Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi is airing now on Disney+, and it’s been a big old nostalgic jolt to anyone who grew up loving the original and prequel trilogies. Unlike many of Lucasfilm’s other Disney+ shows, most of which take place after Return of the Jedi, this one is set in between the two trilogies of films made by George Lucas. The show has leaned into those connections, from the returns of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen as Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader to seeing Princess Leia as a child to Temeura Morrison showing up as a clone trooper in the second episode. The fan service is very present. The fourth episode even revealed the previously unknown fate of a character from The Clone Wars animated series.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. Obi-Wan Kenobi draws directly from the Star Wars films, which means more opportunities to create inconsistencies. And you can bet that fans have found some.
Has Obi-Wan Kenobi created plot holes in the Star Wars canon?
One of the newest potential inconsistencies fans have found involves that iconic scene in A New Hope where a hologram of Princess Leia begs Obi-Wan Kenobi for help against the Empire. “General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars,” she begins…which, when you think about it, doesn’t particularly sound like the way you’d talk to someone who rescued you from mercenaries as a child.
“We talked about it a lot,” Obi-Wan Kenobi writer Joby Harold told Entertainment Weekly, in reference to that particular line of Leia’s. “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.”
This is fair enough; there is a feeling in Obi-Wan Kenobi that it’s too early to really judge whether things like this are inconsistencies or part of a pattern yet to fully reveal itself. Another big example is the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend), a villain who had a lightsaber unceremoniously plunged through his guts by Reva (Moses Ingram) in the show’s second episode. The Grand Inquisitor is a major villain in the Star Wars Rebels animated series, which takes place four years after Obi-Wan Kenobi. Did the show really just introduce this canon character to kill him off immediately?
“It will be so much easier to speak to these things once we’ve aired everything,” Harold said, when put on the spot about it. “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.”
We shall see! Grand Inquisitor is a title, so it’s possible that this is a different character than the one we saw in Rebels; though actor Rupert Friend did say he modeled his performance off the Rebels character. “I got a strong sense of [the Grand Inquisitor] from the script and from the animated production. Then I just wanted to work with our director Deborah Chow, and bring this character to life in the live-action space in a way that felt truthful to the essence of him,” Friend told Collider at this year’s Star Wars Celebration. “It was a real honor actually, getting to inhabit this villain. It felt like an honor to me.”
So that certainly sounds like this is the same Grand Inquisitor. Who knows, maybe Vader was feeling benevolent and gave the Inquisitor a guest pass to his bacta tank or something, and he’s healing up right this very moment.
The final two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi hit Disney+ on June 15 and June 22.
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