The time between the Star Wars prequels and when we meet our favorite characters in A New Hope has been filled with stories of the rebels fighting back, but a time when we don’t know much about our dear Obi-Wan is the ten years that separates the new series Obi-Wan Kenobi and when we meet him again as Sir Alec Guinness.
And what we learn from the first two episodes of the new Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi is that our favorite Jedi is just as lost as the galaxy around him. Ben is struggling to find his place and has resigned himself to a life of loneliness on Tatooine as he protects Luke Skywalker, but these two debut episodes show us that “Ben” is about to learn a lot about the world he thinks he knows. So, let’s get into the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
**Spoilers for the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi lie ahead**
Obi-Wan Kenobi as a character is lost in the sense that he is no longer a Jedi, and when other Jedi need him, he pushes them aside. He has a mission and it’s his duty to protect Luke and look out for him, and he doesn’t really care about anything else. He’s struggling in his own torment and he reaches out to the Force Ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn to no answer. And in that loneliness, he forgets who he is. But when his old friend of Bail Organa needs him, he has to come to terms with the fact that he is still the Jedi that Qui-Gon trained him to be.
But the reason Bail came to Obi-Wan in the first place is because Leia has been kidnapped. Played by the INCREDIBLE Vivien Lyra Blair, Leia is an example of the headstrong princess we know and love from the start. When she runs off to the woods as she is known to do, hunters doing the bidding of Reva (Moses Ingram), who is trying to hunt down Obi-Wan, kidnap her, but both Bail and Ben think that they took Leia for political gain.
So Obi-Wan decides to do the right thing and help Bail find her and when he does, he’s confronted with the real truth: Anakin Skywalker is still alive. What we learned through episode 2 is that Obi-Wan believed Anakin dead and was unaware of Darth Vader’s existence. In his “rescue” of Leia, which is much like the rescue we see in A New Hope in the sense that she’s already rescued herself by the time he gets to her, we see how much Ben misses Anakin and Padme.
Leia is a small girl on a mission and Ben looks at her with the same admiration he had for Padmé. When Reva says to him that she’s taking him to Vader and that Anakin is alive, Obi-Wan is clearly distraught and says his name in such a way that you can feel his pain. All of this just shows us how much this all still hurts him.
It’s going to be a FASCINATING series to watch, and these two episodes set up so much of the show while giving us glimpses of hope for the rebellion (with characters like that of Kumail Nanjiani’s fake Jedi) and having the relationship between Obi and Leia grow is something that I didn’t know I needed and now I love it so much.
(image: Lucasfilm)
