We are around six week away from seeing the return of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi in his new Disney+ Star Wars series. While fans are already pretty hyped for the show, which also sees Hayden Christensen reprise his role of Anakin Skywalker/ Darth Vader, series writer Joby Harold has been opening up about the storyline of the series and how the dark times that arrived in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith are not going to be any better in Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Speaking with EW, Harold broke down where the show fits into the Star Wars story, and following the climactic battle between Kenobi and Skywalker that saw the latter complete his journey to becoming Vader, the new series will pick the story a decade later, when the galaxy’s plight is worse than ever and the future of the Jedi order is uncertain to say the least. He said:
"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. Those surviving Jedi, those that do survive, are on the run, and they're in hiding. And Vader and his Inquisitors are chasing them to the end of the galaxy. 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.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi Will Show How the Star Wars Universe Gained A New Hope
The story of Obi-Wan Kenobi has a lot of scope to work with, and it certainly seems like the long-form series format will be better suited to telling that tale than the original planned movie would have achieved. Harold went on explain that the series has a chance to really delve into Kenobi’s journey between his actions Revenge of the Sith to where his story picks up in Star Wars: A New Hope.
"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. 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."
Fans of the franchise can follow Obi-Wan’s journey when the series makes its double-episode debut May 27 on Disney+.