SNAPSHOT
The story in this new series begins 10 years after the dramatic events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, where Obi-Wan Kenobi faced his greatest defeat—the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who turned to the dark side as the evil Sith Lord Darth Vader. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a six episode mini-series directed by Canadian filmmaker Deborah Chow, director of the film The High Cost of Living previously, plus lots of TV work including Reign, The Man in the High Castle, Fear the Walking Dead, and “The Sin” + “The Reckoning” episodes of The Mandalorian. The series is written by Joby Harold. Executive produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Michelle Rejwan, Deborah Chow, Ewan McGregor, and Joby Harold. Star Wars film composer John Williams wrote the main theme for the series. (synopsis courtesy First Showing)
If streaming has given us one thing besides an endless FOMO about the avalanche of brilliantly good programming it would take us several times to get through, it’s the opportunity to see the blanks filled in the timelines of various beloved franchises among them, in this instance, Star Wars.
Now, any storyteller worth their evocative salt will tell you that you don’t need every last narrative punctuation point added in when the human imagination has a powerful ability to do that for each and every viewer, but there’s something deeply appealing about a series like Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi which is going to fill in the period for us between Revenge of the Sith, when Darth Vader goes volcanically bad (sorry, not sorry) and A New Hope, where we, or rather Luke (Mark Hamill) finds the hermitic Jedi master hiding out on Tatooine.
Granted, we don’t need to know precisely what happened to Obi-Wan to make A New Hope the superlatively escapist piece of epic storytelling that it is, work so superbly well, but the idea that we get to see why he’s there on a remote, seemingly nothing desert planet, satisfies that part of us that wants to spend more time with the characters we love.
Disney+ is counting on that, of course when it is why I will sitting, eager like the 11-year-old I was when A New Hope got theatres in 1977, ready to find out more about the revered Obi-Wan Kenobi and what happened to him before he set Luke off on his path to Force-full glory.
The six-episode mini-series, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, drops its first two episodes on 27 May with the remaining four dropping weekly until 22 June.