Reva's Armor In Obi-Wan Kenobi Hides Her Star Wars History In Plain Sight
However you felt about "Obi-Wan Kenobi" as a whole, you've got to hand it to the series for giving us one of the more complicated antagonists in all of "Star Wars" — Moses Ingram's Reva Sevander, a member of Darth Vader's personal Force-wielding Jedi-hunting hit squad known as the Inquisitors.
From the moment we met her, there was something different about Reva ... and not just because she's a Black woman who served as a member of a group whose ranks otherwise appear to be uniformly composed of individuals with extremely pallid complexions. She was feisty and hungry to prove herself in a way the other Inquisitors weren't. In time, it came to light this was but a mask for a deep well of pain and anger. Reva, we learned, was really a former Youngling who survived Anakin Skywalker's assault on the Jedi Temple on Coruscant during Order 66. Having deduced that Anakin was also Vader, Reva did everything she could to win his favor, all in the hopes of getting close enough to kill him.
Speaking with Variety, "Obi-Wan Kenobi" costume designer Suttirat Larlarb talked about the ways she alluded to Reva's history through her armor. She began by "breaking down traditional hard armor to simplify and streamline her so that the form fit in the Inquisitor language but that the details were less flamboyant than the others." In doing so, she subtly planted the seeds for the eventual reveals about the character later in the show.
A divided but sharpened heart
"Kill Darth Vader" isn't exactly the sort of goal you immediately associate with a "Star Wars" villain. The problem was Reva was willing to throw the renegade Jedi who survived Order 66 (along with anyone who protected them) under the bus to accomplish her objective. There is, of course, a certain utilitarian logic to her actions. As terrible as it sounds when you say it out loud, one could make the philosophical argument that sacrificing a handful of lives would be morally justifiable if it meant potentially defeating someone as powerful and deadly as Vader. At the same time, nobody could reasonably argue this is a clear-cut good thing to do, and it's certainly not the Jedi way.
Larlarb discussed how she and her collaborators went about designing Reva's armor to better reflect her duality, telling Variety:
"There's a detail on her leather cuirass which is subtle. [Assistant costume designer] Stacia Lang took a series of sketch lines that I kept drawing over and over down the center front of the armor and developed it into a low and long and sharp 'fin' that looked like a front-facing external spine. Moses latched on to that detail as a reference to her divided but sharpened heart. We also had the imperial symbol bonded onto the reverse of her split cape, tone on tone, which I also saw as another way to express her conflicted allegiance."
"Conflicted" is the key term there. "Obi-Wan Kenobi" ends with Reva (obviously) failing to kill Vader but returning to the light side. There's a chance that she might yet do some good from here, as Obi-Wan points out by telling her, "Who you become now, that is up to you." It's an appropriately nuanced ending for a character who's far from a black-and-white evil-doer.