Across the first four episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi, we’ve seen Leia casually captured, Leia casually retrieved, Leia casually captured again, and Leia casually retrieved again. Will the fifth and penultimate chapter follow the pattern, or is something else finally going to happen? Find out ahead!
Episode five opens on a flashback of a practice duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin—and don’t worry; it looks just as flat and plays just as wooden as you remember it from the prequels. Very authentic flashback.
We soon see that Darth Vader is just remembering this throwback scene as a recurring bit he’ll return to as both an analogue of Vader and Kenobi’s coming standoff and to give Hayden Christensen a reason to keep showing up to the office.
Third Sister soon shows up and says she’s tracked that Obi-Wan has gone to the planet Jabiim (somewhere on the entire planet), and Vader gives her the promotion she was promised. After The Phantom Menace’s trade negotiations, slight career advancement is probably the most boring thing this series has ever offered us.
Over in Jabiim, Obi-Wan and his team have landed. The waiting crowd is oddly thrilled Leia was rescued, and absolutely no one cares that the other guy was killed. Also, Kumail Nanjiani is there.
Also, it turns out that Third Sister’s Batteries Not Included droid-tracker does more than just track: it makes the little robot fucker mess up the escape plan. Frying some wires, it seals the hangar doors, and with 3rd Sis and her cronies in tow, the resistance fighters are trapped.
Obi-Wan meanwhile uses his down time in this hangar to check out a crate of lightsabers that would make General Grievous drool (if General Grievous were capable of that). It’s supposed to be this sad moment—like, wow, look at all the Jedi who have died on this path! But instead it’s like, why is no one taking these lightsabers? Of course someone is going to take the discarded lightsabers. They’re cool as shit.
This should be a Chekhov’s lightsabers situation, where Obi-Wan will later start chucking these things full-blast, but that never happens. Instead, it’s meant to be this emotional beat. Oh, no! Kit Fisto is dead!? That sucks so much! This is so tragic that we lost beloved characters like Kit Fisto and whoever else! What if that guy with the very tall head and goatee—you know, the one in the Jedi council?—died in this very chamber?
Just give it a rest, alright?
It doesn’t take long for the Empire people to show up, and Obi-Wan is asking Ice Cube’s son, “How much time do you need to override the doors?”
“Three, four hours,” he says.
“You have one.”
DAMMMMMMN.
There is SO much dialogue in this thing that is this sort of stock bullshit. I held back getting into it in the last couple episodes, but this is too much. If you were to for some reason watch this a second time, you will be overwhelmed by how many hackneyed phrases are tossed in once you start needlessly paying attention.
Anyway, as for the bay doors, Leia is going to fix those. She was not precocious enough before, so now she will double up on that by being a tiny mechanic.
Over at the front doors, the Empire troops have started firing away with this big siege blaster to get in, so Obi-Wan tries negotiating. Talking about negotiations was legitimately one of Ewan McGregor’s best line readings ever for Obi-Wan, so sure. Why not?
He gets up at the door, and Third Sister meets him there. Get ready for some backstory!
Long and short of it, Third Sister is yet another callback to the Prequels. She was one of the younglings Anakin tried to kill in his inexplicable rage. She escaped, though, and now she’s ingratiating herself to him solely to murder him out of vegeance.
Just as we know Obi-Wan and Leia can’t and won’t die here, we likewise know that killing Vader is not going to happen before Return of the Jedi, so it’s ultimately a pretty toothless threat. But good on her for trying.
Obi-Wan suggests they team up for her futile goal, but she rightly points out that isn’t he sort of responsible for training and creating Vader to begin with?
His face says, “Wellllll, ya got me there.”
As Obi-Wan comes to the realization of how much hurt he’s caused, Third Sister comes to the realization that there’s no reason to be using this siege blaster thing when she has a goddamn lightsaber.
She slices clean through the lock, and a classic Star Wars-style battle ensues. That is to say, a firefight where almost no one has cover, no one is really aiming all that much, and there are few if any meaningful casualties.
But in this case, there is one meaningful casualty.
Our old friend Sand takes a shot to the belly and decides to become a suicide bomber. Bleeding out on the ground, she pulls out a grenade and explodes herself in the arms of the loader-droid guy who, at this point, it is 100% clear she was fucking. But that is a secret she will take to her grave.
They were definitely fucking, though.
After another on-the-nose dueling flashback, Kenobi decides to play into Vader’s hand and surrender himself for the greater good. Before leaving, he gives his blaster and lightsaber to Kumail Nanjiani, telling him to protect Leia. It’s like, everyone already seemed to have a blaster, and we just saw there’s a whole box of lightsabers no one is touching, so it’s a pretty meaningless gesture from a guy who we already know is just going to end up a bachelor on Tatooine anyway. But a nice thought!
So he surrenders, and kneeling at the feet of Third Sister, he’s again like, “Look, let’s just team up to take care of this asshole, alright?”
She… sort of agrees? Vader is about to arrive, so she has Obi-Wan sent back inside, anyway. The idea is apparently that Vader will be so huffy and distracted with Obi-Wan that she can sneak up and kill him. Which, again, will not happen. There are several more movies about Darth Vader being a contrabass shithead.
At this point, Leia has done enough fiddling to finally open the hangar doors, so by the time Vader shows his helmeted mug, they’re already fucking off out of there on a transport vessel. But Vader is not having it. He Force-grabs the whole damn ship and yanks it back to the ground.
This is one of those moments that, along with the corridor finale of Rogue One, is going to be cheered on and cited by dorks as evidence of JUST HOW BADASS DARTH VADER WAS AT HIS PEAK. That’s fine, but honestly, these are all basically fan-films at this point, so it’s like, great; who cares? Some guy who grew up thinking Darth Vader was cool just made him even cooler by inventing this other thing he’s capable of. I don’t really have a point here. It’s just all getting to be a lot, isn’t it? Disney could make an officially canonical movie where Darth Vader fights the Hulk, and “fans” would spend the next half-century talking about it in comments sections like it’s factual history. “Well, technically, Hulk has shown the ability to resist a Force choke through his Hulk Rage, so…”
Again, no real point here. I should probably just stop watching these things. The Mandalorian was fun for a season, though, right?
Regardless, we’ve made it this far, so we’ll plow ahead through at least the rest of this episode and the finale to come.
MOVING ON!
Turns out, that first ship was a decoy. Just as quickly as Vader yanked that first transport down, another—this one filled with rebels—takes off, and apparently Darth has sort of blown his load by yanking so recently.
As he impotently watches the ship fly off, he remembers this prior time when Obi-Wan defeated him. Not the time Obi-Wan got the high ground and cut a bunch of appendages off before leaving him to painfully die in a pile of his own singed flesh. A different time before that. The same time we were revisiting before.
With Vader being a bit of a Daydream Johnny at this moment, it would have been a perfect time for Third Sister to strike him down. Instead, she misses the opportunity and tries it a bit too late—and Vader plainly sees it coming.
The two have a little duel, and she is easily outclassed, with Vader stabbing her.
The original Grand Inquisitor then shows up, having apparently survived his own stabbing by Third Sister. He’s like, “Now, instead of killing you, we are just going to leave you here to die. I myself recently survived lightsaber wounds to take vengeance, just as Darth Vader and Darth Maul did before me, but who’s to say whether or not you will also somehow do that in the series finale? This is a great cliffhanger and we’ll just see what happens with leaving you presumed dead and not worrying about it.”
Actually, forget about it even being a modest cliffhanger. Third Sister immediately starts crawling around, very much alive, and soon finds a little trinket. As anyone would do after being stabbed and almost dying, she’s like, “Hey, now, what’s this all about?”
It seems it’s a message from Jimmy Smits—one in which he vaguely refers to the existence and location of one Luke Skywalker.
With the rebel escape transport’s hyperdrive apparently busted and limiting their travel options, it seems everyone is headed to Tatooine. It’s our favorite!
