Spoilers ahead for Episode 2 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7, called "A Distant Echo."
Star Wars: The Clone Wars kicked off its final season with the "Bad Batch" arc that is half over as of "A Distant Echo," and the next two episodes finish telling a story that Star Wars fans have been waiting a long time for. What Star Wars fans have not had to wait for is Anakin's final turn to the dark side, since that was covered long ago with Revenge of the Sith, but "A Distant Echo" made me begin to really consider whether Obi-Wan could have prevented Anakin's fall a lot sooner than Revenge of the Sith.
Revenge of the Sith of course saw Anakin make the fateful decision to embrace the dark side so Palpatine would help him save Padme, fueled partly by a conversation with Master Yoda that amounted to Yoda telling Anakin to ignore his premonitions of Padme's death.
Yoda obviously didn't know Anakin was trying to save his pregnant wife, so telling Anakin not to mourn or miss the people he's attached to when they die and let go of everything he feared to lose pretty spectacularly backfired. What does this have to do with "A Distant Echo," in the Clone Wars back before Anakin began having his premonitions?
Well, "A Distant Echo" confirmed the surprising shot in the trailer and included a scene of Anakin affectionally talking via hologram with his wife, with Rex running interference with Obi-Wan outside. Unless Anakin is remarkably unobservant, he had to know that she was pregnant. Despite his best efforts (which really weren't all that good) to hide what he'd been doing, Obi-Wan made it clear to Anakin that he knew he'd been speaking to Padme.
While Obi-Wan clearly wasn't happy about it, it seemed to me that at least part of his disappointment in Anakin was for Anakin lying. Obi-Wan had struggled with attachment himself, with Satine in The Clone Wars, and even Ahsoka and Padme to a certain extent. And of course with Anakin.
Obi-Wan famously screamed that he loved Anakin and thought of him as a brother (after having the high ground) in Revenge of the Sith, after trying to convince Yoda that they should switch adversaries because he didn't want to kill Anakin. And then he didn't kill Anakin, leading to the rise of Darth Vader because Obi-Wan couldn't bring himself to strike a killing blow.
Basically, Obi-Wan had Anakin's back for as long as he possibly could and cared deeply for Padme, as proved by both The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith. While he might have put his foot down about keeping Anakin's secret and letting him remain in the Jedi Order if he found out that Anakin was married with kids on the way, Obi-Wan almost certainly wouldn't have told him to just let Padme die and move past it.
If Anakin had confided in Obi-Wan during the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan could have been the ally and middle ground Anakin needed to keep his head on straight rather than go from Yoda to Palpatine.
The way I see it, Obi-Wan finding out about just how attached Anakin was to Padme and her unborn child(ren) might have resulted in Anakin having to leave the Jedi Order, but not Anakin turning to the dark side and never the confrontation on Mustafar that led Padme to lose "the will to live" out of despair, so Anakin's premonitions wouldn't have come true.
And also a whole bunch of Jedi and younglings wouldn't have been murdered by their own clone troopers or Anakin himself. And a galactic civil war might not have ravaged the galaxy. The Clone Wars is showing that Anakin had opportunities to confide in Obi-Wan, who already knew that Anakin and Padme were a little too close for comfort in the Jedi code. If only Anakin had opened up and Obi-Wan's rigidity would have flexed (which I think it would have) for Anakin and Padme, Anakin might not have fallen.
But of course Anakin did fall and Obi-Wan wasn't around to do anything about it until Yoda sent him to kill Anakin on Mustafar. Anakin is going to fall, Obi-Wan is going to exile himself on Tatooine (with a break in his solitude to do whatever he does in the upcoming Disney+ series with Ewan McGregor reprising the live-action role), and the galaxy is going to be under imperial control until the original trilogy era rolls around, so this is all academic.
Still, it adds layers to the final arcs of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and isn't that what fans deserve after waiting so long for new episodes? Find out what happens next with episodes of The Clone Wars releasing Fridays on Disney+.
