Kenobi was the kind of show a lot of us had been waiting on for years. Ewan back in the robes, that stretch between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope finally getting filled in, Vader hunting again—it all felt like peak Star Wars comfort food. The trailers showed Daiyu lit up in neon, crowded streets, Imperial patrols, all the right pieces of that “lived-in galaxy” look.
But when the episodes dropped, something in the background felt off. Especially in that early scene on Tatooine where the Inquisitors march into town to root out a hiding Jedi in the cantina. The place is busy, the streets are full, but almost every face we see is human.
The Inquisitors Care About Jedi, Not Random Aliens
If we stay inside the universe for a second, there actually is a way to justify some of those human-heavy shots, especially early on.
On Tatooine in Part I of Kenobi, the Grand Inquisitor, Fifth Brother, and Reva aren’t doing a random sweep of the planet—they’re there for one very specific thing: a fugitive Jedi named Nari. They march into a settlement, walk straight into a cantina, and immediately start leaning on the crowd to flush him out. Reva cuts off a woman’s hand, threatens families, and pushes Owen in public; the whole point is to use fear and guilt to make the Jedi or anyone helping him break
That’s pretty much the Inquisitorius playbook across the board: they weaponize civilians. You see the same thing years later in Tales of the Empire, in the Barriss Offee episodes. In “Realization,” Barriss and the Fourth Sister arrive at a shabby little settlement looking for a hidden Jedi. The villagers lie to protect them. Once Barriss gently coaxes the truth out of a child, the Fourth Sister’s response is to turn on the villagers and slaughter them for covering up the Jedi’s presence, before going after the Jedi themself.
Put that mindset back onto Kenobi and the lack of aliens in some of those scenes starts to make a bit more sense. The camera is following the people the Inquisitors are interested in—human villagers, farmers, workers who might be sheltering a Jedi or at least know something. The Empire doesn’t need to hassle every random alien drifting through town to get what it wants; it just needs to squeeze the locals hard enough that someone cracks.
Kenobi Actually Does Have Aliens — Just Not in Cantina Numbers
Even in that first Tatooine showdown, it isn’t literally an all-human crowd. When Reva walks into the square and starts calling out the townsfolk, you can see an alien standing off to the side behind her, head wrapped, goggles on, keeping their distance while everyone else backs away. It’s a nice reminder that Tatooine is still a mixed place—you’ve got humans and non-humans sharing the street—but the camera is locked on Reva and the people she’s threatening, so the alien ends up as background dressing instead of part of the moment.
Same thing inside the cantina. When the Grand Inquisitor corners the owner, most of the people close to camera are human, but behind them you can spot a couple of aliens sitting at the tables, watching and keeping quiet. It’s nowhere near the chaos of the A New Hope cantina, but it does show that Tatooine in Kenobi isn’t human-only. The aliens are just pushed into the background instead of being the main attraction.
