Going forward, I’m more interested in whether new Star Wars properties make the Galaxy Far, Far Away feel larger or smaller (in addition, of course, to whether or not they’re good on their own merits). Consider the final episodes of Book of Boba. Everything got a little too connected. Fan-favorite characters were shoehorned into the action just because. Rogue One was guilty of this as well. Too many nostalgia bombs; too few excuses to care about any of what was going on based purely on the story at hand. In short, when Star Wars panders to its aging Gen-X fans, it starts to feel hollow.  

The good news about Obi-Wan Kenobi, the new limited series on Disney+, is that it makes the Star Wars Galaxy feel less like a playset and more like the mythological world it should. What’s interesting is that, perhaps more so than any new Star Wars property in the Disney era except for Rogue One, Obi-Wan had the most boundaries drawn around it from the get-go. 

The series was originally developed as a film to be directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) and written by Hossein Amini (The Wings of the Dove) before being rejiggered into a limited series directed by Deborah Chow (who helmed some of the best episodes of The Mandalorian), with some adaptation and additional scripting by Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) and Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl). And throughout all stages of its development, it seems like the mandate from above was to function mostly as connective tissue between the original and prequel Star Wars trilogies. 

That required Ewan McGregor, now 51 years of age, to play Kenobi at the midpoint between where we saw him at the end of Episode III (32 playing 38) and where Sir Alec Guinness (58 playing 57) picked up the role decades before in Episode IV. Time is a weird soup, y’all, and it gets even weirder when discussing prequels and sequels and midquels and such.  

The point is, McGregor is technically too old now to be playing a 48-year-old Obi-Wan, but looks too young. And none of that matters once you get immersed in the experience of the show. That has something to do with the fact that, despite following the spirit of the law and delivering a new story that exists at the midpoint between two existing stories, Chow and Harold and the rest have proven that the line between Episodes III and IV isn’t as straight as we might have imagined. The most surprising thing about Obi-Wan Kenobi is that there are any surprises to be had at all, but there are. So much so that, in retrospect, the series’ trailer feels like one giant red herring. 

Thankfully, those surprises feel genuine, organic, the product of imagined history and genuine character interaction, not some cynical effort to pander to fans. Mind you, as I write this only two of the series’ six parts have aired and things could go kerflooey from here, as Boba clearly demonstrated. But so far, Kenobi is making all the right noises and almost none of the wrong ones.

Let’s deal with the not-so-great, because it’s a pretty short list. While Chow has done a great job of somehow creating a cinematic work that stylistically fits somewhere between the slick digital overproduction of Episode III and the down-and-dirty, low-budget grunge of Episode IV, there are still a few things I’m not quite adjusting to as yet. 

Some of the dialogue feels a little too natural—not quite stilted and pulpy enough. In other words, it doesn’t quite capture the “you can type this shit but you sure can’t say it” quality of Star Wars dialogue at its truest. Much of the delivery is a little too naturalistic, and when it isn’t, it’s more modern-theatrical than classic-B-movie-theatrical. 

The music, too, feels a little off. Even the new theme by John Williams is a bit generic and forgettable. It’s mixed well, with a solid Dolby Atmos soundtrack that works in service of the show without feeling the need to remind you of its channel count, and the sound effects are great. It’s just a shame that they couldn’t go a little funkier and weirder with the score.

The good? Pretty much everything else. The cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung (Last Night in Soho, Oldboy) is stunning, especially the composition and lighting. It does break from Star Wars tradition in that it doesn’t rely on quick cuts, wipes, dissolves, or anything of the sort. There’s also a subtlety to the movement of the camera I didn’t pick up on until a second watch-through. The framing moves with the deliberate pace of the show itself. And all of it looks amazing in Disney+’s Dolby Vision presentation—a bit dark but beautifully detailed, with highlights that feel more filmic than showy.

The biggest thing working in the show’s favor, though, is McGregor’s performance. It’s here where we can really see the benefits of the Volume (the microLED virtual sets employed first in The Mandalorian) as opposed to the wallpaper of green screens employed in the prequels, since you can see the environments surrounding Obi-Wan reflected in the actor’s eyes—both literally and metaphorically. Since McGregor isn’t being cut-and-pasted into this fantastical world but is rather immersed in it (albeit via screens), he has to imagine less. And that frees him up to engage more—with the world, with the characters around him, and with himself. There are character moments here that are utterly heartbreaking, and others that are genuinely thrilling.

That’s no mean feat given that we know the ultimate fates of nearly all the main characters involved. But the fact that Chow and company can make you forget what you already know—if even for a moment—is part of the magic of this show. The fact that Stuart Beattie, Hossein Amini, and Joby Harold were able to retcon some inconsistencies between trilogies without making them feel like retcons is another neat trick. (Seriously, there’s some subtle story manipulation here I don’t think will land with most viewers until the next time they watch A New Hope.) 

Now, here’s hoping they can keep this up for four more episodes. Because if this one belly-flops, it’s going to hurt. The off-the-rails disaster of Book of Boba is of little consequence because none of it really meant anything. Kenobi, on the other hand, means so much more. It’s Star Wars at its best—a morality tale wrapped up in a myth inside an action-adventure fantasy that pays homage to cinema of a bygone era (although it hurts my soul a little to know that films of the ‘90s and early 2000s count as classic cinema these days, but so be it). 

Perhaps the best thing I can say about it, though, is that I couldn’t in a million years even begin to guess where it’s going to go from here. And I thought I had it completely figured out from the first frame.