With the arrival of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus just a few short weeks away, excitement ramps and interest dials up, and tuning into that comes writer Joby Harold, talking to website Entertainment Weekly about the state of the galaxy and how the spirit of Kenobi has been whittled so sharply even he needs an injection of hope.
As if it was not brutal enough for the Republic-turned-Rebellion to watch everything go to hell in Episode III, now it seems they’ve had to sit and watch the dark side consume all that it touches in both the inner and outer rim for a decade. But wait, it gets worse! “Those surviving Jedi, those that do survive, are on the run,” explains Harold, “and they’re in hiding. And Vader and his Inquisitors are chasing them to the end of the galaxy.”
Such is the setting when we pick things up with our titular hero. Says Harold: “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.”
It is that (literal) transition from hopeless to A New Hope for our titular hero that the new series hopes to explore. “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 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.”
We’ll be reviewing every episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Making Tracks: Reaction Chat every Wednesday and recapping the weeks Kenobi news on the never-more-aptly-named Good Morning Tatooine Sunday evenings, and we cannot wait.
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