Television Reviews

Obi-Wan Kenobi – Part I

  • Title: Obi-Wan Kenobi – Part I
  • IMDb: link

Set a decade after the events of The Revenge of the Sith, the opening episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up with the Jedi in hiding on Tatooine keeping an eye on young Luke, much to the dismay of Owen Lars (Joel Edgerton). Meanwhile, a galaxy away, the other child of Anakin Skywalker is kidnapped in a move designed to flush Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) out of hiding. The villains of the series, brought in from Star Wars Rebels, are the Inquisitors (Force-wielding Jedi hunters). We get the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) who sadly has neither the look nor menacing voice of the original cartoon character, the largely superfluous Fifth Brother (Sung Kang) , and the Third Sister (Moses Ingram) whose actions in kidnapping the adopted daughter of Bail Organa (Jimmy Smits) are a means to feed her obsession in locating Obi-Wan Kenobi.

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Star Trek: Discovery – Kobayashi Maru

  • Title: Star Trek: Discovery – Kobayashi Maru
  • wiki: link

Our first look at Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in the captain’s chair offers a pair of risky adventures for the U.S.S. Discovery as well as introducing a new looming threat for the season arc. In the shorter opening segment, diplomacy gets a bit tricky for Michael and Book (David Ajala) with the butterfly people of Alshain IV which Michael solves with a risky proposition that ultimately pans out. Later she’ll need to make similar calls when Discovery is sent on a rescue mission from a Federation Space Station spinning out of control after its encounter with some kind of spatial anomaly. Along for the longer mission is the new Federation President (Chelah Horsdal) who tags along to evaluate the ship’s captain.

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NCIS: Hawai’i – Ohana

  • Title: NCIS: Hawai’i – Ohana
  • wiki: link

The second-half of the NCIS: Hawai’i season finale features the team searching for the person responsible for the dead spies on both sides of the prisoner exchange leading to increasing tensions between the United States and Russia. The episode ends with a bit of a twist, but since there’s nothing known about the character beforehand it’s a bit of a toothless move that simply used for the sake of having a twist. Along the way another member of the team will be put in momentary danger when he triggers the assassin’s bomb, but once again things are quickly solved as the show moves toward stopping the larger target. That said, the finale does deliver (finally) a reconciliation between Lucy (Yasmine Al-Bustami) and Whistler (Tori Anderson) hopefully leading to plenty more of the couple together next season.

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Halo – Contact

  • Title: Halo – Contact
  • IMDb: link

I’ll be honest, my only real connection with the first-person shooter video game series the new TV-series is based on comes from the popular multi-player mode where I tried my best not to get shot in the back of the head by players who put in far more hours to the game than I ever would. The larger story about super-elite military soldiers versus invading aliens wasn’t really applicable to those scenarios. The series takes the basic mythology of the game and expands on it by adding a layer of class divide all too familiar to fans of dystopian science fiction. The opening episode is really only notable for recreating the look of the video game hero along with its high special effects and high body count of the various Covenant aliens Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) and the others of Silver Team will put down.

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Dragons: The Nine Realms – Uniconned

  • Title: Dragons: The Nine Realms – Uniconned
  • wiki: link

Dragons: The Nine Realms kicks off its Second Season with the discovery of a Bubblehorn dragon which June immediately falls for and breaks a cardinal rule of Dragon Club by taking the little troublemaker back with her. Despite its cuteness, Nibbles turns out to a pain for everyone causing chaos that somehow doesn’t alert any of the adults and damage that can’t easily be explained. The episode is notable for the introduction of June’s less trustworthy older brother Eugene (Vincent Tong) who is suspicious of June’s behavior but has not yet stumbled upon the secret of the dragons.

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