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This is a thing I came up with before the fourth episode of the show, which I didn’t get a chance to post yet, but now I’m sitting down to watch ep 4, so I’m gonna throw this out here to maintain the illusion that this is possible before the show goes off the deep end slash show off my badass chops at predictions. Or me up for ridicule when the show does something even better.

Anyway:

How to Fix Kenobi.
Some might think all of Obi-Wan’s adventures with Leia at this point are way too much given what we see in the actual movies. But, we can fix that. First, have everything come out. Luke, Vader, Padme, everything, all the backstory. Somehow, between Reva and Obi-Wan, Leia gets all the details and it freaks her out. After their adventures are blessedly over, when Obi-Wan is preparing to bring Leia home, he gives her a choice, which can come up organically, in response to her own conflicts. He can take her with him to Tatooine to train as a Jedi and eventually meet her twin brother, but they will have to stay far away from Bail and Breha for everyone’s protection. Or, he can take her back to her parents and erase her memories of the whole adventure, both to ease her conflicts and prevent her from inadvertently revealing her knowledge of Obi-Wan’s location and Luke’s existence. However, if she chooses this, he promises that he will leave just enough subconscious triggers so that if she’s ever in mortal peril or great need, she will remember to call on him for help. And one day, they will meet again, even if she never calls, and when they do, he will bring her brother to meet her. Furthermore, in compensation, he will share with her through the Force some impressions of Padme.

This explains “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” It explains why she was running to Tatooine of all places, which, rationally, makes no sense, if she is being pursued by an Imperial Star Destroyer with the Emperor’s hitman. It explains why Obi-Wan’s reaction to her message is “You must come with me to Alderaan…” It explains Leia’s quick acceptance of Luke’s explanation of their family relations and “…somehow, I’ve always known.” It explains Leia’s memories of her birth mother that don’t make any sense, as of Revenge of the Sith. It even gives Baby Leia a bit more agency even if it’s a dumb choice to lay on a ten-year-old in line with Disney’s decision to start hyping her as the best and greatest.

I’m not super hopeful, since Disney ignored my head-canon that the weakness in the Death Star was deliberately built in so Vader could blow it up if the Force-agnostic command staff decided that as commanders of the “ultimate power in the universe” they weren’t going to take orders from an old guy in a robe and decided to point it at Coruscant and tell the government to listen to them and not the Emperor. It was much less of a weakness than is obvious, since it required high level piloting skills and use of the Force to hit the target.

But in their ineffable wisdom, Disney decided to have a galaxy far, far away’s lame Oskar Schindler analog build a fully functional and perfectly operational Death Star, except with a secret weakness that only his daughter was allowed to know about, and rather than the rather simplistic technical schematic we see in New Hope, which should not take up all that much memory, he decides to smuggle out of the construction site, a personal message he has to hope the girl he has not seen in over a decade will understand and know how to use to find the actual plans.

Whatever. I suppose their story makes just as much sense. /sarcasm

On to Episode 4:

01:10 “What have you become?” It occurs to me that Obi-Wan should not be so shocked or appalled at what he sees of Vader here on Not-Tattooine #5, considering he has watched footage of Vader slaughtering children and basically murdering his pregnant wife. At that point, you’ve pretty much already seen the worst and lowest he could have become. Wearing a villain suit and collaterally killing a bunch of bystanders is negligible by this point.

03:21 OMG!! Both Obi-Wan and Vader in tanks for their burns! It’s like, a parallel or something! It’s like poetry, it rhymes!

03:48 I don’t begrudge him the work, considering he doesn’t seem to be getting much else, but did they really need Hayden Christensen back to wear all the burn prosthetics or the Vader suit? For the record, he’s over six inches shorter than David Prowse, who originally wore the suit.

04:47 If Obi-Wan is dead, why are you holding Leia? Wasn’t the whole point to use her as bait? Leia figured out that datum two episodes ago. Why are you trying to break her? What can she possibly tell you? The only thing you’ve got is that YOU kidnapped a princess from Alderaan and a Jedi took her away from her kidnappers. Even if you think this is due to the Organas having Jedi sympathies, it’s not exactly going to stand up to any sort of inquiry. Either you don’t need proof, so why bother with what miniscule intel you can get from a ten-year-old, or it’s beyond imagining that she could provide any that would satisfy whomever you have to answer to. Even people as inept at security and tradecraft as the Organas and Obi-Wan have proven in this series, are not sufficiently incompetent to have anything that can be traced, especially through Leia.

05:15 This tedious cliché where the hero is endangering the people whom he should be protecting or who ostensibly on his side, is also kind of tiresome. You’re supposed to be helping Jedi, Ice Cube, not picking and choosing which ones are worthy. What are all those kids who make rocks float going to do without an actual Jedi Master to preserve the teachings and traditions that might someday be able to be taught again?

05:28 Everything should NOT run out of here! I have spent less time in covert operations training than the typical Disney plus writer has spent in writing classes, why is it so easy for me to spot their gaping ignorance in both spheres of activity? You decentralize your illegal operations for EXACTLY this reason.

05:37 Oh, FFS! “You have no idea what ___ is capable of” only serves as the springboard to a monologue designed to give the character to whom that line is directed, the moral high ground and a tragic backstory. Let’s see what Ice Cube had to live with that’s worse that a massacre of literally the only family he has ever known, by his own equivalent to a brother, who is currently trying to kill him, so we get why he has the right to talk smack to a legit hero of this story.

05:57 Your Force-sensitive wife getting killed teaching you about child massacres and world demolition is not so much a lesson of experience as a wild imagination with, in this case, stopped clock accuracy. Assuming you are correct in your assertion that you know exactly what the Empire can do.

You still don’t have the moral high ground here. Maybe Dr Dre will help.

06:10 Oh, good. We don’t need to go ask Eazy E.

6:26 There is a water moon in the Mustafar system, which is “Vader’s system”. Why? Why any of this? Why does Vader get such a shitty system? Why is there not the remotest hint that he rules this system in the actual movies? He’s the number two man in the Empire. I’d think he’d either have a lot more systems than that as his personal fief or none, because he’s supposed to be the successor to it all.

Also, why did you need a hologram table with an image of a blue sphere and a red wire-frame pyramid? From what they say, they only have a tiny bit of intel, so there should not be an elaborate briefing that would necessitate these graphics.

06:31 The Jedi Underground Railroad is able to keep tabs on both Vader and his ship.

06:37 “It’s impenetrable, Wade” should be a new meme.

Also, “Fortress Inquisitorius” sounds a little too on-the-nose and fake-Latin-y for even Warhammer 40,000, let alone Star Wars.

07:02 “She’s ten years old!” is not a functional response to the legitimate operational problem of them not being soldiers and the speeders being sewage haulers.

07:04 Yes! Go on your own! That’s what the fans came for, Obi-Wan. Not Niobe and Ice Cube and their merry diverse band of nobody cares rebels. A Jedi should not need a support commando crew.

07:17 More pertinent regarding her cover is whether or not it is a viable strategy to get Obi-Wan in and Leia out, rather than the bravery of her for risking her life.

07:22 Why was getting her ship fueled and ready not done before this? Why is she even here? Who is back on Not-Tatooine#5 picking up all the myriad Force refugees Ice Cube was so concerned about in the prior scene? Streaming writers DGAF, it’s just a strong, active line on which to end a scene.

07:25 Okay, imagine you’re smuggling people the US wants to lock up. One of the people in your network is a military officer stationed in some out of the way base, so you route your pipeline that way. Does it make any kind of operational sense for that officer to be away from her post, and unable to continue guiding people being sent through? Also, why would the contact who sends people to this officer be someone who openly pretends to be the very thing you are trying to hide? And why would this officer have carte blanche in her own service, to just hop on a plane and flying to CIA headquarters or Guantanamo Bay or some black site on a flimsy premise? Or ANY kind of premise! Facilities like a “Fortress Inquisitorius” are the sort of place where you come only by invitation (and one to inspire dread, at that). You do not get to show up unannounced for a tour or to give information you think is important, you call someone in the chain of command. This is how any sensible organization would work. Not least to prevent people from getting into such places to disrupt their functions or rescue their prisoners as Indira Varma in intending.

07:40 This whole thing where Obi-Wan sucks at the Force now is clearly just a contrivance to ease the writers around the fact that nothing they have presented so far should pose a legitimate threat to him. We know he’s going to make it, with powers up to function, to the point that he is absolutely confident of his ability to move freely through the Death Star and undo its security. We know Leia is going to survive, and they have utterly failed to make us care about anyone who might get killed to extract them from this crisis. We also know that he’s going to get his powers back whenever it’s convenient to the plot. Just like he did when Leia fell. Heck, at that point, they had not even done a good job establishing that his powers were on the wane. “Not the man I once was,” does not automatically convey to an audience that he has utterly lost the abilities that define him, especially when in the primary other media in the IP, there is no hint of that even being possible. Especially considering he is actively engaged in a mission and it would make no sense for him to let his skills lapse, not mention insisting that he himself has a role relevant to said abilities with regard to Luke to two different parties!

If his powers were gone, why would he tell the Organas that he needs to stay with Luke? Why would he be insisting to Owen that Luke needs to be trained? What was the plan if a threat came calling for Luke or Owen said “Good point, I’ll send him over to your place for lessons tomorrow”? It only makes sense from a place of “trying to shock the audience”.

08:05 And now a character with absolutely no established attributes to be doing so, is giving spiritual advice to a Jedi. Unless it’s because women are naturally more nurturing and stuff.

08:36 Wait, an organization devoted to hunting down a particular kind of people, disbelieves rumors of efforts to hide those same people? That makes no sense! They should have been actively looking out for something like that, since it’s the biggest external problem possible from their perspective! And why are your sharing all this with a ten-year-old prisoner?!

09:17 This is not helping the problem of Reva’s competence. Leia knows jack all about the Path. What she knew was that if she followed a tunnel to the end, she would meet someone who would take her on. And Reva, despite the massive advantage of the Force, killed the guy who was going to be piloting a ship to the next point in the destination.

Oh, wait, she might have heard about Jabim. But there is no reason to believe she would know this datum, for all the reasons I have been giving in this and the prior episode. So Reva is magically right, because of massive failures on the part of the Path, and our heroine, the renegade Imperial Officer. Wise enough to understand the root cause of Obi-Wan’s Force handicap, but too stupid to maintain rudimentary operational security.

09:37 It would be hilarious if Leia’s eventual resistance to interrogation that stymied the best efforts of the Empire was something she built up to by deflecting the idiotic and hopeless inquiries of Reva. As well as symptomatic of Disney prequels’ compulsion to explain each and every single detail of the original trilogy.

10:16 How has she managed to land and just wander on in to a facility like this? She has not been asked a single question or had to tell anyone what she was even doing there?

10:44 This deep in, and she’s only now being asked, and she’s acting like being asked for ID is a huge imposition. This should be a basic thing at every door, every landing pad, every everything for anything more important than her dusty old useless base in the middle of nowhere. And this giant mostly empty room with people just milling around is not exactly a secure kill box in which you can contain attempted infiltrators.

11:10 FINALLY! Something approaching sensible military protocols! Of course, this is the same group that, per The Mandalorian, has facial recognition software granting access to Imperial files after apparently nothing more than verifying that you possess a face.

11:21 No, you are not his commanding officer, because he just established this is not your sector! Maybe the word you are looking for is “superior officer”?

11:26 In any halfway competent organization, hell, I would bet in Disney itself, a security guy would respond to a threat to inform his ultimate superior of his checking ID and making sure one belongs there, by saying “Would you? Go right ahead! I would love a testimonial to the higher-ups that I am actually doing my job!” Military people wear rank insignia for a reason! If this guy had anything to fear from challenging someone of her rank, he would have passed her through! If they will let anyone through on the basis of “How dare you question me?!?” how has the rebel alliance not wiped out the entire leadership? Why are they still about a decade away from winning their first victory?

11:30 “I’m here with classified intelligence” is something that no one with classified intelligence says. Luke needed the Force to get past Bib Fortuna with “I have something important for your boss.”

11:35 “Do you know what classified means?” On a halfway decently written show the answer would be “Yes, it means we understand the basic concept of security and it also means you should be in your own damn sector, and someone who I AM allowed to pass through this door should be here to meet you, or you should give me the name of a person who can authorize your entry!”

11:40 Why are we wasting time on this scene? Why not just show her already inside? What is to be gained from showing us how she browbeat her way past the guard?

12:04 There is an officer less than six feet away from Indira Varma whispering into a comlink “I’m inside the system”! How are they getting away with this?

12:20 How far away did she drop Ben? If it was out of sight of the base, that’s an insane distance for someone without the Force to swim, and if it was in sight of the base, how did they not see?

How does she know where he is to tell him the entry port should be “right ahead of” him? Is she tracking him? Does she have his location on a schematic relative to the facility?

Why is there an entry port underwater?

12:55 Why do guards in genre fiction NEVER check in with their command center or partners or anything? Remember in OG Star Wars, when they had to account for the communication issues of the enemy inside the Death Star? This guy should have prefaced opening the door with a call advising that he might have heard something on the other side, so people would be waiting for his “all clear”. Hell, my own house can tell if a door or window was opened, and where, and let you know. No way the Empire should not have that same tech in a “Fortress Inquisitorius”.

13:40 Why doesn’t anyone search her for that fucking droid?!

14:16 NOW he looks over, but still does nothing.

14:41 Okay, maybe he secretly called for this guy.

15:00 Why do you make security searcher droids with eyes in only one direction? Why rely on omni-directional scanning droids instead of CAMERAS?

15:19 Why does that hunter-seeker droid have inferior scanning capability to an old assistant pilot droid manufactured over 20 years ago? Why was it stopped by a door closing? Why could it not open the door to look?

15:29 Twice now, since the superior officer led Tala off, the captioning has read (Terminal officer grunting). This time we get a shot of possibly some sort of struggle in a location we have not been given enough details to ascertain. Please do not tell me he led her off alone where she could beat him up.

15:33 Pausing the video at this timestamp shows the stormtroopers entering the frame, as Obi-Wan’s whole leg is clearly visible sticking out of his hiding place. Six seconds later, a stormtrooper saying “this place gives me the creeps,” confirms they did not see him.

15:53 The guy checking why Tala was not at her station, took her around the corner, where she overpowered him, because he had no guards with him, and now apparently everyone previously seen in the room has left.

15:57 The stormtroopers who were blind to a man climbing into a hatch directly in front of them, somehow heard her whisper, when that was sufficiently quiet to pass notice by a guy at the same console.

16:26 Remember that trick Obi-Wan. It might come in handy if you need to evade a couple of stormtroopers in an Imperial base nine years from now. And also, they should have been calling in the various noises they heard or thought they heard.

16:48 You on your fourth ploy in trying to outwit a ten-year-old. There are not words for how hard you suck, Reva.

17:36 I would never have broken as a child, because I knew that going back on my story was basically admitting a lie, which would get me punished as hard as anything else. Lying is just about the worst thing a ten-year-old can do, being generally lacking in the capacity for serious violence, property damage or theft, so it would get the most severe punishment.

17:43 Crap in a hat, Reva, you can’t tell that she’s about to lie?

17:56 She is actively outwitting Reva, not just resisting her ploys, but making her jump through hoops.

18:18 “I just found the secure sector.” He can tell, because of how unguarded it is. Actually, given the showing of Imperial Personnel thus far, unguarded is at least a viable way of keeping out anyone who would score an own goal for the rebels against you.

18:27 The secure sector is accessible by an ID thingy provided by an officer who isn’t even supposed to be here.

19:43 I feel like we are supposed to recognize some of these people from a cartoon.

19:51 Anyone with half a brain, whatever their age, would be insisting that they did not know anything, not that they would never talk. But the cool thing now is to have girls be defiant, instead of more intelligently seek surcease from their captors or abusers, like women have had to do in patriarchaly-imposed circumstances since time out of mind.

20:04 Are they posing the bodies in the moment of their deaths, or just zapping a bunch of Jedi with stuff that makes amber, like on Fringe? Because an awful lot of these bodies look surprised.

20:12 Obi-Wan remembers his mission, finally.

21:37 I’m gonna give Varma a pass on the inadequacy of this whole thing, because she’s clearly throwing herself on a grenade.

21:48 It took four blows with a lightsaber to take down one stormtrooper. Was the original scene with an extendable baton, only for them to edit in the lightsaber effects in post?

21:51Of course, that explanation makes no sense why the other stormtrooper is terrified to be locked in the room with this guy. Also, why wasn’t he shooting at the first sight of a lightsaber, considering he is posted in an anti-Jedi facility, where Jedi would have been the primary threat to be aware of.

22:43 What actually does not make sense, is how you could possibly think an Imperial checkpoint would be more than a nuisance to a Jedi Master, accompanied by a little girl or not. Unless this is one of Reva’s “I am competent because I read the script” moments.

22:48 “I will not have my integrity questioned.” “Then admit you’re a spy.” That is basically admitting to a total lack of integrity. I don’t think Hollywood, shockingly enough, knows what integrity is.

23:15 Officers who actively command stormtrooper units do not do undercover missions. How was she undercover for two years, when a quick check of duty logs will show her on the base. In fact, there would probably MORE entries showing her present when she was actually off doing Path stuff, to hide her activities! Unless she’s been documenting a sanitized version of her activities with the Path in case she needed to use this very story, which would be far too awesome for this show.

23:30 How bad do you suck when the worst-designed seeker droid catches you?

23:35 Like every other entity serving the Empire, it is going to chase them, instead of calling in suspicious activity. Why does it even have antennae?

24:02 You don’t put your comms on mute when you are going, at your own initiative, to see the last person you can afford a mistake around?

24:07 I remain unconvinced of this woman’s hand-to-hand skills. This is just more making her enemies incompetent to let her survive.

24:32 Same thing for Obi-Wan. That was the crappiest blaster-deflection scene in the entire series. He was standing with his back turned to the troopers for far too long, or holding his lightsaber above his head leaving his vitals unprotected, and they were just not shooting at him.

24:39 They got off a couple of shots before he even raised his lightsaber. In a normal Jedi, I would say that since he had his eyes on them the whole time, he was messing with their aim, and only moved the saber to block when he sensed shots targeting himself. But they have not yet really established that his powers are all the way back, especially with his subpar performance with the lightsaber on this mission.

25:13 Deflecting the shot into the guy behind him would have looked better if he hadn’t looked back like it was a lucky coincidence.

25:57 The stormtroopers can see into the room. They can see what he is doing. They should be calling for backup to cut off Tala and Leia based on their familiarity with their own base’s layout and the direction Tala ran, plus the clear need to get to elevators or stairs to get above the surface and escape. At this point they should no longer be trying to open the door to effect their own deaths by drowning when Obi-Wan lets the window go, or they kill him and the same thing happens.

26:12 Also, we know he swam in here with a breathing doohickey. Are we supposed to be worried about the water getting in?

26:19 You had one job you stupid cow! You were supposed to have been spending the last minute running away with Leia! Sorry, stormtroopers. I maligned your tactical acumen, because I did not realize Tala and Leia were still in your line of sight.

26:37 We have seen no Imperial officers with a beard. That’s going to be a crap disguise.

26:46 This is more ridiculous than the box in Metal Gear.

26:57 Sorry, Fifth Brother, she will not suffer for this, because despite your vastly superior competence, she is the screenwriters’ pet.

27:36 There are people just casually walking past this confrontation in the background like it’s no big deal. I guess when you are stationed at “Fortress Inquisitorius” the sight of Reva suddenly screaming about traitors becomes commonplace.

28:45 Why is this even happening? Since when can those hover? Why was that not used to better effect on Hoth, or do the Rebels have inferior models 10+ years from now? How is he not killing her, being at point blank range, and why is he still hanging there until she finally kills him instead of flying off with Sully?

28:57 If Reva could do that, why did she not do it when they were getting in? The most intelligent way to read what happened is that it was Fifth Brother’s doing, once again supporting my supposition of his superior competence.

29:07 And of course, we’re not going to use the proven tactic against the flying thing with Our Heroes on it. Because the whole internet was not mocking Game of Thrones for doing that with the dragon airlift five years ago.

29:52 Either she’s lying and Vader is a chump for believing this or we’re just throwing out all fidelity to continuity. She had no chance, and no opportunity to do so. Which ship is she talking about? The one Tala came on, or the speeder they actually flew off in? When, where and how did she put the tracker on Sully’s speeder, or does she once against magically know something, like the location of the ship that flew the speeders here?

What they are probably doing here is implying that the trick Vader uses to find the rebel base in A New Hope is something he learned from this clown.

30:22 Probably put the tracker on that stupid droid thing, hence the whole point of showing Leia with it in the interrogation room.

31:49 I don’t recall any ships in Lucas’ movies having these big empty spaces in them, unless there was a specific reason, like it was a hanger space or the bridge of a ship that was supposed to be all about overkill. Smaller ships like this were a lot more compact inside.

32:32 Yeah, called it.

Of course, this required Reva to inexplicably return the droid to Leia’s person while she is being strapped into the interrogation thingy, so that her adult rescuer would take it along with her, because I can’t see anyone with even as little sense as characters on this show taking even the slightest detour or delay to retrieve it. And all this on the off-chance her interrogation would be interrupted and a rescuer would arrive before she either had to utterly destroy a Senator’s child or lose all credibility by calling off the interrogation without cause.

This was so dumb. Two more episodes to go. They still have a chance to use my fix, although I am increasingly convinced they don't see any problems. They probably think this was a thrilling adventure episode, instead of a comedy of plot-driven errors.