I Can’t Stop Thinking About the Obi-Wan Show’s Unassuming Steed

It seems I’m a easy man—I may be rather 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.

Yes, the Obi-Wan trailer was filled 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 pink lightsabers or neon-soaked vistas past the sands of Tatooine (a actually well-worn vista, that one). Instead, they have been way more easy: Ewan McGregor’s exiled Jedi, driving atop and guiding his alien mount. Eopie, as they’re identified, 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 often 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. But what stands out about Obi-Wan on an Eopie is that it looks 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 experience 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 “Essentials Collection,” simply in time for the brand new present—the place Ben, sensible in some ways of the galaxy however how one can 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 shocked to seek out himself having bought a pregnant Eopie, all type a part of the type of stressed, hapless power the put-upon man has as he adapts to his new life on the sides of Tatooine’s threadbare societies. But Rooh’s a hairless, snouted area horse, and whereas Star Wars may be determined at mining each nook of its identified galaxy typically, it by no means bought fairly so determined to put in writing 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 as if the present will have fairly sufficient of that already), however evoking that picture from the Kenobi novel is a captivating alternative, given what comparatively little we find out 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 have now the shut specter of the Empire within the sequence with the Inquisitors, we have now Darth Vader himself searching his former grasp, and we have now 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 huge, it’s acquainted, it’s excessive stakes, it’s nonetheless Jedi vs. Sith, upstart hero vs. sinister, shadowy evil. So far, so very Star Wars, for higher or worse.

It’s a stark distinction to what that Kenobi novel was, almost a decade in the past now. Although 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 concerning the wider Star Wars galaxy. Unlike as of late, the place Tatooine feels prefer it would possibly 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. People discuss in hushed whispers of some obvious coup, the Republic altering its title to the Empire, and as a rule they don’t actually care. Kenobi is, in some ways, barely concerning 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 referred to as the Oasis, the place the massive considerations are Tusken assaults, moisture farming, and the encroaching lawlessness of Jabba’s felony fringe.

It’s not this huge story of Obi-Wan dashing saber in hand to defend his distant cost, or concerning the intergalactic eminence of the Empire and its iron grip. It’s small and intimate, concerning the pull Obi-Wan nonetheless feels to do good, even within the tiniest method 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 trendy age has gotten so huge and so concerned, criss-crossing cameos and sweepingly scaled plots, the considered a serious story akin to this—the story of Ben Kenobi’s time on Tatooine—being such a good, shut, space-soap-opera form of factor, as an alternative of this enormous, dramatically vital story, is nearly 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 many years 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. Maybe that’s all it’s, and any fleeting connection to Rooh and the outdated model of the story is only a pleased coincidence. But if it is a little 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.

Perhaps although, typically an Eopie is simply an Eopie.

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