‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Movie Screenwriter Created Reva; Plan Was to Have Darth Vader Kill Her

The Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi series introduced audiences to Reva Savander, the Third Sister of the Imperial Inquisitorius, and as it turns out, she was part of the pitch when the project was originally planned as a film, according to its writer. Not only that, but her story had a very different ending planned.

 

If for some reason you haven’t watched Obi-Wan Kenobi yet and don’t want to know details, come back after watching.

 

In an interview with The Direct, Stuart Beattie, the scribe for the Obi-Wan Kenobi movie script, stated that “I created Reva all the way through,” and that she had an important role in his version of the story, being the Inquisitor who would target Leia and set the stage for a rematch between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader. The script that he wrote was subsequently adapted and adjusted by other writers when the project was converted into a television series, such as Hossein Amini, Joby Harold, and Andrew Stanton.

 

However, Reva’s original character trajectory was somewhat different than the show, which revealed she joined the ranks of the Inquisitors to get a chance to get close to and kill Darth Vader (whose secret identity she deduced) as a means of avenging those who died on the night of Order 66. This was not the case originally, as even though she encountered the fallen Anakin Skywalker, she would not know who the man behind the mask was:

 

“She didn’t know Darth Vader was Anakin. Cause I was like, ‘How’d she know that?’ All she saw was Anakin as Anakin because he hadn’t changed in the suit yet, right? So Anakin killed her friends, put the scar on her, almost killed her, left her for dead, basically… [I thought] ‘What if she saw everything that went down? What if Anakin/Vader killed her, left her for dead and sent her on this path?'”

Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi

 

Instead, she would have felt a deep distrust for the Jedi Order, due to her own feelings of discomfort in being taken away from her previous life as a young child, and due to buying into Emperor Palpatine’s lie that the Jedi orchestrated a civil war, with the Separatist movement led by one of their own, as they plotted a coup to seize control over a weakened Republic:

 

“In her mind, the Jedi Council were the biggest villains in the galaxy. She believed the lies that they were plotting a coup to overtake and get power and all that, but they were stopped by the Clones. So she believed that’s why she’s hunting Jedi, because she believed the Jedi are the worst, basically… So all that kind of stuff just kind of made sense and allowed me to create a very confused, conflicted, blinded character filled with hate and rage and all the stuff that makes people want to be Sith and Sith Acolytes. And take her to a place of understanding. Understanding truth, understanding who Obi-Wan is, who Vader really is, and what her path is in the galaxy.”

 

Beattie went on to explain that in his draft of the story, Reva Savander was the only significant Inquisitor in the story, meaning that stuff like her rivalry with the Fifth Brother and her surprising move to stab the Grand Inquisitor to take his position were added by subsequent writers on the project, since the focus of what would have been a two-plus-hour movie would have been on Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. Reva was created as a means to draw Obi-Wan out of hiding and to get the two to fight:

 

“[I had] no other plans to include any other Inquisitors… I knew I wanted Darth Vader, obviously, as the big overall villain in this story, and I see him as an antagonist who was going to be more one-on-one with Obi-Wan throughout the show.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi

 

Still, Beattie planned for Obi-Wan Kenobi and Reva to fight at some point, and that Obi-Wan was going to give her a redemptive arc of sorts without her fully becoming a heroic character. As it turns out, this the reason why Reva ultimately didn’t know the truth about Darth Vader – Beattie explains that Obi-Wan telling her the truth about the man behind the mask was going to be a major moment for her character arc:

 

“We were always faced with the fact that Obi-Wan could never kill Darth Vader. So he needed to defeat someone. And so Reva was my attempt to give him someone to defeat or someone to save, because he’s not going to save Darth… I figured, ‘How would she know that this thing in a mechanical suit that everyone calls Darth Vader is the guy who killed her, or tried to kill her?’ So, it was Obi-Wan kind of letting her in on that secret and that revelation that makes her kind of go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been wrong this whole time.'”

 

Despite Obi-Wan “saving” Reva, however, her story wasn’t meant to be open-ended like it was at the end of the series. Reva was first planned to be a one-and-done character, with her fate sealed at the business end of Darth Vader’s lightsaber:

 

“[She] basically saved Kenobi by sacrificing herself, telling Vader, ‘I killed Kenobi.’ And then Vader killed her, [with her] knowing that Vader would kill her. So, that kind of completed her arc… I wanted Reva to play her part in the Kenobi-Vader story, which was, essentially, at the end, she was the one that allowed Vader, basically told Vader to stop hunting Kenobi. You know, she ended the obsession Vader had with Kenobi. She claimed it was over, it’s done. So that was, that was her role to play.”

 

The writers of the series ultimately disagreed, opting to have Reva figure out that Vader was Anakin on her own before failing to kill him in revenge. Reva instead targeted Luke for what she referred to as “justice”, but ultimately decided not to go through with it out of fear of becoming what she hated. Her story ends Obi-Wan comforting her, and her renouncing her ties to the Inquisitorius, subsequently allowing her the freedom to live.

 

Jedi: Fallen Order

 

Lastly, there have been many comparisons made between Reva Savander and Trilla Suduri, the Second Sister from 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order, a sympathetic antagonist who suffered similar trauma to Reva’s. Beattie notes that he worked on his script prior to the completion of Fallen Order and that he had no knowledge of what they were doing with her. Beattie explained that this was unintentional and that the reason he created Reva was to have a new character, though he mentions one character that he planned to use that didn’t make it into the show:

 

“No, look, it’s just coincidence. I wanted to create a new character because I didn’t want to be bound by any canon with any of the others that have already been discussed. And I wanted freedom to take her where I wanted to take her. So that’s why I created her, for this story. And that’s the other thing too, we’re already using so many characters in established canon with Obi, Darth, Owen, Beru… I even had Cody in mind. You know, so I was looking to create someone new.”

 

All six episodes of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi are streaming on Disney Plus.

 

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Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.

Grant Davis (Pomojema)

Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.

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