Obi-Wan Kenobi’s first trailer: From sunny Tatooine to dark nights of Jedi hunts

"The key to hunting Jedi is patience."

Disney+ is about to fill its shortest-ever gap between live-action Star Wars TV series, thanks to a six-episode run of Obi-Wan Kenobi starting May 25. And with less than three months to go, Lucasfilm has finally dropped its first substantial look at what the return of Ewan McGregor to the Star Wars universe looks like.

Tuesday's 90-second trailer is much beefier than the tease we saw a few months ago, and the new footage straddles a solid balance between a vast look at the TV series' environments and a tantalizing tease of plot developments to come. In terms of callbacks to familiar content, we get a particularly intriguing look at Kenobi's inevitable cave-exile future, which includes the character spying on what looks like a childhood version of Luke Skywalker, as flanked by Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru (played by the same actors from the series' prequel film trilogy). "Stay hidden," Kenobi suggests in the trailer's narration.

Seconds later, a Palpatine-like voice makes clear that Jedi are to be hunted, as per the prequel-series mandate of Order 66, and in this Jedi's case, certain events may compel Kenobi to leave his hiding place. "Their compassion leaves a trail," the voice says. "The Jedi code is like an itch. They cannot help it." And at least one familiar hunter, the Fifth Brother (a character who debuted in the CGI-animation series Star Wars Rebels), emerges in brand-new, live-action form with a wicked super-spinning red lightsaber to get on with such a hunt. (Though this character looks much like the Grand Inquisitor in the above saber-filled image, Disney's notes to the press say this character is Fifth Brother, as portrayed by Sung Kang of The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift fame.)

Meanwhile, the trailer's focus on Reva, the Third Sister in the Order of the Inquisitors, includes enough hero-shot coverage to suggest that her allegiances or priorities could shift to something other than hunting Kenobi by the series' conclusion. But based on the trailer's footage thus far, that won't happen until she has at least taken orders from the Sith and interrogated average citizens on Tatooine (including Uncle Owen).

Thanks to this trailer's loud ties to Inquisitor-led hunts for remaining Jedi, fans may very well want to do some homework by watching Rebels and maybe even catching up on Star Wars comics before the first Obi-Wan Kenobi episode debuts on May 25. It also sees this long-rumored series, hovering in fans' minds since it leaked in 2019, finally emerging as a real thing after production slowdowns (which somehow hit before a worldwide pandemic).