Force of nature

It’s an accepted fact amongst the fanbase that the three Star Wars films Ewan McGregor made (confusingly, the story-establishing trilogy which came after the canon-establishing trilogy...) were not the best. Not that McGregor was directly at fault: blame, ultimately, resides with the saga’s creator, George Lucas, who wrote them. I’m not going to list all the faults here, but my principle gripe was that the scripts were awful and the quality control was somewhat off.

Since then, all things Star Wars have fallen into the hands of another galactic empire, Disney, which since buying the franchise from Lucas in 2012 has been Marvelising it with a 'universe' of sequels, prequels and other offshoots from the original Skywalker storyline. These have included films like Rogue One and Solo and numerous TV projects including the ‘space Western’ The Mandalorian and the interconnected Book Of Boba Fett. At a Star Wars convention this week it was announced that a much-anticipated third series of The Mandalorian will come to the Disney+ streaming platform next February, and another new TV spinoff, Andor - a prequel to the events of the cinematic release Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - will launch on the channel in August. 

However, before any of that, today we can add another entry to the entire canon: Obi-Wan Kenobi, a supposedly standalone series in which McGregor reprises his cinematic role as the Jedi master who tutored the young apprentice Anakin Skywalker in the ways of The Force before he succumbed to the Dark Side and became Darth Vader in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith. 

Set ten years after that storyline - and before the old, reclusive ‘Ben Kenobi’ encounters Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film (now known canonically as Episode IV: A New Hope) - Obi-Wan Kenobi finds the Jedi exiled and living in a cave on Tatooine where he keeps a distant eye on the young Luke (whom we all now know is one of Vader’s twin children, the other being the future Princess Leia).

As with all of the Star Wars properties, Obi-Wan Kenobi will frame the classic good-versus-evil struggle, promising plenty of the fairy tale magic that first enamoured a generation of cinema-goers in 1977 and snared another with the prequels and sequels. The series starts from the premise of the Jedi Master coming to terms with the ‘loss’ of Anakin and his emergence as as the Galactic Empire’s ultimate enforcer, Vader.

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ All Rights Reserved

“We find Obi-Wan at the beginning of our story rather broken, and faithless,“ McGregor explained earlier this year, “and beaten - somewhat given up.” But, he added, the series is not without hope.Along the way in the six-part series we will meet the ‘Inquisitors’, a ruthless band of lightsabre-wielding hunters, tasked by Vader to track down his former Jedi mentor. That means, too, a reprise for Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin/Vader in the second two prequels, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith, which saw the Jedi largely wiped out. Presumably, with Obi-Wan the only known Jedi in existence (along with Yoda, of course), the series will bridge the gap with A New Hope, though it’s not clear yet how. Disney+ is committing six episodes now in a “limited series”, although both McGregor and Christensen have said they’d be open to a second series. ”It was definitely conceived as a limited series,” director Deborah Chow said recently. “It is one big story with a beginning, middle, and end. So that's the way we've always approached it. The approach has always been that it is one full story.” 

Given that the series only covers a period ten years after Sith, and a full nine years before A New Hope, Disney certainly has plenty of scope to fill in the period of Luke’s adolescence (though best not worth getting into the technicalities of McGregor’s Obi-Wan ageing in nine years to become Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan). “It was made as a one-off limited series,” McGregor told Entertainment Weekly, following the company line. “And in a way, it does do what I wanted it to do in terms of bridging a story between [Episodes] III and IV and bringing me closer to Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan in A New Hope.” To which he added: “Would I like to make another one? “Yeah, I would like to make another one.”

Time, though, will tell how the fanbase reacts to this latest offshoot. The Mandalorian had a slow start in its first season, but warmed up in its second. The Book Of Boba Fett left many cold for the first half of its run last year, but it warmed up as The Mandalorian character was introduced as a crossover. Another neat segway to the original cinematic canon in The Mandalorian was a significant cameo by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. ”It's nice to know that by all of our efforts in making this Obi-Wan Kenobi series, the fans are going to be stoked,” McGregor said. ”I think they're not going to be disappointed by it. Maybe some will, but you can't please all the people all the time. But knowing that people are going to be happy because of our work is a nice feeling.”

Picture: StillMoving.net for Disney

McGregor was not surprisingly tight-lipped as to how Obi-Wan Kenobi would develop, but gave some insight in his interview with Entertainment Weekly. “At the beginning of our story, we know that it’s ten years after Episode III. So we know that the Jedi Order have been all but destroyed, and everyone who wasn't killed in Order 66 has fled and is in hiding. Yoda and some of the other Jedi who Obi-Wan would’ve known and loved are unable to communicate with each other.”

“So [my character is] much closer to the Obi-Wan Alec Guinness played in that he’s on Tatooine and he’s a solitary man. He’s living as normal a life as he can so as not to draw attention to himself, because the Jedi are being hunted down to be destroyed and he will know that. And his last responsibility to his old life is to look over Luke Skywalker, who is with [Uncle] Owen and Aunt Beru [his guardians at the start of A New Hope], and he's doing that from a distance so as not to draw attention to their family in the moisture farm there.”

McGregor sheds a little light on the premise of the initial series: “I think Owen wants Luke Skywalker to have a normal childhood, to grow up in an ordinary way and not to be bothered by that. And also, there's the risk that, knowing that the Jedi are being hunted down, if Obi-Wan is found out and discovered, then [Owen] doesn’t want him anywhere near Luke Skywalker because they would also take Luke.” This suggests a plot line similar to The Mandalorian’s protection of Grogu (AKA ‘Baby Yoda’), which fits into the canon immediately after the defeat of the Empire in Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi.

Picture: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Disney

Time will tell how Obi-Wan Kenobi will play out, there’s no doubting the commitment of both McGregor and Christensen to the project, chastened perhaps by the criticism that befell their chapters in the film series. McGregor rewatched the entire Skywalker saga while Christensen went even deeper, watching all of the films as well as the animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels, which introduced a number of key character and story developments to the overall canon, which have been touched on in the various Disney-era productions.  

Now older and wiser, McGregor and Christensen appear to have taken a healthy approach to the criticism of the prequel films as they reprised their roles for TV. “For the young stars, there was nowhere to hide. "I found it quite hard," McGregor, now 50, admits of the reaction to the prequels. “For [them] to come out and get knocked so hard was personally quite difficult to deal with,” said McGregor in his interview. “And also, it was quite early in my career. I didn't really know how to deal with that. I’d been involved with things that just didn't make much of a ripple, but that's different from making something that makes a negative ripple.” For Christensen, who was barely out of his teens when he was cast as Anakin Skywalker, he had even more to confiner: “When the films came out and the critics were very critical, of course that was a difficult thing,” he said recently. “Because you care so much about this thing that you've invested so much of yourself into. So, for sure, that's challenging.”

© 2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™All Rights Reserved

McGregor takes the view that the audience who watched his Star Wars films will have now grown up, just as my age group watched the original trilogy and grew up. With that, he hopes, has brought a realisation that the new series has an opportunity to make a new contribution to the saga that spans more than 45 Earth years. It is, he says, one of hope as Obi-Wan heals the pain of losing Anakin, although it remains to be seen, knowing what comes in A New Hope, how much peace he will find. 

“When we last saw Obi-Wan in the prequels, he’s very emotional,” says the TV show’s writer Joby Harold. “There’s a passion to him. And when we get to see him again in A New Hope, he is the Zen master. That was the story that I wanted to understand - what had happened to Obi-Wan between the guy that Ewan had brought to life and the guy that Sir Alec Guinness brought to life.”. Over the next six weeks we will find out.