Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi Episodes 1 and 2.
Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi depicts our dejected former Jedi Master in exile on Tatooine ten years after a commitment made in Revenge of the Sith to protect a young, Jedi-power-potential Luke Skywalker from afar. However, he lives a Kafkaesque existence of filleting (obscenely big) fish for a few life-sustaining credits and comes home alone to empty Paleolithic digs, in which showers are as difficult to achieve as transcending the physical veil of the living Force. This miserably smelly existence is interrupted by the arrival of the Empire’s Inquisitorius, led by the Grand Inquisitor, a familiar face to fans of the 2014-2018 animated series Star Wars Rebels, which is set later in the timeline. However, the accepted canonical status of that series might be in peril.
The Disney+ double-header debut of Obi-Wan Kenobi accelerated the miniseries 1/3 through its six-episode run. Consequently, the action picks up rapidly in Episode 2, which takes Obi-Wan away from his depressing existence on the iconic desert planet to a rescue mission of a young Princess Leia Organa (Vivien Lyra Blair) in the urban red-light district of a planet called Daiyu. Yet, as Admiral Ackbar famously interjected, “It’s a trap!”—in this case, one set by the tenacious Inquisitor Reva (Moses Ingram) to lure Kenobi. After the duo achieves a close escape in the episode’s climax, Reva’s escalating issues with her imperious immediate boss, the Grand Inquisitor, shockingly come to a head when she lightsaber-stabs him in the gut, seemingly killing him! Since the later-set Rebels prominently showcased the struck-down supervisor as its main villain, where does this leave that show?
Indeed, Obi-Wan Kenobi threw one hell of a curveball to viewers with the apparent death of the Grand Inquisitor, a character who—as played for the first time in live-action form by a heavily made-up actor in Rupert Friend—was clearly poised in the trailers to serve as a central antagonistic force on the series. The character, a Pau’an—a species Obi-Wan encountered via administrator Tion Mendon (Bruce Spence) in ROTS—was introduced on Rebels as the initial big bad of the series, on which the whirling-lightsaber-wielding Inquisitorius persistently hunted stray Jedi Knight Kanan Jarrus and pickpocket-turned-apprentice Ezra Bridger. The ongoing vendetta across the galaxy ultimately climaxed in the Season 1 finale, in which the Grand Inquisitor (voiced by Jason Isaacs), having been finally defeated in combat by Kanan, feared the consequences of his failure (presumably at the hands of Inquisitorious overseer Darth Vader), and therefore opted for a suicidal plunge into an unstable ship reactor, perhaps intending to take his enemies with him in one final explosive act (which, of course, he failed to do as well). The act nevertheless set what seemed to be an impervious endpoint for the Grand Inquisitor’s fate in any chronologically preceding appearance.
Pertinently, after a 2012 declaration by then-new franchise owners Disney that Star Wars would curate a codified, more-disciplined story continuity across its various non-live-action mediums (e.g. animation, video games, novels and comics), the Grand Inquisitor’s long-awaited live-action debut on Obi-Wan Kenobi was widely taken as yet another demonstration of this media-crossing world-building. After all, the franchise already made a similar move on The Mandalorian in Season 2 (2020) with its introduction of Rosario Dawson as the live-action Ahsoka Tano, a character who, back in 2008, kicked off the current canon-acknowledged animated corner of the franchise on Star Wars: The Clone Wars (and later on Rebels). Indeed, she was arguably the most important character in the animated sphere, with an arc that started as an energetic preteen Jedi Padawan for an initially reluctant master in Anakin Skywalker to a lone-walking adult Jedi version of a hedge knight, left skeptical of the institutional actions of the Jedi Council. Of course, after the character made another surprise appearance on The Book of Boba Fett, the live-action strategy will soon bear sizable fruit when Dawson reprises the role to star on the upcoming Disney+ Ahsoka live-action series. Because of that, it was easy to assume that Rebels-originated characters like the Grand Inquisitor and even the Fifth Brother (Sung Kang) walked into Obi-Wan Kenobi wearing impenetrable plot armor.
Of course, there are still four more Obi-Wan Kenobi episodes to unveil, and anything can happen when it comes to the Grand Inquisitor issue… that is, if it’s even an issue at all. Indeed, Reva’s abrupt, anger-addled stab may have left the evil overseer lifeless on the ground, but we’ve seen villains come back from much worse in the Star Wars universe, as Darth Maul definitively proved after being chopped in half by Kenobi in The Phantom Menace, only to resurface canonically on Star Wars: The Clone Wars/Rebels and in live-action form in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Plus, a little plot doctoring could potentially point to heretofore unknown anomalies in the Grand Inquisitor’s Pau’an physiology that would allow him to survive the seemingly fatal wound. Indeed, he could still pull through, thereby maintaining the canonical sanctity of the climactic battle with Kanan. While, admittedly, such a development would render this article a circuitous thought exercise leading to a dead-end, one can indulge in the hope that it was at least engaging.
Something that, thankfully, no longer requires speculation is that Obi-Wan Kenobi is (at least, thus far) effectively delivering the goods when it comes to the essence of old-school Star Wars, exercising pathos and intense action spectacle with a balance that would even mollify the Force itself. The four remaining episodes are set to premiere on an individual basis on Wednesdays, culminating with the June 22 drop of the finale.
