Once upon a time on Tatooine...

[formerlyfreedom]

Here is where you can talk about the rest of the Star Wars universe! Be prepared to be spoiled if you enter this topic!

[Megras]

Question about the Inquisitors - do the numbers indicate anything like rank in the Inquisition or something?

[Shanna Marie]

This series has reminded me of something that struck me the first time I saw The Phantom Menace. I think my biggest emotional reaction during that whole movie (maybe aside from the first notes of the theme music at the beginning after so many years without new Star Wars movies) was at the end when Qui-Gon made Obi-Wan promise to train Anakin. I had this big "ooooohhhhh" reaction since in the original trilogy Obi-Wan took full responsibility for what happened to Anakin, saying it was his arrogance in thinking he could train him. But then we learn that it wasn't really his decision or his choice, that it was really Qui-Gon who was arrogant enough to think he could train Anakin, over the objections and warnings of Mace and Yoda, and Obi-Wan was only fulfilling his master's dying wish. I don't see this as a continuity issue, but rather Obi-Wan carrying a lot of guilt for something that wasn't entirely his fault. He was failed by a lot of people around him.

My headcanon before the prequels (possibly supported by something in one of the novelizations) was that Obi-Wan had defied objections about Anakin and had decided on his own to try to train him before he was truly ready to be able to train anyone, like he thought he was more advanced than he really was and had taken on a Jedi reject as a side project to prove that he was right about Anakin.

It turned out that I wasn't entirely wrong about him training Anakin before he was really ready. He'd only just graduated from Padawan himself, and it seems like it was mostly a case of "well, your master's dead, but I guess there's no point in assigning you to anyone else at this point, so congratulations, you're a Jedi." Not that he wasn't truly ready, but he hadn't been through whatever formal completion process there was, since his master died before he got promoted. And then he gets stuck training Anakin. Basically, they stuck the student teacher with the problem child they weren't sure they even should be training, one who was an undisciplined prodigy who was at least five years late to start training, which means he didn't develop the Jedi mindset. The only arrogance on Obi-Wan's part was not refusing to take this on, or maybe not asking for help. He probably should have had more backup in training Anakin, some additional adult supervision, even if only to give Anakin someone else to rebel against, so they could have played good cop/bad cop with him and given him someone he could listen to that he wouldn't also be rebelling against. We didn't get to see how his training went (unless it's in some auxiliary material I haven't seen), so we don't know if he ever went through the "youngling" phase of instruction at the academy or if he went straight to being a Padawan with Obi-Wan as his mentor. At the end of The Phantom Menace, he's dressed as a Padawan and next to Obi-Wan. Did he test out of the academy?

I was hoping at the time that they'd dig into this a bit and explore it, that there was a point in things going the way they did, vs. the way Obi-Wan described it to Luke, so that the story was showing us that he maybe wasn't really to blame, but then they skipped ahead so much in time that we didn't see that part.

Anyway, beaten-down, grief and guilt-stricken Ben in this series reminded me of the thoughts I had then. He's feeling all this guilt when he was actually put in an impossible situation by his master and he went along with it out of loyalty to his master.

[Spartan Girl]

This show feels like what the prequels could have been like with better writing and more depth to the characters. Clone Wars did a much better job with Anakin’s character while keeping the red flags firmly in place, but on the hole Lucas screwed the pooch big time with Anakin’s fall. The ingredients were all there for a good story: a “chosen one” growing increasingly arrogant from his own abilities and a childhood crush turning into obsession, all the while being manipulated by Palpatine. Unfortunately it just couldn’t stick the landing with the dialogue, among other things.

I wonder if the Anakin/Padme romance would have been a million times had they just skipped the whole “we can’t be together” buildup and just had them impulsively cave to their feelings and just had them go from there. Anakin’s “you are in my soul, tormenting me” is NOT romantic, that’s a stalker speech to his victim. 

Don’t even get me started on how dirty they did Padme in ROS. Everyone Obi-Wan mentions her to Leia, I get angry all over again about that “dying of a broken heart” bullshit. And I wish that the writers had at least let her live long enough to make the difficult choice to give up the babies for their own safety and let her have a meaningful scene with her saying goodbye to the babies. Natalie Portman could have sold the crap out of that. 

I wonder if Obi-Wan will reference Satine at some point.

Edited June 4, 2022 by Spartan Girl

[jennifer6973]

I just watched the beginning of Star Wars last night (after watching Rogue One) and Obi Wan said he hadn't gone by that name long before Luke was born.

That seemed odd to me.

[Spartan Girl]

1 hour ago, jennifer6973 said:

I just watched the beginning of Star Wars last night (after watching Rogue One) and Obi Wan said he hadn't gone by that name long before Luke was born.

That seemed odd to me.

Star Wars gave up on continuity a long time ago.

[absnow54]

1 hour ago, Spartan Girl said:

Star Wars gave up on continuity a long time ago.

From a certain point of view. 

[tessaray]

2 hours ago, jennifer6973 said:

I just watched the beginning of Star Wars last night (after watching Rogue One) and Obi Wan said he hadn't gone by that name long before Luke was born.

That seemed odd to me.

Most of us have exaggerated for effect, I think, so that kind of line is easy to handwave. Also, there's the galaxy at large vs a smaller group of insiders who will always think of him as Obi-Wan. 

So far, I'm okay with these minor things as the price of an Obi-Wan series. I can't imagine they'd retcon anything major at this point. 

[dwmarch]

4 hours ago, jennifer6973 said:

I just watched the beginning of Star Wars last night (after watching Rogue One) and Obi Wan said he hadn't gone by that name long before Luke was born.

That seemed odd to me.

This might be a stretch but perhaps this is why episode 2 of Obi-Wan featured that fake Jedi. We can retcon ANH to say that Obi-Wan was letting folks believe that while his name might have been out there doing stuff he was off somewhere else minding his own business. Alternately, you could just say he's correct. He refers to himself as Ben, it's everyone around him who keeps calling him Obi-Wan.

Since you mentioned it, I think there is a total tonal disconnect between Rogue One and ANH. At the end of Rogue One Vader just slaughtered a bunch of Rebels and there was a huge battle over the Death Star plans. The beginning of ANH almost seems comedic when Vader catches up to Leia.

[Shanna Marie]

6 hours ago, Spartan Girl said:

Clone Wars did a much better job with Anakin’s character while keeping the red flags firmly in place, but on the hole Lucas screwed the pooch big time with Anakin’s fall. The ingredients were all there for a good story: a “chosen one” growing increasingly arrogant from his own abilities and a childhood crush turning into obsession, all the while being manipulated by Palpatine. Unfortunately it just couldn’t stick the landing with the dialogue, among other things.

I think part of the problem with the prequels was that Anakin seems to have essentially been a "Mary Sue" for Lucas. He seemed to think Anakin was just the coolest thing ever, and he hit so many of the Mary Sue tropes. Anakin's not only a chosen one, but he was immaculately conceived by the Force. He's super powerful with the Force and a brilliant pilot and a mechanical genius. He built C-3PO (which makes little sense -- why would a kid on a backwater planet even think of building a protocol droid?). The beautiful girl falls in love with him, even though she's older and knew him when he was a small child and she was a teen and in spite of a ton of red flags. You get the feeling Lucas really didn't want him to have to turn evil, but he was stuck because he'd already made those movies, and so he waited until the last second and made it a rather sudden thing and for a reason that he seemed to think made it sympathetic and understandable. Because Lucas loved this character so much, he couldn't bring himself to really explore the fall to darkness. It was more like "and then he went dark and there was the fight with Obi-Wan that led to him becoming the Vader we know, the end." The Clone Wars seems to be handling it better because Lucas wasn't involved in that writing and those writers could be more objective about the character.

It also didn't help the prequels to have the character we already know is going to be the bad guy as the central character. As a friend of mine said, it was like having the "young Hitler adventures" where he's the good guy you're supposed to cheer for, and there's a cognitive disconnect. They'd have done better to have made Obi-Wan the main character (not least because McGregor is a stronger actor and has a lot of cheeky charm) so that we're sympathizing with his struggles in dealing with this kid while knowing it's going to go badly, but at least we're not supposed to be cheering for the guy we know becomes a monster. It's really hard to make it work when your protagonist is on a path to darkness and will turn evil at the end, but you're supposed to like him and be cheering for him up to that point.

[Sarah 103]

12 hours ago, Spartan Girl said:

This show feels like what the prequels could have been like with better writing and more depth to the characters...Unfortunately it just couldn’t stick the landing with the dialogue, among other things.

I wonder if the Anakin/Padme romance would have been a million times had they just skipped the whole “we can’t be together” buildup and just had them impulsively cave to their feelings and just had them go from there.

YES! George Lucus has many, many talents but writing romantic dialogue is not one of them. What's crazy is that he knew this about himself in the early 1970s, which is why he had Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck (an actual married couple who I think knew each other from high school or college) work on the dialogue for Steve and Laurie in American Grafitti, because he knew he didn't understand that kind of relationship. I guess 20 years later, he thought he had gained that skill. It turned out he was wrong. I think the "we can't be together" thing would have worked better with a different more skilled writer. 

[ybrik]

Definitely agree that the prequels main issue was Lucas wearing too many hats. Writer/director/producer. I think him writing the overview for the whole prequels like he did with the OT would have been fine. Then have each movie directed by a different director who may have their own writers or have someone else go through the script and rewrite what dialogue would be needed. I never had an issue with the overall ideas that Lucas was trying to portray in the prequels but it just wasn’t as successfully portrayed as in the OT.

The sequels suffered from the opposite problem. It had too many people’s ideas/visions instead of having one vision and having each director present their interpretation of that vision. It is a shame that people wanted so badly for Star Wars to be out of George’s hands that they didn’t think of what may happen without one person’s guiding vision. 

[absnow54]

17 hours ago, dwmarch said:

Since you mentioned it, I think there is a total tonal disconnect between Rogue One and ANH. At the end of Rogue One Vader just slaughtered a bunch of Rebels and there was a huge battle over the Death Star plans. The beginning of ANH almost seems comedic when Vader catches up to Leia.

It makes Leia’s audacity stunning. 

11 hours ago, Sarah 103 said:

YES! George Lucus has many, many talents but writing romantic dialogue is not one of them. What's crazy is that he knew this about himself in the early 1970s, which is why he had Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck (an actual married couple who I think knew each other from high school or college) work on the dialogue for Steve and Laurie in American Grafitti, because he knew he didn't understand that kind of relationship. I guess 20 years later, he thought he had gained that skill. It turned out he was wrong. I think the "we can't be together" thing would have worked better with a different more skilled writer. 

I’m surprised he didn’t have Lawrence Kasdan write the PT scripts, since he adapted both the Empire and Jedi scripts as well as the Indiana Jones movies. He obviously knew how to capture Lucas’s vision. I’ve also read that Lucas tried to get Spielberg and maybe Ron Howard to direct the prequels, but no one wanted to stand in the way of his vision. 

[Sarah 103]

8 hours ago, absnow54 said:

I’m surprised he didn’t have Lawrence Kasdan write the PT scripts, since he adapted both the Empire and Jedi scripts as well as the Indiana Jones movies. He obviously knew how to capture Lucas’s vision. I’ve also read that Lucas tried to get Spielberg and maybe Ron Howard to direct the prequels, but no one wanted to stand in the way of his vision. 

YES! Lucas can direct. The problem was not having Lawrence Kasdan or someone else who understands his vision write the screenplays. 

[Spartan Girl]

I do appreciate how Leia inherited Padme’s fashion sense, by the way she tried to grab the fancier cloak before Obi-Wan made her go with the green one. I always loved that Padme was the kind of female character that loved wearing beautiful feminine gowns and be a total badass. At least until ROS reduced her to a barefoot pregnant porcelain doll.

Seriously, if SW can retcon anything these says, can they please at least retcon the  Padme “losing the will to live” bullshit and have a last-minute reveal that Anakin’s attack really did kill her, or Palpatine drained her life force? Hell, sometimes I wish they’d bring her back like the did to Boba Fett and Darth Maul—she deserves it more than they did!!!!

[jennifer6973]

48 minutes ago, Spartan Girl said:

I do appreciate how Leia inherited Padme’s fashion sense, by the way she tried to grab the fancier cloak before Obi-Wan made her go with the green one. I always loved that Padme was the kind of female character that loved wearing beautiful feminine gowns and be a total badass. At least until ROS reduced her to a barefoot pregnant porcelain doll.

Seriously, if SW can retcon anything these says, can they please at least retcon the  Padme “losing the will to live” bullshit and have a last-minute reveal that Anakin’s attack really did kill her, or Palpatine drained her life force? Hell, sometimes I wish they’d bring her back like the did to Boba Fett and Darth Maul—she deserves it more than they did!!!!

Re: the last part

Pregnancy can do a lot to a woman.  Weird hormones and all.  It probably make a bad ass woman a totally gooey simp.

My thinking between the pregnancy hormones, Aniken force choking her and then dropping her to the ground, and possibly the chancellor taking her life force, she went into possible early labor had the twins and suffered from PPD.

So between all that, she lost the will to live.

[Spartan Girl]

3 minutes ago, jennifer6973 said:

Re: the last part

Pregnancy can do a lot to a woman.  Weird hormones and all.  It probably make a bad ass woman a totally gooey simp.

My thinking between the pregnancy hormones, Aniken force choking her and then dropping her to the ground, and possibly the chancellor taking her life force, she went into possible early labor had the twins and suffered from PPD.

So between all that, she lost the will to live.

Oh, I can handwave a lot of her characterization in ROS because of hormones, but it was still a dirty way to kill her off, though I did like the tragedy of Anakin causing the death he basically threw everything away to prevent. I just think it could have been done in a far better way.

And I’m sorry, but the gynecological services must be crap in the SW universe if Padme didn’t know up until the end that she was carrying twins. Even if she was trying to keep everything on the down low, there’s no possible excuse for not getting checked out beforehand. Or, you know, it’s just another example of Lucas’ shit writing.

[Genius]

Once I realized how giant the scope of Lucas's overall story was, I became very forgiving of the PT's.  In fact, I gained a much deeper appreciation for them.  Or for what they were trying to be, at least.  George had this massive epic inside his head, and he had to chop it into 3 chapters, and decide what to include, and what to leave off-screen, conveying a multitude of complex political storylines along with a convergence of a zillion characters into one mega-plot.  Did he land everything as powerfully as he hoped?  Clearly not.  But he was creating what he hoped would be his signature opus, with never-before-seen FX, using never-before-used technology, like Spielberg did before him with "Jurassic Park" and Cameron would do after him with "Avatar."  Was he successful?  That's for each individual to decide.  Though I do see the flaws in the writing and acting of the PTs, I still say Lucas succeeded.  We're still talking about them, their effect on the rest of the universe, and still getting stories coming out of them.  I love the PT's and I'm not ashamed to say it.  Do I wish they were better?  Yes.  But I'll take them as they are.

One question, though - before Anakin was even sliced and burned and reassembled as Palpatine's Monster, Palpatine was already calling him Darth Vader to other characters.  So when Darth Vader hit the scene as a badass murderer, was there no one to put 2+2 together that Anakin was still alive?

22 hours ago, jennifer6973 said:

Seriously, if SW can retcon anything these says, can they please at least retcon the  Padme “losing the will to live” bullshit and have a last-minute reveal that Anakin’s attack really did kill her, or Palpatine drained her life force?

Wasn't it already established somewhere in canon since RoTS that Anakin unwittingly stole Padme's life force to survive?

[Spartan Girl]

I just can’t forgive the clunky dialogue of the prequels. “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” Seriously? In the middle of an epic lightsaber duel? Ugh. Poor Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen never stood a chance.

Say what you want about the newer movies and shows, but at least the dialogue on the whole wasn’t so forced. Like I said, Obi-Wan Kenobi feels like what the prequels COULD have been. And that makes me sad.

[jennifer6973]

Regarding a question Reva asked:  Where was Obi Wan when order 66 was given out?  I think he was on Geonosis (sp?).  What did she expect, that OBW & Anakin had to go everywhere together.

Plus by this time wasn't Anakin no longer a padawan?

[Shanna Marie]

41 minutes ago, jennifer6973 said:

Regarding a question Reva asked:  Where was Obi Wan when order 66 was given out? 

Yeah, I wanted him to say, "Fighting for my life when the stormtroopers around me suddenly turned on me." Order 66 meant all the Jedi were under attack. They were kind of busy at that moment. What happened to her was horrible, but someone who was on a different planet at the time wouldn't have been of much help to her.

[jennifer6973]

40 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Yeah, I wanted him to say, "Fighting for my life when the stormtroopers around me suddenly turned on me." Order 66 meant all the Jedi were under attack. They were kind of busy at that moment. What happened to her was horrible, but someone who was on a different planet at the time wouldn't have been of much help to her.

See that's what I thought.  Because obw, Yoda and mace (?), I think watched the footage afterwards.

[Macbeth1966]

I want to say my favorite scenes from the prequel was the battle scene that started Revenge of the Sith.  We finally got a proper Star Wars battle scene in space.  Full blown out.  Didn't have that technology for the first 3 - especially the 1st - with its low budget.  

And the pairing of Obi and Anakin was fantastic they made such a great team.  That was a lot of fun.

[Shanna Marie]

The finale of this series made me wonder what Luke knows/thinks about his heritage as he's growing up. We know from the original film that he believed his father was some kind of freighter pilot. There's no mention of his mother. It's funny how he never mentions her or shows any curiosity about her until he's talking to Leia about her being his sister. He never even asks Force Ghost Obi-Wan about his mother.

I don't think Lucas knew when the first film was made that Vader was actually Luke's father, and he definitely hadn't yet decided that Leia was Luke's sister, so I wonder what Lucas thought the family dynamic was and therefore what Luke knew. At one point, Owen was supposed to have been Obi-Wan's brother, but there's no indication that Luke ever had any idea about that. Did he know that Owen was his father's stepbrother? Since Luke's last name is different from Owen's, the other possibilities would have been that Luke's mother was Owen's sister, or possibly that the relationship was through Beru, with her related to either Luke's mother or father. There's definitely some in-law energy in the way Owen talks about Luke's father in that original movie, so it would have been easy to interpret it as him griping about that useless jerk his sister married, or possibly Beru's good-for-nothing brother who stuck them with his kid, since Beru was a lot more indulgent of Luke. I'm curious what Lucas had in mind for what was going on when he wrote the first film, or if he'd given it any thought at all and was just going with the orphaned farmboy trope.

Anakin would have had a bit of a reputation on Tatooine, given the fact that he was the first human to win the pod race, and he did it as a child. Was that in a different part of Tatooine, so that story didn't spread to where Luke was, or was he aware of that? I would imagine that Owen would have told him as little as he thought he could get away with about his father, but that's the sort of thing he might have heard elsewhere. Which also makes me wonder, was there some kind of school Luke went to, maybe in Anchorhead, or was he home schooled? If he went to school, that would have increased the odds of someone having heard of that other Skywalker, but home schooling would have made it easier for Owen and Beru to control what he knew. They certainly would have wanted to avoid him getting any bright ideas about trying to compete in the pod races, himself. Not only would it be dangerous, but it would draw unwanted attention.

[Sarah 103]

@Shanna Marie We know he had friends because they are mentioned briefly in the movie, and there deleted scenes with them as well. That doesn't really answer the question of education, but it does point to a life and interactions with people outside of his family. You raised an excellent question and possible answers of what Luke knew or thought before the events of A New Hope. 

[LJones41]

On 6/4/2022 at 5:18 AM, Spartan Girl said:

This show feels like what the prequels could have been like with better writing and more depth to the characters. Clone Wars did a much better job with Anakin’s character while keeping the red flags firmly in place, but on the hole Lucas screwed the pooch big time with Anakin’s fall. The ingredients were all there for a good story: a “chosen one” growing increasingly arrogant from his own abilities and a childhood crush turning into obsession, all the while being manipulated by Palpatine. Unfortunately it just couldn’t stick the landing with the dialogue, among other things.

I wonder if the Anakin/Padme romance would have been a million times had they just skipped the whole “we can’t be together” buildup and just had them impulsively cave to their feelings and just had them go from there. Anakin’s “you are in my soul, tormenting me” is NOT romantic, that’s a stalker speech to his victim. 

Don’t even get me started on how dirty they did Padme in ROS. Everyone Obi-Wan mentions her to Leia, I get angry all over again about that “dying of a broken heart” bullshit. And I wish that the writers had at least let her live long enough to make the difficult choice to give up the babies for their own safety and let her have a meaningful scene with her saying goodbye to the babies. Natalie Portman could have sold the crap out of that. 

I wonder if Obi-Wan will reference Satine at some point.

I'm a major fan of the Prequel movies.  And now, I'm a major fan of this series.  Do I think "Obi-Wan Kenobi" was an improvement on the Prequel movies?  No.  No, I don't.  More than any other Star Wars production, "Obi-Wan Kenobi" has extended my love for the Prequel movies.

[Shanna Marie]

21 hours ago, Sarah 103 said:

@Shanna Marie We know he had friends because they are mentioned briefly in the movie, and there deleted scenes with them as well. That doesn't really answer the question of education, but it does point to a life and interactions with people outside of his family.

Yeah, there was Biggs, and Owen commented about him trying to weasel out of work to go hang out with his friends, so he did have a peer group.

So, I wonder how well-known Anakin's feats were. I don't have a good sense of Tatooine geography, so I don't know how close the pod racing thing was to the Lars homestead. It likely wasn't on the other side of the planet, since it seems to have been near where Anakin was living, and Clegg needed to have been somewhat nearby to meet Shmi. The pod race was 30-40 or so years before the time Luke was growing up, so maybe it was forgotten. On the other hand, I don't follow sports at all, but even I know names of major sports figures who accomplished great feats more than 50 years ago, so something as big as the first human to win a pod race, and at age 10 at that, should be some kind of legend. To create a handwave, maybe the racers were so humiliated by being beaten by a human child that the Hutts just cancelled pod racing from that point and the kids from Luke's era have never even heard of it, and that explains why no one has ever said to Luke, "Skywalker? Are you related to the first human to win a pod race?"

I think Lucas went for overkill in The Phantom Menace to try to make audiences like Anakin. We knew going in that he was going to turn into a villain eventually, but I think Lucas wanted audiences to love him first, so he got the full Gary Stu treatment to show us that he's the most awesome person to ever awesome. He was immaculately conceived by the Force, he's the Chosen One who will bring balance to the Force. At the age of 10, he's building a sophisticated protocol and translation droid (that one was just silly; it would have made more sense for Padme, a queen, to have owned a protocol/translation droid than for a slave on a backwater desert planet to be building one for his slave mother). He's the first human to ever win a pod race. He plays a decisive role in a major space battle. Isn't he special? I noticed that they dialed it back in the next two films. There was a "Chosen One" mention, but I don't recall them talking about any of the other stuff, like Lucas realized that his efforts to make people like Anakin had backfired horribly. Meanwhile, making him just that special makes it harder to believe that Luke knew almost nothing about his father, even by reputation.

[Sarah 103]

6 hours ago, Shanna Marie said:

At the age of 10, he's building a sophisticated protocol and translation droid (that one was just silly; it would have made more sense for Padme, a queen, to have owned a protocol/translation droid than for a slave on a backwater desert planet to be building one for his slave mother).

I totally agree with this. Clearly the kid is mechanically/technically inclined, so building a droid makes sense. If he's into building a podracer, I could see him wanting to build other things too. Building a protocol and translation droid makes absolutely no sense for who he was and what he was doing. 

[Shanna Marie]

15 minutes ago, Sarah 103 said:

Clearly the kid is mechanically/technically inclined, so building a droid makes sense. If he's into building a podracer, I could see him wanting to build other things too. Building a protocol and translation droid makes absolutely no sense for who he was and what he was doing. 

If he was trying to help his mom, he might have built a housework droid or a droid that could do whatever her slave job was. Your average 10-year-old would likely have built a battlebot or a friend-type robot, like Leia's Lola, and the personality probably wouldn't have been "stuffy British butler." Based on the fact that they have voice synthesizers for droids but not all droids have them, it would seem that voice synthesizers are expensive or rare, so where did a slave kid get the kind of money to get one, along with whatever chip that contains however many millions of languages Threepio speaks?

It would have worked better if they'd reversed it, and Anakin built R2. An astromech droid would be the kind of thing a kid interested in flying might build, and it would explain all of R2's onboard tools and gadgets if he's not a standard factory build, plus if Anakin is his builder and he never got the memory wipe, it might explain his extreme loyalty to Luke. Meanwhile, a queen would certainly have a protocol/translation droid.

[Sarah 103]

6 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

It would have worked better if they'd reversed it, and Anakin built R2. An astromech droid would be the kind of thing a kid interested in flying might build, and it would explain all of R2's onboard tools and gadgets if he's not a standard factory build, plus if Anakin is his builder and he never got the memory wipe, it might explain his extreme loyalty to Luke. Meanwhile, a queen would certainly have a protocol/translation droid.

LOVE the idea of a reversal, because Anakin building R2 makes infinitely more sense. Meanwhile, I'm now picturing C3P0 as the final straw after Leia causes another nanny/tutor/governess to break down and/or quit. Little Leia's a handful, and a droid can't quit. I could also picture C3P0 as part of her entourage (for lack of a better word) as she starts to go on diplomatic missions and take a larger role in government. 

[Camera One]

I just watched "A New Hope" for the second time, and I feel like I liked it more.  Seeing this "Obi-Wan Kenobi" series right before, it was kind of interesting to see the same places again.  I can actually imagine the precocious Leia from the series grow up to be the Carrie Fisher Leia, who was great in this movie.  I think the sequel trilogy had given me a negative impression of Leia and Luke, but they were fun and easy to root for in "A New Hope".  I think I would take a Leia spinoff rather than a second season of "Obi-Wan Kinobe" or "Reva".

I really don't feel much similarity between the Obi-Wan in this series with Obi-Wan in "A New Hope" (who was so much more bad-ass and intelligent, and really had no hesitation in letting Luke know all about The Force), so in that sense, the series did not do a good job in bridging the gap.  Darth Vader feels much more like one of many in charge whereas this TV series made him seem like the most powerful villain in the Empire who called all the shots.

It did strike me how "A New Hope" is fun to watch but there were so many innocent deaths, including the particular gruesome end to Luke's uncle and aunt, and the destruction of everyone on Alderaan.  I think it's because the movie did not dwell on any of these deaths beyond a line or two (or none).  Whereas the more recent movies take deaths much more seriously which is good in a way but also results in a morose and depressing tone.  

Now, I sort of want to see the next two movies again.  

[Camera One]

I finished rewatching the original trilogy, so at least this show got me interested in the universe again a bit.  I think I liked the original movies more this second time around.  Now I wonder if this "Obi-Wan" series is more rewarding after watching the prequels, since you get to see Ewan McGregor in the role again.   I don't think I have the emotional energy to go through the prequels again, though, since the pre-determined ending was just too depressing.  I didn't dislike the prequels the first time around (unlike the sequel trilogy, which I actively disliked, mainly for ruining and then killing off the original characters).

I also watched the "Solo" movie prequel for the first time.  I thought it was pretty on par with this series in the sense that it wasn't very original, just going over a checklist of how did Solo meet Chewbacca, how did he meet Lando, how did he win the ship, etc.   The movie felt more of an excuse for tiresome action sequences (I thought the first hour was quite boring).  As with all prequels, you knew certain elements/characters would go nowhere because they were gone by "A New Hope".   The "Solo" movie did make me wonder what "Obi-Wan" would have been like as a movie instead of a TV series, though I still don't think the Reva storyline would fit in.

I think next, I will try "The Mandalorian".