When Obi-Wan Kenobi debuted on Friday, it introduced the world to one of the franchise’s most ruthless villains yet. Moses Ingram’s Reva Sevander, better known to the Empire and Inquisitorious as the Third Sister, was shown to be unabashedly vile in her hunt for hidden Jedi. The character managed to remove an appendage, threaten a family, and impale her own boss in just two episodes of shared screen time. Frankly, it was a pretty impressive introductory showing for Reva, in what is potentially just the tip of a rather violent iceberg. Based on the premiere, it would seem the Third Sister is set to play a major role for the remainder of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s run. Despite this, her future in Star Wars as a whole is still very much in question.
The latest Disney+ series takes place a full decade after the events of Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, planting it firmly in the middle of the galaxy’s “Dark Times” era, exploring the relationship between runaway Jedi and their Imperial hunters. It’s an incredibly intriguing basis for a story, but it’s not the first Star Wars show to tackle the topic. Star Wars Rebels, an animated series that ran for four seasons on Disney XD, was the first project to shed some light on the Inquisitors and their lust for democratic demise. The cult-favorite series takes place years after the events of Kenobi, and several members of the Inquisitorious make appearances over the course of its story. Familiar scowling faces like the Grand Inquisitor and Fifth Brother pop up repeatedly, but Reva is never anywhere to be seen.
Of course, there are plenty of viable reasons for her absence. Maybe the Third Sister is simply on a different mission than her companions at the time of the Ghost crew’s rise to prominence, or perhaps her actions against the Grand Inquisitor don’t go over well with the higher powers of the fearsome Empire. At first glance, it would seem fans don’t have any real clues as to Reva’s long-term future. Yet, with a little further inspection,a reasonable explanation may have already been presented…but nobody caught it.
On the same day that Kenobi premiered, a series of character posters were released to help promote Ewan McGregor’s big return. Each installment in the poster series features one of the show’s major players looking intently at the viewer, with their left eye replaced by a Tatooine sun and one of two characters – Obi-Wan, or his former apprentice, Darth Vader. Examining the group of posters as a whole reveals that the protagonists, or “good guys”, have Vader in their eyes, while the villains are shown to be focused on Kenobi. It gives the impression that the characters are looking toward their respective enemies. Curiously, Reva is the only character who doesn’t fit this pattern. Although she has thus far appeared pretty villainous, her character poster has her eyeing down Vader in the same manner as Obi-Wan and Kumail Nanjiani’s surprisingly warm-hearted con man.
It’s made clear in the series that Reva has a desire to prove herself to the Emperor’s right-hand man, so it’s possible the poster is just an indicator that Vader is the real apple of her eye. However, it’s also entirely plausible that Reva won’t stay on the Dark Side of the Force for all six of Kenobi’s episodes. Redemptive arcs are fundamental to the fabric of Star Wars, and tend to happen more often than one might think. The franchise has seen worse villains, including the aforementioned Vader, come back to the side of the Light before. There’s still plenty that’s not known about Reva’s backstory, which was teased as being somewhat tragic, and it wouldn’t be all that shocking to learn she was once a happier individual than she is now. If that’s true, then the long history of Star Wars would imply that good may still be inside of her.
Kenobi began with a sequence in which a group of younglings attempted to escape the Jedi Temple during Order 66. Maybe Reva was there, a Jedi herself, and has doubled down on the pain of the Dark Side to escape the pain of her own past. If her attack against the Grand Inquisitor were to get her booted from the Inquisitorious or put on notice by Vader himself, she could potentially be forced to ally with Obi-Wan in another attempt to survive. From there, who knows what interacting with a former Jedi Master could lead her to remember about herself. Either way, the placement of Vader on Reva’s poster is an interesting choice and one that feels awfully deliberate in comparison to everything else.
