In an effort to foil an assassination attempt on the Chancellor, the Jedi Council sees fit to send Obi-wan Kenobi deep undercover, infiltrating a Republic prison, and joining up with Cad Bane’s group.
It’s an action packed adventure, that is a great start for a four-part arc.
It’s always a hard thing to judge the first piece of a longer story because there really isn’t any closure or anything definitive to latch on to, but quite a bit about this story came to mind and conjured up some excited smiles.
Ultimately, there’s a darkness about this episode. Not just in the color palate or the fact that it’s at night, but I can’t imagine anything darker than the Jedi have set into motion a plan as dark and devious as something Darth Sidious would be capable of. This is a plan of deception, putting a Jedi into harms way after faking his own death. It calls to mind something Yoda said at the end of Attack of the Clones to Obi-wan about Count Dooku. “Joined the dark side, Dooku has. Lies, deceit, creating mistrust are his ways now.”
What are they doing but lying, deceiving and creating mistrust? Particularly on the part of Anakin.
Anakin has no idea that Obi-wan is alive. With his struggles to keep his loved ones alive and seeking revenge for their deaths, this deception has already pushed him to the teetering brink between the light and the dark. Add to the fact that Mace Windu is in charge of this operation and it’s easy to see why Anakin dislikes him so much and for so many reasons in Revenge of the Sith.
This is a step backward for the Jedi. They’re selling out their ideals. And even if they foil this assassination plot (which they obviously do) they’ve lost by drifting closer to the dark side of the force and their eventual ruin.
Visually, at least for the first third of the episode, I got a very strong Kurosawa noir vibe. They were in the evil underworld, completely out of their element, much like Toshiro Mifune in Stray Dog, or the cops chasing the kidnapper in High and Low. The scenery matched that sort of vibe and I liked it very much.
For the rest of the episode, I felt like I was watching some sad mix between Brubaker and Serpico.
Obi-wan is in prison, in a bad place, and he’s got no one he can rely on. Add to that the prison escape where he’s expected to kill clones and anyone else standing in the way since he’s impersonating a hardened killer and you have all the ingredients of a fascinating moral quandary for Ben Kenobi.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this episode showed another improvement in animation and lighting. There was one moment in particular, when Obi-wan swallows the voice modulator, where the internal lighting and the work James Arnold Taylor did mixing his different voices came together to give me a moment that, on a technical level, simply made my jaw drop.
That’s one of the things I absolutely adore about this show. Every episode there seems to be a moment, at least once, sometimes more, where I just have to stand back and marvel at what they’ve accomplished.
As for “Deception,” for the first part of a four part arc, this episode set the scene nicely, but also gave me so much to chew on as far as the lore of Star Wars and that fascinating bridge between Episode II and III.