Welcome back, everyone. If you’ve missed Parts 0 and 1 of this series, wherein I explain my grievances with Kenobi as it is currently written, please feel free to pop back and get a refresher. Part 2 will cover the limitations we’ll be working with for this rewrite as well as an overview of the changes that will be made. If you just want to jump into the story, the rewrite treatment begins next week with Part 3.
Everyone excited? Great. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Hindsight
A quick disclaimer, which I feel is very important with these rewrites and haven’t yet laid down for this particular series: I am working with the benefit of hindsight here. Disney+ tried something with Kenobi, and lessons were learned from that. I am happy to ream the creators of that show for their errors, but I do want to acknowledge that my proposed changes (hopefully, improvements) are possible in part because I had a point of reference.
Episodes
For this series, as well as If They Planned It All Ahead, I want to avoid adding runtime wherever possible. Producing movies and television episodes costs money, after all. While many stories would benefit from adding runtime, saying, “Add more episodes,” feels a little too much like addressing a writing problem by throwing money at it.
I realize that making an exception immediately after establishing a rule cheapens the rule, yet I feel it is justified in this case.
When first announced, Kenobi was going to be eight episodes, much like The Mandalorian before it. They were also supposed to each be an hour long. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why the production needed to be cut down. However, if Disney wasn’t willing to invest money to deliver on the promise of a fan-pleasing show starring one of the most beloved characters in their hemorrhaging franchise, then they should have just cut their losses and scrapped the production entirely.
With that established, the treatment I present will assume that we do indeed get eight hour-long episodes. This will make the rewrite easily 50% longer than the original show (and I’m likely underestimating, as the episode runtimes I see for the existing show include credits).
Heroes
It should go without saying that a show named after a beloved and iconic character should be the hero of the story. Obi-Wan should be the one driving this narrative. Other established or new Star Wars characters can have their roles, but he needs to be the focus.
Obi-Wan
As established in Parts 0 and 1, going the Jake Skywalker route was a poor decision. Obi-Wan’s journey in this series will be about coming to terms with and learning from the failures of the Jedi Order. So, given the starting point from Revenge of the Sith and the end point of A New Hope, where does that put him at the start of Kenobi?
The answer is simple: we need to start with a badass warrior-monk who is all warrior and no monk.
Obi-Wan has settled in to watch over and protect Luke Skywalker. His sole goal in life is to protect this boy and prepare for the day when he molds Luke into a weapon that will destroy Vader and the Empire. Sure, he needs to keep his head down and make money to survive, but that doesn’t mean he needs to sit in a cave doing nothing. He can train. He can gather intel. He can accrue allies. The man fought in a war for three years, engaging in many covert operations in the process. This is just one more mission in a war that never ends.
The Obi-Wan we meet at the start of the series will not be slicing up a Tibidon sand whale and stealing cuts of the meat. He will be a rugged warrior who beats up Sand People. He’ll work as a courier, flying around Tatooine in a skyhopper (perhaps even a T-16, if we’re looking for a bit of fanservice) so that he can keep his ear to the group about the latest news from around the galaxy and anything suspicious happening on Tatooine. All the while, he will be operating as “Ben”. The only character whom we ever hear call him “Kenobi” will be Owen Lars, who would, of course, know who he really is.
Where Obi-Wan will be lacking, however, is in his connection to the Force. We’ll certainly see him applying various Force abilities in discrete or private moments, but despite a decade of effort, he still cannot connect to Qui-Gon. The issue is that, in his isolation and his focus on his mission, Obi-Wan has completely gone over the edge that the Jedi Order was slipping towards when Order 66 happens. He is thinking only of the immediate conflict, not the bigger picture of the Force and Balance. Even if his ultimate mission serves those goals, that is not where his intent is, and thus he is getting in his own way when it comes to his spiritual growth.
This will be his arc for the show. Throughout his adventure, Obi-Wan will be forced to confront the man he has become, and what that means for the Jedi. He will face trials that force him to orient himself towards the service of the Force, thereby enabling him to induct Luke into Jedi teachings with a clear mind when the time comes.
Leia
I think there is role for Leia within this story. However, while I think that her kidnapping and rescue makes for a worthwhile catalyst for the plot, both her screentime and her contact with Obi-Wan need to be significantly diminished to avoid plot holes. Her characterization also needs to be reworked.
In this version, Leia will not be a 30-year-old man in the body of a 10-year-old girl, nor will she be a Disney princess wishing for more than her provincial life. Instead, she will be … a princess. She’ll be happy with the life she’s been given, undergoing education to one day take her father’s place as a diplomat. She will also be wholly unaware of her father’s opposition to the Empire (being that she is still a small child). In young Leia’s mind, the Empire are the good guys.
Leia’s abductors in this story will not be some thugs employed by an Inquisitor. Instead, she’ll be abducted by the Hidden Path, which will play a very different role in this story versus the show we got. I’ll get into this more in the Villains sections. Here, I’ll simply say that the abduction will expose Leia to the desperate situation in the rest of the galaxy and the violence of the Empire. It will also provide her with her first experience with blaster weaponry.
Luke
Luke’s role within this story will also be drastically reduced. He should, at most, appear in just the first and last episodes. His greatest involvement in the story, outside of a few character-building scenes, will be to provide Obi-Wan with an excuse to leave Tatooine to protect him (again, more on that later).
Villains
The villains of the rewritten story must match the change in Obi-Wan’s character arc. They will demonstrate to him just how far he can fall if he continues along his current path. By recognizing the threat they pose and their flaws within himself, he will take a vital step along his own spiritual journey.
The Hidden Path
As mentioned above, the Hidden Path will be the primary antagonists of this story. Rather than a generic Underground Railroad expy, they will be a group of violent partisans. They snatch up Force-sensitive children and train them as soldiers to topple the Empire.
The primary function of the Hidden Path will be to serve as a foil for Obi-Wan. Their mission is, from a certain point of view, identical to his own. However, they will have wholly disconnected themselves from the concept of serving the Force, with the children being tools who can be brutalized or sacrificed without a second thought. They are an outward manifestation of Obi-Wan’s flaw that he must overcome.
The Hidden Path will also serve as a justification for why Bail Organ needs Obi-Wan to rescue Leia. Organa will be fully aware of the Path’s existence and methods, thanks to his connections in the Alliance to Restore the Republic. (Much like Saw Gerrera’s Partisans, they will be an extremist group that is not welcome within the Alliance.) He won’t be able to turn to the Empire for help without revealing that Leia is a Force-sensitive child. Involving the Empire could also lead to the Inquisitors poking through his affairs, revealing Alliance secrets. Organa does try to send a bounty hunter to bring Leia back; however, we’ll get into in the first episode, that won’t go well. Obi-Wan is the only man he can trust to rescue Leia before the Inquisitors find the Hidden Path (more on them later) and thereby realize that Leia is Force-sensitive anyway.
The use of the Hidden Path as antagonists will also force Obi-Wan to leave Tatooine. Much like in the original show, Obi-Wan will originally refuse the call to save Leia. However, the leader of the Path will come to Obi-Wan. He will need to leave Tatooine in order to divert this leader’s attention away from the Lars homestead.
Joru(u)s C’baoth
Those of you who read the Thrawn Trilogy (the Legends one from the 90s, not the Canon novels about Thrawn) will be well acquainted with C’baoth. For those who haven’t, Jorus C’baoth was a legendary Jedi Master who lived prior to the Clone Wars, only to perish in the Outbound Flight project. His clone, Joruus C’baoth (yes, that extra “u” was used to mark him as a clone), was created by Emperor Palpatine. Joruus, like many non-Kaminoan clones, suffered immense psychological distress from his creation, causing him to easily fall to the Dark Side. He came to believe that the Jedi Order were the rightful rulers of the galaxy and that their defeat at Palpatine’s hands was due to them shackling themselves to the service of lesser beings. In the Thrawn Trilogy, he attempted to induct Luke, Leia, and Leia’s children as his disciples, with the hope of establishing a new Empire with himself as the Emperor and his Jedi followers as lords under his command.
The Kenobi rewrite will present a C’baoth who is a composite of the original Jedi Master and the clone. C’baoth was a cunning diplomat prior to the Clone War. When the war broke out, he refused to serve in combat and instead continued to serve as a negotiator in places far from the front. He watched how the strain of the war laid bare the Order’s flaws and ultimately led to their destruction. The ensuring decade under the Empire convinced him that the Jedi Order’s greatest mistake was not ruling the galaxy themselves. His anger tipped him ever-closer to the Dark Side. Fixed upon his desire to overthrow Palpatine’s Empire and establish an Empire of the Jedi, he founded the Hidden Path to hunt for Force-sensitive children and train them as soldiers before the Empire can seize them.
C’baoth will be the ultimate villain of Season 1 of Kenobi. He is the embodiment of the Hidden Path’s philosophy, and thus the dark reflection of what Obi-Wan could become if he fails to adjust his perspective. Through C’baoth, Obi-wan will be reminded not only of the importance of serving the Force above all else but also of the ever-present danger of evil rising up even when the cause is noble.
(Regarding who might play C’baoth, I would personally go for someone like Christopher Lloyd. However, at the time of posting this, he’s already set to cast in Season 3 of The Mandalorian, and his character has not been announced. If it turns out that Filoni is bringing back C’baoth, that is a happy coincidence. Otherwise, I think that Peter Capaldi or Charles Dance could also handle this character.)
The Empire
While the C’baoth and the Hidden Path will be the primary antagonists, the Empire will still have a role to play. They will help to establish stakes and create a looming threat to help move the plot along.
The Inquisitors (and Reva)
The Inquisitors won’t be hunting for Kenobi or have direct involvement with Leia’s abduction. Instead, their focus will be upon the Hidden Path. They will be established as a threat early in the story and will lead the charge when the forces of the Empire and the Path clash later in the story.
Reva will serve as the face of the Inquisitors (thereby allowing the makeup / CGI budget for characters like the Grand Inquisitor and Fifth Brother to be restricted to just one scene with a high production value). In this version, she will not be an unstable and irrational maniac. Instead, she will be a ruthless hunter who has fully accepted her position within the Inquisitors (to the point that she goes by “Third Sister”, and only gets called “Reva” when she encounters C’baoth and he tries to get inside her head). She’s not going to get an arc of her own in this show. That can be saved for a dedicated TV show about the Inquisitors (if Disney really wants to push her as a main character).
Vader / Anakin
Vader will not be involved in this story at all, outside of flashbacks or visions.
Anakin’s involvement in this story will be in the form of visions. With Obi-Wan’s myopic focus on his mission over the Force clouding his ability to connect to Qui-Gon, his internal darkness will instead manifest as Anakin (or, rather, what he assumes Anakin would look like in the present, had he not be mutilated on Mustafar – though there will be opportunities for burn makeup). Obi-Wan can then converse with this vision of Anakin to externalize his internal struggle.
Stormtroopers
It’s time to make stormtroopers intimidating again.
The reputation of this organization has been on the decline since they were overwhelmed by a tribe of teddy bears. However, in A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, they were competent and deadly. In our first scene with stormtroopers, a single squad seizes control of the Tantive IV, despite having to breach the ship through a narrow choke point while more than half a dozen marines were pouring fire into the breach. Obi-Wan lauds their precise shooting. We then see that shooting on the Death Star, when they manage to consistently shoot very close to our heroes without hitting any of them, all in the service of Vader’s plan to track them back to Yavin IV. Then there was the Battle of Hoth, which was a cakewalk for the Empire.
Stormtrooper armor should also be able to take a hit. Going into deeper Star Wars lore, the armor may not be the best at dissipating blunt force trauma (as the teddy bear incident and Season 2 of The Mandalorian demonstrated), but it should be able to shrug off small-caliber bullets, the bolts of non-military blasters, and shrapnel from grenades and near-hit blaster bolts. In short, stormtroopers are reasonably easy to kill when you’re armed with their rifles, but the typical Rebel cell shouldn’t have a prayer against them. (They should also have no issues shrugging off a slap.)
All of this is to say that stormtroopers in Kenobi will be deadly. Without a lightsaber or obvious uses of the Force, any encounter between them and Obi-Wan will be harrowing. Overpowering them will require creative solutions and risky maneuvers to try to get hold of their blaster rifles.
Title Crawl
So there we have it, folks: the foundation on which our rewrite of Kenobi shall be built. Obi-Wan is a hardened warrior-monk on Tatooine, struggling to connect with Qui-Gon as he slips ever-farther into his myopic focus on his mission. The Hidden Path festers in the shadows of the Empire, building a twisted parody of the Jedi Order. The intrusion of the Path into the lives of Obi-Wan and Leia shall kick off a galaxy-hopping adventure, with the Empire looming large over them at every turn. On this journey, Obi-Wan will need to face hard truths about both the Jedi Order and himself, and thus see the path by which the Jedi can be reborn and return to serving the galaxy once more.
It all starts next week in Missed the Mark: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Part 3. I hope to see you all then. Have a great week.