I think I fall on a middle ground. I really enjoyed episodes 1 and 2, they’re certainly my favorite thing to have come out of SW TV, but three was… weird.
I really, really liked the first half of the episode as well. Leia is so Leia about it all, Ben is so Ben about it all, Freck is one of the best characters in Star Wars, the minimalistic setting works wonders. All was well.
But then the Vader stuff happened. Even early on, the scene where he speaks with holo-Reva looks off. Cheap. Again, like the sort of thing I’d see in the Star Wars Theory YouTube channel. And the fight, too, was very bad. It pains me to say that I think the biggest person to blame for the shortcomings of this Episode 3 is the director.
The writing is sound - minus some dialogue from Vader which sounded weird to me - the characters are all great, their interactions great, motivations great. It’s certainly not perfect - I’m not the biggest fan of the Leia plot not being over yet, at this point it does feel like they’re mostly chasing their own tail just to stretch this out to six parts as opposed to a 150min thing - but for the most part very good. Reva is great, Vader is mostly great, Ben is great, the rest of the characters are great.
But the staging, blocking, lighting, heck, even the choreography of that duel… reminded me strongly of the atrocious Sc. 38 Reimagined. That is not a good thing. As mentioned previously, tons of “cool” Vader shots end up making none of them weighty and even a bit cringy sometimes. It’s so weird that this happened all of a sudden, Chow was arguably the strongest point in the first two but doubtlessly the worst part of this one.
But even with this uneven episode, I still have high hopes for the final three - especially when the latter half of this episode felt so much like a “tease”, which, again, is certainly not a good thing and is evidence of the show starting to go in circles, which is bad, but is the promise of good things to come.