It seems I’m a easy man—I will be far more excited by the prospect of seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi atop a bizarre, hairless, snouted quadruped than I can glimpses of Inquisitors, Skywalkers, and the heavy mechanical wheeze of Darth Vader.
Sure, the Obi-Wan trailer was stuffed with dazzling little hints at what to anticipate from the subsequent Star Wars Disney+ sequence, and but the pictures that excited me essentially the most weren’t of spinning purple lightsabers or neon-soaked vistas past the sands of Tatooine (a really well-worn vista, that one). As a substitute, they have been way more easy: Ewan McGregor’s exiled Jedi, driving atop and guiding his alien mount. Eopie, as they’re recognized, first appeared in The Phantom Menace as natives to Tatooine, though in Star Wars lore because the beasts of burden have cropped up in every single place, from Saleucami to Galaxy’s Edge’s Batuu. They’re uncommon for a planet we normally affiliate with both Luke zipping alongside in his landspeeder, or bigger animal rides like Tuskens and their Banthas or the Ronto in A New Hope’s particular version. However what stands out about Obi-Wan on an Eopie is that it seems like a callback to the final time we noticed the story of this era in his life.
The beast is Obi-Wan’s alternative of trip within the 2013 John Jackson Miller novel Kenobi—itself about to be re-released as a part of Del Rey’s ongoing Star Wars Legends “Necessities Assortment,” simply in time for the brand new present—the place Ben, clever in some ways of the galaxy however the right way to take care of a bizarre wanting area horse, finds himself proudly owning an Eopie named Rooh. Rooh’s a minor a part of the Kenobi novel, though she turns into a part of Ben’s defining imagery to the opposite characters within the e-book. She is what he rides in on when he meets the opposite main protagonists of the novel for the primary time; his quest to take care of her, and ultimately Rooh’s baby when the previous Jedi is stunned to search out himself having bought a pregnant Eopie, all kind a part of the type of stressed, hapless vitality the put-upon man has as he adapts to his new life on the sides of Tatooine’s threadbare societies. However Rooh’s a hairless, snouted area horse, and whereas Star Wars will be determined at mining each nook of its recognized galaxy generally, it by no means bought fairly so determined to write down half a novel a couple of area horse.
No, it’s not that Rooh is a few main cameo that Obi-Wan is including (it looks like the present will have fairly sufficient of that already), however evoking that picture from the Kenobi novel is an enchanting alternative, given what comparatively little we learn about this new, definitive “canon” model we’ll watch play out on Disney+. As the small glimpses we’ve seen within the trailer for Obi-Wan to date counsel, we now have the shut specter of the Empire within the sequence with the Inquisitors, we now have Darth Vader himself searching his former grasp, and we now have Obi-Wan despatched on a quest that takes him away from the sands of Tatooine to alien worlds, all in his bid to maintain the subsequent era of Skywalkers safer than the one he’d tried to guard earlier than it. It’s large, it’s acquainted, it’s excessive stakes, it’s nonetheless Jedi vs. Sith, upstart hero vs. sinister, shadowy evil. Thus far, so very Star Wars, for higher or worse.
It’s a stark distinction to what that Kenobi novel was, practically a decade in the past now. Though it’s, equally, a narrative of how Obi-Wan first arrived on Tatooine and settled into his life in exile, it’s additionally a e-book distinctly not in regards to the wider Star Wars galaxy. In contrast to nowadays, the place Tatooine feels prefer it may as nicely be Coruscant by way of big-name comers-and-goers, Miller’s Tatooine within the Rise of the Empire period feels distinctly far, far-off from the occasions of the galaxy Obi-Wan has come to seclude himself and the son of the Chosen One away from. Folks speak in hushed whispers of some obvious coup, the Republic altering its title to the Empire, and most of the time they don’t actually care. Kenobi is, in some ways, barely in regards to the titular man himself, and extra his momentary affect on the lifetime of a widowed shopkeeper named Annileen Calwell, and the folks round her in a small neighborhood known as the Oasis, the place the large issues are Tusken assaults, moisture farming, and the encroaching lawlessness of Jabba’s prison fringe.
It’s not this large story of Obi-Wan speeding saber in hand to defend his distant cost, or in regards to the intergalactic eminence of the Empire and its iron grip. It’s small and intimate, in regards to the pull Obi-Wan nonetheless feels to do good, even within the tiniest approach and for essentially the most random of individuals, and the ache he feels when even doing that threatens to reveal him. As Star Wars’ galaxy within the fashionable age has gotten so large and so concerned, criss-crossing cameos and sweepingly scaled plots, the considered a significant story reminiscent of this—the story of Ben Kenobi’s time on Tatooine—being such a decent, shut, space-soap-opera sort of factor, as a substitute of this enormous, dramatically vital story, is sort of unfathomable.
And but, it’s all I may consider when that Obi-Wan trailer opened, and our first view of McGregor’s Jedi in exile in a long time was fairly like how we left him on the very finish of Revenge of the Sith: a lone man within the desert atop his trusty alien steed. Possibly that’s all it’s, and any fleeting connection to Rooh and the previous model of the story is only a comfortable coincidence. But when it is a bit nod to the model of this story that got here earlier than Obi-Wan in Kenobi, it’ll be good to see if there are any extra influences Miller’s work had in how the present tells this story.
Maybe although, generally an Eopie is simply an Eopie.
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