The trailer for the next Star Wars Disney+ series was full of dazzling little hints at what to expect, but the images that excited me the most were not of spinning red lightsabers or neon-soaked vistas beyond the sands of Tatooine. Instead, they were much simpler, with the exiled Jedi riding atop and guiding his alien mount. The beasts of burden, as they are known, first appeared in The Phantom Menace as natives to Tatooine, but have since appeared all over the place. It's unusual for a planet to have a landspeeder or larger animal rides like the Ronto in A New Hope. The story of Obi-Wan's life feels like a return to the last time we saw it.
The beast is Obi-Wan's choice of ride in the John Jackson Miller novel, which is about to be re-released. Rooh is a minor part of the book, but she becomes part of the book's defining imagery. She is what he rides in on when he meets the other major protagonists of the novel for the first time, his quest to look after her, and eventually Rooh's child when the former Jedi is surprised to find himself having purchased a pregnant Eopie. While Star Wars can be desperate at mining every corner of its known universe, it never got so desperate to write a novel about a space horse.
It's not that Rooh is a major part of the show, but that image from the novel is intriguing. The trailer for Obi-Wan suggests that Darth Vader is hunting his former master in the series with the Inquisitors, as well as that Obi-Wan is sent on a mission. It's big, it's familiar, and it's still Jedi vs. Sith. For better or worse, so far, so very Star Wars.
It is a stark contrast to the novel that was written a decade ago. Although it is a story of how Obi-Wan first arrived on Tatooine and settled into his life in exile, it is not a story of the wider Star Wars universe. Miller's Tatooine in the Rise of the Empire era feels far away from the events of the galaxy than it does these days. People talk in hushed whispers of a coup, the Republic changing its name to the Empire, and more often than not they don't care. In many ways, Kenobi is barely about the eponymous man himself, and more his impact on the life of a widowed shopkeeper named Annileen Calwell, and the people around her in a small community called the Oasis.
This is not the story of Obi-Wan rushing saber in hand to defend his distant charge, or the Empire's iron grip. It's small and intimate, about the pull Obi-Wan still feels to do good, even in the smallest way, and the pain he feels when doing that threatens to expose him. The idea of a major story such as this, the story of Ben Kenobi's time on Tatooine, is what Star Wars has become in the modern age.
When the trailer for Obi-Wan opened, I thought of how we left him at the end of Revenge of the Sith, a lone man in exile. Maybe that is all it is, and any fleeting connection to Rooh and the old version of the tale is just a happy coincidence. If it is a nod to the version of the story that came before Obi-Wan, it will be nice to know if there are any more influences Miller had in how the show tells this tale.
Sometimes an eopie is just an eopie.
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