'Obi-Wan Kenobi' Writer Joby Harold Lays Out The Dark Side Of 'Star Wars' And What We Can Expect From The Disney+ Series.
It seems that the new Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series will be one of the darker addition to the Star Wars Universe.
If you remember the ending to Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, things didn't end on a high note for anyone involved. This is goes double for Obi-Wan Kenobi (played this time by Ewan McGregor), who was forced to go into hiding in order to keep secret the location of an infant Luke Skywalker - who, as any fan will know, grows up on the desert planet of Tatooine after he was forced to dismember his own padawan Anakin Skywalker when he turned to the Dark Side.
(Wow. That was the geekiest thing I've written all day and I LOVE it.)
Now, with the galaxy turning over power to the Dark Lord Sidious and the disbanding of the Jedi council after the death of its younglings, the new show will focus on Obi-Wan's time after the bleak defeat. Series writer Joby Harold spoke with Entertainment Weekly about what we can expect:
"It takes place 10 years after Revenge of the Sith, in a time of darkness in the galaxy. 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."
Harold had much more to say about where Obi-Wan is mentally after such a loss,
"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."
He continued,
"Within that environment and that galaxy, his faith is tested. 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 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."
With Anakin (Hayden Christensen), now fully engulfed in the persona of Darth Vader, the series Obi-Wan Kenobi will deal with a new journey to prepare for his next chapter in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope,
"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. 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."
It will be exciting to see how all of these emotional story beats flesh out in the series - though we hope it is better than the lazy take we were given with the last Star Wars property The Book Of Boba Fett, which came off as a misguided spin-off of a beloved character.
Obi-Wan Kenobi premiers May 27th on Disney+.
