Among Disney’s more controversial decisions since taking over Star Wars was the knee-jerk, albeit understandable, jettison of the entire Expanded Universe in favor of a streamlined canon. Since then, the Mouse House has backed down from its initial stance by incorporating elements of the so-called Legends into the saga, namely Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which canonized Darth Revan by visualizing his statue in Exegol. It seems that Obi-Wan Kenobi is continuing the practice to some degree, though director Deborah Chow insists that they aren’t bringing in elements from the non-canon Legends only for the sake of it.
Here’s what the executive had to say on the matter in a recent chat with Inverse.
“We were trying to do a character-driven show, and there are different things that we looked at. I certainly looked at quite a lot of the stuff in the extended universe. But for us, it was first and foremost about him. If it felt organic to our story, we would bring something in, but we tried not to bring in anything just for the sake of bringing it in.”
Chow had also recently compared Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s character-driven narrative to Logan and Joker, so it seems that no character or storyline, even the most interesting stuff that comes to mind from Legends, is going to steal the spotlight from Ewan McGregor’s Ben Kenobi.
In fairness, even the simple fact that Hayden Christensen is returning as Darth Vader and confronting his old master again should be enough to get your inner nerd squealing with excitement. So I think we could all agree, even if a bit begrudgingly, that none of those alternate Legends stories could stack up to this epic occasion if it came to it.