wan, but it fell flat for me because it's not anything new. She basically wants to capture Obi-Wan and hand him over to Vader in hopes of rising above her station in life and that's it. That's not even anything new in Star Wars. So hopefully there's more to it than that because right now that character does not interest me at all. Though I am wondering if she was one of the children we see in the Jedi Temple during Order 66 at the beginning of the first episode.

These first two episodes explain so much about things in A New Hope. As I speculated in my pre-series thoughts post, it explains why Uncle Owen told Luke that his father was dead. It turns out that Owen doesn't know that Anakin became Darth Vader. He simply believes that Anakin was killed. However, Obi-Wan also believed that Anakin was dead after their duel on Mustafar.

Which actually brings me to my one other problem with these first two episodes. Okay, it's not actually a problem, but more like a question. So this show takes place 10 years after Revenge of the Sith, so how did Obi-Wan not know that Vader was still alive? In the Legends continuity Vader was the face of the Empire, with him debuting as that face during the transition from the Old Republic to the Galactic Empire in the 2005 novel Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, and Obi-Wan found out after catching a Holonet broadcast that introduced Darth Vader, the Emperor's enforcer, to the galaxy. 

I'm not saying that this show has to follow exactly what the Legends novels did, but you'd think that at some point in the ten years since Obi-Wan arrived on Tatooine, he'd at least have heard rumours about the Emperor's enforcer from various off-worlders that he'd come across. Especially because 10 years is a really long time to not know that your former apprentice is still alive and wearing a really cool looking armored suit.

Speaking of the Legends novels, I saw a video from Screen Rant on Twitter that was an interview with Ewan McGregor and he said that they didn't used John Jackson Miller's 2013 novel, Kenobi, for source material for the series, but he read the novel after they'd finished filming the show. Which is interesting. Especially because I even said in my pre-series thoughts post that I wondered if they used Kenobi for inspiration for the show, and it turns out they didn't.

Overall this was a solid start to the series. Both episodes were what I wanted to see from Ewan McGregor coming back to play Obi-Wan Kenobi again, after having filmed Revenge of the Sith back in 2003. I was very nervous about this show going in, as excited as I was for it, because of how The Book of Boba Fett ended up being right out the gate. Now it's possible that this series will end the way The Mandalorian season 2, and The Book of Boba Fett ended, but I'm hoping that with a singular director and a singular writing team on this show, it'll feel less disjointed and end stronger than the other shows I mentioned. We'll see though.

Alright that's it for this review. I'll be back in a little while for my review of this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Stay tuned.