Obi-Wan Kenobi - Part VI

Taken in a vacuum, there's some interesting aspects to the closing episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Taken as part of the whole, "Part VI" continues the trend of uneven writing and bad decision making leaving the finale, like many of the episodes before it, being pretty damn infuriating. After a strong opening episode, the show fell into traps thanks to some bad writing, ignoring Star Wars canon while constantly stealing from it and building its story from its now shaky foundations, and some questionable choices by nearly every single character who appears on-screen. While it delivers a handful of moments fans were salivating for, how it gets to them (and even how it uses them) are often mediocre at best. Is Obi-Wan Kenobi fun? At times. Was it a good show? No, not really.

Here are the lessons of the final episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) is a chump that can't seem to do anything right. Space, it turns out, is really only the size of about a city block from Tim Story's Fantastic Four as characters move across the galaxy without any trouble at all (so, why was it so hard to get one girl to Alderaan?). An atrophied Force user just needs a couple of days on the run to return to the heights of his powers. Finding a child across a desert planet with a sparse population spread out and only the first name of a farmer is apparently the easiest thing ever. And, finally, the writers of this episode must have really enjoyed "Twilight of the Apprentice" as it steals the episode's biggest scene from a much better sequence in Star Wars Rebels (although you can say that for nearly everything good about this series).

The deeply-flawed series closes with a more exciting lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Darth Vader that ends stealing a scene from a better series and has Obi-Wan choose to allow Vader's evil to spread over the galaxy for another decade. There's plenty of fan-service here. Along with the fight, the most obvious being the "Hello there" meme brought to life and an extremely awkward line shoehorned in by Vader to unnecessarily fit with what Kenobi will tell Anakin's son about his father's fate as the show trips over its writers' massive hard-on to add its moment to Star Wars canon.

After not being killed by Darth Vader, because he's such a loser in this series, Third Sister (Moses Ingram) tracks down Luke with only the name of the planet he is on and the name Owen. And she does it in minutes. After saving Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair) and battling with Vader, Obi-Wan makes it to Tatooine in even better time in a failed attempt to save Luke (Grant Feely), who turns out to be a prop more than a character in the series, from the conflicted rage of the former Inquisitor who decides on her own not to kill the boy. After that story's resolution there's an incredibly awkward return to Alderaan (because the bad writing couldn't figure out how to get this scene earlier in the episode) before jumping back to Tatooine with Obi-Wan meeting with the Lars family again and discovering a new path on the desert planet. Although it ends on another fan pop with the return of yet another character, the road to get there leaves much to be desired.

• Title: Obi-Wan Kenobi - Part VI
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