I finally figured out what it is about this scene that’s been niggling at my brain, FINALLY.
You know that feeling where it’s like, you know something means something but you’re missing it; there’s a connection you haven’t made yet and it’s driving you up the wall? That was 100% me with this scene, and since I never rewatch it because I uhhh…hate the arc it’s part of, I never had a chance to figure it out, but I watched it today for photoset making purposes and I got it. It’s the third gif here. I finally figured out what I wanted to articulate about it.
I always felt weird about this scene, and then felt weird for feeling weird about it, because it had Qui-Gon in it and by all rights I should have been excited, but I never connected to it fully, because it seemed very odd – bordering on unbelievable – that Obi-Wan was able to just have a chill conversation with the impossible apparition of his teacher, a man who’s been dead for over a decade, like it was no big deal. It felt absolutely strange.
HOWEVER
I finally made the connection for myself, and it’s the third gif here.
Obi-Wan, at the beginning of this scene, is stunned enough that he starts off by asking exactly the question we would expect – how?? And Qui-Gon is ready to engage with that, he gives Obi-Wan an answer – a cryptic one, sure, but a true one all the same.
And then Obi-Wan nopes out.
He retreats physically. His body leans back, away; he hesitates, he shakes his head, he actually stutters – Obi-Wan Kenobi, stuttering! – No, I – I don’t understand –
and then he straight changes the subject.
“What is this place?”
Back to business. To the problem at hand. To tangible concerns. Completely away from the emotionally-loaded and potentially worldview-altering phenomenon unfolding at his feet.
Qui-Gon is ready for Obi-Wan’s initial question, when Obi-Wan, too shocked to stop himself, blurts out how? But Obi-Wan isn’t ready for the answer. He’s not ready to entertain the possibility. That instant of hesitation in the third gif is him deciding not to engage with whatever is happening as anything more than what Anakin says in Season 6 – an illusion. a mind trick formed out of our memories. If this apparition isn’t real – and of course it can’t be – Obi-Wan can have as many chill conversations with it as he wants. He knows it’s his own mind playing tricks on him.
People ask sometimes, “well, why didn’t Qui-Gon appear to Obi-Wan in S6? Yoda heard him, Anakin heard him – ” And I’m just thinking, because of this. Because you can’t receive something unless you’re open to receiving, unless you’re open to the possibility, unless you’re capable of believing – and Obi-Wan has already shown that he isn’t, yet.
He has no reason to be, of course; it’s not something anyone would blame him for. Obi-Wan watched Qui-Gon die, he felt it happen in his own arms, and it was hard enough for him to accept that loss the first time. To be asked to completely invert his understanding of death, without any real proof, is a pretty tall order.
But, tall order or not, this is the link because S3 and S6, the connection my brain was trying to make before. Qui-Gon tells Yoda, “Speak of this to no one,” because he’s already tested Obi-Wan, and he knows it isn’t time.
The best teachers know when to push their students, and when to wait. Qui-Gon, even as he makes contact with Yoda, isn’t ignoring the best and brightest of his children. He’s waiting for Obi-Wan to show that he’s ready to listen. To give him a sign. And if Obi-Wan doesn’t give him that sign until Tatooine, under the excoriating heat of double suns, then so be it. Readiness comes when it comes, on its own terms and in its own time, and the only thing required of any of them until it arrives is patience.