Our requisite half-hour nothingness in an eight-episode season. Love when this happens.
Recap
On Khofar, Kelnacca lives alone; on the walls of his home is the same symbol as on Mae’s forehead. Back on Coruscant, Osha arrives at the end of a group training session to say goodbye to Jecki; she’s decided that Mae is the Jedi’s problem now and wants to leave, but promises to look her up next time she’s in town. Jecki asks if she’s said goodbye to Sol, but Osha thinks she’s caused him enough trouble. Mae and Qimir arrives on Khofar and begin their trek into the treacherous forests; Qimir knows Kelnacca’s whereabouts because he’s been here before, out of a desire to help Mae. He reminds her that she made a deal with her master and must complete her mission.
A group of Jedi meet with Venestra and Sol to discuss what’s happening here. They agree not to tell the Jedi Council because the Council would tell the Senate; it would become a galactic scandal that Mae is seeking revenge on Jedi. Venestra tries to send Jedi Holden to capture Mae, but Sol fights her on it and insists that going himself with Osha and a group of knights would be the best plan so that they can learn the identity of the person who trained her. Venestra reluctantly agrees. On Khofar, Qimir asks Mae about her quest, and they talk about her sister being with the Jedi and her fondness for Sol.
Sol finds Osha on her way to leave, and asks her to come on the mission. Osha agrees and once on board the ship, she meets Bazil (Hassan Taj), a Tynnan who can track Mae once they reach Khofar. The group sets out toward the forest. As Bazil leads them on, Osha stops Yord briefly and lets him know that she won’t be able to fight her sister. She asks Yord to step in and stop her if she can’t be saved as Sol hopes. In the forest, the group encounters giant bugs in the trees, being guarded by their parent. Sol kills it when it attacks. Osha tells Jecki that she was able to sense that creature and believes her connection to the Force is returning. She tells Jecki that she was never able to become a true Jedi because she couldn’t accept what she lost, but Jecki tells her that they’re not defined by loss, but by what they survive. Mae insists that she pause in her trek with Qimir and also tells him that her “test” from the master cannot be completed because no Jedi will fight a person without a weapon. She also reveals that her master will kill her if she doesn’t complete this mission.
Bazil finally hones in on Mae’s scent and the Jedi press forward. Mae calls for help in the forest, but she’s actually set a trap for Qimir, hanging him upside-down by the ankle. She tells him that everything is different now that her sister is alive; she’s going to turn herself in to Kelnacca, not kill him, and tell the Jedi what she knows so she can be reunited with Osha. On making it to Kelnacca’s home, Osha finds the Wookiee already dead from a lightsaber strike to the abdomen. The Jedi surround the place and tell her to come out, but a figure appears behind Osha—it’s Mae’s master. He draws his saber and knocks Osha out of the way while all the Jedi charge him. He knocks the whole group back with the Force.
Commentary
Oh. So Manny Jacinto is the Sith guy, right?
Y’all, you could’ve made him so much more cleverer and mysterious by giving his character just a pinch of actual backstory? Instead of “ah yes, the random former smuggler type without a past that Sith love to ‘collect’ who keeps helping out on your journey and staying close while no one knows who your master is, and he’s played by an extremely charismatic well-known actor who deserves a meatier role than this seems to be…” Literally who else would make it a real reveal at this point? (Unless it was one of their undead moms?) I mean, I guess they could make it Venestra, but that would be disappointing because she’s already holding up her end as a problematic Jedi bureaucrat.
And you knew that whole ending was going to happen the instant Mae got the idea to give herself up to the Jedi. We’re only halfway through the season—of course something has to occur that forces her away from her sister and any form of reconciliation. The worst part is, the change of heart is so muddy that it feels meaningless. We don’t understand Mae’s journey well enough to feel invested for anything other than Osha’s sake; we don’t know why she joined this master, how long she’s been learning from him, what her goals have been these past sixteen years. Where is your entire story?
We’re back to weekly episodes with much of television, but they need to get on board with longer seasons again. This pacing is deadly for storytelling. There’s no time to do anything interesting! Not even to explore properly, never mind solidify your characters. Imagine if this had been an old-school 22-episode season of TV. If we really got to sink into this era and learn what it was like. Spend time with the Jedi and their messy politics. Let Qimir’s character and relationship to Mae marinate for the majority of that season (or longer, wait for a big season two climax) before letting us in on some secrets.
Give us the chance to actually meet Kelnacca? We got to watch him do three whole things before you murdered him—off camera, which makes it even worse. Stop making us infer and use our associations to enjoy things: Make an entire damn television series, front to back, with all the meandering weirdness that used to entail.
This is going to continue to be a problem for the era we’ve entered, entertainment-wise. And the issues are manifold: For one, television creates more “canon” than movies do (even when you make it this needlessly barebones), and if your story is accustomed to using films as their primary canon-maker (*stares dead-eyed at the MCU*), folks are gonna get twitchy about how much more television is poised to do. This has been a problem across the board for Star Wars—you can practically feel a producer stepping in with the Lucasfilm-approved story beats in the scripts. Corporate interest doesn’t want to let anyone write a plot that cuts off potential narrative avenues for someone else in the future. It’s antithetical to how art is made, and that keeps showing at the seams, especially in these ridiculous half-hour mid-chapters shoved into what’s supposed to be an hour-long action-drama series.
Remember when they told fans that the format was flexible and the episodes didn’t have to be the exact same length each time? Did anyone else mistakenly hope that would mean the occasional longer episode when we hit mid-season?
And it’s depressing because they’ve got great characters and every little bit of interplay we get is so enjoyable. The friendship (and possibly flirting) we’ve got going between Jecki and Osha, and Osha’s request that Yord step in for her with Mae, and Sol still trying to find reasons to keep his former Padawan around, and Mae talking with Qimir about how to kill Jedi without weapons—it’s all good stuff, but there’s just an absolute bare minimum of it. Like we’re being given humanity as table scraps. Star Wars is rarely great at this anyhow, but many of the other shows have the benefit of built-in context. We got nothing here. We needed a full season of television.
Spanners and Sabers
- I want to know if Jecki’s training class is required while being a Padawan, or if she’s just this hardcore about her studies and taking every elective you can at Jedi school. Tell me more.
- Can we talk about the fact that Sol uses the term “neutralize” instead of “kill” when he clearly means kill (when he’s talking to Venestra about sending Holden after Mae). That’s, uh… that’s a choice. That the Jedi seem to have made.
- Civilian Jedi robes? Civilian—okay, that’s really good, though. I also love the Jedi translator deal-y, which is basically the same as what we all use on phones.
- Bazil is a Tynnan, which is a real deep cut of a reference. The species first showed up in the Han Solo Adventures books by Brian Daley, specifically Han Solo’s Revenge, published in 1979. But in appearance and temperament, he reminds me a lot of Teak from The Ewok Adventures films.
- Curious about why Kelnacca is allowed to just live in solitude on this world? Can Jedi just wander off and become hermits with the Order’s blessing and what exactly does that look like?
- Venestra is getting all weird about the Jedi Council knowing about this problem because she knows the Council would feel obligated to tell the Senate. Which leaves me with the question: Who is her circle made up of? There’s an entire group of them discussing this with Sol, so I’m curious about the internal politics of the temple now, and how these little micro-groups try to protect various aspects of Jedi life and work. (Also just love the idea that plenty of Jedi are like ugh, the Council instead of Obi-Wan’s constant earnestness and need to please.)
Hoping for something meatier next week…
