Two Jedi, a clone trooper, and a Protocol Droid leading a gundark walk into a cantina... But, seriously....
Two weeks ago I received three issues of Star Wars Insider within a week. Good timing for me, since I was pretty much housebound by hot weather and a bad back. Issue # 86 contains an article called A New Order by J.W. Rinzler, which talks about viewing the saga in chronological order, Episodes 1-6. I'm going to write about that in my next entry, the working title of which is I Don't Think So! but today I want to take issue with something Mr. Rinzler said about my favorite Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Something along the lines of he looks even crazier in not recognizing R2-D2... Man, oh man, I am so SICK of this! So, I'm giving the definitive answer right here, right now... and that answer is...it depends on your point of view!
First of all, who says he doesn't recognize him? Just because he doesn't jump up and down and shout "R2-D2, it IS you!" (Threepio already had that line) doesn't mean he didn't recognize him. Watch the scene closely, when he moves the hood away from his face there's a hint of recognition in his eyes, something that says "this droid looks familiar."
I'm always telling my Padawans "just because you don't see something happen on the screen, right in front of your face, doesn't mean it didn't happen! Think!"
Obi-Wan is a Jedi, after all, he wasn't given to emotional attachments, especially to objects... Anakin would have recognized him because he was a gift from Padme, but to Obi-Wan he was just a droid...a useful and versatile droid, but a droid just the same...
On the other hand, R2 may simply look familiar because he's an R2 unit. In our universe there's only one R2-D2, and he's an icon... but in the GFFA, There's a hundred thousand worlds, and they all have space travel... that's an awful lot of astromech droids... Thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. . I doubt they are all hand built, so a whole lot of them are going to look exactly like R2-D2.
Incidentally, this is the same reason Owen doesn't recognize C-3PO. He knows he's a protocol droid, but that's all. There are a lot of those around, in fact there's another one on board the Tantive IV! Threepio introduces himself to Luke in the garage, after they are out of Owen's hearing.
Just like Obi-Wan never hears Artoo called by name, not until Luke says "Artoo and Threepio" after they discover the attacked Jawa sandcrawler... by this time there's no way Obi-Wan going to tell Luke anything about the past that he's not ready to hear...He never would have done that, whether he recognized R2 or not...
For a while I was bothered more by the conversation he had with Luke when he told him Uncle Owen "didn't hold with your Father's ideals, thought he should have stayed here and not gotten involved."
"Why would Owen say that, he only met Anakin once", I thought... then I took my own advice to the younglings and thought about it for a minute or five... Owen probably did say it, sometime in those 20 years, that if Anakin had stayed on Tatooine and not gotten involved in all that Jedi business he'd be alive and well then... just because it didn't happen right on the screen didn't mean it didn't happen... Now I'm bothered more by Obi-Wan calling him "Darth" on board the Death Star ... sigh
Oh yeah, the Punch Line... The bartender looks up and says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
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