The following contains spoilers for Obi-Wan Kenobi Episodes 1-4, “Parts I-IV,” now streaming on Disney+.
Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s Reva is even deadlier than the Grand Inquisitor. It’s established very early on in the Disney+ series that there is no line the Third Sister won’t cross to accomplish her goals — whether that entails amputating limbs, threatening to murder an entire family or meticulously abducting a 10-year-old princess. Reva is ruthless and relentless with her own style, but the brutality of her methods doesn’t get fully explored until Season 1, Episode 4, “Part IV.”
Having successfully abducted Leia Organa on Mapuzo while Darth Vader was busy settling an old score with his former mentor Obi-Wan, Reva brings the princess back to the Fortress in the Mustafar system. She then employs various questioning methods that mirror Vader’s tactics in the original Star Wars trilogy. One of those methods entails not coming off as an enemy and appealing to the emotions of the person being interrogated… despite being just as dangerous as the Sith Lord.
Reva takes advantage of the fact that Leia is a nervous girl craving the protection of an adult. She therefore tries to present herself as a warm, empathetic ally looking to protect the Resistance fighters from harm. Leia, however, isn’t a fool and knows she’s been abducted by a servant of the Empire; she refuses to talk. Reva then tries another approach: she lies to Leia by telling her Obi-Wan is dead and that no one is coming to rescue her. While the possibility of not being rescued does frighten Leia considerably, she still doesn’t budge and tries to defend herself against Reva by having her droid Lola attack her.
Reva captures the droid using the Force, but does not destroy it. Instead, she uses the droid to appeal to Leia by briefly telling her about her own childhood. She says she also had a droid when she was a child that was taken from her, along with everything else that mattered. Though Reva hints at her past as a youngling and her own tragic fate in the hands of the Empire, this is still not enough to get Leia to talk and the Third Sister resorts to more violent methods.
One of the more frightening sequences in “Part IV” is Reva ordering her Stormtroopers to force answers out through pain. Reva no longer holds back her anger, which genuinely frightens Leia. This is no different from how Vader forces answers out of people when they refuse to talk. However, instead of Force-choking Leia into revealing the locations of the Resistance fighters like Vader would’ve done, Reva straps her to a torture device similar to the one Vader used on Han Solo a decade later.
Fortunately, Obi-Wan and Tala arrive in time to distract Reva from moving forward, though the Third Sister continues to be a menacing figure. While Tala does admit one location for the Resistance fighters, Reva still tries to intimidate Tala into revealing herself as a traitor to the Empire by employing the same tactics she used on Leia — only this time, she’s not trying to act friendly. Between her near-torture of Leia and her intimidating interrogation of Tala, Reva wants people to fear her, similar to how Vader induces fear in others.
While Reva is Vader-like in her behavior and methods, her brutality may come from fearing her past acquaintance rather than sharing his inability to control emotions. Throughout the original trilogy, Vader never comes off as fearing Emperor Palpatine, but is instead planning to depose him. He originally aligned himself with the Emperor because of the promise of learning how to use the Force to save his wife Padmé Amidala — but upon learning the Emperor lied about the circumstances of her death and the fate of his own children, Vader ended his loyalty to him.
In Reva’s case, she has been conditioned to recognize Vader’s brutality for what it really is: he’s a man with nothing left to lose, which makes him the most dangerous man in the galaxy. Whereas the Emperor is patient and thrives on playing the long game, Vader is violent, impulsive and highly unpredictable. When he doesn’t get his way, not only is he quick to murder everyone who fails him, but he’s not beyond attacking innocent people and murdering loved ones as a way of sending a message — a point that was very strongly made in Obi-Wan Kenobi Season 1, Episode 3, “Part III.”
Knowing what Vader is capable of due to their past relationship, Reva seems inclined to do whatever it takes to protect herself from harm. This includes lying to Vader, which she does in “Part III” when she tries to pin her murder of the Grand Inquisitor on Obi-Wan. She lies again toward the end of “Part IV” when Vader violently confronts her about her failure to capture Obi-Wan, Tala and Leia on their own premises.
While Reva tells Vader the truth about letting Obi-Wan and his allies go in order to locate the Resistance base of operations using a tracker she placed on Lola earlier, the fact she felt the need to lie twice before means that she knows the price of failure. As such, she has to stay one step ahead of him, which entails employing violent methods Vader himself would approve of. If she is indeed one of the younglings who survived Order 66, as Obi-Wan Kenobi has teased, that would contextualize her brutal approach as more of a survival strategy than any attempt to follow in Vader’s footsteps, even though she’s done just that.
To see more of Reva’s methods as an Inquisitor, watch Obi-Wan Kenobi every Wednesday on Disney+.