Obi-Wan Kenobi is at the halfway point, and Star Wars fans need a deep, Vader-like breath. Three of the new series’ six episodes have aired, and already the revelations have been shattering and surprising for longtime followers of the galaxy far, far away. That distressing opening scene at the Jedi Temple. The introduction of young Leia. The Grand Inquisitor’s questionable fate. Darth Vader’s fiery vengeance. It’s a lot to take in.

Joby Harold, the head writer and an executive producer of the series, spoke with Vanity Fair and did not hold back on any subject. Is the Disney+ series changing established Star Wars canon? In some ways, yes, in other ways, no. Harold says Obi-Wan Kenobi will reward patience. He and director and executive producer Deborah Chow's shared goal was to deepen perspective on the story fans already know. If it seems like they’re changing history…well, just wait.

Plus—he says Vader was a lot more extreme in his original concept. “I got pulled back a little bit on that,” Harold says. “It’s awful, but he should be awful. He’s Darth Vader.”

Spoiler Warning: If you aren’t caught up, read no further.

Vanity Fair: Let’s begin with young Leia, played by Vivien Lyra Blair. What was your thinking as you put pen to paper and began showing us Leia as a little girl on Alderaan?

Joby Harold: Obviously, to bring Obi-Wan out of hiding there has to be a pretty good reason for him to leave Luke. Putting that question on the board—what would be seismic enough to make him do so?— acknowledges the importance of the Luke/Leia equation that sometimes has been forgotten. Why is Obi-Wan watching one of them, and not the other? It always seemed a little unfair to me. That allowed us to look at the weight of responsibility in a slightly different way. Having her be the call to action made her important legacy-wise at a young age, as important as the farm boy was. It was a great opportunity to surprise the audience.

There are always rumors, but her presence managed to stay hidden until the debut.

I think marketing did a good job of hiding the football on that. I wasn't sure how the audience would embrace it until [the premiere screening] at Celebration, when we cut to Alderaan and the room lost its mind. It was so nice to see that they really enjoyed the notion of seeing this character in a more nascent form.

Everyone has noted Young Leia’s sassy asides. What influence did Carrie Fisher have on how you wrote her?

The [goal] was to craft the character in such way that honored what Carrie Fisher had done. But also you got to play a little bit of the nature/nurture question, where you see she's the best of her mother and her father [Natalie Portman’s Padme Amidala and Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker], but you also get to get to see her adopted parents [played by Jimmy Smits and Simone Kessell] and how they have formed who she becomes too.

She's very much a byproduct of all those people. And we’re getting to see the untold story of how Obi-Wan was a part of her growing up too. That now informs “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” It helps explain why she would call her son “Ben” one day. There are lovely pieces of the puzzle that are now complete, that we didn't even know needed to be completed.

What were some of your influences in depicting their relationship after he rescues her?

It’s the opportunity to have a two-hander in the middle of the show. I looked at Paper Moon and I looked at Midnight Run a little bit. Those are some of my favorite movies. You don't want to push it too far. Obviously that's not where the show is—but it's nice to give that energy to it a little. And then it comes down to casting. She's such a terrific young actor.

What else do you hope young Leia conveys?

In Episode Three, we start to skirt the edges of Padme. She's part of the story as well. The echo of her. Obi-Wan seeing her eyes in her daughter's eyes is very potent.

The series begins with what was a very disturbing scene—especially shocking given the terrible tragedy in Texas just a week before. Order 66, the extermination of the Jedi, played a lot differently in that context. I’m guessing it probably played differently when you wrote it vs. when it aired. Why start the show with the Clone Troopers shooting their way through classes at the Jedi Temple?

It was a part of the story that had been told before, and telling it again was a reminder to the audience of where this all began, where Obi-Wan’s journey began. That's why it was in the show. But you know, I'm a father of three and with everything happening in the world, it certainly wasn’t something—within the context of events recently—that was easy to watch. But it was a necessary part of Obi-Wan’s story. It belonged in a story about a Jedi who is in hiding, who has to face his past.

It shows why he is hiding? That nobody is protected, nobody was shown any mercy by the the Dark Side when they came hunting Jedi?

Yes, it's a way of establishing the stakes. The stakes are high for everyone, right from the beginning, and then they become higher and higher and higher with Obi-Wan being forced to go out and be exposed, to be more in the spotlight because of the Leia of it all.

Obi-Wan really does hold back. He doesn’t use his lightsaber when we first expect it. He seemingly can’t connect with the Force until he has to save Leia from a fall. Tell me about making the audience patient for those things.

I heard something that JJ Abrams had said ages ago: “It should be a massive moment when a Jedi uses the Force.” So you can't ever throw it away. That really sat with me. You really have to earn the moment. He shouldn't just use it to pull his cup of coffee closer while he's sitting in the cave. Only Leia could pull that out of him.

That’s why when we meet Kumail Nanjiani’s character and he's using the Force to close the windows, you know he’s a fraud?

You're exactly right. Only a fake Jedi would throw it away on shutters and nonsense like that. It's funny watching that scene at Celebration too, because I know the character so well, but the audience didn't. You could feel it in the room—”Are you just doing a really bad job with this Jedi?”— before they realized what was going on. I love that character.

It reminds me of the mediums and spiritualists from the last century who were basically con artists.

Having a fake Jedi felt like such a fun thing to add to the vocabulary of Star Wars. The guy is completely full of it, using a bunch of magnets and nonsense. But I love that character.

I was impressed by your and director Deborah Chow's willingness to go into the despair of Obi-Wan Kenobi. This wasn't a guy who was lying low and eager to get back to the fight. He really had given up.

It was massively important. I fought very hard for it. There were some who say Jedi would never give up hope and would never say the time that the Jedi is done, but it was very important to me that the audience felt that. Hope is a big word in Star Wars. You don't wan’t to take it for granted as a precursor to existence as a Jedi. The notion that he would find it, even if it's the smallest glimmer of it, on his journey and have it reignite, which is part of what Episode Three is when he meets [Indira Varma’s character] Tala, and learns of The Path and that he's not alone. If he began in a place of feeling at peace and centered, those things wouldn’t have landed in the same way.

I want to talk about the Dark Side characters, because I think in fantasy storytelling sometimes bad guys are very dastardly, but not actually evil. In this, you have Reva attack a woman just for speaking up, and she cuts her hand off. We learn in that moment she is willing to be cruel in order to get what she wants. Tell me about that.

She's so brilliantly performed by Moses Ingram. Defining how singular of purpose she is through action and not just through monologuing was really important. It’s having her be unpredictable, having her choices be sudden. And that scene… there's a legacy. Obi-Wan does that in that [1977’s Star Wars], you know.

That's a really good point. He does cut off a guy’s arm in the cantina.

It has to be done sometimes! The effectiveness is in the way Deb covers the scene. It feels so sudden and immediate and speaks to Reva always impatiently wanting to push the agenda and wanting to achieve her goal.

Reva devises the plan to kidnap young Leia as a way of drawing Obi-Wan out of hiding. I've seen some criticism where people say, Why didn't Darth Vader and the Grand Inquisitor do that before? Or why didn’t they go after her adoptive father, Bail Organa, since he was in the Galactic Senate? Can you explain why the Empire would be restrained at this point in the story?

I think you said it very well. The Empire is in control, but they are a body that exists within the day to day life of the citizens of the galaxy. Many people believe they are doing what has to be done. There are people that sympathize with and believe in them.

The Inquisitors aren't acting like renegade hot shots, cruising around going against the wishes of the Empire. Reva's unpredictability isn't consistent with their operating procedure. Certainly going after a senator's daughter is very much off limits. Reva's discovery of the potency of the relationship between Bail and Obi-Wan, and taking advantage of that is certainly not within the playbook.

The Empire is still trying to act like they're not so bad, in other words?

Yeah, but then she calls them out on that hypocrisy too. She says “We've done worse.” We established her as being more impulsive, more committed to her own personal goals, so it felt like we created enough room for her character to push further than they would.

In Episode Two, Reva drives her lightsaber into her superior, the Grand Inquisitor. Yet we saw him meet his end a different way in the animated Rebels show. Is there a break in canon there?

As you know, we would never break canon. So, that's all I'll say. [Laughs.] Canon is everything

So fans should wait to see where that's going before judging it as a mistake or a retcon?

I can't speak to it beyond that. We all know where we're going in the show [from previous films and TV shows] so anytime you can undercut that, pull the rug on that, have a reversal …

What was it like watching that scene at the premiere at Star Wars Celebration, with thousands of fans in the audience who know the full arc of that character—or believe they did?

I was sitting with Rupert Friend [who plays the Grand Inquisitor.] I was right in front of him when it happened and we talked about it beforehand. I was like, “How's this gonna be?” It was an audible gasp. The people like people were not expecting that at all. That was quite gratifying because that's the intention to show. It begins with the Grand Inquisitor, well, grandstanding and enjoying the sound of his own voice. I don't think we anticipate that voice suddenly being cut off as it was.

That brings us to Episode Three and obviously the emergence of Vader. We get Vader and Obi-Wan face to face. But the sequence where Vader is walking down the street slaying innocent bystanders has people saying this is the scariest Vader has ever been.

It was a thousand percent the intention. 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.

Really? Tell me more…

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. He's pushed a little more than the Vader we know. Obi-Wan isn't the finished article before [the original Star Wars], and we can look at Vader in the same way.

He is emotionally invested in that hunt to the same degree that Obi-Wan's emotionally invested in running away. What a tremendous vehicle to try to articulate rage when you have Darth Vader on the board and you have that silhouette. It is a scary sequence, but it was entirely by design and it had to be because everyone's running from something that's terrifying.

He's walking down a street, grabbing and killing innocent bystanders just as he walks. They're not even doing anything. I couldn't help but think of something like Michael Myers from the Halloween films with the stillness of the mask that shrouds the emotion beneath, making it seem detached. Am I reading this right?

I know what you mean. That just makes him all the more intriguing. As he's going down the street and doing those things, he's doing them to draw the Jedi out. We've established the language: the Jedi hunt themselves—because they cannot stand by and watch innocents be killed. So Vader is very cognizant of what he's doing as he's walking down that street. The horror of the moment has an emotional weight because it's calculated.

And to your point, you don't get to see the emotion beneath the stoicism of the silhouette. So it creates something that's really scary. Plus the mix is great in that scene. The sound design is very effective. You are just hearing the breath and the footsteps and seeing the light of the red saber getting close. It’s the feeling of being hunted by that which hates you. It's terrible.

They finally come face to face, and obviously there's a lightsaber duel. But when Vader gets the upper hand, he ignites some fuel and tries to burn Obi-Wan alive, as he burned in the lava when Obi-Wan defeated him in their last encounter. How did you approach that? Tell me about the process of creating that moment.

His choice is revealing the character beneath and the torture beneath—the pain inflicted and the eye-for-an-eye of it all. It’s a chance to hint at something beneath the mask. Vader can't be talking about, you know, his feelings. So it has to be in action. That comes from dragging people down the street behind you to try to pull the Jedi out of hiding, and that comes in inflicting the same pain upon the Jedi that he did to you. It's awful, but he should be awful. He's Darth Vader.

This interview has been edited for context and clarity.