Willow Ep. 1 and 2 send me on a quest to accept new teen characters.
How do you do, fellow kids?
The Short Take:
The first two episodes of the new Willow series on Disney+ satisfied my appetite for high fantasy with a good old fashioned questing party. I found the writing for the younger characters too contemporary, but once I got used to the YA feel and realized the thematic purpose behind that choice, I was ready to forge ahead.
Image Credit: LA Times
[This review will initially discuss details of what happens in Episodes 1 and 2 WITHOUT including any major plot spoilers. When I can’t hold out any longer, I’ll warn you for spoiler mode activation.]
The Long Take:
A provocation, to begin: rebellions are not built on hope. They’re built on whiny teenagers.
Obviously, as the number one Star Wars fan in most of my loved ones’ lives, I don’t actually believe this to be true and am just trying to stir the pot to get you to keep reading (is it working? am I a hypocrite when I try to teach my students how to write a “hook”?). But through a very narrow lens, it is true. The Original Trilogy centers around Luke Skywalker, who, when we first meet him, is an unassuming, immature farm boy who has never left Tatooine. To this day, fans make fun of him for whinging when he can’t go to the Toshche Station to pick up some power converters and hang out with his friends. When The Clone Wars animated series began back in 2008, Ahsoka Tano — who may very well be my favorite Star Wars character of all time — was a somewhat bratty 14-year-old who gave Anakin endless headaches as she complained about not being allowed to do more.
But what amazing hero’s journeys both of these characters have had. Over time, we have been able to watch them grow and mature. So when we get Luke in Return of the Jedi or The Last Jedi or Ahsoka in Rebels or Season 7 of TCW, those moments where they are at the peak of their powers feel earned. We appreciate them more for how far they have come. And they couldn’t have come that far if they didn’t start out as uninitiated teenagers who thought they knew more about life than they actually did or yearned to be a part of something bigger out there.
For those beginning their own journey with Willow, I would say that remembering the naïveté with which many heroes we love begin is the key to enjoying the series premiere, especially the first episode. I recently chatted about these first two episodes with Dan Zehr and Neil Baker on Coffee With Kenobi, and our discussion significantly helped me process my initial reaction. During our conversation, I noted that, to me, many of the “kids” — the younger generation of characters newly introduced in this series — seem like they are in a different show from the older returning characters. The writing for them seemed too contemporary and didn’t fit with my idea of what high fantasy sounds like. And I don’t mean accents. Val Kilmer didn’t have a British accent in the original film, but, from what I remember, he never used slang or idioms common in 1988. There’s a formality. An archaic quality. Or, as is the case with Madmartigan, a neutrality at the very least.
Even if these teenagers did sound more like characters from The Lord of the Rings or even the original Willow film, they are still very much caught up in their own personal hangups, often at the expense of the larger world around them. Kit, Sorsha’s daughter, doesn’t even think for a minute about serving the realm or trying to find some way of doing what Sorsha asks of her and some version of what she wants to do. Grayden, a prince betrothed to Kit, on the other hand, does, but he’s maybe the one exception; considering this, it’s unsurprising he was my favorite new character (Tony Revolori’s charm may also have had an impact). Even the kitchenmaid Dove can’t see past her love for Airk, Sorsha’s son, and becomes so hyper-focused on a serial dater who she probably hasn’t been with for very long because she is 100% absolutely totally convinced that their love is true. While Airk does have a nice scene in which he says that he’ll help his sister even if she doesn’t want his help, he for the most part seems to only care about rolling around in the grass. I guess I’m siding with all the exasperated, disapproving old folks like Sorsha and Jørgen Kase, the knight who says that Airk is the closest he’ll ever have to a son. Perhaps this means I’ve officially crossed over into the “get off my lawn” club. Sigh.
How much this batch of teenagers dominated the story and the way the series presents them definitely threw me off at the start. Having only watched the original 1988 Willow for the first time a few weeks ago, I was expecting a continuity in tone and style. So that certainly played a part. In contrast, Dan Z on CWK explained that he hadn’t seen the original film since it was in theaters in 1988 and purposely didn’t rewatch it to see how the new series would fare; the addition of all these younger characters and the dissonance created by their contrasting speech styles didn’t bother him.
Image Credit: Variety
I had to sit with my reaction just the same, and when I went back and rewatched the first episode (which I don’t normally have time to do but made a point to because I had an adverse reaction to this aspect of the series), I realized that this stark contrast between two generations of characters was what the story was all about. It was deliberate, to show conflict between them and set up this new batch of fledgling heroes at the beginning of what Joseph Campbell would name their “call to adventure,” as Dan Z referenced during our conversation. The whole point is that at the start they are teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing and have been sheltered in a LITERAL bubble made out of a magic forcefield. When Kit says that Dove can’t accompany them because she hasn’t been in a fight, Dove throws it back in her face and says, “Have you?” Kit may be skilled as a fighter from training in the castle, but she’s never left its safe harbor to test those skills in a real fight. And so it makes sense that she would come across as petulant and out of touch with reality.
The ex-con that Sorsha appoints as the party’s babysitter, Thraxus Boorman, has a mini-monologue with the gang as they rest in their camp that unlocked the choice to make these teenagers so very different from their elders and very (at times annoyingly) green. He says, “Well, you’re all so naive. It’s adorable. What? You’ve never known pain, fear, hunger. Out there, it won’t matter who your parents are or what you think you deserve. The world is bigger than you could possibly imagine. It doesn’t give a damn about any of you.” Upon a rewatch, I realized that this was the series’ way of telling me that it was making a point to show me how adorably naive and entitled these kids seemed. That the inter-generational contrast and conflict was the thematic pulse of the series. Boorman, by the way, is hilarious (I found him to be the funniest character). I don’t think this whole gambit with a party of teenagers actually works without his counter-perspective.
Image Credit: Collider
There’s a hopeful messaging behind the decision to center a sequel series around the younger generation. That inexperienced young people will be the ones to move the world forward and make it better. I really appreciated what Dan Z said on CWK about how all of the newer characters were subversions of fantasy archetypes; it made me appreciate them much more in retrospect. And it’s this idea of a newer, more progressive generation that generates momentum for the storytelling and gives it a sense of purpose. As they walk along the path together, their quest just begun, Grayden reassures Kit that they’re going to be in charge someday, so they don’t have to worry too much about dated customs like arranged political marriage. Eventually they can change the rules and change the world.
The series itself has the potential to change the unspoken rules of mainstream American television with its landmark LGBTQ+ representation of Kit and Jade’s budding same sex relationship. While I had my quibbles with Kit as a whiny teen, I thought the way the show introduced her and Jade as a couple was as deft as it was bold. They begin with charged conversations and longing looks, which is more like what we’ve seen in other shows. But then they really go for it by having Kit actually kiss Jade. There’s no plausible deniability here. No way to explain away their interactions and relegate their feelings for each other to subtext. I did not expect that, but loved to see it. The Pink Milk podcast had an excellent discussion of the episodes in general, but I would not have picked up on what they observed specifically about Kit and Jade’s kiss: that Jade’s response indicates that she’s uncomfortable kissing out in the open. As someone in a straight relationship with the privilege of worry-free PDA, I never would have thought about that as an authenticating detail, but am glad it’s there. I also found their relationship problems authentic; the idea that these two people care about each other and want to be together but their aspirations and desires outside of the relationship interfere feels real to me.
What’s unreal is how far I’ve made it in this review without talking about Willow Ufgood himself. But hopefully that gives you a sense of just how much this show is about the new characters as it is about cashing its nostalgia chips in bringing back old ones. Ultimately, though, I’m glad that these episodes prompted me to check my bias against teenagers and remember that all heroes have to start somewhere.
[SPOILER WARNING: I’m not going to discuss a fairly big reveal that we get at the end of episode 1. So even if you’ve been okay having not seen the first two episodes up until now, you may want to consider stepping away until you’ve seen them.]
Image Credit: New York Times
When I watched the original 1988 film, the most compelling and most Lucasfilm-y theme was that believing in yourself is half the battle. The “finger test” that a young Willow undergoes at the beginning of the film is emblematic of this idea because Willow doesn’t believe in himself and chooses one of the High Aldwin’s fingers rather than his own. He was never going to become a sorcerer at that point because he didn’t trust his instincts and he didn’t have the confidence that his own finger was the one “with the power to control the world.” One of the great joys of the film is then watching Willow go on his quest and repeatedly attempt to change sorceress Raziel back to her human form, only to fumble and keep transmuting her into other animals.
I was thrilled to see Elora (surprise…it was Dove all along!) go through the same finger test. This didn’t feel like a cheap fan service callback or a rip-off of the original film. It seemed like the kind of beautiful rhyme across stories that George Lucas always said Star Wars should have.
Considering he went through the exact same process, Willow SHOULD be the perfect person to teach Elora how to unlock her dormant powers. And yet, instead of sharing his own experience with Elora, he adopts a much more removed, didactic approach that essentially relies on learning by rote. It does work eventually, through Elora’s sheer will, but I don’t think that’s the result of Willow’s teaching.
Or maybe the spell worked due to her heightened emotional state when she gets frustrated. If Willow’s description of magic as the “bloodstream of the universe” parallels how The Force works as much as it sounds (his words reminded me of how Obi-Wan Kenobi describes The Force to Luke Skywalker in A New Hope), that may become a problem later. As Yoda notoriously says in The Phantom Menace, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” So if she continues to make breakthroughs by channeling her emotions, she may need to unlearn that later. (I acknowledge this is all speculation on my part.)
In order to keep Elora from falling to the Dark Side, Willow will have to regain his own confidence alongside her. As they travel on the wagon, Willow begins his lecture on magic with, “Forget all you know or think you know” but Elora interrupts him by saying she doesn’t actually know anything. I suspect Willow will, over the course of the series, need to learn that in order to be a good teacher, he has to meet Elora where she is instead of just saying an incantation and expecting her to copy it as if that means anything to her.
Willow doesn’t relay his own experience such that Elora can identify with him and learn from that experience because he’s insecure. We see in a flashback with Sorsha that she flat out tells him he’ll never be a great sorcerer, even after all these years. Considering that context, I see the way he’s teaching Elora as what he thinks a great sorcerer would do as a teacher because he’s got imposter syndrome and can’t conceive of how his own personal experience could be valuable to a student. As you can probably tell from how much I’m writing about it, I very much enjoyed all the scenes establishing this student-teacher relationship (or should I say Padawan-Master?) between Elora and Willow.
As I wrap up another semester with my own students, I am humbled by that which this new Willow series has reminded me: that in order to be a great teacher, we have to remember what it was like to be young and immature. We can’t lose sight of what it was like to be just starting out. We must give grace to those who may come across as irresponsible, or selfish, or ungrateful. Because even great heroes have humble beginnings.