The first trailer for the highly anticipated Disney Plus Limited Series “Obi-Wan-Kenobi” has arrived, and despite my excitement for seeing the heroes of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy return to the screen 20 years later holding steady, the lacklustre trailer has also stoked many of my deeper fears regarding the quality of the show and the future of Star Wars in its entirety.

Star Wars has always been a cornerstone of my entertainment experience, and to this day remains one of my favourite properties of all time, and that love was cultivated in part by growing up in the era of the Star Wars prequels – so after years of rumours and speculation, finally hearing the news in 2019 that both stars of that trilogy, Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, would be returning for the new series Obi-Wan Kenobi was tremendously exciting. Alas, looming over the happy news was a dark shadow – the series was of course going to be hosted on the Disney Plus streaming service, and was of course being produced by the now Disney-owned Lucasfilm – a far cry from the studio in the days of George Lucas’ prequel movies. It’s been my experience that for every good turn that Disney has taken with the Star Wars brand, there’s a trio of equally stupid decisions waiting around the corner, and the recent release of The Book of Boba Fett has shown that even with the lessons learned from their creative failure of a sequel trilogy, and their moderate success with original stories like The Mandalorian, the House of Mouse is still unafraid of demolishing long-standing legacy characters to fit their all-encompassing creative vision. So into the picture comes the Obi-Wan series, and it’s not hard to see why long-time fans might be a little white-knuckled. Ultimately, for me, the show is the make or break moment for Disney-Lucasfilm to see if they’re truly capable of handling the brand and legacy of George Lucas’ galaxy far far away, or whether I should simply retreat into warm embrace of the Star Wars I grew up with.

With the trailer just released today, I have to admit – the outlook isn’t good for the show itself. The trailer opens with shots of a nomadic Kenobi living out his days on Tatooine – which, while I’m not opposed to it in this show, for obvious reasons, I am a little worn down after having the planet plastered across the last four live-action Star Wars titles. It’s accompanied by a solemn and defeated voiceover from the titular Jedi, and the last of these few shots sees him watching over what is presumably a young Luke Skywalker, so it’s looking good so far aside from some slightly rough looking special effects, but considering the show is still a while away I’ll let it slide. However, it quickly erupts into the choral blitz of John Williams’ Duel of the Fates, and the soundtrack of the trailer is entirely an auditory assault of his most recognisable scores from the prequels, no doubt stuffed in for a bit of shameless nostalgia-baiting. The rest of the trailer switches it’s focus onto the Inquisitors, as seen before in Rebels and Jedi: Fallen Order, and here’s where some issues really start to arise. Firstly, there’s quite a lot of focus on the show’s all new Inquisitor – The Third Sister, or Reva, which not only denotes the focus being drawn away from Kenobi and Vader, but if Disney are also as predictable as usual, she’s likely to turn from evil and end up the true hero of the story in some stroke of deconstructivist nonsense. There’s not much to be said of the small glimpses we catch of the other Inquisitors, but we do get our first couple of looks at the Grand Inquisitor, who not only looks nothing like his character in Rebels, or the established appearance of his species in the movies, but also looks utterly cheap and ridiculous. “Cheap” was the word that came to mind with a lot of these shots, and while I’m aware of the fact that a series has to be more frugal with its budget than a movie, a lot of the design and visual effects rubbed me the wrong way, so I can only hope this is a symptom of it being pre-release footage.

Other than that, there isn’t much else to the trailer due to it being on the shorter side, but it finishes up with one last look at Kenobi as he looks off into the distance, and as the title fades in, the iconic sound of Darth Vader’s mechanical breathing is layered over the crescendo of Williams’ score for the extra hard sucker-punch of nostalgia to the head. It’s not a bad teaser – it offers a taste of what to expect in terms of its mood, settings and characters, but gives very little away in terms of the plot, and almost entirely holds back on anything to do with Vader to save those hopefully mind-blowing moments for the show. That said, reading between the lines doesn’t reassure me that Obi-Wan Kenobi will hit that level of quality that it so desperately needs to in order to succeed. It seems like it’s going to be riding heavily off the back of nostalgia, arguably more than even the Sequel Trilogy, as it marries both eras of the Lucas movies together into one story. Deborah Chow crosses over from The Mandalorian to direct all six episodes, and while both of her episodes there weren’t bad by any means, they weren’t exactly standouts either, and I can’t say there’s any sense of a distinct, directorial style in her work. Above all, it’s the prospect of Disney Lucasfilm getting their slimy fingers all over these landmark characters, and injecting their creative vision right into the middle of the Prequel and Original trilogies that worries me most. Already the inclusion of characters created specifically for the show casts a shadow on my expectations, because inevitably its a lose-lose situation; either they’re given room to be fleshed out, detracting from the characters we already wanted to see, or not explored enough to justify their presence. Alas, despite my pessimistic outlook, I’m not looking to see the series fail, rather I desperately want to see it succeed to show me that Star Wars might just survive in Disney’s hands, so from here I can only hope I’m pleasantly surprised when Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres on May 25th.