Mild spoilers ahead!

Darth Vader is back and it’s a dastardly return for the character. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen him so angry and aggressive not even in Rogue One. I thought Reva was aggressive, but she never actually killed randomly, merely threatened or maimed people, but Vader just straight up murders random people on the street in order to flush Obi-Wan out.

Vader is just toying with Obi-Wan in their fight scene. I love how they did the lightsabre effects in this scene, lighting each character up in a bright glow. You don’t see how bright the lightsabres are that often in the series, they usually have to get right up close to their faces for the glow to become apparent. It’s very, very cool and quite cinematic. It makes for some interesting shots that differentiates itself from every other lightsabre duel we’ve seen.

I’ve seen a few people complain about the dialogue as being cheesy, and yeah, of course it is, it’s Star Wars. The franchise is known for cheesy on-the-nose dialogue. It isn’t quite Shakespeare and it never tried to be. Watch A New Hope again and really pay attention to the dialogue, it’s not great.

Other than Darth Vader, there actually isn’t much else going on in the episode. The whole sequence of Obi-Wan and Leia trying to evade the stormtroopers is entertaining at times, but it is nowhere near as interesting as when Vader shows up.

As a result, it’s a good episode if not for the interaction of Vader and Obi-Wan alone. It will be interesting to see if there is more Vader because right now, Obi-Wan is no match for him. He’s a broken man and Vader has only gotten stronger thanks to his anger. Surely there won’t be another duel between them, or perhaps this is setting up for Obi-Wan’s redemption duel, but does that really work if we know how A New Hope goes? The dialogue in the original’s scene implies that they haven’t met since that day on Mustafar so it will be interesting to see how much the series plays with canon.

I was surprised to see that they were on a different planet yet again which I thank the heavens above for everyday because I am sick to death of Tatooine. I know it makes sense that Obi-Wan is on Tatooine but I’m glad they resisted the urge to stay there. There’s a whole galaxy out there and somehow almost all the most important events in Star Wars happen on Tatooine.

Worth the watch and absolutely helps to set up the next half of the series.