If you thought the events seen in Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith were grim, wait until you get a load of Disney+’s new Star Wars series. Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Joby Harold recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the latest Star Wars series hitting the mouse-eared streaming service, and what he has to say could surprise you.
Harold says the show “takes place ten years after Revenge of the Sith, in a time of darkness in the galaxy.” This is after Obi-Wan watched his Jedi pupil Anakin slice off Mace Windu’s arm, butcher a group of younglings, Force-choke his wife, and try to defeat Obi-Wan in a battle for supremacy (and higher ground). “The Empire is in the ascendancy. And all the horrors that come with the Empire are being made manifest throughout the galaxy. And the Jedi Order as we know them are being all but wiped out. So everything that was in the prequels has crumbled.”
Woof! Things are tough all over for those who oppose the Empire; it would seem. What if I told you that it gets worse? Hold onto your science-fiction-inspired hats, ladies and gentlemen, and get a load of this. “Those surviving Jedi, those that do survive, are on the run,” Harold explained to EW, “and they’re in hiding. And Vader and his Inquisitors are chasing them to the end of the galaxy.”
However, “Within that hopeless, fatalistic world, we find possibly the most famous of all our surviving Jedi in hiding struggling with that faith that defines the Jedi, and wanting to hold onto it and hoping to regain that faith within that sort of hopeless world,” says Harold. “Within that environment and that galaxy, his faith is tested,” Harold says. “And he goes on a journey that allows him to travel from that character that we saw in the last of the prequels, where [McGregor] really felt like he was embodying Obi-Wan Kenobi to a pretty extraordinary degree, and ends with him as the more finished article that Sir Alec Guinness gave to the world in A New Hope. And so, in this very specific time in the history of Star Wars, when the Jedi are on the run, we get to sort of stand next to and watch Obi-Wan as he runs the gauntlet and has to survive a pretty extraordinary experience.”
It sounds as if Obi-Wan will be forced to contend with several demons throughout his adventure, and I don’t mean in a biblical sense. Watching your own kind be hunted, slaughtered, or driven into servitude will make a Jedi do desperate things. Will Obi-Wan retain his honor by the end of his journey?
“Part of the journey of what he goes through is reconciling that past and coming to understand it and coming to understand his place in it,” Harold says. “And that journey and the places he has to go emotionally as well as physically, and some of those battles he has to fight, are very much to do with facing that past and understanding who he was, his part in his own history, in the history of others.”
In addition to this in-depth interview with Harold, EW debuted two news images from Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series:
How excited are you for Obi-Wan Kenobi? Do you think the series will be as brutal as Harold describes? Sound off in the comments section below.
Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres on Disney+ with a two-episode debut on Friday, May 27, 2022, and in time we will see what writer Joby Harold meant.