What they said.
It builds and builds such that the Season 2 finale will have you gnawing your nails down to the knuckle. Perhaps the most tense episode of TV ever made.
I dunno, some of the early Homeland episodes win in that category for me.
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Never watched Homeland.
I saw the first couple of seasons of Homeland. It’s pretty intense. Clair Danes manages to pull off her role exceptionally well.
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I’m not sure my ticker could withstand anything more intense than late Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul.
I’m in!
Obi-Wan is getting his mojo back.
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So, I am halfway thru episode 3. I don’t often stop anything Star Wars halfway but I thought it made sense so I could gather my thoughts. The show is entertaining and well done, with good, cinema-quality SX, excellent music and a pleasing number of easter eggs sprinkled throughout. But…
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…man, I hate watching the young Leia character. And, I feel a little bad saying so. She comes across as spoiled, entitled and snotty instead of precocious in an endearing way. I find myself hoping, just a little bit, that she gets what she deserves. Like, “you keep running away and eventually you’ll end up in a garbage bag in a dumpster” type of outcome. I know she ends up becoming the matriarch of the entire Star Wars universe but this early incarnation is nearly unwatchable. I find myself mentally tabulating the body count just from her propensity to disobey her parents and run away from authority. It’s not often I have a visceral response from a character like this but it’s increasingly hard for me to suspend disbelief as she continues to be that snotty and not suffer any real consequences while people all around her are dying as a direct result of her continual spoiled disobedience. End mini-rant.
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Spoiler
I agree. Maybe it’s on purpose, to mirror Anakin’s youthful shittiness. Maybe it’s simply necessary to further the plot and they don’t care when, how or if it gets turned around.
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After re-watching the ANH a few days ago, I have to say I don’t find mini-Leia to be all that different from original Leia. The character matures a ton over Empire and Jedi, but in the first one she is loaded with the same type of personality they’re writing mini-Leia with. I also think mini-Leia is about the only thing that works about the show, which I’m generally finding boring and pointless.
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For those wishing for that Obi Wan character to grow up some, I’d say episode 4 delivers.
I’m very much enjoying it.
Rogue One, The Mandalorian, and Obi Wan give me hope that some folks at Disney have a clue.
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I continue to enjoy Kenobi, but…
Spoiler
In Ep 5, they showed close quarters fighting between Stormtroopers and regular folk. It was cool how it was staged, but it was also so chock full of incongruity that it completely broke the tension of the scene for me.
Skipping past the part where they spend an inordinate amount of time blasting away at the locked door, only for Reva to open it at will with her lightsaber, the Stormtroopers - that Obi-Wan bigged up ahead of the battle - still can’t hit shit even up close. But, more than that, despite wearing armor, they die from a single blaster shot while the regular folks - without armor - are merely injured, with about as much blood as a razor nick.
The juxtaposition between Obi-Wan’s and Anakin’s training fight with the battle at hand, though, was pretty cool.
On the plus side, Reva’s story in episode five was the first interesting thing they’ve done in this series. Wish they’d made it an explicit part of the story around episode two instead of saving it for the end.
I don’t think Kenobi is any worse than Book of Boba Fett or the weaker parts of Mandalorian, all of which I enjoyed, but I’m still disappointed. You have to put in more effort if you’re using these characters. You can be mediocre with Boba Fett, you can’t be mediocre with Obi-Wan and Vader.
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You also can’t play fast and loose with movies in the main, numbered, series. Yet…
That’s why I mentally rewrote the prequels and sequels and they’re all much better now.
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Still haven’t watch IX. Likely never will.
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Keep it that way. However you feel about the prequels, TFA, or TLJ, compared to Rise of Skywalker they’re fucking Citizen Kane.
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The thing about the prequels is that they were flawed movies, mostly due to the terrible dialogue and a production process that prioritized effects over acting (Christiansen isn’t that bad of an actor). However, other than having Padme die of a broken heart at childbirth, which was silly but really only conflicts with one scene in ROTJ, they at least didn’t do anything to interfere with the OT.
The sequels took the entire arc of the preceding 6 movies, and completely shit on it. All the sacrifice that had gone before was swept away because the Empire, in the guise of the New Order, was back. What had the Alliance been doing in the meantime? Why were they now back to the position of plucky underdogs when they’d already freed the galaxy?
And everyone had forgotten about the Jedi somehow, even though it was within people’s living memory. They brought back all the OT’s characters, who would’ve been famous from one end of the galaxy to the other, and then had everyone forget them. This is just TFA.
Ignoring TLJ - because JJ did for TROS - you get the finale which saved the biggest “fuck you” for last. Palpatine’s not dead. He just isn’t. Somehow. So everything from Ep 1 to Ep 6 was completely pointless.
And then, the peanut on top of this giant turd, Rey - who, to this point, had simply been an overpowered Mary Sue - just starts calling herself Skywalker. So the entire Skywalker family line is swept away, their deeds rendered irrelevant and Rey - who has no ties to the Skywalkers whatsoever aside from some swapped spit with Ben - casually co-ops their family name for herself.
One of the (many) reasons I likely will never watch TROS is that I will need a new TV after that sickening moment. EOR.
I went to see it in theatres, but have never rewatched it and can’t imagine having a desire to.
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The only way I can accept this at all is that if it were an implication that “Skywalker” would be adopted by any Jedi.
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