Okay, but they really do need to explain the lightsaber shortage issue.
Recap
Osha wakes to find Mae’s master fighting all the Jedi in the forest. They are all dropping like flies, and Yord gets injured. He tells Osha to run and she listens, with the Sith following. Sol finds them, asks who the Sith is, and admits that he finds him familiar. They begin to fight as Yord takes Osha back to the ship. Mae runs into Jecki; they begin to duel as Jecki tries to arrest her. Yord talks to Osha about how the Sith can get in your head, something that Osha admits her mother could do to Jedi.
Jecki finally defeats Mae, but the Sith appears and they duel. Mae runs way and the Sith follows. When he accuses her of being weak and nearly strikes her down, Sol intervenes and Jecki arrives as well. The two of them fight the Sith as Osha gets contact from Mae and knows that they need to go back. She turns on her light to attract the moth creatures and heads back with Yord. Jecki manages to get the Sith’s helmet off right as he stabs her multiple times in turn. Jecki falls and reveals the Sith to be none other than Qimir.
Qimir grabs Mae by the throat and taunts Sol for attempting to attack when his back is turned. Sol discards his saber and asks what he wants. Qimir insists that he wants freedom to use his power how he likes, and to have a pupil, but Mae betrayed him. Yord goes to attack Qimir and recognizes him when he sees his face. Qimir kills Yord. Sol and Qimir begin a hand-to-hand fight, but when Sol gets the upper hand and nearly executes Qimir with his lightsaber, Osha stops him. She attaches part of PIP to Qimir so that its bright light will call the moth creatures. They carry him away.
Osha asks Sol why Qimir said she shouldn’t trust him. He promises to explain, but Mae comes back and stuns him. She takes Osha away to have a talk, but the two argue about what happened and what they’ve each done. Mae begs Osha to choose her this time, thinking Osha has been brainwashed by the Jedi. Osha tells Mae that she’s a criminal, so Mae knocks her out, cuts her own hair, and takes Osha’s clothes, pretending to be her. She finds Sol, who asks where her sister is. She claims that her sister is gone. They leave together. Qimir finds Osha, healing her wound and covering her with a blanket.
Commentary
Called it.
The bare arms made it even more obvious, which is genuinely funny. If you enjoy shouting “Those are Jason Mendoza’s arms!” at the TV, anyway.
And for my next trick: I don’t think any of this quite played out the way we saw it. If the point is to channel Rashomon, and we’ve clearly got combating points of view all over the place, I think the confusion in this episode is a piece of that. And I think that red dust all over the ground has something to do with it. Qimir is great at poisons and alchemy, right? The choice to showcase that dust—which seems to come from nowhere—and also depict it following that path he used to shove everyone out of the way? (Which he also didn’t need to do, since his whole plan was clearly to run into the woods to make the ground harder for a large group to fight on?) That’s sus.
The sudden death matches are also pretty suspect, given that we’ve got three episodes left, and so was Sol’s anger: He’s the Jedi Master of Feelings, as we’ve already seen, but the fact that Osha had to remind him to back down in that situation feels like more than just emotional manipulation on Qimir’s part. I think everyone was under the influence of something for the majority of this episode. Whether it affected their moods, their abilities, or their perception, I couldn’t say, but I’m not trusting anything that just happened as the full story.
Also, Sol absolutely knows that Mae swapped places with her sister. Osha used to be his Padawan; he knows her more deeply through the Force and would be able to recognize her. He pointedly asked “Where is your sister?” instead of “Where is Mae?” You can’t just cut your hair and fool this man. Please.
The fight choreography continues to be a high point for this show, and I was so happy to see someone finally use terrain when fighting a group to their advantage. Heading into a densely forested area to prevent being easily surrounding on all sides! Using the trees as their own forms of shielding because no one wants to accidentally cut one down in the midst of a duel! (Also, they gave Jecki an Ahsoka moment with her double green blades—I shrieked.) I’m still curious as to what exactly was happening to the lightsabers when they shorted, though. A lot of things can cause that outage. It was unclear if it was environmental, perceptual, or if use of the Force was interfering.
This was another half-episode, and I really wish they glued it together into one. It took us way too long to reach that reveal; not having a week between the parts would have helped. (Though I stand by my previous complaint that the most preferable way to unfold this would have taken much longer over seasons of television.)
But the thing that tweaks at me the most is continuing to mess with the relationship between Osha and Mae due to both characters never once bothering to say “Wait, this is what I thought happened—what do you think happened?” There is enough time in this scene that I just don’t buy it never coming up. It’s a very common television problem, but you can write things in such a way that it’s easier to believe no one is arriving at the obvious. Even if I still wish folks would stop doing it altogether.
Also, why do people keep using arguments like “You’re a criminal!” in dialogue like this? Osha’s upset because she thinks her sister murdered their whole family and then a few more Jedi—I don’t think crime is the primary issue here.
On Qimir’s end we’ve got some good stuff, though. How often has a Sith popped up with “Look, I’m pissed that you won’t let me practice my dark arts over in the corner, and that’s the reason you’ve all got to die”? He’s presenting it as a philosophy issue, or even a form of religious persecution. This doesn’t mean we should give the dark side a shot, but it’s fun to see a different form of narrative manipulation from the Sith. You’re just being so unfair to him, y’all. He made his own helmet and everything.
How is the sister-swap going to pay off? Hopefully we’ll get a longer episode next week to find out.
Spanners and Sabers
- Qimir doesn’t want to take off his helmet so Sol can read his thoughts? Are we… are we literally Magneto-ing all Sith now? They use the helmets because it makes them less susceptible to Jedi mind stuff? That’s ridiculous, and I will laugh frequently about it if this is a thing they commit to.
- The way Yord says “You” and Qimir says “Surprise”—they’re about to launch an entire ship on a two-word exchange, and I am here for it.
- I know this was not the point, but when Mae cut her locs with the lightsaber, all I could think about was how she’d probably smell like burning hair for a while, and that would be a pretty big giveaway.
- Also funny to probably only me: When this show started and I realized Stenberg was playing twins, I thought “Oh, it’s the Star Wars version of The Parent Trap.” And then Mae proceeds to cut her hair to look like her sister… just like in The Parent Trap.
- Bazil saved PIP! Lil guys gotta stick together in this great big universe.
We’ll tune back in to Galactic Parent Trap next week!
The lightsabers were shorting due to hitting his armor.
Which my wife says is Cortosis Ore from the old EU.
I don’t know the specifics, but it seemed clear to me that Qimir’s armor (first the bracers, then the helmet) were causing the shorts in the Jedi lightsabers. It seemed to happen every time he would block one of them with his arms, so I’m guessing the metal he’s using is intended for just that purpose.
Why did they do these as two consecutive half-hour episodes, instead of a single hourlong episode? They’ve made a story designed for bingeing but are releasing it only once a week.
I’m not happy with them killing off Yord and Jecki just as we were getting to know them. I’m not a fan of killing off main characters. It’s too much of a blunt instrument for generating shock value, and it cuts short so much story potential. It’s not like they haven’t already killed off a number of Jedi and other characters — enough already.
It’s interesting how bad Sol is at the whole Jedi detachment thing, in a good way. He’s very emotionally invested in Osha and Mae, and seeing him just wale on Qimir with his bare fists was so much more visceral and raw than the usual Jedi/Sith fight scene.
And I’m glad that Bazil saved PIP’s head. PIP is, of course, the most important character.
It annoys me, not only that the end credits list the show’s ten or so producers before listing the actors, but that Disney+ always shrinks the screen down exactly when the actors’ names start to appear, quite literally minimizing the actors’ contributions. They do this on every Star Wars show, if not others, and it’s so precisely timed that it must be deliberate. It’s insulting to the actors.
Jecki was particularly painful for me. I knew she was doomed the minute she took on Qimir alone but I kept hoping they would just injure her.
RE: “Sol’s anger … was pretty suspect … He’s the Jedi Master of Feelings” Everything we’ve seen of Sol is that he’s no where near as in control of his feelings as he pretends to be – emphasizing the fact that *none* of the Jedi have ever been the stoic unattached people they pretend to be.
I’m loving all the pointed jabs at how everything about how the Jedi order operates is just terrible, leading to my favorite exchange of the show so far:
Right after Jecki is slain and Sol cries out in anguished fury, “She was a child!” and Quimir just shrugs, “You brought her here.”
Like .. Yeah! – Why you bringing babies to a battlefield?
We giggle at the cute little six year olds training in blind-folds to deflect blasters because it’s an adorable mirror of Luke in the first movie … but those are child-soldiers being indoctrinated for battle after being abducted from their homelands … Yikes!
I forgot to mention: Qimir/the Stranger gave the impression of being someone who was there on Brendok and was involved on what happened there, and who expected Sol to recognize him. But IIRC, all the children on Brendok were girls — or at least presented as female. Could the Stranger be trans? It would be problematical to have SW’s first overtly transgender character to be a villain, though.
One thing that really bothered me: After the battle, Sol just left his fellow Jedi’s bodies lying there on the field? He didn’t bury them or anything? I hope that he was going back to the ship to arrange some means for their recovery, maybe call in some Jedi support personnel for it, but the episode didn’t address it, so it gave the impression that he was just abandoning the dead where they lay.
They made a point that Mae and Osha were the ONLY children on Brendok 16 years ago.
Hmm, yeah, I was unclear on that. Odd, then, because the Stranger’s lines gave the impression that he was connected to what happened on Brendok. Or at least they gave me that impression.
I was definitely getting the impression that he had some personal gripe against Sol. I also like the idea that the Sith were the ones teaching the witches how to conceive someone through the Force, and also how to “get inside a Jedi’s head” as this episode alludes.
Ooh, I don’t like that idea at all. I prefer the idea of the witches being their own group apart from the Jedi/Sith duality, instead of just pawns of one side of the binary. Heck, maybe the Sith got it from them instead of the other way around.
I’m wondering if the Stranger is another lapsed/expelled padawan that Sol somehow doesn’t remember.
Didn’t everyone know who Mae’s master was? I was hoping it wasn’t Qimir since it would be way too obvious but in the words of the showrunner:
“I think a good twist is not about hiding everything from the audience and then throwing it on them like, ‘Hey, this is what you didn’t see! We hid it so well that you didn’t see this,'” she explained. “I think a good twist is telegraphing what’s going to happen, and then once it does, executing it without an ounce of pity or sentimentality.”
Because a “twist” is something you can see coming now, I guess.
I did really enjoy most of the fights, the ingenious use of the ore to short out the lightsabers, and the fact that people can actually be killed by getting stabbed from a lightsaber again.
Yeah, I’m not sure I necessarily agree in terms of something that’s actually supposed to be a twist–however, I don’t feel everything needs to be a surprise. It’s fine for the audience to know something and have it only be a surprise to the characters. We knew from the moment the Phantom Menace trailer said the name “Senator Palpatine” and showed Ian McDiarmid in the credits that the Emperor was going to be in it. And yet some people still insisted Sidious and Palpatine were somehow not the same. I think this show did a good enough job making you sure it was Qimir and then making you think it might be one of the mothers based on the comment of getting inside a Jedi’s head. So it was fine. It was still a nice reveal even if we knew who it was. He even taunts Mae for not suspecting.
The name “Palpatine” was never used onscreen in the original movies, only in the scripts, novelizations, and tie-in media, so it was an Easter-egg clue that people who’d only seen the movies wouldn’t have gotten. And many people don’t read the credits, and McDiarmid was buried under makeup in ROTJ. Plus, sometimes the same actor plays more than one role in a series. So whether Palpatine’s true identity was a surprise or not depended on whether you had information beyond what was in the body of the films themselves.
Yes, let me clarify. By “we,” I meant my nerdy friends and myself. I wouldn’t necessarily have expected casual viewers to pick up on it. When I speak of people who insisted they weren’t the same, I’m referring to those people who were fans familiar with all the extra who should have realized. Yet there was a lot of bending over backwards to suggest that maybe one of them was a clone, etc. I wasn’t speaking of the casual viewer who didn’t realize until they looked at the chins. Still, they started dropping heavy hints even in episode II (as opposed to the more subtle hints in TPM of resting the camera on him).
It didn’t occur to me that Qimir might be the master. I was thinking it would turn out to be one of Mae’s mothers.
“the fact that people can actually be killed by getting stabbed from a lightsaber again.”
That’s not fair. As with any stab wound, the survivability obviously depends on where the wound is inflicted. And Star Wars has shown people surviving limb amputations by sabers ever since the original film, so it’s a huge double standard to call it implausible that people can survive merely getting stabbed by one. Implicitly, the blade cauterizes the wound and stems bleeding, so if anything, a stab wound by a lightsaber is more survivable than one by a metal blade.
That armor is made of cortosis ore – it’s a pretty big deal in the EU. Luke and Mara Jade had a hard time cutting it with their sabers in order to break out of a room and avoid drowning in Thrawn’s fortress.
Man, what a colossal waste of Dafne Keen. I could understand the bait and switch with Carrie Anne-Moss, but this? You can’t even say Jecki lasted five episodes, when they barely even clock past the 30 minute mark. We had little time to get to know the character.
They need to figure out a way to produce longer seasons, even if that means finding ways to keep the cost down per episode. Sometimes, I feel they’re doing that in this show. The forest feels like a set, especially with all that fog. I’d say that sometimes it actually feels a lot like modern versions of the Ewok movies.
I’ll say it: a 5 hour movie spread into 8 episodes just plain sucks. It’s beyond frustrating watching a show like this, with little bite-sized plot beats each week. I barely got to the point where I remember all their names.
And this show has tons of potential, with some great inspired visuals and some of the best lightsaber coreography since Phantom Menace. This and Ahsoka certainly have the visual language nailed down.
I also liked the portrayal of Qimir. I like the idea that he feels clamped down by Jedi policies and restrictions. He almost comes across as a libertarian, in a way. I like it that there are Sith or Dark Jedi that aren’t necessarily concerned with taking over the galaxy and slaughtering every threat. At least that’s what I’m getting from this.
And I guess slaughtering all the Jedi here (who did not inform the council about their mission, I might add) means Yoda and Mace Windu really have no way of knowing that the Sith were already back by Phantom Menace, sticking to their “Sith have been extinct for a millenia” line.
If they’re sticking this close to the standard 3 act movie structure, I’m assuming next Tuesday we’ll be getting Mae’s POV of whatever happened with that fire and the slaughter of the force witches.
There was something familiar about the Stranger, which the internet confirmed later; he looks a lot like Ren, the guy who started the Knights of Ren, who Kylo worked with in the sequel movies. I’m wondering where he hid those musclebound arms of his when he was playing creepy Quimir.
The deaths were a bit much, but I have to admire the audacity of the writers to kill off main characters. It felt like a Star Wars version of the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones.
This series is keeping me engaged; I can’t wait to see the next episode.