Vader has always been an amalgamation of every terrifying villain you could possibly imagine, but his entrance in Obi-Wan Kenobi this Wednesday was enough to unsettle even the most tried Star Wars fans.
By that, of course, we’re referring to Vader nonchalantly walking down the street and paving it with the corpses of innocent townspeople to root out Kenobi. At first, the dark lord Force pulls someone out of their house, whereupon his younger son courageously walks out to confront the encased monster. Vader pushes the kid against the wall and snaps his neck without so much as twitching a muscle, reminding everyone of why he always ends up in the top 10 villain lists in cinema history.
That terrifying scene goes hand-in-hand with Vader’s arrival in Rogue One, where he singlehandedly slaughters a squad of Rebel troopers in close quarters in a most imaginatively gruesome way.
According to what writer Toby Harold has just told Vanity Fair, though, he initially wanted to eclipse that scene with his own street sequence, though the powers that be ultimately had to intervene and tone it down.
“From a Vader point of view, we’re all living with the memory of the end of Rogue One, and how effective that was. It was very gratifying to see Vader finally be unleashed in a sequence like that, so we wanted to try to trump it if we could. It was a lot more extreme, at one point. I got pulled back a little bit on that. It was so important to define Vader’s anger and rage. There’s an emotionality to the choices he’s making that are a little further than we’re used to seeing with Vader.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi has already set a new standard for Disney Star Wars content in terms of gory elements. And frankly, something tells us that the chopping off of hands or stormtroopers being cut in half is just the show’s way of warming us up for what may come next as the ultimate confrontation between Kenobi and Vader.
Let’s hope that it lives up to the hype.
