“…Like you trained his father?”
Ouch! The man best known as “Uncle” Owen Lars, as played by returning Prequel Trilogy portrayer Joel Edgerton, delivered that brutal, arguably accurate comeback to star Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi after his suggestion that it might be time to train his foster son, a child Luke Skywalker, in the ways of the Jedi. While we’ve long-known how that element of the original Star Wars origin story gets resolved, the scene from the latest Obi-Wan Kenobi trailer delivers a new dimension to the eponymous hermit Jedi’s decades of inactivity.
Darth Vader’s return on the Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series has been a source of peripheral hype for quite some time, and the new trailer finally delivers the goods with an ominous montage of the Sith Lord, as played by returning Anakin Skywalker portrayer Hayden Christensen, in the midst of a disturbing daily routine as robotic limbs and a signature glowing respirator are violently installed onto his burned, mangled body. The imagery serves as the climactic punctuation to a strongly recurring theme in the clip, namely that Obi-Wan will become the quarry for an overwhelming array of scum and villainy on the series—and we don’t just mean the Galactic Empire’s army of stormtroopers and inquisitors, an evil collective already featured in the previous trailer.
Check out the new, May the 4th trailer for Obi-Wan Kenobi just below.
Along with further glimpses of new characters to the live-action sphere such as Star Wars Rebels villain the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) and the debuting Reva (Moses Ingram), the trailer is teeming with new material, the most notable of which are broken down below.
4-LOM is Back!
In some revelatory dialogue, the tenaciously antagonistic Inquisitor Reva states that, in addition to Imperial forces, “every lowlife and bounty hunter” will be set loose to hunt across the galaxy for Obi-Wan (whose profile pic has, understandably, been left without an update since the events of Revenge of the Sith). Surprisingly, the declaratory dialogue sets up the live-action return of one bounty hunter in particular—and no, not Boba Fett, but rather one of the other iconic “scum” set loose on the Millennium Falcon crew from The Empire Strikes Back: 4-LOM.
While that name might not mean much to casual moviegoers, those intimately familiar with the Original Trilogy, and, more notably, Kenner’s contemporaneously released action figures (which famously confused him for fellow bounty hunter Zuckuss), will know 4-LOM as the dark droid bounty hunter with an insect-like head attached to a protocol droid body similar to that of C-3PO. Now, the new Obi-Wan Kenobi trailer reveals that the explosive rooftop shootout we saw in the previous clip was occurring between Obi-Wan (who, contrary to his character, seems to embrace blasters here,) and the heretofore inactive droid bounty hunter, who we’ll see in action for the first time… well, ever.
Kumail Nanjiani’s Mystery Role Remains Mysterious.
A split-second glimpse has been provided of actor Kumail Nanjiani (Eternals), whose still-unnamed role on Obi-Wan remains one of the show’s tightly kept secrets. While the most noteworthy details of those secrets have been maintained, he’s clearly playing a human character, and his robe-resembling outfit seems to imply (at least, from this limited glimpse,) that his character is a Jedi, one who has been similarly targeted by the Empire’s extremely motivated Inquisitorius, as led behind the scenes by Darth Vader himself. While that notion remains in the realm of speculation, the trailer’s opening line by Obi-Wan, stating, “They’re coming, stay hidden or we will not survive,” certainly implies that he’s warning a fellow hidden member of the Jedi order.
*batteries not included 2: The New Batch.
What might be the most significant Obi-Wan reveal (at least, regarding knickknack-pushing potential,) is the very first official glimpse of the show’s brand-spanking-new merchandising-destined cutesie character. Indeed, while we’re still without an official name, the trailer has validated the substance of a recent report by StarWarsNewsNet that the series will feature its own adorable, aww-evoking Baby-Yoda-type character in the form of a flying saucer-resembling drone droid.
While we are only shown a quick scene of the small droid—glowing eye, expressive flaps and all—resting comfortably in the palm of a gloved humanoid character’s hand, the report claims that it will serve as a companion to a 10-year-old Princess Leia Organa, whose presence on the series has been rumored to be a vital part of Obi-Wan’s mission. Of course, the droid’s potential popularity will likely bring belated attention to director Matthew Robbins’s memorable 1987 sci-fi feelgood family flick, *batteries not included, in which an embattled elderly New York couple find themselves at the center of an invasion by cute miniature flying saucer aliens. It wouldn’t be a coincidence, seeing as that film was overseen by Steven Spielberg and a gaggle of Star Wars executive producers, notably current Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy.
“You should not have come back.”
Back from what? Indeed, a line from A New Hope uttered by Darth Vader to Obi-Wan upon their fateful final duel on the Death Star turned out to be profound in its vagueness. While many fans and other-media apocrypha creators have envisioned a pre-ANH meeting between Obi-Wan and his mechanically altered evil-embracing former apprentice, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series will finally canonize such a notion.
Indeed, after 2016 supplemental standalone film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story provided an intriguing glimpse of Vader’s daily routine (we witnessed him sleeping in a restorative bacta tank without his artificial limbs), the aforementioned trailer montage of Vader’s disturbing dress-up complements a profound reaction we see from Obi-Wan (as shown in the article’s title image) that presumably reflects the highly anticipated payoff moment in which he first sets eyes upon the mechanical malevolent monstrosity that Anakin Skywalker has become. We can see Ewan McGregor powerfully channeling a mixture of guilt, sadness and disgust, presenting a moment of pure pathos with the potential to distinguish itself as one of the most memorable yet from the Star Wars franchise.
Obi-Wan Kenobi will deliver its first two episodes to Disney+ on Friday, May 27. However, that won’t be the show’s regular day since subsequent episodes will premiere weekly on Wednesdays, building to its sixth and final episode (at least barring a Season 2 renewal,) on June 29.
