Warning: this story contains spoilers for Wednesday’s Obi-Wan Kenobi Episode 4. In Obi-Wan Kenobi “Part III,” Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) learned of The Path: a secret Jedi smuggling network leading to Jabiim. “These days, the Empire hunts anyone who’s Force-sensitive. Even children,” undercover Imperial officer Tala (Indira Varma) revealed on the mining system Mapuzo. Asked what happens to the Force users hunted by Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) and the Inquisitors, Tala told Obi-Wan, “We’re not sure. But no one ever sees them again.”
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In “Part IV,” Obi-Wan witnessed firsthand what happens to the Force-sensitives who don’t escape to Jabiim: they’re displayed as trophies in the Fortress Inquisitorius, the near-impenetrable Inquisitor base on the water moon Nur. The Jedi graveyard revealed a grim fate for Tera Sinube, an elder Jedi Master who appeared in The Clone Wars, and a youngling captured during Order 66 a decade earlier.
“This place isn’t a fortress,” Obi-Wan realized. “It’s a tomb.”
“We wanted to find something that, in the bowels of that facility, would feel shocking, but still be consistent with Star Wars,” Joby Harold, the head writer and executive producer of Obi-Wan, explained to EW. “You didn’t want to have it to be too shocking, but you wanted it to be something that really felt like a gut-punch for Obi-Wan in that moment.”
The Inquisitor trophies are like “pinned butterflies on the wall,” Harold added. “How sad that is to see? And the horror of everything the show is about, Jedis on the run and in hiding and being hunted — as a visual, it reinforces just how far from home he is. And we just wanted an image that felt resonant in that way.”
Like Cal Kestis, the Jedi Knight who infiltrated Fortress Inquisitorius five years earlier in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Obi-Wan encounters danger around every corner on his mission to rescue kidnapped Alderaan princess Leia Organa (Vivien Lyra Blair) from Reva the Third Sister (Moses Ingram). The sight of the hunted Jedi is a shocking one for Obi-Wan, still reeling from his 10-years-later rematch with the Sith Lord Darth Vader an episode earlier.
“We set it up a little bit in [“Part III”] about nobody really knows what happens [to the Jedi],” Harold said. “So the idea that we get to see a little bit of that and contribute a little bit to the mythology in that way was just a little bit of an opportunity we tried to take advantage of.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi “Part V” premieres Wednesday, June 15, followed by “Part VI” June 22 on Disney+.
Starring Ewan McGregor, Moses Ingram, Rupert Friend, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Indira Varma, Sung Kang, Grant Feely as young Luke Skywalker, Vivien Lyra Blair as young Leia Organa, and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi is now streaming on Disney+.
