Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Joby Harold has said “by the time everything has concluded, all things should be in place” in relation to potential discrepancies in the Disney+ series.
While Darth Vader’s classic line in A New Hope of “I sense something. A presence I’ve not felt since…” now has new meaning thanks to the Dark Lord’s battle with his former master on the mining planet of Mapuzo (meaning the last time they faced off is no longer Mustafar), the New Hope line still makes complete sense in its current context.
However, there is another piece of dialogue that has now come under scrutiny. While Leia reaching out in hologram form to Obi-Wan at the start of A New Hope now in many ways makes even more sense considering their current joint adventure, Leia’s introductory line of the message does not exactly track.
“General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars,” Leia says in the message stored on R2-D2. That’s an oddly formal greeting for someone the pint-size princess jokingly teased about his age on Daiyu. It also comes across as if the Jedi would not even know who she was, because the reference point she uses is her father, Bail Organa, and the Clone Wars, instead of this huge personal connection they experienced together a good decade after said Clone Wars.
While Harold won’t say a lot, he does note that this was not an overlooked aspect of the broader Star Wars story, and that all the pieces of the puzzle should fit once the series is complete. “We talked about it a lot,” Harold says of Leia’s line. “And we’re looking forward to the show airing in its entirety so that hopefully all questions are answered fully. So it’s tricky to field some of those questions mid-process. But yes, all I can say is we’re very cognizant of that, and of canon. And it’s a massive team, Lucasfilm, so we’re all very aware of all the choices that are being made.”
One of the other choices that stunned fans of the franchise occurred when Moses Ingram’s Reva thrust her lightsaber into the chest of Rupert Friend’s Grand Inquisitor at the end of episode 2. Not only was it a shocking lack of respect on Reva’s part for the Inquisitor chain of command, but it was shocking because the Grand Inquisitor is a huge part of the season 1 storyline of Star Wars Rebels, which takes place roughly four years after the events of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
While it could be a different Grand Inquisitor who appears later in Rebels(voiced by Jason Isaacs), they look awfully similar, and the backstory for Friend’s character that the actor provided to EW matches up perfectly with the Rebels version. So is Obi-Wan Kenobi blatantly messing with canon, or was that seemingly fatal blow not as deadly as it appeared?
“It will be so much easier to speak to these things once we’ve aired everything,” Harold says. “But as I said before, we very much take canon very, very seriously. And there are many, many people behind the scenes who prioritize that. So we have it in mind, and by the time everything has concluded, all things should be in place.”
The fifth and penultimate episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi streams this Wednesday, June 15th, exclusively on Disney+.
