To bring Vader back or to not bring Vader back? The execs at Lucasfilm hotly debated whether to have Hayden Christensen back as the Sith Lord in the upcoming Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi. As we now know, the ultimate decision was yes, and in a recent interview, Obi-Wan director Deborah Chow shared why it was important for her for Vader and Obi-Wan to meet once again before the events of A New Hope.
“For me, across the prequels, through the original trilogy, there’s a love-story dynamic with these two that goes through the whole thing,” Chow told Vanity Fair. “I felt like it was quite hard to not [include] the person who left Kenobi in such anguish in the series.”
In Chow’s mind, Obi-Wan still deeply cared for Anakin, and those emotions didn’t just go away when his former Padawan became Vader. “I don’t think he ever will not care about him,” Chow said about Obi-Wan feelings toward Anakin. “What’s special about that relationship is that they loved each other.”
Anakin, of course, had his own transformation when he became Vader, and in the same article Christensen shared that it was Chow’s perspective on the character that made him decide to return. “A lot of my conversations with Deborah were about wanting to convey this feeling of strength, but also coupled with imprisonment,” he said. “There is this power and vulnerability, and I think that’s an interesting space to explore.”
We can see Obi-Wan struggle with his love for Anakin when Obi-Wan Kenobi starts streaming on Disney+ on May 27, 2022.
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I mean, it’s not really too much of a stretch given Obi-Wan says, “I loved you.”
Dude raised Anakin from the time he was ten.
That’s not brothers in arms, that’s father and son.
If It hadn’t been for “The Clone Wars” series, this show could never work. No one would have believed that they really did care for each other if they only had the prequels to go by.
I’m reminded of the Youtube video called “Obi Wan has PTSD” which intercuts the scenes where Luke meets Ben with clips from the movies and the shows. I’m hoping for more of that vibe from this show.
Obi Wan has PTSD
@2 – I never needed TCW for the prequels to work, and I think in RotS in particular it’s clear they’ve built a rapport over the ensuing gap. TCW is vaulable for showing us the nitty gritty details of all that, in a medium that the movies aren’t going to have time to explore as in depth, but I believed it when Obi-Wan yelled “I loved you” on Mustafar.
I kinda hope we get an Immolation Scene reprise, which is one of my favorite pieces of music.
I agree that The Clone Wars did a lot of the work that the movies really didn’t do to show us the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan, as the pair of them spent almost no time together in the prequel movies — Anakin is with Qui-Gonn for most of The Phantom Menace, the two are separated less than a third of the way through Attack of the Clones, not reunited until the climax, and Anakin spends most of Revenge of the Sith with Palpatine. We hear about the relationship but we don’t see it hardly at all until TCW.
Which is a big reason why I’m looking forward to this series. It finally gives Ewan MacGregor and Hayden Christiansen to show that sundered friendship the way that James Arnold Taylor and Matt Lanter did.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2 “That’s not brothers in arms, that’s father and son.”
Which gets to the core of the Jedi’s failure. When he says ‘You were my brother Anakin!” he means it literally. But when they met, Kenobi was 25 and Anakin was 9. As you point out, that’s not a brotherly age gap, that’s a single dad raising a kid he had as a teenage.
But Kenobi doesn’t want or know how to be a father to Anakin, and the order’s refusal to take him on as a youngling means that Yoda rejects the role as well. Palpatine just steps into the gap, and spends the next 10 years wondering why no one’s stopping him.
@6, Obi-Wan was always a nurturing elder brother rather than a father figure. Both Obi and Anakin regarded Qui-Gon as their ‘father’. His death leaves Obi in exactly the position of an elder brother raising a younger. It wasn’t a choice it was just how their relationship evolved. Maybe Anakin did need a father figure but it wasn’t Obi-Wan’s fault he was a brother instead.
I think Dave Filoni has gone on a large rant on the topic of how Anakin needed a father, not a brother, and how Duel of the Fates plays into that. It was in one of the Mandalorian gallery episodes.
Or as Steve Sadjak put it: “Here’s what happened: a monk went to a poor, isolated town and took a small boy for his own purposes.”
It’s easy to blame the Jedi for Anakin’s fall, and there were many flaws of the prequel Jedi, but I also feel like Anakin at age 28 is hardly someone without blame. Tortured teenager he may be but he is the one who sided with a galactic authoritarian government.
I’d actually be interested in a narrative that highlights how monumentally selfish and vile Anakin’s actions were without affording him too much sympathy.
I’ve been torn between wanting to rewatch at least Revenge of the Sith before this show premieres and reminding myself how approximately one minute of that film was the only stretch in all three prequels that I didn’t find absolutely maddening.
@10 – yesss. Obviously there’s plenty of blame to go around in terms of the Jedi’s short sightedness, and Palpatine taking advantage of all of that (and grooming Anakin from a young age).
But let’s not pretend he has zero agency. Even in Attack of the Clones you can see that he’s possessive, jealous and controlling to a fault (and there’s a fairly distrubing TCW arc that really shows this). Some of this is exacerbated by the Jedi’s inability to help him process grief/attachment but…obviously Ahsoka recognized these flaws as well and she just…walked away (and she had been indoctrinated since birth). Which was always an option, but not one, I think, that Anakin would consider. Luke also disobeys the Jedi when it matters, but again, picks a different path.
At any rate, pointing out the Jedi’s flaws here doesn’t absolve Anakin of responsbility (and vice versa).
The Jedi were jerks admittedly but that doesn’t make Anakin a helpless victim. Palpatine was influencing him, yes, but his training should have told him something was wrong.
Saw a recent promo picture of Obi-Wan sitting in the desert, and strongly wished these new shows would give us a real sense of space again. Not space like in “spaceships”, mind you, but space like in: places, atmosphere, feeling. It is something that my heart craves. And I´m not getting it out of anything anywhere anymore, whether its these tv shows or movies. All I´ve got in the last few years is super fast storytelling with lots of characters, lots of action, lots of twists. But I´m not in it for the story. I´m in it for the places, the characters, the sinking-in-feeling of „thats a real place where you could go in your dreams“ – that kind of thing. Am I the only one?
I dream of slow burning scenes, where you could almost smell the sand, feel the coldness of the evening breeze and see the lights of Mos Eisley in the distance, when the suns just sank behind the horizon. I dream of storys that spring from visions of single filmmakers, where she or he is allowed to do their own thing, without a writers rooms full of authors with a collective agenda and a brand guide breathing down their neck.
I have almost lost hope that this craving of mine will ever be answered, except for when I´m turning to the films of the past (for me, it´s mostly the eighties).
So: Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You´re my only hope.
The idea that emotion is bad eliminates empathy. IF the Jedi way involved stifling all emotion, then they were justice without mercy and that is no better than fascism. Always bothered me. The movies (certainly the writing and maybe Hayden himself) failed completely to create any sympathy for Annakin. I never had time for TCW. I guess I will look into it.