Obi-Wan Kenobi episode 6!

Obi-Wan and ex-Anakin finally get the lightsaber duel (and closure) they've been brooding about for a decade. A recap of “Part VI,” the sixth episode and ...

There’s a bit more of this matching game later in the episode, as Obi-Wan agrees to take a more hands-off “here if you need me” approach to his watching over Luke, tacitly explaining why a teenage Luke is familiar with “crazy old Ben” rather than “the cool lightsaber-wielding guy who’s always watching our backs.” It helps Obi-Wan’s case that he’s not the one who saves Luke from Reva, who knocks him down from an embankment and approaches his unconscious body, ready to strike. I understand that the funky-alien-diner vibe was ultimately not the goal of this relatively somber character piece, but if Obi-Wan pulls a classic prestige TV and does follow up its “limited series” with a second season, I dearly hope it will leave room for some more Lucas-style whimsy. • The petty question that always lingers with me when a cinematic event or character makes the jump to TV is this: Did this need to be a series? (It seems like Vader would have the resources to pursue Obi-Wan while sending the rest of the Empire after the others, but never mind.) Here is the actual lightsaber battle, that “rematch of the century” that can’t really hope to live up to the operatic intensity of characters battling it out on an erupting lava planet. Obi-Wan Kenobi started out feeling like a sequel to a prequel; it ended up feeling like a prequel to itself. That’s doubly true of Obi-Wan’s crushing rejection of Vader’s vow for revenge: “Good-bye,” he says, before adding an uneasy “Darth.” Obi-Wan has never really talked about attempting to bring Anakin back from the dark side; the futile hope and subsequent sad reality of the situation are all allowed to live in McGregor’s performance. (“The weakness still remains … which is why you will always lose!” isn’t worlds away from Darth Helmet’s “Evil will always triumph over good … because good is dumb.”) As directed by Deborah Chow, the fight feels like it has its own visual identity, using her favored (and, let’s be frank, probably cost-effective) lightsabers-as-lanterns technique and the landscape’s roughness to stage something scrappier and less elegant than the Revenge of the Sith face-off. For a few minutes, the show, too, gets to pierce through all of that heavy helmet iconography and look for a human who might be able to meet Obi-Wan’s gaze. As the entertaining and satisfying “Part VI” opens, the Empire is hot on the heels of the transport carrying various Force-adjacent refugees, and while Roken (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) tries to keep hope alive among his passengers, he quietly confides to Obi-Wan that they’re basically screwed. (Doesn’t he also … want to save everyone?) Okay, fine, you want to make it clear that Obi-Wan is actually ready to stop avoiding the big Darth, but boy, it would have been cool if Roken felt like an actual character and not just the person who spouts off contradictory assertions to gin up nominal conflict. Gleaming, menacing helmets have become a major part of the Star Wars iconography, to the point where they’ve come to symbolize a kind of originalist traditionalism in the series. Yet the movie is prescient about one aspect of Star Wars movies that had not yet been produced back in 1987: Underneath the gleaming, menacing dark helmet is a whiny, insecure human being — whether it’s Rick Moranis or Hayden Christensen.

It's about time these characters got the credit they deserved for all their work with Luke.

The Lars family is more than just the redshirts wiped off the face of Tatooine to send Luke on his intergalactic adventure. When we think of who made Luke the person he is, it’s tempting to say Obi-Wan or Yoda, but they only made him the Jedi he became. Luke is her son just as much as Leia is the Organa’s, and she’ll do anything to protect him. Though Obi-Wan Kenobi focused on the relationship between Obi-Wan and young Leia, it was bookended with his original mission to protect Luke from anyone who could harm him while he grew up on his uncle’s moisture farm. Star Wars has never been shy about reinforcing that adopted families are just as legitimate as biological ones, but the Lars extended family raising young Luke always came off as a favor. From estranged family like Luke and Leia to found family like Rey and the Skywalkers, there’s a constant refrain that you can survive anything with family by your side.