Good grief, whose idea was it to put this episode out of sequence? It provides all the emotional context we need to immediately engage with the characters, it's honest with us right up front that the Jedi are in the wrong about a lot of things, it provides all the stakes that previously felt missing about the opening scenes that the show started off with, and it's SO much better-written than the other two episodes.
[Spoilers Below]
If I'd started my rewatch with this episode, I would totally have been able to maintain my naive viewer pretense, because we start outside of the Republic, outside of the Jedi order, with mostly sympathetic characters who just want to do their own thing and an interesting conflict because for one of those characters, her own thing is not aligned with everyone else's. The Jedi show up as interlopers who arrogantly intrude on someone else's property and interrupt a private ceremony, making demands they don't actually have the authority to insist on.
Whereas on my original viewing of the show, I was suspicious of everyone's motives for episodes 1 and 2, and then suspicious of the coven in episode 3 because the two well-established parts of the story so far were how much Sol cared for Osha, and how Osha had clearly made a life for herself after leaving the order, if I'd started with E3 in the first place, it would have been easy to see the appropriateness of the coven's concerns and the wrongness of the Jedi's actions, while also believing in Sol's good intentions.
Instead of having the fire alluded to and the deaths of Osha's family laid out with expository dialogue, in chronological sequence, we get to see the tragedy unfold with a full understanding of what's going on ... and then we're left with some uncertainty over whether the witches were actually all killed, or if maybe they were playing possum using the Force in order to protect themselves from the Jedi returning and shield Osha from a lifetime of uncertainty or regret over whether she'd made the right choice. So we still get a major mystery to ponder as the series unfolds, but we also have all the setup we need to become deeply invested in the characters, and we're left without the false drama of "Wait, is this woman waking up on the spaceship the same woman who just killed that Jedi?" followed by the disorienting revelation that Osha "had" a twin, which is the blindingly obvious explanation for who actually committed the murder.
Anyway, now I'm kicking myself for starting off this chronological rewatch of the whole franchise by stupidly failing to use chronology in approaching the very first series of the effort.
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