Obi-Wan Kenobi Fixes Alderaan Mistake That Pissed Star Wars Fans for Years
The Obi-Wan Kenobi series on Disney+ was a highly controversial show that faced a fairly cold reception from audiences.
Many of its plot turns were heavily criticized, but there was at least one thing that it did right, at least from a certain point of view.
Some among Star Wars fans had long believed that the destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope received too little attention from the both the narrative and the movie's characters.
While Obi-Wan Kenobi did feel "…a great disturbance in the Force as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced," the movie continued on, with none of the characters, including Leia, who just witnessed her home planet getting blown up before her eyes, dwelling on the event.
Which, of course, was a result of the conscious decision to move between plot points as fast as possible and to make characters act, instead of reflecting, as much as possible.
That obviously worked, in the film format, but did not satisfy everyone. We didn't even get any glimpses of Alderaan before the Special Editions and the prequels. So, the above mentioned subset of fans complained, that the event had little weight.
Not even the old Expanded Universe did much to address the issue – it introduced some second-hand lore, explaining why Alderaan mattered, and elaborating on political consequences of its destruction, but made no significant stories that would have allowed us to look at Alderaan directly.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, however, added more and substance to the broad strokes of what was already known about the gorgeous, seemingly utopian planet, by presenting it on screen.
Now, thanks to this Disney+ series, we got a chance to actually see Alderaan and its people on the screen, and, consequently, to actually care about them. All in all, by giving Alderaanians faces and voices, the series made abundantly clear that destruction of Alderaan was not only a tragedy, but a terrible loss for the entire Star Wars galaxy.
Well, expanding and fleshing out the universe is what spin-off series should do, after all.