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Star Wars: Nothing But Star Wars


Myrddin

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Obi-Wan's problem isn't that it's crap, because it isn't really, it's just sort of mediocre. It had some very good moments but also some very poor ones, and some logic problems and a general sense that the script needed more revisions and the scenes more takes to get better performances. A lot of the complaints have been with how the show fits into the canon, and a lot of those problems could have been taken away with an extra line here and there to smooth things out. I think there's also issues with the "working backwards" school of writing which is dominating a lot of stuff these days, where people say "Vader and Obi-Wan should fight again, that's cool," and they work backwards to find a way for that to happen, rather than starting the story and then halfway through go, Hey, Vader and Obi-Wan should fight here," or "it'd be good for Vader and Obi-Wan to meet, but there's no way to make it work without seeming forced, so we won't do that."

It occurs to be that The Wrath of Khan would never be made today because the suits would insist on a Kirk-Khan fistfight at all costs.

The cheapness thing I don't entirely get, and it's something that people say a lot about shows with outstanding vfx. I don't think it's the vfx but maybe how they sit people within the vfx backdrops and environments, which often feels fake. Usually it's weak greenscreen, but I think it might also be a problem with the Volume. I think with The Mandalorian they put a ton of work into making the Volume work, but I think with later shows they've been making them too fast or not having as much time to have everything look good (because the next show needs to get in there a few weeks later). Or it might just be the vfx production bottleneck, they haven't got enough experienced artists in Hollywood to spread around the colossal amount of shows now requiring top-tier vfx.

The new Star Wars material has generally been spotty with vfx anyway. Rogue One had, by far, the best, but some of the shots in the sequel trilogy were actual dogshit.

2 hours ago, Aejohn the Conqueroo said:

Do TIE fighters have landing gear?  40 odd years ago on my bedroom floor they were fine to land on those wigs of theirs but do they really do that?  I have to admit I wanted to see the ship that we know as Vader's TIE fighter in that scene too, but given where he was going I didn't think it would have been practical for him to take it.

The wings fold in half and little landing legs come out the bottom of the sphere. We saw this in The Mandalorian.

I think Vader gets his TIE Advance later on (I vaguely remember a Rebels episode featuring it, but might be misremembering).

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24 minutes ago, Aejohn the Conqueroo said:

So you've been exhaustively going over the things you didn't like about a show you've stopped watching 3 weeks after you've stopped watching it?  You're going to give yourself one hell of an ulcer if this is normal behavior for you. 

:lol: There are other participants in this thread aside from me. I've only made a few comments since I stopped watching, but I confess that it is entertaining how disastrously bad this show turned out to be. 

Although I agree with your overall sentiment. Why waste time on something you don't like? If you want to experience a truly wild ride, check out the Rant and Rave threads. People have dedicated entire novels worth of words in their echo chamber of hate, to the point where it seems like their entire life identity is centered around their hate for some random bit of entertainment that is now three years ended. Fascinating stuff.

And just to clarify: I will freely make fun of this show because for now it's fun to do so. But I don't think there's anything wrong with liking it. I don't think liking it makes a person stupid, or it indicates anything negative about a person.

I'm interning in a facility that produces radioisotopes for targeted cancer treatment. I'm not part of the research team, I simply help the Radiation Safety Officer write up procedures so the accelerators are run within safe and legal standards. The person who is the head of the team, though, I do know and he is an extremely intelligent guy. One of the brightest I've ever met. And he loves Obi-Wan Kenobi, too.

All liking or disliking Obi-Wan Kenobi says about a person is that they like or dislike Obi-Wan Kenobi.

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5 minutes ago, IFR said:

Although I agree with your overall sentiment. Why waste time on something you don't like? If you want to experience a truly wild ride, check out the Rant and Rave threads. People have dedicated entire novels worth of words in their echo chamber of hate, to the point where it seems like their entire life identity is centered around their hate for some random bit of entertainment that is now three years ended. Fascinating stuff.

Venting is healthy. That's why people have therapists. The Rant and Rave thread is like a therapist.

Don't suppress your emotions, just let it all out. 

 

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Just now, Darryk said:

Venting is healthy. That's why people have therapists. The Rant and Rave thread is like a therapist.

Don't suppress your emotions, just let it all out. 

 

Good. Gooood.... Let the hate flow through you.

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17 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Why on earth did Obi-Wan defeat Vader but refused to kill him ... yet again? Seriously, there is no reason for this. We could have gotten an Obi-Wan who didn't want to do it, but knew he had to, to protect the children, the future, and the innocent. Vader could have gotten away and/or be saved by the Grand Inquisitor. Obi-Wan just walking away, again, just doesn't make any sense.

I agree with most of your other complaints but I have no problem with Obi-Wan walking away again.  I don't think he sees it as consigning everybody to Vader's surely terrible wrath and I don't think he should.  "Darth" is just a servant of the Emperor, if Obi-Wan kills him there, all the future carnage Vader will exact would almost certainly be carried out by someone else under Palpatine's orders.  Which means, of course, the problem is why we don't get more stuff about why Yoda and Obi-Wan weren't trying to figure out a way to kill the Emperor for 19 years.  Poor Ian McDiarmid needs to get paid!

Anyway, like I said after their first encounter in episode 3 (of this sereis), I find nothing wrong with Obi-Wan refusing to kill Vader because I like how both in that encounter and in ANH he basically refuses to even fight Vader.  When Yoda orders him to go kill Vader in ROTS he tells him he can't do it and begs him to send him to kill Palpatine instead, and the reasons for that are obvious in terms of his personal relationship compromising his duty to kill Palpatine's new apprentice like he did with Maul and tried to for years with Dooku.  If the show had Obi-Wan try to actually kill Vader instead of just evade and neutralize him I would be far more disappointed in it not serving the character.

17 hours ago, RumHam said:

It seems to me her plan was to avenge child murder by murdering a child, but then at the end realized that she did not want to become a child murderer. It was weird.

Yeah, I thought this was clear and didn't need to be explained any more than it was.  Reva failed at killing Vader - which she's been devoting her life to for ten years - then finds out about Vader's children, so resolves to kill one of them instead.  Only to realize she can't do it once she comes to her senses.  Pretty basic stuff to me.

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1 minute ago, DMC said:

Yeah, I thought this was clear and didn't need to be explained any more than it was.  Reva failed at killing Vader - which she's been devoting her life to for ten years - then finds out about Vader's children, so resolves to kill one of them instead.  Only to realize she can't do it once she comes to her senses.  Pretty basic stuff to me.

I think it would have made a bit more sense for her to plan to be abduct Luke, and use him to lure Vader to his death.

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2 hours ago, Babblebauble said:

How much is Disney+ stealing from you a month? Ten dollars? In ten years you will have paid 1,200 dollars (assuming no price hikes) for your Obi-Wan sequel show sequel show. 

It's your life and your stolen money, but I'd demand more in my $1,200 story not less. But that's just me.

You are aware there is more than just Kenobi on Disney plus right? 

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Just now, RumHam said:

I think it would have made a bit more sense for her to plan to be abduct Luke, and use him to lure Vader to his death.

I guess maybe but I mean, the point is she isn't really thinking rationally.

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6 minutes ago, dbunting said:

You are aware there is more than just Kenobi on Disney plus right? 

What do you get for your $120 a year? What do you possess in return for that money? Access to definably select 'content'. Conditional to the offerings of the controlling interest, at use with their discretion, and unavailable without exposure to their monitoring of what you watch, when, how much, and how reliably. 

You're paying an amount of money that used to buy four to six movies a year -that were YOURS, useable at your discretion and without outside monitoring- for the right to rent under the eye of a monopolistic enterprise.

Yeah. There's a lot more than Kenobi coming along with that service.

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What a strange time to have media-as-a-service being harangued against. The explosion of content, much bad, some good (but then, that was always the way!), funded in part by the move to streaming and vast digital libraries that are all-you-can-consume for a monthly fee may eventually be a problem, but right now it is an absurd feast of riches. Especially for those who are smart and hop around services rather than just letting subscriptions sit idle.

Imagine having just $120 a year to enjoy content in 1992. That was not quite 30 movie tickets, and realistically you'd spend a bit on transportation or on drinks and snacks, so maybe you'd get to watch 20 films that year. That's nearly 2 a month! Or, yeah, it's maybe 6 tapes that I actually own -- great! 6 films to rewatch over and over for a year, because I no longer have money.

Or... I can pay the same and watch 200 films in a year if I feel like it. And then do it again the next year. And maybe this particular service doesn't have the films I want to see.. but hey, I could just end that subscription  and use a service that does have it until I get through the content library I'm interested in.

It's not a bad time to be a fan of television and film, as far as that goes.

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8 minutes ago, DMC said:

I guess maybe but I mean, the point is she isn't really thinking rationally.

Yeah, it doesn't even crack the top ten "wait, what?" moments from this show.

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25 minutes ago, Babblebauble said:

What do you get for your $120 a year? What do you possess in return for that money? Access to definably select 'content'. Conditional to the offerings of the controlling interest, at use with their discretion, and unavailable without exposure to their monitoring of what you watch, when, how much, and how reliably. 

You're paying an amount of money that used to buy four to six movies a year -that were YOURS, useable at your discretion and without outside monitoring- for the right to rent under the eye of a monopolistic enterprise.

Yeah. There's a lot more than Kenobi coming along with that service.

Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers? 

DINGERS!!!

That fight was lost years ago back when $120/year was something more than an absolutely negligible sum of money. I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but like I said that fight's been lost.

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

I thought this was clear and didn't need to be explained any more than it was.  Reva failed at killing Vader - which she's been devoting her life to for ten years

By serving under him and doing everything he asks, and having a weirdly greater obsession with finding Obi Wan than Vader himself…

1 hour ago, DMC said:

- then finds out about Vader's children, so resolves to kill one of them instead.

Which she could probably figure out he doesn’t even know about, and if he did, he seems to give zero fucks about. I have no problem with the character, or devoting the time they did to her in this last episode, but her plan was nonsense. 

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6 hours ago, mormont said:

Here, I disagree. I was thinking about this and I'll explain why I think it's necessary.

I've heard it said about superhero comics that they're about literalising your problems, making them into things that you can solve by punching them. It's true of genre more widely, I think. Reva's survivor guilt, trauma and desire for revenge need to be literalised on screen. Reva internally wrestling with the idea of killing Luke as a way of resolving these problems, ultimately deciding on the path of peace and never going to Tattooine, doesn't work. A scene where she fights Owen and Beru and chases Luke before bringing him back and putting aside her lightsaber, that's how you resolve such a storyline in genre TV.  

The issue with the character is so badly written that we don't understand why she doesn't kill Luke - when she must have killed dozens of other children directly or indirectly as an inquisitor earlier. That's what's implied by what we saw. Her not killing Luke doesn't mean anything in context. It doesn't make her a better person.

More importantly, there is little to no motivation for her to care about Luke - especially if we view her being stabbed as her breaking with the Empire for good.

The character would have been served much better if she hadn't gone to Tatooine to kill Luke ... but merely to pay him a visit.

Not to mention that it would have been very easy to make her revenge plotline make more sense - by establishing that she couldn't get close to Vader before, by telling us how she joined the Inquisitorius and why her peers despised her so much. We don't understand any of that, truly.

 

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4 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

 but her plan was nonsense. 

...I agree!  That was exactly my point - that she responded to finding out about the kids by directing her need for revenge that way without thinking only to eventually come to her senses.  Again, pretty standard story/characterization.

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

I agree with most of your other complaints but I have no problem with Obi-Wan walking away again.  I don't think he sees it as consigning everybody to Vader's surely terrible wrath and I don't think he should.  "Darth" is just a servant of the Emperor, if Obi-Wan kills him there, all the future carnage Vader will exact would almost certainly be carried out by someone else under Palpatine's orders.  Which means, of course, the problem is why we don't get more stuff about why Yoda and Obi-Wan weren't trying to figure out a way to kill the Emperor for 19 years.  Poor Ian McDiarmid needs to get paid!

Is that really true? Anakin was hyped up as the chosen one, the most powerful force user going during the prequels. Darth Vader is positioned as this incredible force of nature and of almost pure evil in the OT. The idea that he could just replaced with some other apprentice kind of defeats the entire point of the prequels.

Obi Wan not killing Darth is up there with the most stupid things to have happened in this series. It only happened because Darth Vader doesn’t die and we know that. 

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I was fine with seeing a badass side of Owen and Beru defending Luke. I was fine with Reva wanting to kill Luke and seeing the error of her ways. But the whole thing was poorly set up and directed. The stakes were lowered by only one of these characters not having default plot armor. And it's shown by how Reva carried her activated lightsaber in one hand while fighting off the two farmers with the other, instead of simply decapitating them. She was still gripped by the dark side at that point, so there was no reason for her to not go through them like a knife through butter when her intention was to murder a child.

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1 hour ago, DMC said:

I agree with most of your other complaints but I have no problem with Obi-Wan walking away again. 

Mind you, I don't think that's a really *big deal*. Just something I think could have been handled better.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

I don't think he sees it as consigning everybody to Vader's surely terrible wrath and I don't think he should.  "Darth" is just a servant of the Emperor, if Obi-Wan kills him there, all the future carnage Vader will exact would almost certainly be carried out by someone else under Palpatine's orders.  Which means, of course, the problem is why we don't get more stuff about why Yoda and Obi-Wan weren't trying to figure out a way to kill the Emperor for 19 years.  Poor Ian McDiarmid needs to get paid!

So we are thinking that putting down Palpatine would have made everything better? With there being lots of Sith guys out there, Vader or some of the Inquisitors would have taken over, no?

The reason why I think Obi-Wan should have killed Vader is basically twofold:

(1) He owes him as much in light what he did to him in ROTS - Vader deserves a mercy killing, if only for the memory of Anakin Skywalker.

(2) Obi-Wan owes it to himself and the galaxy to put a stop and/or punish to that particular monster he himself helped to create if he is able to do it.

Just walking away is him keeping the moral high ground in a weird way. And I mean - let's not forget how cruel Obi-Wan's actions in ROTS are. Cutting off all his limbs and watching while he burns and then just walking away is arguably one of the crueler things in movie history.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Anyway, like I said after their first encounter in episode 3 (of this sereis), I find nothing wrong with Obi-Wan refusing to kill Vader because I like how both in that encounter and in ANH he basically refuses to even fight Vader.  When Yoda orders him to go kill Vader in ROTS he tells him he can't do it and begs him to send him to kill Palpatine instead, and the reasons for that are obvious in terms of his personal relationship compromising his duty to kill Palpatine's new apprentice like he did with Maul and tried to for years with Dooku.  If the show had Obi-Wan try to actually kill Vader instead of just evade and neutralize him I would be far more disappointed in it not serving the character.

We could have gotten the neutralizing thing if it hadn't been a duel setting but more Obi-Wan distracting Vader to get him away from other people. Him keeping Vader distracted, but not being able to completely overpower him. Here he overpowered him, so there is really no reason to hurt him some more and then walk away.

More so in light of them wanting to keep the children safe.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Yeah, I thought this was clear and didn't need to be explained any more than it was.  Reva failed at killing Vader - which she's been devoting her life to for ten years - then finds out about Vader's children, so resolves to kill one of them instead.  Only to realize she can't do it once she comes to her senses.  Pretty basic stuff to me.

One can interpret in that way - but it isn't clear. I mean, we could just as well assume she thought we talk about a Force-sensitive child Obi-Wan tries to hide from Vader for some reason. That Luke is Vader's son is not revealed in the message, nor do we learn that Reva concludes he is.

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18 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Why on earth did Obi-Wan defeat Vader but refused to kill him ... yet again? Seriously, there is no reason for this. We could have gotten an Obi-Wan who didn't want to do it, but knew he had to, to protect the children, the future, and the innocent. Vader could have gotten away and/or be saved by the Grand Inquisitor. Obi-Wan just walking away, again, just doesn't make any sense. How is it that the drop ship Obi-Wan used had a hyperdrive? And where the hell is the Star Destroyer when Obi-Wan leaves the planet?

I commented on this a couple of pages back, but here is my take on it again:

I thought the duel was generally good. Obi-Wan once again simply walking away is a head scratcher because even from a Jedi perspective, a foe like Vader ought to be brought to justice. But it does mirror the encounter in Rebels between Vader and Ahsoka, where Ahsoka decides to kill Vader as a means to avenge Anakin, which, as stated by Vader, is not the Jedi way. And maybe Obi-Wan thought that there was no meaningful justice to serve Vader as the Republic is gone. So either give into the temptation of avenging the loss of Anakin and kill Vader, or walk away.

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1 minute ago, Corvinus85 said:

I commented on this a couple of pages back, but here is my take on it again:

I thought the duel was generally good. Obi-Wan once again simply walking away is a head scratcher because even from a Jedi perspective, a foe like Vader ought to be brought to justice. But it does mirror the encounter in Rebels between Vader and Ahsoka, where Ahsoka decides to kill Vader as a means to avenge Anakin, which, as stated by Vader, is not the Jedi way. And maybe Obi-Wan thought that there was no meaningful justice to serve Vader as the Republic is gone. So either give into the temptation of avenging the loss of Anakin and kill Vader, or walk away.

Oh, I was not thinking about Obi-Wan killing Vader out revenge or in anger, etc. ... but simply as a mercy killing, to put him out of his misery. You can kill Vader for the wrong reasons ... but you don't have to.

In that sense I think there is a difference there between Ahsoka's and Obi-Wan's motivation.

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