Reva’s story arc in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series was a confusing one. Her motivations and actions throughout the course of the series were all over the place and really didn’t make any sense.
Before this series was announced, Stuart Beattie had written several drafts of a script for an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie that was originally going to launch a planned trilogy of films. He recently shared all kinds of details about that trilogy that you can read about here. I loved the direction that he was going to take the story, and he actually seemed to have a better understanding of Star Wars and the characters.
Well, he’s now revealed details on the original story arc that he had written for Reva, and it makes so much more sense than what ended up happening with her in the series! In the show, it was revealed that the Imperial Inquisitor was one of the Jedi younglings that survived Anakin’s violent attack in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and that she’s been hunting Obi-Wan ever since.
In the original version of her story, Reva didn’t know that Anakin was Darth Vader. This is something that she was aware of in the series, though. in regards to that Beattie told The Direct:
“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.”
Exactly! She would have never even known Anakin was Vader! It’s not like he goes around telling people he used to be Anakin Skywalker. So, what’s her motivation to want to kill Jedi? The writer goes on to explain:
“So, 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.”
As a young kid, that’s exactly what they would get from that terrifying situation. Beattie went on to reveal that, in his version of the story Reva is killed by Darth Vader, after she eventually discovers who he really was, and she chooses to sacrifice herself in order to save Kenobi to atone for her past sins against the Jedi. Beattie also explained:
“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.’ So she goes and [tells] Vader, ‘I killed Kenobi’, knowing that Vader would kill her. So, that kind of completed her arc. She’d done so many terrible things, I felt she had to die. You can only redeem so much.”
Yeah, that’s a much better story arc for the Reva character because it actually makes sense! It’s a shame that the creative team for the series didn’t stick with that.