RETURN OF THE JEDI

DISNEY+'S NEW OBI-WAN KENOBI TV SHOW REVEALS WHAT THE VENERABLE JEDI HAS BEEN UP TO SINCE REVENGE OF THE SITH. WE GET THE LOWDOWN ON A HOTLY ANTICIPATED COMEBACK...

- RICHARD EDWARDS

ORIGINAL MOVIES or prequels? Which you prefer depends greatly on your own point of view - or at the very least, when you were born. Nonetheless, there's one character who straddles both eras of Star Wars storytelling like a bearded colossus, a Jedi Master who had front row seats while the limelight-hogging Skywalkers were busy either falling from grace or taking their first step into a larger world.

At risk of stretching a metaphor to the point where millions of voices cry out in terror, he's the energy field binding two trilogies together, and his new eponymously titled Disney+ show is set to fill in some crucial gaps of canon from those two decades between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope.

"We're 10 years after Revenge Of The Sith and it's quite a dark period," Obi-Wan Kenobi director and executive producer Deborah Chow tells SFX, with understatement. "Obviously, Order 66 has happened, so many of the Jedi are either dead or in hiding, and the Empire is fully in ascendance. And for Obi-Wan personally, there's obviously all the feelings towards Anakin and what happened in Revenge Of The Sith, so there's a lot of stuff for him to deal with at the start of the show."

"Certainly one of the things that appealed to me is that the Obi-Wan we left at the end of Episode III is very different to the Sir Alec Guinness interpretation of the character," adds writer and executive producer Joby Harold. "At the end of Episode III, Obi-Wan is quite emotionally torn up in regards to what's happened with him and Anakin, and then in Episode IV he's comparatively at peace. That always felt like an untold story to me. How he became that zen Jedi master having seen his brother burn in front of him on Mustafar, there's a clear arc to a story between those two moments. It's very much the connective tissue between the prequels and the original trilogy."