4D Chess
Episode 5 of Obi-Wan Kenobi begins with a flashback to a training session between Anakin and Obi-Wan. Sprinkled throughout the episode, these two trade lightsaber blows and go all out for victory. Fast forward to the present and Reva is promoted to Grand Inquisitor for her “good work” in the last episode of losing Kenobi but playing 4D chess and planting a tracker on Lola. Now, Obi-Wan and the others are heading for Jabiim, where they touch down and begin to make plans to evacuate. Roken is there too, along with a number of other people desperate to get off this inhospitable rock. While they all scramble around, trying to find a way to outrun the Empire, the bugged Lola manages to open a large vent in view of everyone, high up in the air. No one sees it though, as Lola heads inside and manages to scramble the wiring. The hangar doors slam shut. Leia decides to head off and try to fix this, with a returning Haja on babysitting duties (despite his pleas not to). Hold up, couldn’t Leia get electrocuted doing this? Anyway, that’s not important right now. With the empire inbound and the hangar doors shuts, they’re trapped inside. Obi-Wan gives a rousing speech and gives Roken an hour to fix the electrics before they’re all toast. Cut to Reva and the others, who are now right outside the hangar door. They pummel it with missiles but the doors hang tight. Hey, how about using Lola to scramble the wiring and open these doors? Why only the hangar doors? Anyway, enough questions we have fighting to get to! The siege continues but both sides are at a stalemate. Obi-Wan approaches the door, just as Reva does too. She knows Obi-Wan is on the other side, presumably sensing him although that contradicts earlier in the season when she couldn’t find Obi-Wan hiding nearby. Anyway, plot issues aside, Obi-Wan realizes that she was one of the younglings from inside the temple when Order 66 was enacted. I mean, if the flashback at the start of episode 1 wasn’t a big enough clue, we now get confirmation of this. Reva speaks about how she lay in wait, hiding from the empire among the cold bodies. She played possum, and here Obi-Wan realizes that he was never the target. Apparently Vader was and she’s been waiting for the right time to strike. Don’t worry, we’ll circle back to this nugget later on! Obi-Wan encourages Reva to work with him to try and stop Vader but she’s having none of it. With her spinning lightsaber, she breaks into the hangar bay door by slicing it open. The doors open, stormtroopers approach and a game of laser tag ensues as everyone trades blaster shots. Obi-Wan does his best to hold them all back but Tala takes a blast to the stomach. Her bot tries to protect her, but it’s no good. Obi-Wan is forced to watch as Tala sacrifices herself, blowing up the tunnel with her grenade that miraculously doesn’t send the whole thing tumbling down around her. With all hope lost, Obi-Wan decides to give up and surrender to Reva. He believes he can get through to Reva and use her to turn on Vader. Surrendering, he’s led out to the main bay where he makes his pleas. Reva decides to bring him back inside again, guarded by two stormtroopers which obviously doesn’t work, as Vader touches down and goes after Obi-Wan, who has managed to get onboard the freighter. While this is going on, Leia manages to fix the electrics, the hangar doors reopen and everyone scrambles aboard the ship. Vader uses his force powers to knock the ship back down. It crashes into the hangar bay, Vader rips open the hull of the ship and all hope looks lost… but wait! Deus ex machina strikes again, as it turns out another ship was perfectly placed right next to that one and takes off. Now, to be fair you can actually see another in the hangar but… who’s onboard this one? Is it a droid? How did they know Vader would use his force powers right then? We’re never told but more drama ensues here. Vader is attacked from behind by Reva but he uses his force powers to stop her. He barely breaks a sweat as Reva uses her twirling lightsaber to try and take him out. It doesn’t work and eventually Vader bests her, taking both halves of the lightsaber for himself. Remember when Vader just mercilessly snapped someone’s neck outside? Anyway, he stabs Reva through the stomach but leaves her “to die”, as the Grand Inquisitor arrives, absolutely fine as before. “You are of no further use.” He says, as they all walk away. As Vader and the others leave, there’s a problem. In their hasty retreat, Haja has left the comms device Obi-Wan gave him earlier in the episode on the floor. Reva crawls over and sees the message about Tatooine and “the boy”, which is obviously Luke Skywalker, thus setting up a big finale to come.
The Episode Review
Much like with other Disney+ shows, the legacy characters are ultimately just a hook to reel you in and not really what these stories are solely focused on. Here, we have Obi-Wan used as said legacy character when really the story is centered around Reva. While her arc sounds good on paper, it also raises all sorts of questions when you actually stop to dissect it. So to confirm, Reva was there and saw Anakin enact Order 66. After playing dead, she decided to join the dark side, hunting down the very Jedi that could have helped launch a counter-offensive against Vader, happily torturing innocent people, even hanging a Jedi in the middle of the street because she’s “angry at Obi-Wan.” But… not really. This was all a smokescreen because she’s angry at Vader, whom she wants to gain revenge on by… killing Jedi? Becoming Grand Inquisitor, finding The Path and then turning on Vader. You see, when you break it down like this, the motivations are skewed. But then it goes deeper than that thanks to Vader’s reveal that he’s seemingly known she’s been a youngling all this time and has been playing her at her own game. So if that was the case, then why did he make her Grand Inquisitor in the first place? Why not kill her after finding out about the tracker last episode? Beyond that, the whole siege on the base is a nice idea, with the interspersed “Member Berries” for the fight between Obi Wan and Anakin nicely implemented. But then, why have we waited five episodes for this? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to include it in the opening episode so we get a sense of Obi-Wan’s confliction? The biggest disappointment here though comes from Obi-Wan himself. His development has been absolutely non-existent, he’s still the same downtrodden guy we saw at the start of the season, deflated and defeated while simultaneously protecting Princess Leia by letting her scramble around in vents with dangerous electrics. And how is a 10 year old princess the best person to fix electrics that she’s unlikely to have ever been near in her life? But then she does it anyway. Although to be fair, this was definitely a better episode than what we’ve been served up before but given Disney have spent $25 million an episode, I can’t help but feel we deserve better when it comes to storytelling and directing.
