'Obi-Wan Kenobi' Can Finally Answer A Huge 'Star Wars' Plot Hole

We’re just weeks away from the release of Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series starring Ewan McGregor as the suave Jedi Knight turned stinky desert recluse. Judging from the newest trailer, this show has everything from Bounty Hunters, to Sith Inquisitors, to Uncle Owen basically telling General Kenobi to go to hell, justifiably pointing out that training young Skywalkers may not be his jam, exactly.

This could also be a chance for Star Wars to patch up some of the more glaring plot holes created by the prequel trilogy. Obi-Wan Kenobi is seemingly already doing this to some extent; Alec Guiness in A New Hope is more than ten years older than McGregor would be 19 years after the events of Revenge of the Sith – but the new show is speeding up his aging process by setting its story only 10 years after ROTS, even though 17 years have passed in real life. Potentially, this could all be chalked up to the fact that Obi-Wan never ever wears a hat despite living in the middle of a sweltering desert with two goddamn suns.

But then there’s the scene in A New Hope in which Obi-Wan, weirdly, doesn’t remember his old buddy R2-D2 – in fact, he doesn’t even seem to remember owning a droid at all!

Judging from the trailer, the Empire goes full “Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive” on Obi-Wan, hunting for the famous Jedi. And weirdly, it seems like they find him? We see multiple scenes of Obi-Wan fighting off baddies, and shots of Imperial forces seemingly on Tatooine. So if Obi-Wan ends up in the hands of the enemy, this could provide a golden opportunity to explain away this nagging narrative inconsistency.

After all, it seems probable that if Kenobi were to be captured, he might also be tortured, and the Star Wars universe is full of torture techniques that, not unlike an episode of Young Sheldon, cause significant brain damage. We’ve already seen this to some extent in a Star Wars movie; remember the Bor Gullet in Rogue One, the mind-reading monster that wreaks havoc on Bodhi’s cognitive abilities?

Maybe something similar happens to Kenobi, thus forever erasing all his memories of R2 – and also presumably Jar Jar, Watto, and that portly cartoon alien who runs Obi-Wan’s favorite space Denny’s.