Cody! Clone Marshals! Reva! Details on original plan of Obi-Wan Kenobi movie trilogy

So, now that the Obi-Wan Kenobi series is over, we can start to look at what it almost was and ponder if we missed out.

Given that the show has – shocker! – it’s fair number of haters, it seems fair that we should point out how much the story changed from the original plans. We knew early on in the show’s production that the series was delayed because Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy wanted large amounts of the story rewritten, with the rumour at the time being that it was because the overall story was too similar to the story of The Mandalorian, although the grizzled warrior looking after a young ward story we got is already pretty close.

However, before all this, it seems that Obi-Wan was set to return in a movie as part of the Star Wars stories movies that died after Solo: A Star Wars Story tanked – yes, it was because of The Last Jedi, deal with it.

Stephen Daldry and Hossein Amini were hired to write the movie, however, the plans were scrapped once Disney+ became a thing and Joby Harold was hired as the new writer with Deborah Chow stepping up as director.

Kenobi was originally a movie trilogy

Original writer on the project, Stuart Beattie has now come out to discuss how the original plan was a movie trilogy!

“I wrote the film that they based the show on. So, yeah. I spent like a year, year-and-a-half working on it. And then, when the decision was made not to make any more spin-off films after Solo came out, I left the project and went on to other things. Joby came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff,” Beattie says.

“So when I pitched my Obi-Wan story to Lucasfilm, I said, ‘There’s actually three stories here. Because there’s three different evolutions that the character has to make in order to go from Obi-Wan to Ben.’ And the first one was the first movie, which was the show, which was, ‘Surrender to the will of the Force. Transport your will, surrender your will. Leave the kid alone.’ So then, the second [movie] was thinking about where Kenobi ends up. And one of the most powerful and probably the most powerful moment in all of Obi-Wan’s story is that moment where he sacrifices himself in A New Hope. Great moment, you know, makes you cry. But, if you stop and think about it, it’s a pretty sudden thing, to just kind of go be fighting a guy, to see Luke and go, ‘I’m gonna die.’ You know, that to me, that required forethought. That required pre-acceptance that this was going to happen.”

“So again, it’s one of those universal things we all struggle with, to come to terms with our own mortality. So, that was the second step of the evolution for me, that Obi-Wan now has to come to terms with his own mortality, somehow in a prophecy, or Qui-Gon telling him, ‘There’s going to come a moment where you’re gonna have to sacrifice yourself for the good,’ And then [Obi-Wan] is like, ‘What? No, no, no, no, I’m here to help… I can’t, no.’ And get him to that point where Obi-Wan has accepted the idea that he’s going to die, and that he’s going to die willingly at a crucial moment, and you will know when that moment presents itself. So that when that moment comes up in [A New Hope], you understand. He’s recognizing he’s been on this journey already, and he’s waiting for this moment, and that’s how he’s able to make it so easily. To do this [sacrifice], and die. So that to me was the second evolution, the second film, the second story. So for me, if I have anything to do with the second season of Obi-Wan, that’s the character evolution that I would take him on. That, to me, is really interesting. And like I said, universal.”

Wait, was this actually close to happening? Was it ready to go? “Oh absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Ewan was on board, everyone. We were like, ‘Yeah, ready to go.’ And we were so excited about it, too… It’s a great story to tell, right? It’s such a fitting character and Ewan is just so fantastic at it. And he’s the perfect age, everything.”

Beattie is fully aware that the perceived underperformance of Solo was the death knell for Kenobi: “It was Solo that changed the direction of the system. I like Solo, personally, but it hadn’t made a lot of money. It is crazy in some ways to think about it how it [was directed by] of the best filmmakers working today. But, just because it didn’t hit a certain number, they just had to rethink. And, again, way above my paygrade, but it certainly crushed us. Devastated, absolutely devastated.

“But, that’s the business, you know, highs and lows. I’m glad it got made. I’m glad the show got made. I’m proud of my story that [got] told. I’m glad my characters are all through it. And I’m glad I got credit for it. I wish, I wish they’d been able to make my movies.”

Personally, I loved the series but seeing an Obi-Wan movie – even better, a trilogy! – on the big screen would have been pretty special and it really sounds like Beattie had a plan for Kenobi to get him from the McGregor to Guiness and it sounds like it would have been a blast to take that journey over a few years, leading up to the original meeting between Kenobi and Vader.

Reva’s Story

Ok, so out of the new series, one of the big additions to the lore was the Third Sister, Reva, played by Moses Ingram, left, who became the main protagonist in the series before finding her redemption at the series’ end. However, it seems that her character faced a very different ending… one which many people suspected once we learned that there were extensive changes made to the end of the series and it seems that, yes, Reva was at the centre of the changes.

After luring Kenobi out of hiding and revealing that she wanted to kill all the Jedi, including Vader, who she knew was Anakin Skywalker and who killed her friends when she was a youngling, Reva was defeated by Vader but decided to head to Tattooine to kill Luke, who she learned Kenobi was protecting on the planet – luckily, she was unable to bring herself to do it and, in the end, walked away to find her own path, away from the Jedi and Sith altogether.

Obi-Wan Kenobi introduced fans to a few new faces during its six-episode run on Disney+. The most prominent new character that the show featured was Moses Ingram’s Reva, the Third Sister. Reva spent the majority of the show tracking down Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, using Vivien Lyra Blair’s Princess Leia to lure him out. Eventually, it was revealed that her hate for the Jedi Master originated during Order 66 when she was just a youngling.

The finale saw Reva seeking out Luke Skywalker, only for the Inquisitor to return the boy back to the hands of Owen and Beru and tell Obi-Wan she didn’t want to turn in to Vader.

Beattie reveals that Reva featured in his original movie script too, saying: “I created Reva all the way through.”

However, one of the big plot points about Reva in the series is that she knows who Vader really is and it drives her to her goal… that wasn’t always the case?

“The only little difference in mine was she didn’t know Darth Vader was Anakin. Cause I was like, ‘How’d she know that?’ All she saw was Anakin as Anakin because he hadn’t changed in the suit yet, right? So Anakin killed her friends, put the scar on her, almost killed her, left her for dead, basically. So, in her mind, the Jedi Council were the biggest villains in the galaxy. She believed the lies that they were plotting a coup to overtake and get power and all that, but they were stopped by the Clones. So she believed that’s why she’s hunting Jedi, because she believed the Jedi are the worst, basically.”

Changed too is the fact that originally, Reva died at the hands of Vader rather than surviving her encounter with him: “Because I figured, ‘How would she know that this thing in a mechanical suit that everyone calls Darth Vader is the guy who killed her, or tried to kill her?'” he says.

“So, it was Obi-Wan kind of letting her in on that secret and that revelation that makes her kind of go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been wrong this whole time.’ And so she goes and basically saved Kenobi by sacrificing herself, telling Vader, ‘I killed Kenobi.’ And then Vader killed her, [with her] knowing that Vader would kill her. So, that kind of completed her arc. So just a little bit different that she was, yeah, absolutely, the Inquisitor hunting Kenobi all the way through and driven by her own personal demons.”

But, as her creator, Beatie believes Reva’s story should have ended there, saying he “felt she had to die”, something many believed too on watching Kenobi, especially after she survived having Vader’s lightsaber driven through her stomach,

“Yeah, killed by Vader at the end of it. Yeah, I wanted this story, I wanted her story to end. I wanted Reva to play her part in the Kenobi-Vader story, which was, essentially, at the end, she was the one that allowed Vader, basically told Vader to stop hunting Kenobi. You know, she ended the obsession Vader had with Kenobi. She claimed it was over, it’s done. So that was, that was her role to play. And she’d done so many terrible things, I felt she had to die. You can only redeem so much.”

He confirmed too that Reva was the only Inquisitor featured in the movie script and that he wanted her to be the product of Vader’s actions in the Jedi Temple during Order 66 but he also discussed how difficult it is to make a story compelling when you already know who lives and dies… Mostly.

“We were always faced with the fact that Obi-Wan could never kill Darth Vader,” he says, “So he needed to defeat someone. And so Reva was my attempt to give him someone to defeat or someone to save, because he’s not going to save Darth. The Darth Vader storyline is going to end in a downer, so I wanted to save someone, and that’s why I created Reva.”

Oh, and we all know that Reva’s story is very similar to that of Jedi: Fallen Order’s Second Sister but he’s keen to point out that he created Reva long before that game was written but he believes it’s all a coincidence: “I wrote this initially in 2017, so that was before I played Fallen Order. I then played Fallen Order and was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is Reva!’ No, look, it’s just coincidence. I wanted to create a new character because I didn’t want to be bound by any canon with any of the others that have already been discussed. And I wanted freedom to take her where I wanted to take her. So that’s why I created her, for this story. And that’s the other thing too, we’re already using so many characters in established canon with Obi, Darth, Owen, Beru… So I was looking to create someone new.  I even had Cody in mind. You know, so I was looking to create someone new.”

Wait… Cody?! Was Cody originally in the story?!

Commander Cody returns

For those who don’t know, Commander Cody, right, lead the 212th battalion during the Clone Wars along with Kenobi and the two became great friends however, after Order 66, the order to kill the Jedi which was enforced by a chip in his head, Cody believed he had successfully killed Kenobi on the planet Utapau… for a long time, fans have wondered if the two ever met again.

Seems, in this movie script anyway, they had.

“Cody was the big [legacy character to appear]. I love the idea of Obi-Wan having a buddy on Tatooine. Like a secret buddy. So, like the first time he goes into town, you see, Cody, and he’s following him through the streets and attacks him, takes him into an alley with a knife to his throat and says, ‘You’re dead.’ And then you realize, ‘Oh, no… Cody’s making a point.’ Like, ‘Come on. You got to be more careful.’”

Now, before we go any further, this relationship sounds amazing and reminds me of Inspector Clouseau and Cato in the original Pink anther movies in the 1960s in which Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, to keep his reflexes sharp, hired Cato, played by Burt Kwouk, to try to kill him at any available opportunity, often to hilarious effect (continues after clip):

Of course, this isn’t an entirely new idea even within Star Wars as fans will recall in The Force Unleashed games Galen Marek has a droid called Proxy who could imitate the best Jedi warriors and would attack Marek when he least expected it to keep his wits sharp.

Beattie goes on: “And you realize, ‘Oh, Cody has now morphed from someone who was trying to kill him when we last saw them to someone who is now devoting his life to protect him.’ Because by now he’s had the biochip taken out of his head, and now he realizes, ‘Oh my god, what I did was wrong.’ And he has driven by guilt, as much as Obi-Wan is driven by guilt. So you got these two kind of old warriors bickering like this old married couple, bitching about, ‘God, it was so much better when we had an army at our backs,’ you know?’”

This sounds amazing!

We have heard several times in the past that Cody was set to return to the Star Wars universe, including, at one point, as a villain in Rebels and it’s likely that this idea is where at least some of those rumours came from. However, we do know that he is set to return in The Bad Batch season 2 which airs later this years (here) and we’re hoping that now we’ll get to see Cody learn of his the Empire used him and turning back to the side of the righteous along with his brother, Captain Rex.

“The idea of mine was that when Obi-Wan had to leave Tatooine, he left Cody in charge of Luke,” Beattie continues, “and that gave us a fun little B-story to keep cutting away to. And yeah, he’s a really fun character and a guy racing against the clock obviously, because he’s aging twice as fast. He’s trying to atone for the worst thing he’s ever done in his life. So tragic in a way, but just fun… The way they bickered in my stuff, it was just, you know, put a smile on your face and, you know, (laughs) just arguing all the time.”

Beattie speculates why they didn’t go this way, saying that Temeura Morrison’s playing Boba Fett in his own series may have been a reason: “They just decided, I don’t know… maybe Temuera Morrison was busy on Boba Fett… It would have been obviously Temuera. Maybe they decided they didn’t need him either. I just felt Obi-Wan needed someone to talk to, someone who could tell him, you know, ‘You’re in bad shape.'”

This all sounds like it could have been fantastic! Perhaps we’ll see Cody make his way to Kenobi if the show gets a second season? As for any scenes that Beattie wishes had made it, he talks about a fun one that took place on Tatooine that he wished had made it to screen: “Cody was with Owen and there were some bounty hunters that had discovered Obi-Wan… And they gotta get rid of the bodies. And so there was just this really fun scene where, you know, what do you do with bodies on Tatooine and you need to get rid of them? Well, you go out to the local Sarlacc, right? They kind of park and they’re having this whole discussion about, you know, Cody shooting… Obi-Wan and all this kind of stuff.”

“But as they’re doing it, they’re just tossing these bodies into the Sarlacc pit, and the Sarlacc’s eating them, right? In the middle of doing this, this other speeder comes up and… they get their guns ready. And these guys see them. And they’re like, everyone’s like frozen, like, ‘Are we gonna kill each other?’ But then the guys open their trunk and they’ve got Stormtroopers that they want to throw in the Sarlacc. And so they start throwing.”

Another theme in Beattie’s script which made it to the final series was that during all this, there were refugees on the run from the Empire and Obi-Wan became involved with trying to get them to safety. But, in this script some of these refugees had their own religion which, while they called it something else, was the same as The Force. In one scene, the leader of these people would show Kenobi a vision that would tie themetically into the vision Luke has on Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back: “When [Kenobi] opens his eyes, he’s on Mustafar. And it’s like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, how I get here?’”

“And he sees a guy in a dark robe with a red lightsaber, and he’s like, ‘Anakin, Anakin, Anakin!’ And as… the guy in the robe comes up, he lifts his lightsaber, you see, it’s Luke. Mark Hamill, 19. And so, Luke attacks him. Obi-Wan and Luke had this lightsaber battle in mine, which was mirroring, of course, Empire Strikes Back… so it was that kind of a thing that ends with, you know, Luke, just almost killing Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan is snapping out of the, you know, the vision, basically, but it’s a vision of the future if Obi-Wan keeps training Luke and putting all his guilt on this kid, Luke’s gonna turn to the Dark Side.”

This is a crossroads for Obi-Wan in this story as he realises if he keeps pressurising Luke and obsessing over training him, he will lead him down a dark path: “This was before they brought back Luke in The Mandalorian. We were gonna be the first to do that, which would have been really fun. And a nightmare,” he says.

Reva’s Clone Trooper Marshals:

Getting back to Reva, Beattie confirms that she did not travel with other Inquisitors but rather had a team of Clone Trooper Marshals although they were called Stormtrooper Marshals: “[Reva] actually had a squad of Stormtrooper Marshals. So, I thought, ‘Yeah, of course the Stormtroopers have like the equivalent of the U.S. Marshals, right?…’ Except that these guys were Clones. So she was using Clones that, yes, they were all Cody basically.”

Now, although these guys are villains, I can’t help feel this feels like The Bad Batch in a way, especially the storyline of Crosshait joining the Empire.

“They were all Temuera Morrison, you know, speaking in his voice, and they were all veterans of the Clone Wars, they all knew Kenobi, they knew these Jedi they were hunting, and they were still with the biochips in them… and they did not miss when they shot, and they were absolutely ruthless. There were ten of them. And they were commanded by a guy named Commander Jet. And so they were her squad basically. And they all ended up dying over the course of the story…”

Most interestingly, one of the big complaints about the Kenobi series was that characters, notably Reva and the Grand Inquisitor, seemed to die and then return and Beattie says that’s exactly why he had the Marshals and not the Grand Inquisitor: “One of the funny issues I have with movies and shows in general these days is that nobody dies. Nobody really died, you know? It takes away from the jeopardy of the story. We’re now in a world where no one really dies. Then, well, why do I care, you know? So, I believe in killing characters and having them stay killed so… And of course, [The Grand] Inquisitor is not someone you can kill… I just didn’t even bring him in, because I didn’t want to have that going on and do that and have people come back.”

Man, they really should have let this guy work on this project!

As I said at the start of this article, I’m a big fan of the Kenobi series – despite all its flaws – but this all sounds great; I love the idea of Cody living with Kenobi on Tatooine and looking after Luke while Kenobi is off-world. I think Reva dying would have been a much more satisfactory ending to her story and as for the Marshals and Beattie’s disillusionment with people dying and coming back? Well, that’s a major problem with this show in particular. Heck, I even think the Sarlaac scene would have been very funny and to me feels like it would have worked if done right.

It sounds like the failing of Solo at the box-office really upset the Lucasfilm/Disney applecart and, sadly, its we fans who are suffering.

That all said, I can see a lot of ideas from this script being used down the line… I just cannot wait to meet those Clone/Stormtrooper Marshals.

Sources: The Direct, The Direct, The Direct