Let’s pick the fly out of the ointment first: this episode’s timeline was fucked in half. Last we saw of Reva, she was lying on the floor of an abandoned hangar on some shitty dust planet with a broken lightsaber[1] and only a busted hologram of Jimmy Smits to keep her company. As awesome as Jimmy Smits is, I’m not sure that a message from him grants the listener teleportation powers (or new internal organs).

            Thusly, I was somewhat perplexed by the severely-wounded Reva’s nigh-instantaneous appearance on Tatooine. How did she get there? Who knows. How long did it take? Twenty minutes or so, given that the rebel transport is still clumsily fleeing Vader’s star destroyer while Reva is interrogating shopkeepers for information on Owen. Does any of this make sense? Not really.

            As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m inclined to give shows and movies (particularly members of franchises I’m fond of) a pass when it comes to plot holes, as long as those plot holes aren’t so large that they pull me out of the story. Unfortunately, I spent a chunk of this episode very much removed from the plot; instead, I was busy being confused by the characters’ relative travel speeds.

            A smaller, but still relevant, quibble – I don’t think that anyone is particularly fond of the “low-speed space chase” plot anymore (it worked in Empire, but after that? Not so much.) On top of that, I must admit to being somewhat bemused by the way Vader let the larger rebel ship go in favor of pursuing Obi-Wan. Don’t star destroyers have, like, a shit-ton of TIE fighters on them?[2] When the mechanisms of the plot are so eye-bleedingly obvious, it kind of shits all over the audience’s sense of immersion.  

            Back to the story: I was half-hoping that Reva would, at some point during her visit to the Lars homestead, drop a callback to her previous encounter with Owen.[3] Instead, we got a scene that might have been thrilling if we didn’t know that all the “good guys” (that is, Owen, Beru and Luke) would survive. Things started off silly: Beru tells Owen that they need to prepare a defense strategy…but the next time we see the two of them, the only thing that’s changed is that it’s dark out. I’m not an expert at planning ambushes, but you’d think it would be better to have everyone in their hiding places before the perimeter alarms go off. The ensuing confrontation was…fine, I guess? As mentioned, there just wasn’t much tension to milk out of the scenario.[4] Mini-Luke didn’t get as much dialogue as mini-Leia, which I suspect might be a function of the abuse that Jake Lloyd dealt with following his turn as Anakin in The Phantom Menace. I thought this worked out fine – Star Wars in general has a bit of a “Skywalker-overload” problem as it is.

            Reva’s decision to spare mini-Luke was essentially predetermined by the story – with Obi-Wan otherwise engaged (discussed shortly) and no one else left to defend “the boy,” there was only one way things were going to go. So, naturally, Reva started seeing Luke as a younger version of herself, which led to her sparing his life and bringing him home (mostly) unharmed.[5] Was this character turn predictable? Definitely. But I thought that Moses Ingram’s performance helped to sell Reva’s conflicted state of mind – she can silently convey a lot of emotion just by using her eyes.[6] I was vaguely surprised that she didn’t wind up getting Vadered (a la the Second Sister in Jedi: Fallen Order), but keeping her character alive leaves the door open for potentially-fun follow-up stories.[7]

            Obi-Wan’s portion of the episode is, naturally, the main course: we get another bonding scene with him and mini-Leia, some noble speechifying, and a somber-but-supportive exchange between him and Roken.

…and then it’s rematch time. Obi-Wan, apparently, made up for a decade’s worth of not practicing with his lightsaber by, uh, believing in himself really hard? The duel’s choreography was excellent; the fight imparted a sense of physicality, with real weight behind the blows exchanged by the combatants. My only real issue – and it’s so minor it barely qualifies as an issue – was how long it took Obi-Wan to remember, “oh, yeah, I can use the Force and my lightsaber at the same time.” I guess the fight would have ended too quickly otherwise. Thankfully, the effects held up well, even with dozens of CGI rocks getting pitched around, and the battle was fun from start to finish.

The highlight of the episode – and, quite possibly, the series – was Obi-Wan’s post-duel exchange with a partially-unmasked Vader. Every part of this scene was top-notch, from Kenobi’s tearful regret and Anakin’s bitter rage to the use of lightsabers to illuminate the characters’ faces. Special mention goes to the sound design: the way Anakin’s (Hayden Christensen) voice descended and morphed into Vader’s (James Earl Jones) was superb.

The end of the episode was on the quieter side and included a couple of satisfying moments. Obi-Wan met mini-Luke! And he said the thing! On top of that, Qui-Gon showed up as a force ghost for all of thirty seconds. Honestly, I don’t hate this move – facing what remained of Anakin Skywalker was something that Obi-Wan had to do himself. That said, it’d be cool to see Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon just chilling in the desert and chopping it up.

Not cool enough to warrant a second season, though. With these six instalments, Disney generally managed to integrate a continuity-straining story[8] into chunks of firmly established canon, but I’m not confident that the same thing could be done twice.

Rating: 7.5/10 (+.5/-1)

Adjusted for Sentimentality: 6.75/10

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[1] Vader snapped that shit in half, right? Did she duct tape it back together, or what?

[2] And yeah, I know TIE fighters don’t have hyperdrive capabilities…but neither did the rebel ship, right? So…why not just send some dudes to follow them?

[3] Seen in Part 1.

[4] Shoutout blue milk.

[5] He might have a concussion, though, and those are no joke.

[6] Kind of like Tom Hardy.  

[7] She’ll almost certainly make an appearance in one of the Star Wars comic series, for example.

[8] The Mandalorian doesn’t run the same risk – core characters from the film series are only occasionally seen, with the focus of the story on characters whose fates aren’t predetermined.