Obi-Wan Kenobi reintroduced an old — and best abandoned — Star Wars fan fixation

polygon.com:

For a franchise as huge as Star Wars, finding new ways to thrill audiences isn’t so much an obligation as it is smart business. Yet, for Lucasfilm and its parent company, Disney, keeping the nearly 50-year-old series feeling fresh has become a circuitous, Kessel Run kind of quagmire. What is truly the way: retroactively welding heretofore unrevealed story beats onto their lore, or exploring the uncharted cosmic expanses of this galaxy far, far away? Play the hits or gently remix them?

That brings us to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the latest in an ever-growing line of Star Wars television to find itself navigating this exact storytelling binary. Unlike The Mandalorianor The Book of Boba Fett (which featured blank-slate antihero types) Kenobi is hamstrung by the well-documented legend of its leading man, the eponymous exiled Jedi Knight (Ewan McGregor). Finding something new to say about a character we have already seen fight, fail, and die was always going to be the show’s biggest gamble, but Kenobi has kicked over the dejarik table and expanded on the space between episodes III and IV as far as it can go before it breaks the immutable laws of A New Hope.

One of the show’s biggest swings to date is the assertion that the last time Obi-Wan and his former apprentice (Hayden Christensen) crossed lightsabers was not, in fact, at the raging fire pits of Mustafar. Kenobi met Darth Vader for the first time since that fateful duel last week, and from the look of things they’ll be swinging sticks at each other again. And last week presented yet another distressing (and potentially story-breaking) addition to the Kenobi lore, a left-field reveal made by Old Ben himself, where Ewan McGregor wrinkled his weary brow at the cherubic Leia Organa