Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 23

Non-Fiction Spotlight: By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga by Erica Friedman

After the Hugos is before the next Hugos, so I’m continuing my Non-Fiction Spotlight project, where I interview the authors/editors of SFF-related non-fiction books that come out in 2022 and are eligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards. For more about the Non-Fiction Spotlight project, go here. To check out the spotlights I already posted, go here.

For more recommendations for SFF-related non-fiction, also check out this Facebook group set up by the always excellent Farah Mendlesohn, who is a champion (and author) of SFF-related non-fiction.

Some people claim that the reason that SFF-related non-fiction books have increasingly been crowded out of the Best Related Work category at the Hugos is that there are not enough non-fiction books published every year to fill the Hugo ballot. This is wrong, since there is a wide spectrum of non-fiction books covering every SFF-related subject imaginable released every year. Today’s featured non-fiction book proves how wide that spectrum truly is, because it is a book about the history of lesbian relationships as portrayed in manga and anime.

Therfore I’m thrilled to welcome Erica Friedman, author of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga to my blog today.

Tell us about your book.

My book is By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga.

Lesbian-themed animation and comics (and related media), known as “Yuri,” is the newest genre of Japanese pop culture. Even though it’s only been acknowledged as a separate genre for a little over a decade, Yuri has a literary and artistic history that can be traced back to the early 20th century. My book is a series of interlocking lectures and essays that trace that history and bring the story of Yuri to the present. I cover key series and creators, as well as the efforts by creators and fans to carve out a space for ourselves in the larger Japanese pop culture fandom.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Erica Friedman. I have lectured at dozens of conventions and presented at film festivals. I have edited manga, most recently Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles. I have read, watched, thought about, written and spoken about Yuri for more than 20 years now. My blog, Okazu, is about to turn 20 years old, in fact.

What prompted you to write this book?

Yuri has passed that tipping point where it’s no longer fighting to be recognized as a genre. More Yuri manga, anime and games are coming out than I can keep up with – a very good problem to have, honestly. But as new series bring in new fans, I wanted to capture all the history up to this point, so it wouldn’t be lost in the crush. Fandom did a lot of heavy lifting in Yuri and other queer fandoms.

Yuri’s roots are also different than any other genre in Japanese pop culture, since Yuri was a feature included in all the other genres, with their own tropes. I wanted to capture the complexities of the genre’s origins in hope that other people would use this as a springboard to jump off for further research.

Plus, I just really like writing about Sailor Moon. ^_^

Why should SFF fans in general and Hugo voters in particular read this book?

That’s a great question!  I think By Your Side is a truly unique book, because it  is a story of a brand new fandom that was born only a quarter of a century ago. If you’re part of any fan community, it’s sometimes hard to remember that  everything in fandom is changing all the time. But it is. The rise of queer content and queer fandom is shaping multiple media even as we speak. And, of course, folks who have worked in fan culture are likewise shaping their own genres in new and exciting ways.

Secondly, Japanese pop culture has had an indelible imprint on western pop culture at this point. I hope that Hugo readers are interested in that phenomenon and would like to learn about this particular piece, which was driven by fans on both sides of the globe to become something new. I also hope the LGBTQ+ folks will take a look at this book and learn that if it feels like there’s no space for them in a fandom, it should not stop them from creating that space. It’s not just possible – it’s critical to do so.

Do you have any cool facts or tidbits that you unearthed during your research, but that did not make it into the final book?

The Yuri genre is growing so fast – and so much new content  is being created that even as we went to press, there were new works I was scrambling to squeeze in. Yuri creators are more likely to be openly queer than they were even a few years ago. I wanted to capture that.  As we were going to press, I was rewriting my look at the future of Yuri furiously!

SFF-related non-fiction is somewhat sidelined by the big genre awards, since the Nebulas have no non-fiction category and the Best Related Work Hugo category has become something of a grab bag of anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere. So why do you think SFF-related non-fiction is important?

If fiction is us, as a species, sitting around a fire, sharing our hopes, fears, aspirations and legends; then non-fiction is us passing along our skills, our lessons and our history. Non-fiction is stories, too— stories told of what was and what is…stories that shape what might be. Non-fiction gives us shoulders to stand upon.

Most importantly, non-fiction is the chronicle of us. SFF fandom is not just those who create stories. For instance, we know how many people were and still are inspired by Star Trek to seek out new worlds and new civilizations.  Non-fiction allows fans to explore spaces where we take to the stars in other ways.

Are there any other great SFF-related non-fiction works or indeed anything else (books, stories, essays, writers, magazines, films, TV shows, etc…) you’d like to recommend?

While I’m here repping queer Japanese culture, I want to take a moment to shout out Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia ed. by James Welker.  Boy’s Love as a genre in Japan has a different trajectory than Yuri, but it’s gone global in a big way since the 1990s. Now that it is a global phenomenon, embedded into everything from anime and manga to Korean pop music. This is a collection of writing by 21 scholars, looking at the explosion of BL across Asian countries and their pop cultures.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’m really excited about all the Yuri – and Yuri research — yet to come. What series, people and tropes will we be discussing in the next 20 years? I don’t know – and I can’t wait to find out.

Where can people buy your book?

I’ve got links to all the major online and several niche booksellers – plenty of non-Amazon options – for both print and digital on my site:

https://www.yuricon.com/product/bys/

(Direct links if you prefer: )

Amazon: https://amzn.to/39PTF8i
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/12445/9781951320201
RightStuf: https://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=65886&userID=2780977&productID=1247596382
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/by-your-side-erica-friedman/1141367217?ean=9781951320201
Cheapmanga.com: https://www.cheapmanga.com/product/by-your-side-the-first-100-years-of-yuri-anime-and-manga/2124?cs=true&cst=custom
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/by-your-side-16
Ebook Direct from Publisher: https://journeypress.e-junkie.com/product/1741866/By-Your-Side3A-The-First-100-Years-of-Yuri-Anime-and-Manga

Where can people find you?

Okazu: https://okazu.yuricon.com
Twitter; http://www.twitter.com/OkazuYuri
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Okazu
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/yuristudio
Discord: https://discord.gg/4NPHGH7Vc4
For all my links: https://www.yuricon.com/links/

Thank you, Erica, for stopping by and answering my question.

About By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga:

The Untold Story of Lesbian Love in Japanese Anime and Comics

“The first in-depth study of Yuri in English.”

James Welker, Professor of Cross-Cultural and
Japanese Studies, Kanagawa University

Two decades in the making, By Your Side is a collection of essays, scholarly and approachable, by the Western Hemisphere’s authority on the subject. This landmark work should be in the library of any fan of anime, manga, lesbian relationships in media–or any combination of the three!

“By Your Side is the complete Yuri resource I only ever dreamed could exist…Friedman graces readers with illuminating insights as they follow her through a century of the genre’s evolution and revolution.”

Nicki Bauman, Yurimother

About Erica Friedman:

Erica Friedman is the founder of Yuricon community, and was the first publisher of Yuri manga in English, with ALC Publishing. She holds a Masters Degree in Library Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and is a full-time researcher for a Fortune 100 company.

She has lectured at dozens of conventions, presented at film festivals, and participated in academic lecture series in the United States in Japan. A Manga editor, she most recently worked on Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles.

Erica has written about Yuri for a host of prestigious Japanese and American outlets. She has written news and event reports, interviews Yuri creators and reviews Yuri anime, manga and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002.

***

Are you publishing a work of SFF-related longform non-fiction in 2022 and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Siblings”

The next Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Obi-Wan Kenobi reviews are coming, but I had another stressful day, relieved by the mailman (and it is a man) bringing me that elusive Masters of the Universe Origins Roboto figure, so here is another  Master-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. I already posted a version of this story on Twitter, but this one has more dialogue. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

Now Roboto has a bit of a strange history. He was an action figure in the 1980s, but he only had a handful of appearances in the original Filmation cartoon, where he was an alien explorer from a planet of robots who crashlanded on Eternia, was repaired by Man-at-Arms and wound up staying and fighting alongside He-Man and his friends.

The 2002 cartoon retconned his origin and made him a sentient and intelligent robot built by Man-at-Arms originally as a chess partner for Man-e-Faces. However, Roboto wanted to be a warrior, upgraded himself and heroically sacrificed himself in order to save He-Man and all of Eternia from a plague of multiplying skeletons. Luckily, Man-at-Arms was able to repair him and so Roboto was frequently seen fighting alongside the other heroic warriors.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation tweaked Roboto’s backstory yet again. He’s still a sentient and intelligent robot who was built by Man-at-Arms, but in Revelation Roboto considers Duncan his father and Teela his sister and refers to them as such. He also heroically sacrifices his life yet again (heroically sacrificing himself seems to be what Roboto does) to reforge the Sword of Power in a scene that made me misty-eyed about a character I barely remembered from the original. And this time, Roboto isn’t repaired either, but permanently destroyed by the immense power discharge resulting from reforging the sword.

Proud papa: Duncan with Roboto and Teela

I probably wouldn’t have been all that keen on buying a Roboto action figure, if not for Masters of the Universe: Revelation. However, I liked him a lot in Revelation and besides, Roboto was the one member of the Man-at-Arms extended family I was still missing (except for Andra, of whom there is no figure at the right scale at the moment), so once I found one at a decent price (he’s quite difficult to find due to production and distribution issues), I of course snapped him up.

When I posed Roboto next to his family, I couldn’t help but wonder how Teela reacted, when her father decided to build himself a son. I imagine she wasn’t particularly happy about that, at least not at first. And indeed, in the 2002 cartoon Teela (who like Adam is younger and brattier in the 2002 version) repeatedly sends Roboto away when he wants to join her palace guards (cause for some reason, bratty sixteen-year-old Teela is still Captain of the Guard) and defend the palace and only comes to appreciate him, after he has heroically sacrificed himself to save Eternia.

So enjoy “Siblings”, a Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre story about Teela meeting her mechanical brother for the first time:

In Man-at-Arms’ workshop:

“Roboto is my greatest invention yet, Malcolm. I created him as a training robot for Adam and Teela and then upgraded him into a chess opponent for Man-a-Faces. But now he has gained sentience and become a fully sentient and intelligent cybernetic lifeform.”

“First the Attak Trak, then Stridor and now Roboto. Do all of your inventions gain sentience, Duncan? And does this mean my first will start arguing with me eventually?”

“Maybe it will even punch you in the face, Malcolm. Cause you sure have it coming at times. There, Roboto. You should be able to get up now.”

“Thank you, Father. I seem to be working perfectly. You built me well.”

“He calls you ‘Father’? Cause that’s not creepy at all.”

“He simply started calling me ‘Father’ and I guess technically, it’s not wrong, because I did build him. Besides, part of me always wanted a son. As a young man I always assumed that if I had ever children, they’d be boys. When I first held Teela, I didn’t even know what to do with a baby girl…”

“There. One last adjustment and you’re finished.”

“I am alive. Father, I am alive.”

“Yes, not creepy at all.”

“Roboto, meet my brother Malcolm.”

“Hello, Uncle Malcolm. It is such a pleasure to meet you. I have never had an uncle before.”

“Good having another warrior with a steel fist… ahem, axe in the family. Nope, this is not creepy at all.”

Meanwhile…

“Great. I knew I’m not what Father wanted and that he would have preferred a boy, but that he’d go as far as build himself a perfect metal son, because I’m not good enough…”

“Ah, Teela. Come and meet your new brother.”

“Hello Sister. It is so great to finally meet you. Father has told me so much about you.”

“Let me get one thing straight: You are not my brother. And Father, if you wanted a son, could you at least have picked one from the gutter like you picked me. Or better yet, picked a boy from the gutter in the first place? But no, you had to build this… this thing.”

“Well done, Duncan, well done.”

“Teela, what on Eternia…?”

“I’m done, Father. Be happy with your perfect robot son!”

“Hi, Duncan, I… Teela, what’s wrong?”

“Ask my father… sniff.”

“Teela, wait… Oh no, she heard everything I said about wanting a son, didn’t she?”

“Every word, Brother, every word.”

“Wait, it’s not what you think. What you heard was…”

“I’ve heard enough, Father.”

“I do not understand. Why does my sister not like me?”

“Don’t worry, Roboto, it’s got nothing to do with you and everything with my idiot of a brother.”

“Duncan, what’s wrong with Teela?”

“Sigh, she thinks I don’t love her and built Roboto to replace her.”

“But that’s not true… is it?”

“Of course not. I’ll go after her and try to explain.”

“No, I’ll go after Teela. After all, I have some experience with parents who think I’m a disappointment.”

In the palace garden…

“It’s not fair. I tried so hard to become the child my father wanted and then he builds that… that thing to replace me.”

“Hey, Teela…”

“Adam, can you just… sniff… go away, please? I… I think I’d like to be alone…”

“Not a chance. I’m not leaving my best friend alone, when she needs a shoulder to cry on.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Listen, Teela, I know how you feel. After all, my Dad and I don’t always get along either and I know that I’m very much not the son he wanted.”

“But your father never tried to replace you with a robot.”

“Sometimes I wish he would. A robot double to stand beside the throne and look regal during all those boring state functions would be great. Especially since I don’t even get a chair. I just have to stand there and look regal. A mannequin could do that job.”

“How is it that you always make me smile?”

“It’s my top secret superpower. But anyway, as someone who suddenly had a sister show up out of the blue, I know a thing or two about surprise siblings. And I know that you haven’t lost your father, but gained a brother.”

“Yes, but Adora is great. She’s amazing. I would be happy, if she were my sister. But Roboto…”

“Give him a chance. He may surprise you.”

“It’s not even Roboto I’m mad at. I mean, he’s a bunch of rivets and gears, so how could I be mad at him? It’s Dad I’m mad at – for making Roboto, because I couldn’t be the son he wanted.”

“You know that’s not true, Teela. Your Dad loves you… very much. Even if he wanted a son originally.”

“Could you just hold me, Adam?”

“Of course.”

“You know, sometimes I just want to get away from all of this madness.”

“That’s a great idea. Let’s away. Even if it’s only for a few hours.”

“Lieutenant, you’re in charge of palace security. Prince Adam and I are going to patrol the outer perimeter.”

“Again? I mean, yes, Captain.”

“Sister…”

“Oh no, not him.”

“I am sorry if I offended you. I want to be the best brother and the best warrior I can be.”

“Listen, Roboto, I really don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“I heard you are going to patrol the outer perimeter. I can come along and help. I am fully equipped for battle and my sensors…”

“No!”

“But I want to help.”

“Go away!”

“Look, pal, no offence, but this is not a good time. Teela and I want to be alone, if you know what I mean.”

“I do not understand. Why does no one like me? All I want to do is help, but my sister hates me, Prince Adam hates me, everybody hates me.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m just standing here, guarding the palace garden and soaking up some juicy gossip I’ll share in the guard barracks later on.”

Yes, I know it’s She-Ra, but there is no Adora figure of the right scale and type, so She-Ra must play both roles.

“Hi there! I don’t think we’ve met. You must be Roboto, Duncan’s newest invention. I’m Adora.”

“Prince Adam’s twin sister. It is a pleasure to meet you, Princess Adora.”

“Just Adora. After all, we’re friends by proxy, since my brother and your sister are… ahem… best friends.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a question? Why does your brother not like me?”

“Adam not like you? Don’t be silly! Adam likes everybody. Well, maybe not Skeletor and Hordak, but everybody who’s not a supervillain. He’s the friendliest person I know.”

“But Prince Adam does not like me and my sister does not like me either. I offered to come along on their patrol of the outer perimeter, but Prince Adam and Teela sent me away.”

“Well, of course they did. You see, Adam and Teela are not really patrolling the outer perimeter. That’s just an excuse to sneak away and spend some alone time together to cuddle and… well, you know.”

“Oh, I understand. My Uncle Malcolm said that Prince Adam and Teela like to exchange physical intimacies.”

“Yes, they’re sneaking off to have sex. The entire palace knows. Well, I mean my parents don’t know and I’m not sure about Duncan, but everybody else knows. There even is a betting pool when we’ll have a royal wedding.”

“Adora, can I ask you another question? Did your brother always like you?”

“Well, maybe not from the very start. After all, I shot him in the back the first time we met, back when I was still Force Captain Adora of the Evil Horde. But Adam always believed in me and told me that I didn’t need to be like Hordak and Shadow Weaver, that I could be better. And he always loved me and I love him.”

“Then why does my sister not like me?”

“Listen, Roboto, when I first came to Eternia, your sister did not like me either. Not because of anything I did, but because she was afraid that I would stand between her and Adam. But once she realised that I wasn’t going to take Adam away from her, we became good friends, almost like sisters.”

“I am not planning to exchange physical intimacies with Prince Adam, if that is what my sister is worried about. I am not even sure if that is physically possible.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s an attachment for that. But this isn’t about Adam. It’s about your father.”

“Father? I don’t understand.”

“Teela is afraid that your father will love her less, now that he has you.”

“But that is not true. Father always talks about Teela, how much he loves her and how proud he is of her.”

“I know, but Teela doesn’t. Give her time, Roboto, and she’ll see that she hasn’t lost a father, but gained a brother.”

“Thank you, Adora. It is good to have at least one friend.”

Meanwhile, at the outer perimeter:

“You were right, it was a great idea to get away from it all. No Prince Adam, no Captain of the Guard, no He-Man, just you and me.”

“You talk too much. Just kiss me again.”

“As you wish, my lady.”

“Looks like the Prince has his hands full.”

“And his pants down, snicker.”

“I wouldn’t mind some of that myself. That Teela is one hot babe.”

“Evil-Lyn is prettier. And now come on, let’s get them, boys.”

“Hands up and lay down your weapons! You are now prisoners of Skeletor, Supreme Lord of Destruction.”

“We’re under attack. Adam, get behind me.”

“Not a chance. I can take care of myself. And I’m not leaving you to face them alone.”

“Shit, two of these guys are a bit much for Prince Adam to handle. Must become He-Man. But I can’t transform here and I can’t leave Teela to face them alone.”

“Stand back, Beast-Man! Ahhhh!”

“Teela, no! Okay, that’s it. By the Power of…”

TWAP!

“Not so tough now, are they?”

“Shut up and help me get them back to Shake Mountain. Skeletor will be pleased.”

“Listen, Randor, I’ve got your useless son and Duncan’s annoying daughter, too. If you, Duncan and He-Man don’t surrender to me, I will kill them both. And before I kills them, I’ll torture them until they beg for death.”

“This isn’t going to work Skeletor. My father thinks I’m a failure and he’s not going to negotiate with terrorists, least of all because of me. And He-Man isn’t going to show up either. I can assure you that.”

“And my father replaced me with a robot, so he’s not going to give in to your demands either.”

“Boss, can we play with them, just a little bit?”

“Yeah, and check if the Prince really has blue blood.”

“And what Teela is wearing under that outfit?”

“Enough. All right, where was I? Ah yes, torture. So who’s going to go first? The Prince or his plaything?”

“Take me and leave her alone.”

“Take me and leave him alone.”

“Such eagerness. Well, I’ll leave you to contemplate your fate amongst yourselves.”

“Looks like we’re screwed. My father can’t give in to Skeletor, even if he wanted to.”

“And my father replaced me with a robot.”

“And He-Man’s out of the picture, so it’s up to you and me.”

“Okay, I’ll create a diversion and you make a run for it.”

“No, I’m not leaving you here.”

“My sister and Prince Adam captured and in the hands of Skeletor. This is all my fault.”

“No, it’s mine. But we’ll get them out.”

“Damn right, it is your fault, Duncan.”

“Do you have any helpful ideas, Malcolm? No? Then just shut the hell up!”

“If we go on a rescue mission, I want to come, too. I will rescue my sister.”

“No, Roboto, we will rescue our siblings. So what’s the plan, Duncan?”

“Good to have you on board, She-Ra. What about you, Malcolm? You in?”

“You have to ask?”

“She-Ra, Roboto? Am I glad to see you guys.”

“Father, you came to rescue us?”

“Of course. I’d descend into Subternia itself to save my daughter.”

“Roboto, would you do the honours?”

“Of course, Father. Have no fear, Sister, I shall have you free in a minute.”

“Hurry up, cause here comes Skeletor.”

“All right, battle positions, everyone.”

“Catch, brother. Looks like it’s time for He-Man.”

“Can’t. Too crowded. Adam will have to do.”

“So we meet again, Fisto.”

“Indeed we do, Jitsu, and you’ll get another arse whopping.”

“Put your filthy hands on my daughter again, Keldor, and I swear that this time I will kill you.”

“Pah, you don’t have the guts, Duncan. You never did and neither does Prince Useless here.”

“Leave my sister alone, you hairy horror!”

“Get out of my way, rust bucket!”

“Mer-Man, honestly? Of all the Evil Warriors, I get Mer-Man? Was Evil-Lyn busy or what?”

“Shut up and feel the kiss of my blade, She-Ra.”

“Eat steel knuckles, shithead!”

“Get out of my way, Beast-Man. It’s your boss I want, not you.”

“So much for the great Mer-Man. Ugh, he stinks. Now who’s next?”

“Say good-bye to your daughter and Prince Adam, Duncan.”

“Leave my sister alone, fiend!”

BLAST! BOOM!

“Roboto, no!”

“No, Roboto. He… he jumped in fronht of Adam and me and shielded us from Skeletor’s blast. And now he’s…”

“I’m sorry, Teela, but we should get out of here, before Skeletor comes back.”

Later, in Duncan’s workshop:

“Can you fix him, Dad?”

“I don’t know. He absorbed the full power of Skeletor’s havoc staff.”

“Oh Adam, Roboto saved us both and I was so mean to him. And now he’ll never know… sniff… that I’m sorry and that it’s an honour to be his sister.”

“You can tell him yourself, Teela.”

“Roboto, you’re alive!”

“Yes, Sister, I am alive. And I am glad that you like me now. You do like me, do you not?”

“Of course, I love you, Roboto. You’re my brother, after all. And I’m sorry that I was so mean to you.”

“That is all right, Sister. Princess Adora explained everything.”

“She did`?”

“And you do not have to worry. I do not intend to take our father’s love away from you nor do I intend to exchange physical intimacies with Prince Adam.”

“Uhm, that’s comforting, I guess.”

“Well, that went better than expected, Duncan. But now you’ll have to excuse me, cause I need a drink after all that excitement.”

“I can prepare tea for us. Father has a very nice tea set.”

“Sorry, Roboto, but I think I need something a bit stronger this time.”

***

I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story. There’ll be more stories, including the promised She-Ra story, since the Evil Horde is actually beginning to resemble its name by now.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Goes On a Rescue Mission in Part IV

Here are my thoughts on the fourth episode of the Disney Plus Obi-Wan Kenobi series. For my thoughts on previous episodes, go here.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut!

When we last left our favourite down and out Jedi knight, Obi-Wan had just gotten his arse kicked by his former pupil Anakin Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader and sustained severe burn injuries. And Leia had been kidnapped by Third Sister – again.

Part IV (I guess they’re not calling them episodes in order to avoid confusion with the movies) opens with Obi-Wan in a bacta tank. And since bacta seems to have the previously unknown effect of generating flashbacks, Obi-Wan sees snatches of his fight with Anakin Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader. Worse, the Force also connects him to Vader, who is soaking in a bacta tank of his own. It appears the psychoactive properties of bacta have been severely underestimated until now.

The combination of flashbacks and unwanted mindlinks with Darth Vader cause Obi-Wan to prematurely emerge from the bacta tank, before he is fully healed. Does this mean that the Obi-Wan we saw in A New Hope has heavy burn scars on his shoulder and arm? I guess it’s possible, since his robe would cover up the scars.

Tala is not happy that Obi-Wan emerges from the bacta tank before he is fully healed, but Obi-Wan is determined to rescue Leia and tries to enlist the aid of The Path, all four members of it. The leader Roken doesn’t want to help and would prefer not to have Obi-Wan on his planet (Is this Jabiim? Or still Mapuzo? Or some other planet, cause I don’t think it’s ever named and all we see is a cave) at all, because Obi-Wan is too high profile a fugitive Jedi. Obi-Wan tries to tell Roken that he doesn’t know what the Empire is capable of – a line that got an eyeroll from me, because dude, these people are part of an underground railroad type network that smuggles former Jedi and other Force sensitives to safety, so you can bet they know exactly what the Empire is capable of. And indeed, Roken cuts Obi-Wan down by saying that his wife was a former Jedi, that he always knew what she was and that they did their best to hide from the Empire, but the Empire found and killed her anyway. Touché.

Luckily, The Path does have some information on the Fortress Inquisitorius (Ah, the joys of bad Latin in SFF), the pyramid-shaped stronghold of the Inquisitors, where Leia is being held. The Fortress is located on a water-logged planet in the Mustafar system. The Path also have handy schematics of the place rendered in the early CGI line-art style that has been associated with Star Wars since 1977. I guess many Bothans died to bring those plans to The Path. Sorry, if I sound a bit snarky here, but I only just realised that there is zero information given about how The Path came by what has to be top secret plans. io9 reviewer Germain Lussier makes the same point. How exactly does The Path, which literally seems to be four people in a cave, know all this, including that Darth Vader is still aboard his ship en route to Mustafar?

Obi-Wan is determined to infiltrate the Fortress and Tala is determined to go with him, using her security clearance as an Imperial officer to get in. Methinks Tala has taken a liking to our broken Jedi, even though we all know that this won’t go anywhere and not just because Disney era Star Wars does not do romance period. Though I hope they won’t kill off Tala, if only because this is probably my favourite Indira Varma role to date. Here is a nice interview with her at The Guardian BTW.

While Obi-Wan is trying to organise a rescue mission, little Leia is facing down Third Sister in an interrogation room (standard interrogation for now, not the enhanced sort) at the Fortress Inquisitorius. Leia may be only ten years old, but we see all the tactics she will use on Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin ten years later on display here, starting with “I’m a princess and my father is a senator and you can’t hold me.” It’s the first of many callbacks to A New Hope, as Guardian reviewer Andy Welch points out.

Third Sister is a skilled interrogator, more skilled than Darth Vader who tends to resort to histrionics, Force-choking and torture, when things don’t go his way.  And so she tells Leia that Obi-Wan and that no one is coming for her and that The Path are not her friends, but Leia still refuses to neither believe nor budge and even asks how exactly Obi-Wan died.

Since her initial approach doesn’t work, Third Sister changes tactics, puts her hand on the side of Leia’s face Vulcan mind-meld style and tries to use the Force to dig what she wants to know out of Leia’s brain. However, this doesn’t work, since Leia blocks her. “Is this a staring contest?” Leia asks with feigned innocence. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Little Leia is wonderful, particularly since you can already see the woman she’ll grow up to be one day in this little girl.

The battle of wills between Leia and Third Sister is highly compelling, even though it’s only two people in a barren room, but as AV-Club reviewer Manuel Betancourt points out, “sometimes all you need to make a solid SW scene sing is a great pair of characters sitting in a room with crackling dialogue.”  Betancourt also explains what it is that makes Third Sister such a compelling and chilling villain (though of course the usual racist fanboy arseholes have problems with the fact that she is played by a black actress, Moses Ingram), namely that she’s a different type of villain from the usual Star Wars villainy. She doesn’t have the histrionics or the casual cruelty of Darth Vader, the Emperor or Grand Moff Tarkin. Instead, Betancourt says that “Third Sister moves through the world like an immovable object who will bulldoze everything and anything in front of her until she gets what she wants”, which is a very accurate description of her character. What makes her even more intriguing is that she we still don’t know just why she does what she does and why she is so obsessed with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

When her questioning of Leia doesn’t yield results, Third Sister graduates to enhanced interrogation tactics and has Leia dragged to a torture chamber, which reminded me of the final scene in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which came out two years after Return of the Jedi.

Now we know that torturing prisoners is something the Empire does, since we’ve seen characters tortured in Star Wars before. Hell, we’ve even seen Leia tortured before – twice, once at the beginning of A New Hope and once near the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Nonetheless, the torture scene is disturbing, because here we have the Empire about the toture a ten-year-old girl. Of course, we also know that the Empire kills children – after all, we have seen the slaughter of the padawans at the Jedi Temple in Revenge of the Sith. However, while torture and child murder were always a thing in Star Wars, the torture scenes in the original trilogy were remarkably subdued. In both Leia’s torture in A New Hope and Han’s torture in The Empire Strikes Back, we see Leia or respectively Han strapped to a board and we see the torture droid with various instruments and syringes approaching, then the scene cuts away. Empire Strikes Back also gives us a few screams, but the rest is left to the imagination.  And while it’s been a while since I’ve seen Revenge of the Sith – I don’t always include the prequels in my annual Star Wars rewatch – I don’t recall the murder of the padawans being actually shown on screen either. Obi-Wan Kenobi does go further in actually showing Imperial cruelty than the Star Wars films, so it feels more disturbing.

While all this is happening, Obi-Wan and Tala are executing their rescue mission. Tala lands her shuttle in the main hangar and walks in through the front door, pretending to be on a secret mission and pulling rank on a suspicious officer at the access gate. Over the course of the episode, we will see Tala pulling rank and pretending to be on a secret mission a lot.

Meanwhile, Obi-Wan goes in through the backdoor. Since the Fortress Inquisitorius (stupid name, that) is surrounded by water, we see him swimming under the sea in his regular Jedi robes (I guess Neoprene wetsuits are one of the inventions that exist in our world, but not in the Star Wars universe), using the same breathing device he used on Naboo way back in The Phantom Menace. Obi-Wan then enters the Fortress through the moon pool (no, not this one). Why does an Imperial fortress have a moon pool and why is it not better secured and not even equipped with an alarm system? This is one of the many questions the episode never really answers.

Though the moon pool is guarded by a lone Stormtrooper, who quickly winds up taking a plunge into the moon pool, while Obi-Wan sneaks into the Fortress proper, his Jedi robes mysteriously dry. Maybe quick drying clothes is a Force power we haven’t yet seen, though it’s more likely just a continuity error. Not that blatant continuity errors don’t happen, but they normally don’t happen in a production of the size and scale and budget of a Star Wars series. Throwing the Stormtrooper into the moon pool is not a bad way to dispose of an inconvenient body, but I still wonder why Obi-Wan didn’t just borrow the Stormtrooper’s armour as a disguise, like Luke and Han did in A New Hope and Din Djarin did in season 2 of The Mandalorian. Of course, Obi-Wan also sneaks around the Death Star in his Jedi robes in A New Hope, but that Obi-Wan is a lot more confident in his Force abilities than the down and out version from this series.

The bulk of this comparatively short (only about 35 minutes runtime) episode is given over to Obi-Wan sneaking through the corridors of the Fortress Inquisitorius, dodging seeker droids and Stormtroopers, using his patented “Make a noise somewhere else to distract them” technique, while Tala access a computer terminal and directs Obi-Wan via one of those handheld com-links we saw C-3PO use in A New Hope.

It’s all very thrilling stuff, however, it’s also highly familiar, because we’ve seen it all before. Rescuing someone from an Imperial detention facility is a stock Star Wars plot along with infiltrating a secured location or trying to escape a planet under siege. And so we’ve seen daring rescues like the one in this episode pulled off in The Mandalorian, The Force Awakens, Return of the Jedi and most famously in A New Hope, where the subject to be rescued is even the same one as here, namely Princess Leia, albeit ten years later.

The parallels to A New Hope are really glaring, as many reviewers including The Guardian‘s Andy Welch, io9‘s Germain Lussier and The Daily Dot‘s Gavia Baker-Whitelaw all point out. At one point, a suspicious officer even questions Tala what she is doing there and forces her to abandon the terminal, leaving Obi-Wan’s voice echoing out of the com-link lying on the desk in a scene very reminiscent of the scene in A New Hope, where C-3PO and R2-D2 have to bluff their way out of an encounter with some Stormtroopers and almost get Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie squashed in a garbage press in the process. Thankfully, Obi-Wan avoids garbage chutes and presses, while Tala doesn’t bluff her way out of the situation, but takes out the Imperial officer maybe five meters from two other officers who fail to notice anything at all amiss.

Which brings me to another issue: The rescue mission may be thrilling, but it’s also incredibly badly planned or rather there is no real plan at all, as Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin points out. Not that Star Wars in general isn’t known for its meticulously planned rescue mission and indeed most of the daring rescues we’ve seen in Star Wars over the years only succeeded due to a combination of luck and glaring security oversights on the side of the Empire. However, it is a bit depressing that Luke Skywalker, an untrained farm boy from Tatooine, could come up with a better rescue plan than Obi-Wan and Tala, a Jedi master and former general and an Imperial officer turned proto-rebel.

At one point, Obi-Wan wanders into a corridor which is lined with glass-fronted cabinets holding the bodies of Jedi and other Force sensitives pickled in formaldehyde. I immediately assumed that we were probably expected to recognise some of those pickled Jedi and indeed, one is a minor supporting character from an episode of the Clone Wars cartoon, while another is a kid, obviously one of the padawans from the Jedi Temple. “This isn’t a fortress, it’s a tomb,” Obi-Wan mutters and indeed I wonder just why the Empire is keeping pickled Jedi in some underwater corridor deep inside the Fortress Inquisitorius? Is is just a macabre trophy gallery?  Or are they conducting cloning experiments like the one for which Moff Gideon and Werner Herzog wanted capture poor Baby Grogu?

Obi-Wan finally located Leia, when he hears her screaming. Yes really, he locates the very person he’s looking for in a giant fortress by chancing to hear her scream, which makes just as much sense as everything else about this whole rescue.

However, the torture chamber is guarded by Stormtroopers and Third Sister is there as well, so Obi-Wan calls Tala and asks her to create a diversion, which Tala promptly does. Tala demands to speak to Third Sister, claiming to be a double agent who has important information about the path. Third Sister is no fool and so she is sceptical of Tala and her motives. Interestingly, so is the viewer, because it is entirely possible that Tala is truly a double agent and working for the Empire after all. The fact that Indira Varma is mostly known for playing ambiguous and sometimes downright treacherous characters – remember Suzy Costello from Torchwood? – certainly helps to create that little seed of doubt.

But whoever she really is working for, Tala does interrupt the interrogation, giving Obi-Wan the chance to rescue Leia. The scene where the lights go out in the torture chamber and Obi-Wan’s lightsabre lights up the darkness, as he dispatches of the Stormtrooper guards is legitimately great.

Obi-Wan rescues Leia, but the corridors are still swarming with seeker droids and Stormtroopers. Obi-Wan does his best to dodge them, but he also has a terrified ten-year-old girl in tow and so eventually he and Leia are spotted. The alarm is raised and Third Sister sets off in pursuit, unwisely leaving Tala alone with only two Stormtroopers to guard her. The Stormtroopers are no more match for Tala than for anybody else and so Tala manages to escape and come to the aid of Obi-Wan and Leia.

Obi-Wan and Leia have been cornered in an underwater corridor and so Obi-Wan has to protect Leia, while blocking Stormtrooper shots with his lightsabre. Unfortunately, one of the blaster shots goes wide and cracks the glass walls on the corridor. Why do Stromtroopers use weapons that can crack walls in an underwater base? You’ll have to ask the Empire, cause I certainly have no idea. Though it makes for an impressive sequence, as Obi-Wan uses the Force to hold the glass together and the water back, while deflecting blaster shots with his lightsabre.

Luckily, Tala arrives in the nick of time and so Obi-Wan and Leia escape through a glass door, while the pursuing Stormtroopers are caught in the water break-in and presumably drown. Once again, one would expect the Stormtroopers to have some kind of breathing apparatus built into their helmets, but the scene of the dead Stormtroopers floating in the flooded is genuinely creepy.

Now, Obi-Wan does don an Imperial uniform as a disguise, though it’s not Stormtrooper armour, but an officer’s uniform consisting of a cap and an oversized trenchcoat. Have we seen Imperial officers wearing khaki trenchcoats before? I can’t recall any examples outside earlier in this episode, though the rebels do have khaki trenchcoats. But unlike the more tailored black long coats we’ve sometimes seen Imperial officers wear, the trenchcoat does offer the space to hide Leia underneath, since a ten-year-old girl will stick out like a sore thumb on an Imperial military base.

Not that Obi-Wan with Leia stuffed under his trenchcoat does not stick out like a sore thumb, because he does. For starters, Imperial officers are all clean-shaven – the only bearded officers we ever see in Star Wars are rebels – but Obi-Wan not only has a beard, his beard is also not very well kempt. Not to mention the fact that his trenchcoat is too big for him and has a child-sized lump on one side. And yes, I know that “disgusing yourself as your enemy” is a common trope, in Star Wars (in fact, A New Hope was where I first came across this trope and found it oh so clever) and elsewhere, even though the result often isn’t all that convincing, whether it’s Luke being too short for a Stormtrooper, Din Djarin literally not knowing what to do with his face, when he’s forced to take the helmet off, Indiana Jones borrowing an ill-fitting Nazi uniform without the shirt and getting caught, He-Man disguising himself as a Horde Trooper and getting caught because a lock of blonde hair sticks out of the helmet in The Secret of the Sword or He-Man disguising himself as a visiting Horde Inspector in an episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power and miraculously not getting caught, even though he looks nothing like the man he’s impersonating and his only disguise is a borrowed uniform and a fake beard. Obi-Wan’s Imperial officer disguise is about as convincing as He-Man with a fake beard or shirtless Indiana Jones in a Nazi uniform jacket, i.e. not convincing at all.

io9‘s James Whitbrook actually likes the trenchcoat disguise, because – as he points out – rescue missions in Star Wars are usually badly planned affairs and the suspense generated by the characters almost getting caught is a big part of the fun. But while I’m willing to accept Han and Luke dressing up in Stormtrooper armour and escorting Chewie to the detention block in order to rescue Leia or Din Djarin and Migs Mayfield infiltrating an Imperial mining outpost in order to get some vital information (and note that neither mission goes as planned and the characters have to improvise and are discovered), the rescue mission in Obi-Wan Kenobi is a bit too absurd for my taste.

Somehow, Tala and Obi-Wan with Leia stuck under his borrowed coat make it past the checkpoint at the entrance to the hangar deck and are halfway across the hangar, when Third Sister shows up with a whole lot of Stormtroopers in tow and all hell breaks loose. Obi-Wan, Leia and Tala try to make a run for it, but they’re cut off from the shuttles.

But just when it seems that all is lost, two Snow Speeders or rather the vehicles we know as Snow Speeders, since there obviously is no snow on the Inquisitors’ planet, show up, piloted by two of Tala’s pals of The Path. They fire at Stormtroopers and one Snow Speeder takes Tala, Obi-Wan and Leia aboard. It must be really crowded inside that thing, because the cockpit was barely big enough for two in The Empire Strikes Back.

Both Snow Speeders make a triumphant escape, but one – piloted by a redshirt named Wade – is shot down. Miraculously, there is no pursuit, because – as Emmet Asher-Perrin notes in their review at Tor.com – security at the Fortress Inquisitorius is abysmal with no gun turrets, TIE-fighters, force fields, tractor beams or any other kind of security measures.

The surviving Snow Speeder with Obi-Wan, Tala, Leia and pilot Sully on board makes it back to a spacecraft piloted by Roken, who clearly had a change of heart. He’s initially enthusiastic, too, until Tala tells him of Wade’s death, which clearly affects Roken and Sully deeply. I would have liked for the sacrifice of poor Wade to affect me, too – and note that deaths of underdeveloped or one-of characters can affect you, see Porkins for a Star Wars example or Zak from the original Battlestar Galactica for a non-Star Wars one. Alas, Wade is no Porkins and so his death is literally the death of a random redshirt.

Darth Vader finally arrives at the Fortress, just as Obi-Wan, Tala and Leia have made their escape. And since Darth Vader really does not like failure, he promptly proceeds to Force-choke Third Sister, leaving her hanging suspended in the air to the obvious delight of Fifth Brother. However, Third Sister is able to stave off her execution by informing Darth Vader that she placed a tracker on the escapees, which will lead them to Obi-Wan, The Path and all the escaped Jedi. So that’s where Darth Vader got the idea from.

Coincidentally, the tracker plan might also explain why there was no attempt at pursuit or shooting down the escapees – just like the half-hearted chase with four TIE-fighters in A New Hope. Indeed, this may also be via Leia saw through the ploy with the TIE-fighters at once, because she literally experienced this whole situation before.

The final scene shows Leia taking Obi-Wan’s hand in the hold of Roken’s spaceship, while Tala comforts Sully about the loss of the late lamented Wade. The camera pans open to reveal a sinister red light glowing in Leia’s pocket. It’s her little droid Lola, now equipped with an Imperial tracker.

I may sound overly critical, but don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this episode, while I was watching it and there are some genuinely good moments. However, even by Star Wars standards, this was an ill thought out rescue plan. Hell, I’ve seen better thought out rescue plans in cartoons aimed at children.

But my biggest issue is that in spite of the thrilling action and great visuals, it also feels like something we’ve seen before, because the beats are borrowed almost one to one from A New Hope.

A large part of Marvel‘s success, which is keeping the franchise fresh even after more than twenty movies and TV shows, is that it tells a variety of very different stories that just happen to be set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and feature superheroes. Marvel movies and TV-shows can be action thrillers, epic fantasy, gonzo space operas, retro war movies, heist movies, teen dramas, X-Files type paranoia,multiverse spectaculars, family sitcoms, time travel adventures, Christmas movies and much more.

Meanwhile  Star Wars, the other big franchise Disney acquired in their bid to rule to universe, keeps telling the same story over and over again, even though their universe is as big, if not bigger than Marvel, and offers an unlimited potential for telling stories, so why do we always get the same story remixed and retold. And yes, we we all loved that story back in the day, but maybe it’s time to tell a different story. It’s certainly no accident that the best of the Disney era Star Wars stories – The Mandalorian, Rogue One, The Last Jedi (which was a good movie viewed in isolation, it just didn’t fit in with the other two) – are those which at least try to do something other than telling the same damned story over and over again.

So far, Obi-Wan Kenobi has offered a fine remix of the classic Star Wars story. I just wish it would do more.

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Dinosaurs and Fists of Steel”

The next Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Obi-Wan Kenobi reviews are coming, but I had a stressful day, somewhat relieved by the mail person bringing me toys, so here is another short Master-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

The background is that in 1987, Mattel was planning to send He-Man back in time and produced three bionic dinosaurs for the Masters of the Universe figures to ride, including a triceratops called Bionatops. The dinosaurs were never made again in any of the later Masters of the Universe lines, but I had the idea that maybe a Schleich triceratops would work as well, so I ordered one and he (or she) arrived today. And even if the triceratops wouldn’t work for my Masters of the Universe figures, it’s still an awesome dinosaur and you can never have too many dinosaurs:

“Don’t mind me, I’m just grazing here and enjoying the grass and the flowers.”

The mail person also brought me Jitsu, a rather underdeveloped member of Skeletor’s Evil Warriors, who only appeared once in the 1980s Filmation cartoon and not at all in any of the subsequent cartoons, probably because he was portrayed very much as a racist stereotype in the Filmation cartoon, so no one wanted to tackle him in later incarnations. And yes, it’s depressing that the only Asian character in Masters of the Universe is an underdeveloped bad guy. Though come to think of it, there also was a ninja character who was even more underdeveloped.

That said, Jitsu does make a great action figure, so I put him next to my new triceratops.

“Ah, what a fearsome beast! I shall tame you and ride you to Snake Mountain to strike fear in the hearts of my enemies.”

“Eat shit and die, mammal.”

Jitsu is often considered Fisto’s archenemy, probably because they both have a prosthetic metal hand. So of course, I had to pit them against each other and this is what happened:

“So we finally meet again, Fisto, my old enemy. And this time I shall vanquish you with my deadly steel chop.”

“Well, I’ve got a steel fist of my own.”

“But mine is shinier.”

“And mine is bigger.”

“I have a dinosaur.”

“And I have Ram-Man.”

“Actually, mammal, you don’t have a dinosaur. I just happened to be passing by, minding my own business, when you showed up.”

“Eat steel knuckles, Gold Boy.”

“Feel my golden chop.”

“Hey, that’s my boyfriend you’re beating up there.”

“Ah, the sweet smell of testosterone. Mammals, so predictable.”

“Leave Fisto alone or I swear I’ll ram you into the ground.”

“Bring it on, Bucket Head!”

“Look, mammals, could you maybe do that somewhere else, cause I only wanted some peace and quiet in the sun?”

“Take that, Gold Hand Dude.” Rammm!

“Oww, my head. Krass, what happened?”

“He knocked you out and then I knocked him out, Malcolm. But we won.”

“That’s it. I’m leaving and finding a quiet place far away from all of those brawling mammals.”

I did put a Masters of the Universe figure on the Schleich triceratops and it does work, though Fisto looks a bit like Lee Marvin’s drunken cowboy from Cat Ballou when riding the triceratops. Though as these picture show, the original 1987 Bionatops wasn’t all that big either.

“I was born under a wand’rin’ star… la, la, la, la…”

“Shut up, mammal! Your voice is terrible and besides, that song isn’t even from Cat Ballou, but from Paint Your Wagon.”

“And what does a dinosaur know about music from movies released on another planet?”

“I’m a very culturally interested dinosaur. And besides, what does a grumpy and drunkard loser like you know about movies from another planet?”

“Queen Marlena holds regular movie nights at the royal palace. Krass and I always attend. Anyway, can’t you go any faster, boy. I’ll be late for dinner.”

“I’m not a boy, I’m a girl, idiot.”

“Well, can’t you go any faster, girl? I promise, I’ll give you a nice big lamb chop, when we get back to the palace.”

“I’m a herbivore, idiot.”

“Well, then I’ll give you a pot of potatoes. Or maybe carrots?”

“A big bowl of salad and we’re in business.”

“Okay, deal. I was born under a wand’rin’ star… la, la, la, la…”

“Oh, not again!”

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the.Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story. There’ll be more stories, including the already announced She-Ra story, since the Evil Horde has gained a few more members in the meantime.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

A Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special: “Fisto’s Significant Other”

I’m interrupting the steady stream of Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Obi-Wan Kenobi reviews for another Masters of the Universe action figure photo story. I was always planning to do more of these and I also posted a few on Twitter, but blog posts are less ephemeral.

The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server, by the way, based on the Masterpiece Theatre series of random British TV dramas presented by PBS in the US. I like the name and adopted it with thanks to Kevin.

Initially, I was going to continue the Secrets of Eternia series with a look at the backstory of She-Ra, He-Man’s long lost twin sister, but that was somewhat stymied by the fact that though I have a great She-Ra figure, the Evil Horde was rather anaemic to the point that Hordak had to borrow henchpeople from Skeletor.

So instead, you get a different story today. My photo story about the origins of Teela and particularly who her biological parents are ended with Fisto (whom the people behind the 2002 Masters of the Universe cartoon planned to reveal as Teela’s biological father for reasons best known to themselves) coming out as gay to his estranged brother Man-at-Arms. The fact that Fisto and Man-at-Arms are brothers was established in the 2002 cartoon. However, Fisto being gay is purely my head canon, because with a name like that, how can he not be?

“The Origin of Teela” story ended with Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms and Malcolm a.k.a. Fisto going for a drink. And here is a sequel, where we finally learn who Fisto’s significant other is:

“Well, Duncan, when you said, let’s have a drink, I expected a tavern and beer, not… Wait a minute, is that mother’s prized tea set? I had no idea that thing still existed.”

“I kept it. For Teela, for when she gets married.”

“If that idiot Prince Adam ever gets a move on and pops the question, you mean?”

“He’s not an idiot. He’s just… shy.”

“Well, I doubt that the future Queen of Eternia needs mother’s old tea set, considering she’ll inherit a palace full of fine china and silverware. Besides, I don’t think Teela is the type for fancy tea sets anyway.”

“You’re right. She’d only use it as target practice. Talking of which, I could have sworn there used to be more cups. Anyway, Malcolm, do you want tea? And some pastries maybe?”

“Actually, I want a beer, but since tea and pastries are all I get, I guess the answer is yes.”

“Anyway, you wanted to know if I have someone and the answer is yes and it’s…”

“Man-e-Faces.”

“What? No. Oh, hi Manny. Bad timing.”

“Am I interrupting anything?

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“I won’t be long. I just wanted to let you know that I’m off for a few days to play Hamlet in Avion. You know, my real job, before I got drafted into this whole saving Eternia thing.”

“Also, just because I’m an actor doesn’t mean I’m gay. Why do people always assume that? Does not compute. Anyway, I’m off. See you in five days. Nice tea set, by the way.”

“All right, so where were we? Oh yes, you wanted to know if I have someone and the answer is yes I do and it’s Ram-Man.”

“Hi boss. Yup, Malcolm and I are together. Hope you don’t mind. Nice tea set, by the way. Oh, pastries. Munch, munch.”

“Sure, help yourself. Why not? After all, you’re apparently part of the family now.”

“Hi, Dad, Uncle Malcolm, Rammy. Did we miss a tactics meeting? Anyway, Adam and I are going to borrow the Wind Raider, if you don’t mind, Dad. We’re going to… uhm… patrol the outer perimeter.”

“Hey, Teela, isn’t that the ugly tea set that we… mumble.”

“Shush! Dad is really weird about that tea set. If he finds out that we broke some of the cups…”

“Do you two have anything to say for yourselves? For example, why two cups of your grandmother’s prized tea set went missing?”

“Uhm…”

“I’m waiting, young lady.”

“Ahem, actually, I have something to say. I’m gay and Ram-Man and I are together.”

“Hey, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy for both of you.”

“Thanks for covering for us, Uncle.”

“No problem. I know how weird your father is about that tea set.”

“Anyway, Dad, we’re off to… ahem… patrol the outer perimeter.”

“See you later, Duncan. Oh pastries! You don’t mind, if we take some, do you? The outer perimeter is very far out.”

“Sure, take my pastries. Why not? It’s not as if I ever get any of my own cake.”

“Well, all things considered that didn’t go too badly. I mean, your brother wasn’t mad at us and that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Plus, we got pastries”

“Duncan only isn’t mad because he was too busy worrying about Mom’s old tea set. Though I have to say ‘patrolling the outer perimeter’ is a great excuse. I wish we would have thought of that one.”

“You mean, Adam and Teela are not…?”

“Trust me, the only perimeters those two are patrolling are each other’s bodies.”

Patrolling the outer perimeter.

“Hmm, those pastries are really good. And Fisto and Rammy are an item. That’s… unexpected. I mean I had no idea. Did you?”

“No, but I’m happy for them. Dad always says that Uncle Malcolm needs someone to look after him and now he has someone. Plus, they no longer have to hide, neither from Dad nor from anybody else.”

“So… uhm… do you think we should tell our parents? About us, I mean?”

“Oh dear, Dad would give me the birds and the bees lecture. The one he obviously ignored or I wouldn’t exist.”

“Come to think of it, Duncan would probably kill me. And I’m no match for him as Adam.”

“Dad would never kill you. He loves you. You’re the son I failed to be. But I suspect your parents wouldn’t be too happy. They probably wanted someone else for you. Someone with a royal title like those pink and pretty princesses your sister always hangs out with.”

“Don’t say that! My parents love you. Dad’s always going, ‘Why can’t you be more like Teela, son?’ But if we told them, Mom would start making wedding plans and Dad would drop hints about grandchildren and preserving the royal lineage.”

“That’s scary.”

“So we don’t tell them? At least not yet.”

“No, it’s wonderful as it is and I… well, I don’t want to jinx it.”

“You know, we could just elope. Find a priest and a temple in some village, get married and then tell our families. No pressure, no party, no big ceremony, just you and me.”

“Come on, Adam, you’re being silly. And now kiss me.”

***

As for how Ram-Man ended up becoming Fisto’s significant other, the initial spark was this tweet by John Chu

Wait, the He-Man universe had both a Fisto and a Ram-Man?

— John Chu (@john_chu) June 1, 2022

So I put the Fisto and Ram-Man figures next to each other and they made a cute couple. Besides in the 2002 He-Man cartoon (the same one which retconned Fisto into Man-at-Arms’ brother), Ram-Man is very protective of Teela, second only to Duncan and Adam. So it makes sense, if they were family of sorts.

The tea set was a lucky accident. For while I didn’t have a miniature mug or beer jug for Man-at-Arms and Fisto to share a drink, I remembered that I had a miniature tea set, which is exactly at the right scale. So I used the tea set and the story became much funnier as a result. The bit that Man-at-Arms doesn’t get to eat any of his own pastries is a reference to the time he won the 2021 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award and didn’t get a single slice of Martha Kent’s famous apple pie, which serves as a trophy.

Unfortunately, the male figures are too bulky to get them to hug or kiss each other (and Ram-Man is extra bulky), but they can hold hands and look deep into each other’s eyes. Though it does work with Adam and Teela, as you can see.

The Adam and Teela coda wasn’t part of the original Twitter thread. However, I realised that “patrolling the outer perimeter” sounds an awful lot like an excuse to sneak away for some private time together. Especically since this episode of the original cartoon shows that the bedroom arrangements in the royal palace make nightly visits nigh impossible, because Adam or Teela would have to sneak past both their respective parents and Cringer, too (bonus Man-at-Arms without his helmet, Randor and Marlena in 1950s TV appropriate separate beds and Teela’s sexy pink nightgown). So if Adam and Teela want to spend some qaulity time together, they’d have to leave the palace. And yes, I do have a Wind Raider.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the.Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special. There’ll be more stories, including the already announced She-Ra story, since the Evil Horde has now gained a few more members.

As a bonus, here is Man-e-Faces, who has always been protrayed as an actor turned heroic defender of Eternia, performing Hamlet, specifically, act V, scene 1.

Alas, poor Keldor! I knew him, He-Man: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it.

Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?

Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners. Also, apologies to William Shakespeare.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds meets the “Ghosts of Illyria” and uncovers some dark secrets of the crew

It’s time for the next Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review. Reviews of previous episodes (well, just two so far) may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers under the cut!

The episode opens with the Enterprise exploring the remains of an Illyrian colony on a planet called Hetemit IX. The Illyrians, so the voiceover courtesy of Una Chin-Riley a.k.a. Number One informs us, are a humanoid race who genetically modify themselves. This brings them into conflict with the Federation, where genetic modifications are banned because Khan Noonien-Singh was a murderous arsehole who started a war. And yes, this literally is the explanation given. As a result, the Federation wants nothing to do with the Illyrians. They can’t join the Federation and individual Illyrians are not allowed to join Starfleet and probably not even to become Federation citizens.

Watching this episode, I had no idea if the Illyrians had ever been mentioned in Star Trek before. But luckily there are people like Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido who know more about these things than me. And Keith R.A. DeCandido reports that the Illyrians were first mentioned in a 1989 Star Trek novel named Vulcan’s Glory by D.C. Fontana, which is set before “The Cage” (and consequently before Strange New Worlds) and which mentioned that Number One a.ka. Una Chin-Riley is a genetically modified Illyrian. Until fairly recently, this was one of the very few things about the character that we knew. Considering that the Federation feels about genetically modified individuals much like ordinary humans in the Marvel Universe feel about mutants, it’s easy to see why the fact that Number One is Illyrian will become a problem.

Number One is a member of the away team exploring the ruins of the Illyrian colony on Hetemit IX along with Pike, Spock and a bunch of redshirt ensigns. Since Hetemit IX is battered by regular ion storms, the away team cannot stay on the surface for long, because another storm is approaching. Number One gathers the team together, including a floppy-haired ensign who seems overly interested in some test tubes and other chemical equipment – because touching chemical equipment of unknown origin is such a brilliant idea – to beam everybody up. This proves to be difficult, because the storm is interfering with the transporter – at least until Hemmer, the brilliant but grumpy Andorian chief engineer, works his engineering magic and provides an extra boost of power for the transporter. Hemmer was largely a cameo appearance in the first two episodes, but this episode finally gives him more to do as well as a personality. Unfortunately, that personality is Dr. House, only as a blind albino Andorian engineer.

But even though Hemmer and the young transporter operator Chief Kyle manage to beam up the away team, there’s still trouble, because Captain Pike and Spock are still stuck on the surface, because Spock found the colony’s library/archive and forgot the time over reading, which Keith R.A. DeCandido says is the most Spock thing ever. So the Enterprise has to wait for the ion storm to subside before they can beam up Spock and Pike, who need to find shelter in the abandoned colony in the meantime.

At this point, I assumed we would be in for a spooky survival thriller in the abandoned colony on Hetemit IX and we do get some of that. However, the bulk of the episode is set aboard the Enterprise, for it turns out that a biological contagion hitched a ride on the transporter. Which is not supposed to happen, because the transporter’s bio filters are supposed to filter out any contagions. Someone should tell Discovery this, which had an issue with bio filters in spacesuits not filtering out psychedelic alien dust in season 4.

The first indication that something is wrong is when the floppy-haired ensign who messed about with the test tubes in the ruined colony (I knew that was a bad idea) suddenly starts tearing off his clothes in a corridor, crying that he needs more light, and then breaks a light fixture, injuring himself in the process. Erica Ortegas, who finds him, takes him to Dr. M’benga, where it turns out that the floppy-haired ensign is not the only person desperate for light. And all of those affected were members of the away team on Hetemit IX.

Meanwhile, Number One is in her quarters and suddenly finds that it’s rather dark in there. She order the computer to turn up the light and even tears open her uniform to soak up more light. Then she suddenly begins to glow orange and seems to be normal again. Shortly thereafter, M’Benga calls her to inform her that the Enterprise has a problem. Several members of the away team have fallen ill, all are craving light and have abnormally, even dangerously low vitamin D levels. Dr. M’Benga and Christine Chapel suspect that an unknown alien virus is responsible for the problem. Number One asks M’Benga to check her out. He does, but her vitamin D levels are normal.

This was the first point in the episode where I thought, “Now wait a minute, this makes no sense.” For starters, while it’s true that the body needs light to generate vitamin D, it needs sunlight, specifically UV-B light. Artificial light from lamps, etc… won’t do, because lamps don’t normally give of ultraviolet light nor do you want them to, because too much ultraviolet light is harmful. Of course, there are specific ultraviolet lamps used in greenhouses and the like (and for indoor marihuana plantations), but I doubt that the regular Enterprise lights are ultraviolet lamps. Furthermore, while vitamin D deficiency can have serious health consequences (low bone density and immune system problems and low vitamin D levels are also associated with severe cases of covid), it is easily treated by vitamin D supplements which you can buy in any drugstore. My Mom takes them regularly, because she does not go out a lot and doesn’t get enough natural sunlight. I sometimes take them, too, when I haven’t been outdoors for a while. So when Dr. M’Benga started talking about dangerously low vitamin D levels, I thought, “I have an almost full pack of vitamin D pills in the cellar that I’d be happy to donate to the Enterprise crew.”

Number One goes to see Hemmer and asks him how the hell some kind of virus could get aboard the Enterprise with the away team. Hemmer insists that this is impossible, because the biological filters should have filtered out any unknown contagion. Number One insists that Hemmer run a full diagnostic anyway, which he reluctantly does.

Not long thereafter, security chief La’an Noonien-Singh begins to show the same symptoms as the members of the away team. However, La’an was never on Hetemit IX, suggesting that whatever causes the disease is spreading from person to person. As more and more crewmembers fall ill, Number One orders a shipwide lockdown with all non-essential personnel confined to their quarters.

As a cadet, Uhura is considered non-essential and so she’s sent to the quarters she shares with two other crewmembers. She goes to bed and when she wakes up, she finds her two roommates dancing around a sun simulation. Both of them have contracted the disease, but Uhura is perfectly fine. Number One believes this may be the key to finding out what triggers the disease and asks Uhura exactly what happened. It turns out that Uhura closed the sleeping compartment, when she went to bed, and was in complete darkness. This leads Number One and M’Benga to assume that the disease is transmitted via light. And yes, I know that lightwaves don’t normally transmit diseases, but I could have suspended my disbelief for this, if not for the other gross stupidities perpetrated in this episode.

In spite of the shipwide lockdown, crewmembers keep falling ill and M’Benga and Christine Chapel have their hands full, when Hemmer shows up and wants to check the emergency medical transporter as part of his general diagnostic. Dr. M’Benga is not at all happy about this and insists that the emergency medical transporter is not the source of the problem. Hemmer insists on checking it anyway, when the lights in the sickbay suddenly go off. “Hmm, this shouldn’t have happened”, Hemmer mutters and leaves. The camera pans in on M’Benga to show that he has clandestinely operated the master light switch in the infirmary. Looks like the good doctor has something to hide.

Now the crew knows that the disease is transmitted via light, Number One orders all lights aboard the Enterprise dimmed. Because this causes pain for those struck by the disease, Number One and M’Benga decide to sedate everybody. And still nobody even considers just giving the affected crewmembers vitamin D supplements, intravenously if necessary.

Number One receives a message about a problem with the transporter. She goes to investigate and finds Hemmer trying to beam a glowing piece of Hetemit IX’s mantle aboard Enterprise, so there will be enough light. Unfortunately, the manooeuvre would also seriously endanger or even destroy the ship and it would do nothing to help Hemmer, because planetary mantles do not emit ultraviolet rays, never mind that it’s not even sure if Hemmer, who is a completely different species with a different skin colour, synthesizes vitamin D from UV-B light, like humans do. Since Hemmer is endangering the ship, Number One stuns him and bodily carries him to sickbay, even though Hemmer is rather heavy, something that Christine Chapel comments upon.

Now Number One finally comes clean. She already caught the virus, but her immune system fought it off like it has been engineered to do, since she is one of the dreaded Illyrians. She tells M’Benga that the cure is in her blood and asks him to synthesize it. M’Benga says that he can’t, whereupon Number One tells him that she’s aware of Starfleet regulations forbidding the mixing of human with evil genetically engineered Illyrian blood, but there are lives at stake here. M’Benga replies that’s not the reason, he recognises the ban on genetic modification as the idiotic overreaction and prejudice that it is. However, Number One’s immune system has done such a good job at wiping out the virus that there’s nothing left for M’Benga to analyse.

While all this is going on, Pike and Spock are still stuck on Hetemit IX. Pike is pacing the archive, while Spock continues his study of the records left behind by the Illyrians. The storm closes in and in the storm, Spock and Pike see strange glowing energy creatures, the titular ghosts. And they truly are ghosts, because as Spock learns from the archive (Spock’s role in this episode is basically Mr. Exposition) this particular group of Illyrians was so desperate to join the Federation that they attempted to reverse their genetic modifications. As a result, they caught the same virus that strock down the Enterprise crew and since they had de-engineered their boosted immune system, they all died. Some of the colonists were affected so badly by the virus that they ran into the ion storms seeking light and were transformed into the friendly energy ghosts that protect Pike and Spock from the storm, when it breaches the compound.

Aboard the Enterprise, Number One – who is one of the last crewmembers left standing – receives a message that the Warp field containment is weakening. She goes to investigate and finds La’an, who has knocked out Christine Chapel, when she tried to sedate her and now decides that breaching the warp core will finally give her enough light. I suspect that a warp core breach might emit UV-B radiation along with a whole lot of other, far more deadly spectrums of radiation.

Number One tries to stop La’an, whereupon La’an, who was mercilessly bullied as a child (that would have been before she was abducted by the Gorn) for being the descendant of that noted mass murderer Khan Noonien-Singh, screams at Number One that she is a genetically engineered monster. Now La’an has not inherited Khan’s modifications, though she does prove that people named Noonien-Singh should be kept away from the Enterprise‘s warp core at all costs. Number One finally manages to subdue La’an when the warp containment field begins to fail, flooding engineering with radiation. Both Number One and La’an glow.

There is a cut and the episode continues with Dr. M’Benga being woken from sedation by Christine Chapel and Number One. It turns out that Number One’s augmented immune system saved her from a lethal dose of radiation. However, it saved not only her, but La’an as well and cured the disease in the process, too. And since La’an is not Illyrian, but a plain regular unmodified human, she developed antibodies, which Christine was able to synthesize to cure the crew. And if you’re screaming at the screen at this point, “This is not how immune systems work. None of this makes any sense,” then you’re not alone.

Number One also tells M’Benga point blank that they have found the cause of the problem, namely the emergency medical transporter, whose bio filters were not upgraded along with the regular transporter, because Dr. M’Benga refused the upgrade. Number One further reveals that she knows that M’Benga is storing something in the pattern buffer of the transporter and wants to know what the hell he was thinking. M’Benga reveals that what he’s keeping in the pattern buffer of the emergency medical transporter is not a something but a someone, his terminally ill daughter. Because M’Benga can’t cure her, he keeps her in the pattern buffer until a cure is found. Upgrading the emergency medical transporter would have interrupted the power supply and deleted the pattern buffer and his daughter. M’Benga fully expects that Number One will order him delete his daughter and only asks for some time with her, but Number One will do no such thing. Instead, she will arrange for the emergency medical supporter to get a permanent power supply to keep the daughter safe. Of course, the away team didn’t even use the emergency medical transporter, but the main transporter with the bio filter upgrades, but the episode is not concerned with such details.

Once Pike and Spock have safely returned from Hetemit IX, Number One goes to see him and offers to resign her commission, since she hid the fact that she was an Illyrian to join Starfleet. Pike, however, will have nothing of this and when Number One says that not turning her in might get him into trouble, Pike replies with, “Let them try.”

Finally, Number One goes to see La’an in the Enterprise mess hall to make up – the first episode revealed that they have a close connection. Number One says that the Illyrians were not like Khan, they genetically modify themselves in order to adapt to their environment rather than terraform planets, which reminds Paul Levinson of the 1950 science fiction story “Enchanted Village” by A.E. Van Vogt.

The Enterprise mess hall displays yet more of the glorious retro design that characterises Strange New Worlds so far, e.g. the sets look like something from the 1960s, only with a much higher budget. And so the Enterprise mess hall is reminiscent of Verner Panton’s Spiegel cafeteria from 1969 in all its psychedelic glory. Thr Illyrian archive is furnished with midcentury Knoll International sofas and the abandoned colony on Hetemit IX looks like an abandoned World Fair of the late 1960s or early 1970s, complete with Buckminster Fuller domes, glass bricks, walkways and brutalist architecture, which is very fitting, since science fiction films liked using abandoned World Fair sites for filming in the 1970s and beyond (large parts of Iron Man 2 were shot on the grounds of the 1964 World Fair in New York City).

But while the visuals and the acting of Strange New Worlds continue to be great and I really like the characters, plus everybody passes the “What would Commander McLane do?” test this episode, I still can’t look beyond the fact that the entire light virus plot is complete and utter nonsense that makes zero scientific sense. Ditto for the fact that Number One was somehow able to join Starfleet and serve for years without anybody ever scanning her to notice that a) she is not human, though she looks human, and b) she’s genetically modified.

But then, telling a science fiction story that makes sense is not what this episode is about. Instead, “Ghosts of Illyria” is another example of Star Trek using a science fiction story to deliver a moral message, in this case that blanket prejudices are wrong. And while the message is still rather blunt, “Ghosts of Illyria” manages to do a better job at delivering it than “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, not that that is a high mark. And indeed, this would have been a good episode, if not for the fact that the science makes so little sense that my suspension of disbelief was completely shattered. It also doesn’t help that while I may be able to except a lot of gobbledegook about transporters and pattern buffers, since there are no transporters and pattern buffers in the real world, I know how vitamin D works, how ultraviolet radiation works and how immune systems work and so the many mistakes just pulled me out of the story.

I’m actually surprised that most reviewers seem to have enjoyed this episode, for while it was enjoyable enough to watch and also has something to say (but then it’s Star Trek and Star Trek always has something to say), the abysmally bad science really ruined this one for me.

Road Trip with Jedi and Princess: Some Thoughts on Part III of Obi-Wan Kenobi

Here are my thoughts on the third episode of the Disney Plus Obi-Wan Kenobi series. For thoughts on previous episodes (well, there only are two), go here.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut!

When we last left our down and out ex-Jedi Master, he had just freed little Princess Leia from her kidnappers and escaped the planet Daiyu on an automated cargo ship.

Part III begins where part II left off, with Obi-Wan and Leia aboard the transport ship. Obi-Wan, who has just learned that his former padawan Anakin Skywalker is still alive, is obviously distraught and calls the Force ghost of his old master Qui-Gon Jinn for help. But once again, Qui-Gon does not answer. Instead, Obi-Wan gets a wrong Force connection (So the Force works like a telephone exchange now?) and connects with Anakin a.k.a. Darth Vader, which also gives us the “Darth Vader getting dressed/armoured up” scene no one particularly asked for, though it serves as a nice reminder for the extent of the injuries Anakin received at the hands of Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan’s meditation is interrupted by Leia, who asks the time-honoured question all little kids on a road trip ask, namely “Are we there yet?” The answer is “not yet”, though Obi-Wan has used the journey to repair Leia’s beloved droid pal Lola. The automated transport takes them to the mining planet Mapuzo, which looks uncannily like the California desert. Because the cargo port (actually just a dusty mesa) is staffed only by droids and not the smarter kind of droids either, so Obi-Wan and Leia are able to sneak off.

The rendezvous point that Haja Estree had mentioned is some way off, so Obi-Wan and Leia have to walk. In the distance, they see Stormtroopers overseeing the locals doing mining work and Obi-Wan notes that the Empire has decimated Mapuzo and is exploiting the planet and its people. “But I thought the Empire were the good guys,” little Leia notes. Obi-Wan hedges that some people, like Leia’s (adoptive) father try to make things better, but that many others don’t, which certainly is one way of putting things.

When Obi-Wan and Leia finally reach the rendezvous point, no one is there. Leia assumes that their contact is just late and wants to wait, but Obi-Wan immediately assumes that they have been set up and wants to get away as soon as possible. Leia asks why and Obi-Wan replies that people are not always good. Throughout this episode, there is a nice contrast between Leia’s openess but also naivety and Obi-Wan’s being suspicious of everybody.

Leia also once again takes the initiative and flags down a transport driven by an alien named Freck (voiced by Zach Breff of Scrubs fame, who’s also down a lot of voice acting in his career). Freck has the Imperial crest painted onto his battered transport and generally is a big fan of the Empire, because “What’s wrong with a little order?” You’ll find people like Freck in any authoritarian state, people who don’t mind the lack of freedom, because order and safety are what they crave. So far, Star Wars hasn’t really shown us the presumably many, many people in the galaxy who don’t particularly object to the Empire, since at least it brought order and safety. Mostly, we see either Imperial true believers or rebels or outlaws who would be at odds with any system.

“Oh, we love the Empire”, Leia lies to Freck, as she climbs aboard the transport and Obi-Wan has no choice but to follow. Obi-Wan also gives Freck a story that they’re Orden and his daughter Luma, two farmers from Tawl who were visiting family on Mapuzo and get lost. Freck is a tad suspicious – why exactly did they got lost in an open field in the middle of nowhere? – but initially goes along with it.

But then Freck, the Imperial sympathiser, stops to pick up yet more passengers in the form of a squad of Stormtroopers whose transport is late. Obi-Wan is just about as uncomfortable in the presence of a whole squad of Stormtroopers as you can imagine, especially once the Stormtroopers start questioning him, who he is, what he’s doing on Mapuzo and if he’s seen any Jedi around and if he’s really sure that he hasn’t seen any Jedi. Obi-Wan also messes up and accidentally calls Leia by her real name, whereupon the Stormtroopers immediately demand to know why he’s called his daughter Leia, when he just said her name was Luma. Obi-Wan tells them that Leia was the name of the girl’s mother, who died, and that sometimes, when he looks at the girl, he sees her mother (though Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin notes that Leia as portrayed here shares as many traits with Anakin as with Padme). The Stormtroopers are satisfied with this explanation – for now – and get off when their stop comes up.

Leia, on the other hand, realises that not everything Obi-Wan told the Stormtroopers was a lie. And so she tells him point-blank that she knows that he knew her biological mother, which Obi-Wan neither confirms nor denies. But Leia isn’t finished yet and asks Obi-Wan if he is her biological father, which – to be fair – is a logical assumption to make when faced with someone who clearly knew her mother and gets misty-eyed, when looking at Leia. This time, Obi-Wan does reply and says, “No, I’m not, but I wish I were.”

Once again, this rings true, for even though I don’t think Obi-Wan ever had any romantic feelings for Padme, he certainly had platonic feelings for her. Plus, Obi-Wan was the one who held Padme’s hand as she gave birth to the twins and died and Obi-Wan was the first person to hold Luke and Leia after they were born. And at the end of Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-Wan delivers baby Luke to Owen and Beru Lars, it  always seems to me as if he would have loved to keep the baby, only that Luke will be much safer with Owen and Beru than with the galaxy’s most wanted Jedi.

Obi-Wan also opens up to Leia about his own family from whom we was taken as a small child like all padawans. He talks about fragmented memories of his mother and father and of a baby he believes was a younger brother, which may be a reference to the fact that Owen Lars was initially supposed to be Obi-Wan’s brother rather than Anakin’s stepbrother. I liked this quiet heart to heart between Obi-Wan and Leia a lot, especially since it is one of the very few times – in fact the only example not involving Anakin – that Star Wars acknowledges that the Jedi miss the families from which they were taken and also that separating children from their families and never letting them see them again is wrong.

Because Leia is an inquisitive little girl and permanently curious, she also asks Obi-Wan about the Force and what it feels like. Of course, Leia probably already knows what the Force feels like, though she doesn’t know what it is. Nonetheless, Obi-Wan answers that the Force is like turning on a light when you’re afraid of the dark. It’s a lovely explanation, probably the best explanation for the Force I’ve yet heard in Star Wars, to the point that I wonder why Obi-Wan didn’t use it with Anakin and Luke. Yeah, I know, because George Lucas, who is not the world’s most gifted writer of dialogue, never thought of it.

Interspersed with Obi-Wan and Leia’s adventures on Mapuzo are scenes of Darth Vader in his citadel on Mustafar. And yes, I get that Darth Vader really likes the Snake Mountain vibes of the place, but would he honestly stay on the planet where he was near fatally maimed? Especially since he has a whole galaxy to choose from?

Just as Obi-Wan can sense Anakin, Anakin can sense Obi-Wan now and is even more determined than ever to capture him. And luckily, he has a most devoted inquisitor at his command with Third Sister, who for as of yet undisclosed reasons of her own is just as obsessed with capturing Obi-Wan as Anakin himself. Darth Vader (still with the iconic voice of by now 91-year-old James Earl Jones, though the suit is now filled by Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) promises Third Sister the position of Grand Inquisitor (which is currently vacant, since Third Sister killed the previous Grand Inquisitor), if she succeeds in bringing in Obi-Wan. Should she fail,  Darth Vader will kill her. In short, Third Sister faces the usual way of advancing through the ranks in the Imperial Forces.

Emboldened by this, Third Sister pulls rank on her fellow inquisitor Fifth Brother, who clearly hopes to take over the vacant position of Grand Inquisitor himself. She notes that the automated frighter on which Obi-Wan and Leia escaped was carrying mining equipment according to its manifest and has extrapolated a number of likely destinations where the freighter might be headed. Third Sister then orders probe droids dispatched to those likely destinations.

This is yet another example where the Star Wars universe is significantly less technologically advanced than our own (obstretic care is another – note how no one noticed that Padme was carrying twins literally until the moment she gave birth). Because in the real world, when two fugitives escape aboard a freighter, it takes a phone call to determine the destination and have someone waiting for the fugitives there. Nor is this new technology – Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen and his lover were arrested upon arrival in Canada after murdering Crippen’s wife and attempting to escape Europe way back in 1910. Furthermore, not only is it easy enough to tell the destination of any freighter – no, you can also track the vessel’s route via GPS, sometimes even online, and – if necessary, e.g. when dealing with a dangerous fugitive like a Jedi knight – airlift a special forces team in en route. In short, jumping aboard a random ship to escape prosecution hasn’t been a thing since 1910 and it certainly isn’t a thing in 2022. However, if a Star Destroyer has intercepted the automated freighter carrying Obi-Wan and Leia, it would have been a very short episode.

As it is, Obi-Wan and Leia dodged a bullet when Freck gave the Stormtroopers a lift, but their luck runs out, when Freck reaches a checkpoint manned by yet more Stormtroopers and pretty much sells out his suspicious passengers to the Stormtroopers. Worse, the Stormtroopers are accompanied by one of the probe droids Third Sister sent out. When the probe droid begins to scan Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan shoots it and the Stormtroopers, too. One Stormtrooper grabs Leia, but Obi-Wan shoots him, too. Of course, their cover is completely blown now and a transport with even more Stormtroopers, accompanied by an officer arrives. It looks as if Obi-Wan and Leia are screwed, but then the Imperial officer suddenly shoots her own troops.

The Imperial officer introduces herself as Tala and she is the person who was supposed to pick up Obi-Wan and Leia at the rendezvous point, only that she was late and they were already gone. So Haja Estree came through after all. Tala is played by Indira Varma, who has quite a sizeable list of genre and genre-related credits, including the lover of Mandalorian-to-be Pedro Pascal in Game of Thrones and John Luther’s ex-wife in Luther. But the role I will always associate her with is the murderous agent Suzy Costello in the first season of Torchwood, back when that show was actually good. The Guardian has an interview with Indira Varma about her role in Obi-Wan Kenobi here, by the way.

We learn that even though Tala apparently voluntarily joined the Imperial Forces, she has long been disillusioned by the Empire and so she is part of “The Path”, a sort of underground railroad to smuggle Jedi and Force-sensitive children to safety. Now a sort of underground railroad to smuggle Jedi, Force-sensitive children and others targeted by the Empire to safety is not really something I ever considered, though once again it makes complete sense that something like this exists, especially considering that clandestine networks trying to get endangered people to safety tend to exist in most totalitarian regimes, whether it’s the original underground railroad of the 19th century or networks hiding Jews in Nazi Germany and occupied territories and trying to get them to safety or networks organising escapes from Communist East Germany. There’s no mention that Tala’s group is affiliated with the Rebellion that we know, though it is likely.

Tala takes Obi-Wan and Leia to a safehouse behind a droid repair shop that is manned by a non-verbal loader droid. Once again, little Leia shows her affinity for droids and introduces not just herself but also her little pal Lola. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan notes messages scribbled on the walls of the safehouse, including one from an old acquaintance named Quinlan. According to io9 reviewer Germain Lussier, this is a reference to one Quinlan Vos, a character who appeared in the Clone Wars cartoon. Meanwhile, Jabiim (which I have to admit I misheard as Yavin), the planet that is the final destination of the Jedi underground railroad, is a reference to a Dark Horse Star Wars comic.

However, Obi-Wan and Leia’s respite at the safehouse is shortlived, for the probe droid managed to contact the Inquisitors before Obi-Wan shot it and now the Empire is closing in. And if the Jedi Inquisitors alone weren’t trouble enough, Darth Vader himself is along for the ride.

Obi-Wan senses this while Tala is leading him and Leia through an underground tunnel that leads to the spaceport, where a pilot will fly them out. That is he not just senses that Anakin is on Mapuzo, he receives a Force shock that almost knocks him out. Once he has recovered, Obi-Wan tells Tala to get Leia to safety and goes to confront or at least stall his former padawan and friend, because he cannot risk Anakin getting his hands on Leia and realising who she is.

Meanwhile, Darth Vader struts through the streets of this Mapuzo mining town, Force-choking, torturing and murdering random citizens in order to draw Obi-Wan out, while his iconic breathing echoes from the soundtrack. I was initially sceptical about including Darth Vader in the Obi-Wan series and not just because of the continuity issues with A New Hope, but also because I would prefer to see a new, never before seen villain than Darth Vader yet again.

Fact is that Darth Vader suffers from the same problem as many other iconic villains – e.g. Skeletor, Cthulhu, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Magneto, Dr. Doom, Blofeld, etc… – namely overexposure. You’ve seen these characters so often, both in films, TV shows and comics, as well as on all sorts of merchandise from t-shirts via action figures to Funko Pops and plush toys that it’s easy to forget why they were scary in the first place. Until a movie/TV episode/comic comes along and reminds you how fucking scary these villains can be.

Skeletor and to a lesser degree Hordak from Masters of the Universe are two excellent examples. We’ve seen both of them come up with increasingly silly plans to conquer Eternia/Ethiria/the Universe and inevitably fail so many times over umpteen episodes of the original He-Man and She-Ra cartoons, not to mention that we’ve seen them parodied, turned into memes, toys and t-shirts that it’s easy to forget that why used to be scary. However, Masters of the Universe Revelations gave us Skeletor stabbing He-Man/Adam in the back, murdering the Sorceress, zombifying half the population of Eternos, snuffing out the souls of Fisto and Clamp-Champ, torturing Man-at-Arms and exploiting and abusing his lover Evil-Lyn, while the 2002 Masters of the Universe cartoon gave us Skeletor throwing a vial of acid in his brother’s face, torturing King Randor and throwing him into a bottomless abyss, threatening to throw Prince Adam, who is only sixteen here, into a lava pit and torturing Man-at-Arms again and reminds us just why Skeletor can be damned scary and how he became such an iconic villain.

The scene near the end of Rogue One where Darth Vader cuts down scores of rebel troops reminded us just how scary and deadly he can be. And Darth Vader strutting through the streets of Mapuzo, Force-choking, torturing and murdering random people left, right and center, while his heavy breathing echoes from the soundtrack, once again reminds us how truly scary Darth Vader can be, even if Hayden Christensen, who wears the iconic costume, is more associated with whiny Anakin than with scary Vader. Andy Welch makes a similar point in his review at The Guardian.

Of course, we knew beforehand that Hayden Christensen would be returning as Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi, but most of us expected that a physical confrontation – if there would be one at all – would happen in the series finale, as io9 reviewer Germain Lussier points out. However, to mine and I guess everybody else’s surprise, the long awaited Darth Vader versus Obi-Wan Kenobi rematch happened at the half-way point of the series in a quarry of all places. Of course, we all know that thirty percent of all planets in the galaxy look just like quarries (of the remaining seventy percent, thirty percent look like the California desert, thirty percent like British Columbia and the remaining ten percent look like Tunisia, Iceland or are CGI), but quarries doubling as alien planets is a visual that is more connected to Doctor Who and low budget science fiction series from the UK and Canada (even British Columbia has quarries) than a multi-million dollar per episode property like Star Wars. It’s not that the quarry duel is not good, it’s just as if Obi-Wan and Darth Vader had wandered into an episode of Doctor Who by mistake. Both io9’s Germain Lussier and Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw note that a quarry is maybe not the best location for such an iconic rematch. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw also points out that the sets of Obi-Wan Kenobi look oddly cheap in general, even though Disney has more money than God.

That said, the night time quarry lit up by Obi-Wan’s blue and Darth Vader’s red lightsabre does look suitably atmospheric and when they clash in the darkened quarry it’s everything you hoped it would be. As for the duel itself, it’s quite short. We’ve already seen in the first two episodes that Obi-Wan has become rusty in the Force and of course Darth Vader immediately notes that Obi-Wan is no longer the Jedi he was. “The years have made you weak”, Darth Vader notes, “You should have killed me while you had the chance.” He’s right, too, because a lot of drama and millions of deaths could have been averted, if Obi-Wan had just finished the job on Mustafar. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan is horrified to see what his padawan and friend has become, since this is the first time he actually sees Anakin as Darth Vader. “I am what you made me”, Darth Vader replies.

However, Darth Vader isn’t just satisfied with killing Obi-Wan, though he probably could have. No, he wants to torture him and explicitly tells Obi-Wan that he will now suffer like Vader has suffered. And so Darth Vader Force-chokes Obi-Wan, leaving him dangling in the air. Then he ignites the ground of the quarry – don’t ask how, maybe sand is flammable on Mapuzo – and drags Obi-Wan’s body through the flames, which like Obi-Wan abandoned the wounded Anakin to the lava and the flames on Mustafar. This was also the moment where I realised that the reminder early on of the extent of Anakin’s injuries was important after all. Because even with the advanced medical tech of the Star Wars universe, Darth Vader is probably in constant pain due to the burn injuries he sustained on Mustafar. And now he wants to give Obi-Wan a taste of that pain. Because – as io9 reviewer James Whitbrook points out – Anakin has always been a drama queen at heart.

Meanwhile, Tala and Leia are heading through a tunnel towards the spaceport and the ship that will get them out. However, Leia tells Tala that she’s a big girl and can go on alone and begs Tala to go back and help Obi-Wan. Tala agrees, gets a hug from Leia and returns to the town, just in time to fire at Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers and save Obi-Wan from getting burned to a crisp. However, Obi-Wan has sustained significant burn injuries and Tala declares that they must take him to Jabiim to heal.

While all this is happening, little Leia has reached the end of the tunnel and the spaceport, only to find Third Sister waiting for her. “Are you the pilot who’s going to fly us out?” Leia asks, unaware of who this woman is. “He couldn’t make it”, Third Sister says and the camera pans open to reveal the dead pilot lying on the ground.

As I said before, I’m not entirely sure what I had expected from an Obi-Wan Kenobi series, but an intergalactic roadtrip with a down and out Jedi and a pint-sized princess was not really it. And since the series only has six episodes and we’re at the midway point already, I suspect that “Obi-Wan rescues Leia, dodges Vader and Third Sister and returns Leia to her family” is exactly the plot we’re going to get. Which is fine, though not at all what I expected.

Furthermore, “grumpy loner rescues cute Force-sensitive child and is redeemed” is also exactly the plot of The Mandalorian and much as I enjoyed that series, I’m not sure if I want to see the same plot rehashed in every Star Wars series from now on. And indeed, AV-Club reviews Manuel Betancourt notes that Obi-Wan doesn’t really give us anything we haven’t seen in Star Wars before.

That said, I’m enjoying Obi-Wan Kenobi so far and the relationship between Obi-Wan and little Leia is the best thing about it. Though I still wish that a Star Wars series would take us into new territory for once, then perpetually sticking to the same well-worn grooves.

A Trio of Links: Vintage Crime Fiction, 1960s Protests and New Sword and Sorcery

The next Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Trek reviews are coming, but first of all, here are some links to new work by me that may be found elsewhere:

To begin with, issue 439 of the fanzine The Drink Tank has just come out. The theme of this issue is crime fiction before 1950 and I have an article in it about Harald Harst, a forgotten Weimar Republic era pulp detective. You can also read articles by Christopher J. Garcia, Julian West and Ian Nicholas about topics as varied as Sherlock Holmes, J.G. Reeder or the Moon Man. There is a noir title generator as well.

So what are you waiting for? Download the issue here and start reading.

Yesterday, I was also over at Galactic Journey again with an article about the protests against the visit of the Shah of Iran to West Berlin and the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967. This was the moment where the peace and love sixties turned violent in (West) Germany and would have reverberations into the 1970s and beyond. It’s also a truly horrifying story, even more horrifying than I knew.

Content warning for photos and descriptions of police violence as well as a photo of a body, because you can’t write about the murder Benno Ohnesorg without the iconic photo of him dying in a West Berlin backyard.

Finally, I also have a story out in issue 5 of Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery.  It’s called “Village of the Unavenged Dead” and is a dark story about a cruel emperor, a vengeful necromancer and a spooky village.

You’ll also find new sword and sorcery stories by G.T. Wilcox, Michael Burke, George Jacobs, Dariel Quiogue, T.A. Markitan, Robert O’Leary, Charles Dooley, Jason M. Waltz, Gregory D. Mele, H.R. Laurence, Anthony Perconti, Chuck Clark, Nathaniel Webb, Patrick Groleau, J. Thomas Howard, B. Harlan Crawford, Rev. Joe Kelly, Rett Weissenfels and Scott Oden and an evocative cover by Jake Kelly in this issue. If you’re interested in what the sword and sorcery genre looks like today, you could do worse than check out Whetstone. Best of all, it’s 100% free.

So what are you waiting for? Download issue 5 of Whetstone right here.

First Monday Free Fiction: The Beast from the Sea of Blood

Welcome to the June 2022 edition of First Monday Free Fiction.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

June is the first month of summer, so here is The Beast from the Sea of Blood, a summery sword and sorcery story of a trip to the seaside, a crab boil on the beach… and a monster.

So accompany Thurvok, Meldom, Sharenna and Lysha as they face…

The Beast from the Sea of Blood

From the ocean called the Sea of Blood for its red waters the colour of freshly shed blood rose a small rocky island. Nothing and no one lived here except for a colony of noisy seagulls and some crabs, which scuttled across a narrow strip of sandy beach. This was the Desolate Isle, a place avoided by sailors far and wide, because it was believed to be cursed. At least, that’s what old Danvalk said. But then Danvalk would believe his own bed was cursed, should he happen to fall out of it in a drunken stupor.

Thurvok the sellsword, on the other hand, did not believe in curses. But nonetheless, the red waves, so very much like the fresh blood sprouting from an enemy’s cut throat, unnerved him. As a son of the Eastern steppes, he did not much care for the sea in general. Any body of water larger than a well, a puddle or bathing pond tended to make him nervous. But the Sea of Blood with its eerie gory colouring made him even more nervous. Water should simply not be that colour and only the cannibals of Grokh bathed in fresh blood.

Nonetheless, he was stuck here for the time being. For the Mermaid’s Scorn, a small fishing sloop that Thurvok and his friends had purchased from the one-legged sailor Danvalk, sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition to the lost city of Nhom’zonac, had run aground on the sands just off the Desolate Isle. Until the tide rolled in, she would not sail again. At least, that’s what Sharenna had said and she prided herself in her knowledge of the sea. Even though she had run the Mermaid’s Scorn aground, come to think of it.

Worse, the quest that had brought them here, a great pirate treasure supposedly hidden among the seagull nests, had proven to be a bust. Thurvok’s friend and companion Meldom — thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin — had gotten the story of the treasure from an old acquaintance, who’d claimed that he’d been right there, when it was hidden.

“Well, if the treasure really is so great, why doesn’t he get it himself then?” Thurvok had asked.

Meldom had no answer to that, probably because there was none.

Not that it mattered much. For as usual, Thurvok’s objections had been overridden. For Meldom had never heard a rumour of a treasure he did not want to go chasing after. His lover Lysha inevitably sided with him and besides, she was forever concerned about replenishing their dwindling funds. And the sorceress Sharenna, who would normally have been the voice of reason, liked feeling the sea wind in her hair a little too much. And so Thurvok was outvoted and the quartet set sail for the Desolate Isle. Only old Danvalk, whom the foursome occasionally took along on their quests to take advantage of his sailing skills, flat out refused to come.

“I’m not setting a foot, let alone two, on the Desolate Isle,” Danvalk had insisted, “That place is cursed. Cursed, I’m telling you, and beset by monsters and evil powers.”

Of course, Danvalk only had one foot left — as Meldom was about to point out, when a jab from Lysha silenced him. Nonetheless, the old sailor had a point. For there was something very off about the Sea of Blood and the lone rocky island that rose from its waters.

As soon as the quartet reached the blood-red waters, things started to go wrong. The wind became erratic, alternating between eerie calm and violent gusts. And then, when they reached the Desolate Isle, the Mermaid’s Scorn had run aground. Meldom and Sharenna were still arguing about whose fault that was.

But whoever was to blame, they were all stuck here until the tide rolled in, which should happen in approximately eight hours. And so Thurvok and Meldom had busied themselves scaling the slippery rocks to look for the legendary pirate treasure. They found lots of seagull nests and even more seagull shit. What they did not find, however, was even a hint of any treasure.

“All this bother and nothing to show for it,” Thurvok grunted as he and Meldom sat side by side on top of the highest rocks looking out across the tiny island and the bloody sea roiling all around as far as the eye could see.

“Maybe the seagulls ate the treasure,” Meldom mused, “After all, they seem to eat everything else.”

“And shit it out again,” Thurvok added, “No, if there was a treasure here buried in a pile of bird shit, we would have found it.” He sighed. “This whole expedition has been a waste of time.”

“Would you rather sit in The Rusty Nail in Neamene and drink yourself into a stupor?” Meldom countered.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

Meldom shook his head. “Some adventurer you are.”

“Better a happy, well fed and drunk adventurer, then hungry, thirsty and shipwrecked.”

Meldom rolled his eyes. “Oh please, you make it sound as if we’ll be marooned here forever. It’s only eight hours…” He looked up at the sun, which had sunk further towards the west, and mentally calculated. “…more like five now. And we do have provisions, so it’s not as if we’ll die of hunger or thirst.”

“Yeah, stale bread and water,” Thurvok grunted, “As if we were prisoners languishing in a dungeon.”

“I wanted to take along some salted herrings for variety,” Meldom said, “But you said you’d rather die than eat another salted herring.”

“It’s not natural for a man to eat so much fish,” Thurvok said.

“That’s just because you’re from the Eastern steppes where fish are as rare as ice beasts, dragons and pots of gold. In the coastal cities, it’s perfectly normal to enjoy the bounty of the sea.”

Even an encounter with a dragon would be preferable to being marooned on this forsaken rock in a Sea of Blood, Thurvok thought, though he did not say so out loud.

Meldom, meanwhile, spotted an ivory gleam among the mounts of bird shit. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt — black, like the rest of his attire — wrinkled his nose and reached into the pile of shit.

He held the object aloft. “Look at what I found.”

Thurvok looked and shrank back at once with such force that he almost toppled from the rock down to the beach below.

“By the crown of Kresgumm…” he exclaimed.

For the object in Meldom’s hand was not a jewel or a gold doubloon, but a skull. A grinning skull with bird shit sticking between its teeth and dripping out of its eye sockets.

“What’s your problem?” Meldom wanted to know, “This is good news. It means that someone has been here before.”

“Yes, and look what happened to him.” Thurvok scratched his chin in confusion, because he had no real way of knowing what gender the owner of the skull had been. “Her? Them?”

“It probably belonged to one of the pirates who buried the treasure,” Meldom mused.

“Or to another treasure hunter. Or just a hapless shipwrecked sailor.”

“Maybe…” Meldom waved the skull about to shoo away one of the ever-present seagulls. “…a bird ate him.”

“Whatever ate that poor soul…” Thurvok said darkly, “…was a lot bigger than a bird.”

He did his best to ignore the skull in Meldom’s hand and how it was staring at him with its hollow, bird shit dripping eyes.

So instead, he looked down at the beach, where Sharenna and Lysha were skipping across the sand and scrambling between the rocks by the sea. Occasionally, they bent down to pick up something from among the rocks and put it into bucket.

“What are the girls doing down there?” Thurvok wondered.

Meldom shrugged. “Gathering firewood maybe.”

“With a bucket?”

“Why not?”

As if to prove him right, Lysha walked past at just this moment with an armful of dry driftwood, which she began to build into a campfire. Sharenna followed, lugging the bucket.

“Come on down,” she called up at them, “Lysha and I have gathered crabs and mussels for a seafood boil.”

Thurvok wasn’t entirely sure what a seafood boil was, though crabs and mussels didn’t sound particularly appetising. And anyway, what was wrong with plain old meat? Though he figured that even crabs and mussels were better than stale bread and plain water.

Though he was lithely built, Meldom was perpetually hungry. And so the promise of food — even food as unenticing as boiled crabs and mussels — made him to stuff the skull into his bag and begin to scramble down the rock.

With a grunt, Thurvok followed. Though in the end, Thurvok reached the beach before Meldom, who’d been shat upon by a seagull halfway down.

On the beach, Lysha had gotten a good fire going, while Sharenna was bent over the bucket, adding some herbs and oil from her bag.

“You’re not trying to magick us, are you?”

Sharenna rolled her eyes. “Of course not. Herbs and oil are good for both magic and cooking. The only thing that differs is the recipe.”

Thurvok peered into the bucket. A crab peered back at him with black beady eyes and menacingly clicked its pincers.

“Crap, those things are still alive.”

“Of course,” Sharenna replied and took the bucket away to fill it up with water, the eerie blood red water of the sea, “If they were dead, we couldn’t eat them, because they’d have gone off already.”

“I’m not eating live crabs,” Thurvok grunted.

“Don’t worry.” Sharenna hung the bucket with the scrambling, clawing, living crabs over the fire. “By the time dinner’s ready, they won’t be. Even crabs can’t survive boiling water.”

At this moment, Meldom appeared, cursing and brushing at a stain of white-grey seagull shit, which now adorned his jerkin, black like the rest of his garb.

“I’ll never get this out of the fabric again,” he lamented and shook his fist at the seagulls circling overhead.

“Just let it dry and brush it off,” Sharenna said.

“That’ll still leave a stain,” Meldom replied.

“Yes, but you can wash it out with saltwater and vinegar,” Lysha said. When Meldom shot her a curious look, she added, “Oh please, I’m the daughter of a silk merchant. I know a thing or two about removing stains from fabric.”

***

The wind had picked up again and was blowing in cold from the sea, so cold that the four adventurers huddled around the campfire, which was blazing away merrily. The bucket had been hung over the fire and occasionally, Meldom or Sharenna reached out with a stick to shove a crab trying to escape the boiling inferno back into the pot.

Thurvok did not touch the bucket or the crabs. Those scuttling, skittering, clicking things with their beady black eyes freaked him out. There was something unnatural about them.

“So did you find anything?” Lysha wanted to know.

“No treasure, unfortunately,” Meldom said, though he seemed remarkably unbothered by the fact that this whole quest had been for naught. “But we found this.”

He opened his bag and pulled out the skull.

Lysha emitted a little squeak, much to Meldom’s amusement. Sharenna frowned.

“Where did you find that?”

“Up yonder among the seagull nests,” Thurvok replied.

“And the seagull shit,” Meldom added.

Sharenna still frowned. “Could you give that to me?”

“What do you want with that?” Thurvok wanted to know, “It’s all dirty and full of bird shit.”

Meldom’s grey eyes went wide, while his already pale complexion turned a shade paler. “You’re not going to reanimate it, are you?

“Why not?” Sharenna countered, “If there really is a treasure hidden here, the skull might know where it is.”

As a sorceress, Sharenna occasionally engaged in a spot of necromancy, though only in emergencies. And unpleasant as being stuck on an island in the middle of a blood red sea with not a single copper penny to show for it was, Thurvok was not entirely sure if it constituted an emergency.

“I thought you needed whole bodies to reanimate,” he pointed out.

“Oh, it works just as well with parts, though normally there isn’t much of a point to reanimating a severed limb or a headless body. After all, it’s not as if they can do much or tell you anything. A skull, on the other hand…”

“Try it!” Meldom all but shoved the skull at her.

“All right.” Sharenna accepted the skull, wrinkling her nose at the bird shit that was still clinging to the bone. She held the skull between her hands and her expression grew blank and distant, as she called up her magic.

Sharenna closed her eyes. Abruptly, the skull’s jaw dropped, as its mouth opened.

“Beware,” the skull said, its voice grating and hollow, like something from the depths of the underworld, “Beware the Beast from the Sea of Blood. Or it will take you, as it took me. Snapped me in half and left me lying on the beach, my bones to be picked clean by the gulls.”

The skull’s mouth closed. At the same instant, Sharenna opened her eyes and dropped the skull as if it were made of red hot iron. The skull rolled into the campfire and lay there, as the flames ignited the bird shit and licked out of the hollow eye socket.

Sharenna seemed troubled, so Thurvok quickly put his arm around her, pulling her close.

“Are you all right?”

Sharenna nodded weakly. “I just need a moment.”

Meldom reached out with a stick to pull the skull out of the fire and cursed, as the stick caught fire as well.

“Now that was ominous,” he announced, “And utterly unhelpful. Nothing about a treasure, just some blather about how the seagulls picked clean his — or her — bones. As if it wasn’t bloody obvious that that was what happened.”

“Don’t forget the beast,” Thurvok pointed out, “It also talked of a beast.”

“Yes, the beast from the sea of blood. And what exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“I for one am not keen to find out,” Thurvok said.

“I just wonder how that skull could talk at all,” Lysha wondered, “After all, it neither has a tongue nor vocal cords.” She cast a doubtful glance at the skull and the flames that enveloped it. “At least, I think it doesn’t.”

Meldom scowled. “No matter how the skull managed to talk, I still think he — she — could have been more precise. I mean, is this beast a sea serpent, a mermaid, an oversized fish, a creature like the monstrous guardian of the lost city of… well, you know what I mean?”

“Does it matter?” Thurvok countered, “It’s a beast and it killed this poor soul. Does it really matter what manner of creature it is?”

“As matter of fact, yes. If we knew what it is, we would have some idea how to fight it? But a beast could be anything, even those blasted seagulls. After all, their shit truly is beastly.” Meldom futilely began to rub at the stain on his jerkin again.

“It’s not a seagull,” Sharenna said suddenly, “But something much bigger and much more dangerous. I couldn’t see it, because he couldn’t, but I felt his fear and his desperation, as he tried to climb the rocks to save himself. But he wasn’t fast enough and so the best got him.”

“How do you know all that?” Thurvok asked.

The flickering firelight illuminated Sharenna’s face and suddenly she looked very witchy indeed. “Sometimes…” she began, “…when I reanimate a body, I get an impression of their final moments. This is what I got from him. And yes, it was a man. A sailor. I could see that very clearly.”

“Did you get anything about a treasure?” Meldom asked, single-minded as always.

Sharenna shook her head. “No, only his final moments. And they didn’t involve a treasure, just fear, terror and an unseen monster.”

“So what do we do now?” Lysha wanted to know, “About the monster, I mean?”

“I don’t think there is much we can do,” Sharenna replied, “Except wait for the tide to roll in, so we can take the Mermaid’s Scorn and get out of here. But until then…”

She peered into bucket and stirred it with a stick, pointedly ignoring the flaming skull at her feet.

“…dinner is ready.”

***

Sharenna emptied the bucket and all four of them cracked open the crabs and mussels to get at the soft flesh within. And even Thurvok, who was deeply suspicious of the sea and anything connected with it had to admit that the food was good.

Meldom waded over to the Mermaid’s Scorn and brought back a jug of rum, which they shared around the fire, while the sun slowly sank towards the western horizon.

“How much longer?” Thurvok asked, keeping a wary eye on his surroundings, just in case this beast the skull had mentioned decided to put in an appearance after all.

“Not long now,” Meldom promised, “The water is already coming back. Another hour or so and the Mermaid’s Scorn will sail again.”

Thurvok looked at the sun, which was already very close to the horizon, painting the Sea of Blood even redder.

“In an hour it will be almost dark,” he said, “Can we even make it back to Neamene in the dark?”

“Of course, we can,” Sharenna replied, “After all, the fisherman go out to sea by night. And if they can navigate in the dark, then so can we.”

Thurvok was about the point out that Sharenna’s and Meldom’s navigation skills were what had caused the Mermaid’s Scorn to run aground in the first place, but then he thought the better of it. He knew a lost argument, when he saw one.

And besides, his stomach was full, the rum was warming his chilly limbs and even his worries about the skull’s ominous pronouncements were slowly fading. In fact, Thurvok felt as comfortable as he had ever since they set out for the Desolate Isle. But as always, when life was going well, it could not last.

Meldom heard it first, a clicking, scuttling sound blowing in from the sea with the wind.

“Please not a storm, please not a storm,” he muttered to himself and turned towards the sound. “What in the name of the Seven Gods of Grayvault,” he exclaimed.

For from the Sea of Blood, halfway to the horizon and further out than the Mermaid’s Scorn, rose a rock where there hadn’t been one before.

“Maybe the tide uncovered it,” Thurvok suggested.

“When it recedes maybe,” Meldom countered. His hand reached for the sheathed dagger at his waist, “But the tide is rising.”

And then the rock ended all speculations, when it began to move, move inexorably towards the shore.

They all jumped to their feet, the fire and the rum forgotten. Thurvok drew his word. Meldom pushed Lysha behind him and drew his dagger. Sharenna stood between them, outwardly calm, but the slight glow around her hands showed that she was calling up her magic.

The thing grew ever bigger as it approached the island. By now, Thurvok could make out details. Eight scuttling legs. Two black beady eyes the size of a baby’s head. And two clicking pincers big enough to snap a man clean in half.

“This would be the beast then,” Sharenna said.

“Uhm, folks, I think it’s angry that we ate its brethren,” Lysha whispered and reached for the slingshot she used for defence.

Meldom sheathed his dagger, for it was clearly no good against a creature of this size, and drew his own slingshot.

And still the giant crab scuttled towards the beach, pincers clicking menacingly. Meldom and Lysha fired their slingshots and pelted it with pebbles and seashells, which did not even slow the thing down.

Thurvok rushed to meet the creature in the lapping water, his mighty sword raised high above his head. He swung his blade in a mighty blow that would have taken a man’s head clean off. But the blade glanced harmlessly off the creature’s shell, while the backlash knocked Thurvok off his feet and into the wet sand.

The beast was almost upon him now, but Thurvok managed to scramble to his feet just in time. He changed tactics and stabbed at the thing, again and again, hoping to find some weak spot. But the point of his sword could not pierce the monster’s sturdy shell and so he only succeeded in annoying the creature. The crab swung one of its pincers towards Thurvok, snapping madly, and only a quick roll to the side saved him from decapitation.

He got to his feet again and swung his sword, this time aiming low at the legs. But once more, it was to no avail. There was no way to stop this creature, no way to even slow it down. All four of them would end like the poor fellow whose skull Meldom had found among the rocks, snapped in half, their bones picked clean by seagulls.

“Get back,” Sharenna cried out, “Its armour is too strong. Your blade can’t hurt it.” She called up a fireball in her hands. “But my magic can.”

Once Thurvok had rolled clear, Sharenna hurled her fireball at the critter. It missed the massive armoured body and landed in the water at its feet instead, exploding in a hiss of steam.

“You missed,” Thurvok called out.

“No, I didn’t.” Sharenna hurled another fireball at the thing’s feet. It hit the water with a hiss and bathed the thing in steam. “I’m boiling the crab.”

After the third fireball, the crab screeched in pain, while the steam and the hot water slowly turned its shell a bright fiery red. But it took another five fireballs, until the thing finally collapsed into the shallow water, quite dead. Waves crashed onto the sand, drenching their shoes and the hems of their clothes.

Sharenna swayed and would have fallen, if Thurvok had not caught her by the waist. Using her magic always took a lot out of her and taking down the giant crab had required some mighty magic.

“Uhm, guys…” Lysha pointed at the horizon, where two more rocks, which had not been there before, had appeared, while the wind blew a scuttling, clicking sound towards the beach, a sound that was getting steadily louder.

“I’d suggest we’d better get back to the ship and away from here fast,” Meldom said, “Before more of those things show up.”

“Can the ship even sail again?” Thurvok wanted to know.

“It’ll have to, unless we want to be crab fodder.”

“And what if we can’t get free?” Lysha asked.

“Then Thurvok will have to get out and push.”

So they all raced for the Mermaid’s Scorn. Meldom and Lysha dashed ahead to unfurl the sails, though Meldom thought to grab the jug of rum first. Thurvok picked up Sharenna, who was still too weak to run, and carried her on board. He set her down against the stern railing and gripped the tiller, following Sharenna’s directions. For unlike Thurvok, Sharenna knew a little about the sea and sailing.

As the Mermaid’s Scorn sped away from the Desolate Isle, Thurvok looked back and saw two giant crabs launching themselves at their fallen comrade, while more of creatures rose from the sea. Seagulls circled overhead.

It was only when they were well away from the Desolate Isle and its monstrous inhabitants and had reached the area where the blood-red sea turned into regular blue-green again — or would, if night hadn’t fallen in the meantime, turning the water to ink — that they dared to relax.

Thurvok fastened the tiller with a rope and Meldom evenly divided the last of the rum between four cups.

“Well, we did not find the treasure, but that was certainly an adventure,” he said, “And it will make a grand tale to tell at The Rusty Nail or any other harbour bar in Neamene.”

“So more gullible folks will come here in search of treasure and night have their heads snapped off,” Thurvok grumbled.

“Well, that’s their choice, isn’t it? After all, it’s not as if we’re going to pretend that we found the treasure.”

“Maybe we should,” Lysha pointed out, “To discourage other adventures and make sure they won’t get eaten by the monster crabs.”

Meldom laughed. “That won’t work. Cause don’t you know that rumours of treasures found always draw more treasure seekers.”

“Well, you should know,” Thurvok said, “After all, there was never a rumour about a treasure that you did not follow up on. Even though all it ever got us was vengeful corpses, crazed cultists, tentacled monsters and now giant crabs.”

“And bird shit,” Meldom said, still rubbing at the stain on his jerkin, “Don’t forget the bird shit.”

“Oh, stop complaining,” Sharenna, who was largely recovered by now, said, “At least be grateful that it was a regular sized seagull and not a monster-sized one.”

Thurvok lifted his cup. “I’ll drink to that.”

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

Down and Out in Tatooine and Alderaan: Some Thoughts on Obi-Wan Kenobi Parts I and II

Since last weekend was a long holiday weekend in the US, Disney Plus in its infinite wisdom has decided to give us the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi in one go and then the next episode dropped today. Though the first episode begins with what is basically a recap of the prequel trilogy in five minutes.

But before we get started, fellow Hugo finalist Camestros Felapton is currently doing profiles of all the 2022 Best Fan Writer finalists and today it was my turn. Also check out Cam’s profiles of Chris M. Barkley, Bitter Karella and Alex Brown with Jason Sanford and Paul Weimer still to come.

But now, let’s get back to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Warning: Spoilers after the cut!

When the episode proper opens we get another flashback to Order 66 and the slaughter at the Jedi Temple. A female Jedi teacher gives her life in order to protect five padawans, who manage to escape. I’ve heard some complaints online that because this episode streamed so soon after the devastating Uvalde school shooting, it should have come with a warning label like season 4 of Stranger Things. Initially, I was initially a bit dismissive of this, because surely everybody who sits down to watch a Star Wars TV show about Obi-Wan knows about Order 66 and the slaughter of the padawans at the Jedi Temple. However, at the time I did not know that this scene is literally the first thing you see (except for the title and the lengthy flashback), when you sit down to watch the episode, so you have no foreshadowing or warning at all. So yes, Disney should really have added a warning label.

Ten years later, one of the escaped padawans, a young man named Nari, has made his way to Tatooine, because everybody in Star Wars eventually ends up on Tatooine. And because everybody eventually goes to Tatooine, Nari has three Imperial Inquisitors – basically lightsabre wielding and Force sensitive Jedi hunters who were introduced in the Star Wars Rebels cartoon – on his tail.

Those Inquisitors, the Grand Inquisitor (a pasty-faced white guy), Fifth Brother (a pasty-faced Asian guy) and Third Sister (a black woman with awesome cornrows), come to Anchorhead to harass a barkeeper. The reasoning behind this is that – as one of the Inquisitors puts it – “the Jedi hunt themselves”. Because Jedi, being essentially noble, compassionate and good-hearted, cannot help themselves helping people in need. But whenever someone displaying Force abilities or brandishing a lightsabre at evildoers appears somewhere, there are bound to be rumours. The Inquisitors follow up those rumours and one of those rumours led them to Tatooine, specifically to this bar in Anchorhead. Because it turns out that the barkeeper had a spot of bother with some criminal lowlives and was saved by Nari, who had to use his Jedi skills to help him.

There’s something incredibly depressing about compassion being twisted into a fatal weakness here. And considering that the Star Wars universe is a terrible place, always has been and always will be, this show does a good job of portraying the generally awful Star Wars universe as just a bit more awful then usual

We get all this in a speech from the Grand Inquisitor, until Third Sister, who’s the impulsive type, hurls a knife straight at the barkeeper, forcing Nari to use the Force and reveal himself. Nari does manage to escape the Inquisitors, for now. Third Sister, whose real name is Reva, gets dressed down by the Grand Inquisitor. We also learn that Third Sister is really, really obsessed with hunting down Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Which brings us to the other Jedi on Tatooine who has been living there under the radar for ten years at this point. We first see Obi-Wan, who now goes by Ben, working at some kind of alien meat processing plant in the Tatooine desert, where that planet’s abundant mega-fauna is transformed into food for sale. Meat processing plants on Tatooine are as awful as on Earth, if not worse, and so the owners are ruthlessly exploiting and underpaying the workers. We see the foreman harassing a worker, while Obi-Wan stands by and does nothing. Unlike Nari, he will not give himself away, betrayed by his own compassion. Or maybe he is just too numb to care.

We follow Obi-Wan through his day, as he returns to his mount/pet/only friend in the universe, a camel-like eopie, played by a camel named Silas, whom Ewan McGregor almost wound up adopting. Obi-Wan even steals a slice of the alien meat he’s supposed to process for his one true friend in the universe. Then he returns to the cave where he has made his home. The only other contact Obi-Wan has is with a Jawa, who steals parts from his vaporator to sell them back to him (“You could at least clean them first,” Obi-Wan tells him) and who also procures other items for Obi-Wan such as a spaceship toy (which looks just like a beat-up vintage Kenner Star Wars toy).  The Jawa also tells Obi-Wan that there is another Jedi on Tatooine, which the Jawa knows, because he stole his belt. Obi-Wan does not react to the mention of a fellow Jedi.

Next, we see Obi-Wan and his faithful eopie friend making their way to some rocks in the desert, which just happen to overlook the farm of Owen and Beru Lars. Obi-Wan tends to hide among those rocks and spy on the Lars family and particularly their young nephew Luke Skywalker, who even at the age of ten tends to sneak away from his duty to pretend to be podracing. After the Lars family has gone to sleep, Obi-Wan leaves the spaceship toy behind as a gift for Luke. It seems to be the same spaceship toy that young adult Luke has in A New Hope, by the way.

If Obi-Wan’s life sounds depressing, that’s because it is. He’s less living than existing and he seems to have a massive case of PTSD complete with nightmares, which exactly surprising considering what Obi-Wan has been through. Obi-Wan also keeps calling for the Force ghost of his old master Qui-Gon, but gets no reply (was Liam Neeson otherwise engaged?). Though only middle-aged, Obi-Wan is a sad old man who lives in a cave and stalks a happy family, watching from afar the one thing he can never have.

Jedi don’t tend to live long in the Star Wars universe – most of them die in battle well before their time or they turn to the Dark Side. As for those who survive, their ultimate fate seems to be ending up as a sad old hermit living in a cave. This is what happened to Obi-Wan, to Yoda and to Luke. I honestly wonder why do many people still view the Jedi as aspirational, when the actual Star Wars movies and TV shows have shown time and again that the Jedi inevitably fail and that the whole concept just doesn’t work.

Ewan McGregor is excellent at portraying Obi-Wan has a broken man aged before his time, by the way. Of course, we always knew that Ewan McGregor was an excellent actor, but he really knocks it out of the park here, as Andy Welch points out in his review at The Guardian.

Obi-Wan’s secret gift to Luke is not appreciated, as he finds out when Owen Lars (played once again by Joel Edgerton who played him in the prequels) confronts him in the streets of Anchorhead on the very next day to return the toy and tell Obi-Wan in no uncertain terms to keep the hell away from his family. Owen goes full Papa Bear on Obi-Wan here and tells him that Obi-Wan doesn’t really care about Luke at all, he only cares if Luke is manifesting Force abilities. Obi-Wan tries to tell Owen that Luke needs to know that there is more to life than Owen’s farm, that there is a big galaxy out there and also that Luke needs to be trained. “Like you trained his father?” Owen counters and you can see on Obi-Wan’s face that this blow really hit the point.

IMO, Owen and Beru Lars (and Bail and Breha Organa, for that matter, but more about them later) have never gotten the credit they deserve for raising Luke (and Leia) to grow up into good people who don’t succumb to the Dark Side of the Force. It’s also telling that in no version of what happens after Return of the Jedi do Luke or Leia ever name any of their kids after the people who actually raised them, while Obi-Wan/Ben gets a kid named after him twice (though the less said about Ben Solo the better) and in the Expanded Universe, Han and Leia even name one of their kids Anakin. Ignoring the people who raised Luke and Leia to be good people has always struck me as an odd oversight. Furthermore, Star Wars fandom seems to be particularly harsh on Owen Lars for trying to keep Luke on the farm and stymying his ambitions to leave Tatooine and go to the Academy.

However, try to see things from Owen’s point of view. As far as he knows, Anakin was a normal kid, until the Jedi came to Tatooine to take him away. The next time he meets Anakin (actually, the first time Owen meets him, since they are stepbrothers), he’s a troubled young Jedi with his girlfriend in tow who does try to rescue his mother and slaughters a whole tribe of Tusken Raiders in the process. Then the next time Owen hears about Anakin, Obi-Wan tells him that Anakin is dead and Padme is dead, too, and would Owen and Beru please raise Anakin’s orphaned kid. I’m not sure how much Owen ever knew about what exactly happened to Anakin and Padme? He certainly doesn’t know that Anakin became Darth Vader, but did he know that Anakin went bad and slaughtered a whole lot of people, including kids. Does he know that a large part of the reason why Padme died giving birth is because Anakin force-choked his pregnant wife? Or does he believe that Anakin fell in battle? At any rate, as far as Owen is concerned the trouble started when the Jedi came to take Anakin away. He’s not wrong either, because the Jedi and their complete and utter incompetence are to blame for Anakin ultimately falling to the Dark Side. And Owen is not going to let that happen to Luke, even as it increasingly becomes clear that Luke is his parents’ kid and not made for the farming life. Plus, Luke grows up at a time when not only full Jedi, but Force-sensitive kids are being hunted. So in short, Owen is trying to protect his (adopted) son like any father would. And make no mistake, Owen and Beru were good parents to Luke.

One night, Obi-Wan realises that someone is following him. It turns out to be Nari, who spotted Obi-Wan in Anchorhead and followed him, hoping for help in rebuilding the Jedi Order and liberating the galaxy or maybe just escaping the Inquisitors. Obi-Wan initially does his “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have me confused with someone else. My name is Ben” routine, but when Nari won’t go away and even shows him his lightsabre, Obi-Wan tells him to bury the lightsabre in the desert, walk away and live a normal life. “But what about the fight?” Nari asks. “It’s over,” Obi-Wan replies, “We lost.”

However, the Inquisitors, particularly Third Sister, are no more willing to give up than Nari is. And so they are harassing the people of Anchorhead again the following day, demanding that they give up the Jedi or face the consequences. Obi-Wan just manages to duck into an entrance before he is spotted and recognised. A woman tells the Inquisitors that the Empire doesn’t even have any jurisdiction in the Outer Rim and promptly gets her hand chopped off for her troubles. Third Sister then zeroes in on Owen and asks him if he has seen any Jedi. Owen replies that he hasn’t seen any Jedi and that he has no love for the Jedi, but thinks they are vermin to be exterminated. Third Sister, however, is not convinced and threatens to kill Owen and his family, if the people of Anchorhead don’t give up the Jedi. She even puts her lightsabre to Owen’s throat, before her fellow Inquisitors stop her. Owen barely flinches, when he has a lightsabre at his throat, which shows that in his own way, Owen is a badarse.

Once the Inquisitors have left to harass someone else, Obi-Wan comes out of hiding and thanks Owen. “I didn’t do it for you”, Owen replies. It’s the truth, too, because Owen does not care what happens to Obi-Wan. However, he clearly fears for Luke, especially since Luke very likely already is showing Force abilities at this point. After all, we know that he inherited his father’s piloting skills and quick reflexes, which are one way Force abilities manifest itself. And Owen probably recognises the signs from his experience with Shmi and Anakin.

The Inquisitors eventually get their man and the next time Obi-Wan is in town, he sees Nari or rather what’s left of him strung up for all the town to see. Obi-Wan clearly knows that he could have helped Nari, but chose not to.

Meanwhile on Alderaan, a ten-year-old Princess Leia is enjoying a considerably more privileged life than her twin brother. Though little Leia is not happy with her princessly duties. She does not want to be dressed up, she does not want to attend state functions and she does not want to wave at people from the isolation of a groundcar. She doesn’t want to be a Senator either, because that’s boring. However, little Leia hasn’t yet fully figured out what she wants to do with her life. However, for now what she wants is run off into the woods outside the palace with her little droid companion. She wants to climb trees and watch the spaceships coming in and taking off, cause little Leia really likes spaceships.

When we first see little Leia – or rather what we think is little Leia – she is being dressed by a bunch of servants in order to meet her aunt, uncle and cousins. However, when her mother Breha (New Zealand actress Simone Kessell) comes to pick her up she finds another little girl wearing her daughter’s ceremonial outfit. Clearly, Leia has inherited the tendency to switch places with handmaidens and servants from her mother Padme.

Eventually, Breha and some guards find little Leia in a tree and drag her to meet her aunt, uncle and cousin. At the reception that follows, the uncle reveals himself as an Imperial profiteer (“Finally, we can make some money”) who gets rich of slave labour. Leia trades some barbs with her older cousin who first insults her for thanking a droid (“It’s good manners”, Leia says, and yes, that droid not only looks like C-3PO, but actually is him, played by Anthony Daniels even) and then tells her she’s not a real Organa, whereupon Leia tells the cousin that he wants nothing more than be like his father, but that he never will be and that he’ll always be a failure. In general, little Leia shows some remarkable psychological insight into people she meets, which I strongly suspect are her Force abilities manifesting themselves. After all, we know that Leia is telepathic.

Vivien Lyra Blair, the young actress who play little Leia, is amazing in the role and truly channels Carrie Fisher, as both Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin, io9 reviewer Germain Lussier and Ben Sherlock of ScreenRant point out. I have no problems believing that one day, this little girl will grow up to become the Leia we all know and love. When little Leia is uncertain about what she wants out of life, only that waving behind glass isn’t it, you want to hug her and tell her that she’ll find her purpose and that she’ll have an amazing life, that she’ll have lots of friends, a brother and that she’ll get to kiss (and more) the hottest space rogue in the galaxy.

We have never seen more of Alderaan than a brief glimpse at the end of Revenge of the Sith, when Bail Organa brings baby Leia home. It does look uncannily like a California woodland with some futuristic white spires added. On the one hand, I really like seeing more about Leia’s (and Luke’s, though we haven’t seen much of him yet) childhood, since the movies completely skipped over this part of the story. On the other hand, those scenes are also disturbing, because we know what will happen to Alderaan. We know that those forests and futuristic spires as well as all the people we see, including Bail and Breha Organa, will be blasted to smithereens by the Death Star. Just as we watch Owen and Beru Lars knowing that both will be murdered by Imperial Stormtroopers, while trying to protect their adoptive kid.

As soon as she can slip away, little Leia and her droid pal run off for the woods again. But this time, she runs straight into trouble in the form of a sinister and strangely familiar looking fellow who looks as if he stepped right out of a late 1980s cyberpunk influenced science fiction film. As for why the fellow looks familiar, that’s because he’s Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who also has an acting career going back to the 1980s.

For a ten-year-old, little Leia is quite formidable and leads her would-be kidnappers on a chase through the forest. However, she is also still only ten years old and so she is eventually caught and taken away by the kidnappers on their spaceship. The lead kidnapper tells little Leia that she’ll never see her family again, whereupon Leia stares him down and tells him that yes, she will see them again and that her father will send an army and then her kidnappers will be very sorry. At this moment, you can clearly see the woman who will face down Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin some ten years later in this little girl.

Bail and Breha are understandably frantic, once they realise that little Leia has been kidnapped, especially since there is no ransom demand. And so they contact the one person they know they can trust to get her back, namely Obi-Wan. When his holographic communicator starts beeping, Obi-Wan has to dig through his possessions to find it. He also tells Bail and Breha that he’s not the man they remember, that he can’t help them and besides, he must stay on Tatooine to watch over Luke.

We all know that the original Star Wars movie a.k.a. A New Hope closely followed the “hero’s journey” template according to Joseph Campbell, since George Lucas was never shy talking about it and Campbell was very likely grateful to Lucas, since the Star Wars connection helped to sell a whole lot of copies of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which had been a fairly obscure folkloristic popular science book before then.

One part of the hero’s journey is the “refusal of the call”, where the hero (or heroine) initially refuses the call to adventure. In A New Hope, this is the moment where Luke tells Obi-Wan that he can’t go with him to Mos Eisley, let alone Alderaan, because he has to be home for dinner. And in A New Hope, the refusal of the call feels organic, though in many other cases, it feels shoehorned in, as if the protagonist only refuses the call, because the hero’s journey requires this step. One example is the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, where Prince Adam, when he is taken to Castle Grayskull on his sixteenth birthday and informed that he is the chosen hero to defend the secrets of Castle Grayskull and all of Eternia, tells the Sorceress that she’s got the wrong person, that he’s not the hero type and why doesn’t she ask Man-at-Arms who’s standing right there and clearly would make a much better hero. On the one hand, it is sweet that Adam immediately thinks Duncan is the one who should be the hero to defend Eternia, but on the other hand, the whole scene also doesn’t fit the characters or any other version of this story, because one thing that all versions of Masters of the Universe have always stressed is that Adam not only is brave and heroic, he also wants to be recognised as a hero in his own right. At any rate, Prince Adam never strikes me as someone who would refuse the call to adventure, but the hero’s journey requires that he does.

Obi-Wan, on the other hand, does not only repeatedly refuse the call to adventure – when the foreman bullies a co-worker, when Nari asks him for help, when Third Sister threatens Owen and the rest of the people of Anchorhead, when Bail and Breha ask him to find Leia – he literally buries his head in the sands of Tatooine so he won’t have to hear the call to adventure. It’s a great subversion of both the hero’s journey and expectations in general, since so far we have only known Obi-Wan as the Jedi who will immediately launch himself into action. This repeated refusal of the call shows how much he has changed and how broken he truly is.

Coincidentally, it also shows how twisted and Empire and its Inquisitors truly are, because they literally use the Jedi’s natural compassion and desire to help those in need against them. Obi-Wan was only able to stay hidden for so long, because he hardened his heart against the plea of anybody in need. And – as it turns out – Third Sister is using both Obi-Wan compassion and his old friendship with Bail Organa against him and orchestrated the kidnapping of little Leia in order to draw Obi-Wan out. Though she clearly has no idea of the much greater prize she has caught, namely the daughter of Darth Vader himself.

The next evening, Obi-Wan find Bail Organa himself (still played by Jimmy Smits who has by now gone from “Hey, that guy from L.A. Law and NYPD Blue plays Leia’s Dad” to “Did you know Bail Organa used to be in L.A. Law and NYPD Blue?”) in his cave, waiting for him. Obi-Wan is not happy to see him and tries his full sticking his head in the sand and refusing the call routine again, but Bail won’t have any of that. And so Obi-Wan digs up his lightsabre as well as Anakin’s from the spot where he buried them in the desert. And yes, even with Jedi powers it’s amazing that he found the box again, considering I managed to lose a treasure chest I buried in my parents’ own garden, which is considerably smaller than the desert of Tatooine. Then he gets on a transport – as a down and out ex-Jedi, he no longer has his own ship – and heads for a planet named Daiyu to rescue Leia.

Daiyu looks amazing, a Blade Runner-esque hive of scum and villainy straight out of a 1980s cyberpunk novel. Even though Blade Runner actually came out a year before Return of the Jedi and cyberpunk started up almost directly after the Star Wars boom, Star Wars itself has never really embraced cyberpunk tropes and aesthetics until fairly recently and a lot of fans were not happy when it did. However, I really like how the various recent Star Wars TV shows not only go back to inspirations of the original Star Wars such as Italian westerns and samurai films, but also to works, styles and trends that came out around the same time and could well have inspired Star Wars, only that we have no record of it. So cyberpunky neon hellscape of Daiyu absolutely fits into Star Wars.

Obi-Wan wanders around the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Daiyu, asks questions and claims he is looking for his lost daughter. A drug-dealing punk girl (played by Ewan McGregor’s real life daughter Rose McGregor) tells him to give up, that he’ll never find her and then gives him a free sample of her wares, so he can forget his mission. Obi-Wan also has a brief encounter with a decommissioned and homeless clone trooper (played by Temuera Morrison in a cameo that’s both squeeworthy and disturbing for showing that the Empire treats even its most loyal troops like shit) who’s reduced to begging on the streets. And yes, that’s also very obviously a comment on the problem of homeless military veterans in the US, because Star Wars has always been political. Obi-Wan is clearly terrified – Does he know this particularly trooper by any chance? And does the trooper recognise him?

Shortly thereafter, a street kid approaches Obi-Wan and tells him that there is a Jedi on Daiyu who helps people… for a price. Intrigued, Obi-Wan follows the kid – Jedi help would be welcome – and meets Haja Estree, played by Kumail Nanjiani of Eternals fame, who’s also a huge geek in real life. Haja Estree is not a Jedi, but a skilled con artist pretending to be a Jedi via magnets, fake mind control and other tricks. He really does help people and in his introductory he helps a woman and her Force sensitive kid escape Daiyu, though he also fleeces his victims.

Now a con artist pretending to be a Jedi was not even remotely on my list of things I expected to see in a Star Wars series, though it also makes complete sense, because with the Jedi already passing into legend at this point, the existence of a con artist using the legend of the Jedi for his own ends is not unlikely at all. Obi-Wan, however, is appalled and threatens Estree with his blaster – no lightsabre or Jedi powers required for this fraudster – and gets him to tell him where Leia’s kidnappers are.

It turns out that Leia is being held in a drug-processing facility. Obi-Wan sneaks in, pretending to be one of the workers processing and packing the drugs. He breaks open a door and finds what he thinks is Leia, but it’s really just a droid in a cloak tied to a chair. Turns out it’s a trap – cue Admiral Ackbar voice – and Obi-Wan soon finds himself surrounded by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (apparently, his character is called Vect Nokru) and his thugs who proceed to kick the crap out of him. This is the point where we realise that Obi-Wan truly is not the man nor the warrior he used to be, since his fighting – and as we will see later in the episode, Force skills – have gone rusty. His brain is still sharp, however, and though he throws the vial of Spice the drug-dealing punk girl gave him onto the floor. Obi-Wan holds his breath and replaces his respirator mask, while Vect Nokru and his thugs get a noseful of Spice and are drugged out of their minds for the next hour or so. It is interesting that the Spice we saw in an episode of The Book of Boba Fett was sand-coloured, but this stuff is red. Do drug dealers mix colour into spice or are there differently coloured types of the stuff? And can we maybe find a better name for it, especially considering that “Spice” was cribbed wholesale from Dune?

Obi-Wan finally finds the real Leia and is promptly hit be her with a chair, because Leia has already freed herself with the help of her little droid Lola (who unfortunately was badly damaged in the attempt). Even at the age of ten, Leia is not particularly impressed by people trying to rescue her and let’s Obi-Wan know in no uncertain terms, that she expected an army rather than an old man named Ben. And no, Leia will definitely not pretend to be his daughter, because as far as she is concerned, he looks old enough to be her grandfather.

Little Leia continues to be a handful, because when Obi-Wan ditched the drug-processing worker device and decides to buy some clothes for little Leia, Leia is not at all happy with the dull Yoda-green poncho Obi-Wan selects and would rather have something sparkling and pretty. “We’re trying not to draw attention to ourselves,” an exasperated Obi-Wan explains and buys the boring poncho, though he does relent on sparkly cut off gloves.

Meanwhile, Third Sister has arrived and finds Vect Nokru and his hench people drugged up to their gills. She is not happy that Obi-Wan has escaped again, but at least she knows that he is on Daiyu now. And so she places a huge bounty on his head and sends a message to every bounty hunter and other criminal on Daiyu. And since Daiyu is a cyberpunky criminal hellhole, there are a lot of them.

Worse, Leia chances to see the holo on the wrist communicator of a random lowlife, notes that this is the guy who rescued her, but that his name is not Ben, as he claimed, but Obi-Wan. So Leia – who after all has just been kidnapped and was rescued by a guy she’s never seen before and isn’t sure she can trust – decides that Obi-Wan is no more trustworthy than her kidnappers and may in fact be one of them. Also, he lied about being a Jedi and even at the age of ten, Leia realises that all of the people with the blasters are after Obi-Wan because he is a Jedi and that she’s about to get caught in the crossfire. So she runs off and Obi-Wan now has to chase after Leia, while trying to dodge bounty hunters left, right and centre.

This turns into a thrilling chase across the rooftops of Daiyu, which takes up the bulk of episode 2. Guardian reviewer Stuart Heritage isn’t entirely sure if a series focussing on Obi-Wan between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope needed to be made at all, but he really enjoyed the action scenes and he is right, too, because the action and fight scenes are very good, especially since they show Obi-Wan very much not in top form and also trying to hide his Jedi skills, lest he be recognised.

This multiple way chase eventually leads to Obi-Wan getting cornered by two bounty hunters on a rooftop, while trying to persuade Leia not to make the jump across the gap to another rooftop, because the gap is too wide for her little legs, while on another rooftop, Third Sister stands in best Batman manner, observes the laser fire and knows she has found her quarry.

Leia, being the stubborn type, tries to make the jump and of course doesn’t make it, but winds up clinging to a wire, so Obi-Wan now has to rescue her from falling to her death by using the Force in what appears to be the first time in ten years or so. And while using the Force to lift up a ten-year-old kid wouldn’t have been a challenge for Obi-Wan in the old days, it clearly is now, since he is visibly straining to hold Leia and gently set her down. Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin calls it Force athritis and that’s exactly what it looks like.

AV-Club reviewer Sam Barsanti points out that Leia meeting Obi-Wan ten years before the events of A New Hope does mess up continuity, since there is no indication that Leia knew who Obi-Wan was, when she sent out the holographic SOS hidden inside R2-D2. However, there is also no indication that she didn’t know who he was either. Also, it never made sense to me that Leia would name her only child after a man she only briefly saw once, as he was being cut down by Darth Vader with a lightsabre. Never mind that only Luke called Obi-Wan Ben, while Leia calls him Obi-Wan and General in her message. However, if Leia actually met Obi-Wan as Ben, it makes a lot more sense that she would name her son after him.

At one point, Obi-Wan tells little Leia that she reminds him of someone. Of course, we all think that he is going to say Anakin, but instead he talks about Padmé, though he does not say her name. When Leia asks about this, Obi-Wan tells her that she was a friend and a leader and that she died a long time ago. Are those the seeds that persuade little Leia that she, too, can be a leader and that being a princess need not mean waving at people from groundcars? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the street kid which led Obi-Wan to the false Jedi Haja Estree has also seen the Wanted holo and bounty offered and immediately runs to Estree to tell him that they had a really big fish on the hook and let him go. Estree pales, once he realises that he just met an actual bona-fide Jedi, and heads out into the mean streets of Daiyu. He catches up with Obi-Wan just after he has saved little Leia from certain death, tells him that the passenger spaceport has been shut down and is being monitored, but that there is an automated cargo port they can use to escape. Estree also gives Obi-Wan an access key. When Obi-Wan asks Estree why he’s suddenly helping them, Estree replies that he’s trying to make amends, before sending Obi-Wan on his way.

Is Estree honest and is a really just someone trying to make his way in a hostile galaxy anyway he can? It’s possible and Star Wars has its share of criminals and outlaws with a heart of gold, see Han Solo and most of the cast of The Mandalorian. Or is he running a longer con? Neither we nor Obi-Wan can be sure, but Obi-Wan also has no other choice and sets off for the cargo port, Leia in tow. Shortly thereafter, Third Sister tracks down Estree. “Those are magnets, right?” Estree asks, as Third Sister force-chokes him.

Though Third Sister has problems of her own, because the Grand Inquisitor, Fifth Brother and a Sister whose ordinal number I did not catch also show up on Daiyu. Third Sister gets dressed down for ignoring orders and going after Obi-Wan once again. Wheen she tries telling the Grand Inquisitor that her plan worked and that Obi-Wan is here now, Grand Inquisitor informs her that he will be the one to bring in Kenobi, not Third Sister. Third Sister, however, is having none of this and cuts down the Grand Inquisitor, which apparently messes up the continuity of Star Wars Rebels, but since I never watched the various animated shows, I don’t particularly care.

This is as good a moment as any to note that Third Sister makes an awesome addition to the Star Wars villain roster. At io9, Justin Carter notes that she is unpredictable, more than slightly unhinged and that her obsessions with Obi-Wan is not explained, at least not so far, though she really has it in for him. Though it’s not just her unpredictability that brings her into conflict with her superiors, but also the fact that to them, she is gutter scum and “the least of them”. However, Third Sister is ambitious and wants to impress Darth Vader himself. Moses Ingram is fabulous in the role of this disturbed and fanatical young woman. However, Moses Ingram also happens to be black and so the usual suspect are out in force, hurling racist abuse at her. This behavious is not only disgusting, it also makes no sense, because Star Wars has never been all-white. There are people of colour in the original trilogy and in the prequels, including in major parts. And though it’s been twenty years, I don’t remember this sort of racist uproar, when the casting of Samuel L. Jackson, Temuera Morrison or Jimmy Smits was announced back in the day. But then, today’s toxic and racist fans would probably even complain about casting James Earl Jones as Darth Vader’s voice and Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian.

Third Sister finally corners Obi-Wan at the automated cargo port and tells him that she has order from Darth Vader himself to bring him in alive. Obi-Wan stiffens at the name and Third Sister twists the knife or rather lightsabre. “Yes, Anakin Skywalker is still alive,” she tells him. Now it is strange that Obi-Wan was not aware of this. Yes, he left Anakin for dead on Mustafar, but has he been really so isolated on Tatooine that he never even saw news footage of the Emperor’s right-hand man in his sinister black armour? Or is Darth Vader not well known to the universe at large? But whether it makes sense that Obi-Wan did not know that Anakin was still alive or not, Ewan McGregor plays his reaction beautifully. Because once he learns that Anakin lives, Obi-Wan actually smiles.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Showrunner and director Deborah Chow said in an interview I can’t find right now that the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin was one of love, which predictably infuriated the usual arseholes. Once again, this is completely ridiculous, because for starters, Obi-Wan raised Anakin from the age of approximately ten on. He says on screen that he viewed Anakin as a brother, so of course he loves him. And yes, Jedi are not supposed to have attachments and emotions, but we all know how well this worked out time and again.

But is it really just brotherly love Deborah Chow was referring to? Because ever since The Phantom Menace, Ewan McGregor has played Obi-Wan as gay man who’s so deeply closeted that he may not be aware of it himself. I’m always stunned how many people miss that because it has always been obvious to me that Obi-Wan was gay. Witness his obvious jealousy at Qui-Gon’s interest in Shmi Skywalker and Anakin. Witness Obi-Wan’s scream when Qui-Gon is killed. Watch his relationship with Anakin or even Luke. I don’t know if Obi-Wan ever had a physical or romantic relationship with anybody – maybe Qui-Gon, but not Anakin let alone Luke – but the feelings are there and Ewan McGregor conveys them beautifully. And no, I don’t think that this show is going to go further than looks and expressions, Disney being cautious about LGBTQ characters because of homophobes both abroad and in the US. Witness the bizarre war between Disney and Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis going on right now.

Third Sister struck a low blow, but Obi-Wan still manages to get away on the automated cargo ship with Leia, leaving a ranting Third Sister standing on a rooftop. However, the revelation has clearly distracted Obi-Wan to the point that he doesn’t react when Leia calls his name. He reaches out with the Force, likely for the first time in years, and soemwhere in a bacta tank far away, Darth Vader opens his eyes.

I have to admit that I was not all that excited about an Obi-Wan Kenobi series, when it was first announced. Obi-Wan flat out lying to Luke in the original trilogy was a true shocker for me and one of the reasons I instinctively distrust wise old mentor characters. Ironically, I actually liked Obi-Wan in the prequels and IMO Ewan McGregor’s portrayal did much to make him a more likeable and relatable character and also explains why he does not tell Luke the truth. So the fact that we would be seeing Ewan McGregor back in the role he has made his own, admirably filling the big footsteps of Alex Guinness, was definitely a plus. It is also nice to see more of Luke and Leia’s childhood and of the people who actually raised them to be the heroes and leaders they became, Owen and Beru Lars and Bail and Breha Organa. Finally, little Leia is a pure delight.

But while it’s early yet, so far Obi-Wan Kenobi is more Mandalorian than Book of Boba Fett. So yes, I’ll definitely keep watching.