Star Wars is obsessed with destiny and with Episode 9 completing the sequel trilogy, Rey
and Kylo Ren's stories come to a dramatic close with huge reveals about Rey's parents,
her connection to the Dark Side, and Kylo's fate.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video I'll be explaining Rey and Kylo
Ren's journey in The Rise of Skywalker and revealing all the hidden clues that foretold
their ultimate destiny.
There will of course be spoilers, so take care if you haven't seen the movie yet.
In the very final scene of Episode 9, we see Rey visit Luke's old home, the Lars homestead
on Tatooine, where she buries both Luke and Leia's sabers in honour of their sacrifice
for the freedom of the galaxy.
She then unveils her own new lightsaber, and when an old lady asks who she is, Rey replies
that she's "Rey Skywalker", as the Force Ghosts of Luke and Leia look upon her.
It's a bold statement that will doubtless spark debate because Rey isn't a Skywalker
by blood.
What Rey's really doing here though is two-fold.
Firstly, on a personal note, she's showing her allegiance and adopting the family she
identifies with over her biological one.
Rey is not a Jedi because of her heritage but because of how she chooses to act and
who she chooses to be.
And secondly, she's taking the legendary family name and establishing it as an identity or
title for the future Jedi.
And Rey looking out over Tatooine with the twin suns in the distance is, of course, a
nostalgic call back to a New Hope when Luke looked out over the sunset and dreamed of
adventure, and it signals Rey as the new hope for future generations.
In fact, Rey becoming an honorary or adoptive Skywalker is something that the new trilogy
set up early on in The Force Awakens.
At Maz Kanata's castle, Rey hears voices from the basement that lead her to Luke's old lightsaber
that he lost during his duel with Darth Vader.
"That lightsaber was Luke's.
And his father's before him.
And now, it calls to you."
This is the saber that Rey uses through the whole of the trilogy and, as Maz mentioned,
it also originally belonged to Anakin Skywalker.
Later in The Force Awakens when Rey and Kylo Ren battle for control of the lightsaber,
it flies to Rey's hand, not Kylo's even though he is a Skywalker via his mother Leia's bloodline.
And Kylo felt entitled to that Skywalker saber because of his heritage.
"That lightsaber.. it belongs to me."
He eventually gets to wield it in The Rise of Skywalker when Rey passes it to him through
their Force Bond after he arrives on Exogol.
At that point, he's given up the identity of Kylo Ren, having turned to the light and
become Ben again, making him worthy of wielding the saber.
Rey ultimately defeats the Emperor by combining that legendary lightsaber with Leia's saber,
which symbolises the passing of the baton from both the Skywalker siblings as well as
Rey's vital connection with them and their crucial impact on her character and journey
in this saga.
The way Rey crosses the sabers together in this scene is a moment that visually recalls
how Luke and Darth Vader crossed lightsabers as they duelled in front of the Emperor in
Return of the Jedi.
And that defensive lightsaber technique which deflects Palpatine's lightning back to him
reminds me of what Yoda once taught Luke: "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense..
never for attack."
Rey embracing the Skywalker legacy as a title that future Jedi can use and honour also gives
meaning to the title of Episode 9, "The Rise of Skywalker".
And is something that Snoke foresaw in The Force Awakens:
"If Skywalker returns... the new Jedi will rise."
And by the way, there's also precedence in the history of our own galaxy of famous family
names becoming titles that future leaders acquire.
The title of "Caesar" that numerous Roman Emperors gave themselves was taken from the
most famous man of that name, "Julius Caesar", even though they weren't related to him by
blood.
The traditional phrase "The king is dead, long live the king!" is another example of
this idea of continuity with change and the idea that the "Skywalker" name will now live
on through future generations of Jedi: "We've passed on all we know.
A thousand generations live in you now.
We'll always be with you."
And that Jedi legacy is what Rey felt when the voices of Jedi past called to her, giving
her the strength to finally defeat Palpatine.
But what about Rey's actual bloodline?
After all, in The Force Awakens, Rey's ancestry and background was set up as an important
detail to pay attention to: "Where do you come from?
Classified, really?
Me too.
Big secret."
The Last Jedi intriguingly subverted many fans' expectations when we discovered her
parents were nobodies.
"So you want to know the truth about your parents?
They were filthy junk traders who sold you off for drinking money."
But similar to Obi-Wan Kenobi's 'certain point of view' explanation of his original statement
that Darth Vader killed Luke's father, in Episode 9, Kylo tells Rey that her parents
chose to be nobodies to protect her as her father was Palpatine's son, making her a descendant
of the Emperor, his granddaughter.
Rey's link to the Dark Side was strongly hinted at during her training with Luke in Episode
8, when she discovered she had a powerful connection with the dark force beneath the
island.
"You went straight to the dark."
"That place was trying to show me something."
"It offered something you needed."
"And you didn't even try to stop yourself."
Luke was terrified of this given his previous experience with his nephew:
"I've seen this raw strength only once before, in Ben Solo.
It didn't scare me enough then.
It does now."
Episode 9 further develops this theme of Dark Side Rey when she gives in to anger and accidentally
lets loose a lightning blast that blows up a transport ship, thereby revealing her connection
to the Emperor.
Lightning blasts are, of course, Palpatine's signature attack style and Rey even acknowledges
that the lightning power came from within her.
We witness Rey's struggle to contain her anger and path towards the Dark Side in Episode
9 when she arrives on the wreck of the second Death Star and enters the old destroyed throne
room of the Emperor.
After she picks up the Sith wayfinder, she has a vision and encounter with a dark version
of herself who seemingly bests her.
The moment has some parallels with Luke's Dark Side Cave encounter on Dagobah when he
struck down in anger a vision of Darth Vader only to reveal his own face underneath the
helmet.
And when Kylo confronts her on the Death Star and destroys the wayfinder, Rey gives in to
anger again and attacks him.
In this duel, Rey's anger fuels her Dark Side in a similar way to how Luke became enraged
when he confronted Vader again in Return of the Jedi.
"Good!
Your hate has made you powerful."
And just as Luke chopped off Vader's hand, Rey attacks Kylo with his own red lightsaber
and stabs him while he's distracted by a Force call from Leia.
It's a crucial moment for Rey who is brought back from the brink of giving in entirely
to the Dark Side when she senses Leia's passing.
And it makes me think of how Luke also pulled himself back from the Dark Side when the Emperor
tried to goad him into killing his father Darth Vader.
After Rey's failure to control her fear and anger, she goes to the island to withdraw
herself from the world as Luke did.
Here she's reunited with Luke's Force Ghost who gives her that crucial third lesson she
seems to have missed in The Last Jedi.
Luke reminds her that retreating from the world in fear isn't the answer:
"Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi.
Your destiny" After all, as Yoda previously told Luke:
"Anger, fear, aggression.
The dark side of the Force are they."
And Leia told Rey at the beginning of Episode 9 to never be afraid of who she is.
Leia already knew Rey was a Palpatine but, as Luke explains, his sister understood that
Rey's spirit and heart were more important and that "some things are stronger than blood."
And this is perhaps one of the biggest messages to take away from the these films:
that no one is or should be completely defined by their past.
After all, Poe is a former spice runner, Finn and Jannah were both Stormtroopers, and Rey
was a scavenger.
But more important than their previous lives or the families they were born into or even
forced into, is the family they later choose for themselves or adopt as their own.
Just as Maz Kanata told Rey in The Force Awakens: "The belonging you seek is not behind you...
it is ahead."
And Maz followed that up by asking her to take Luke's lightsaber, a sign that Rey's
true family and sense of connection would be with the Skywalkers and the Jedi.
By the end of Episode 9, Rey understands this and rejects Palpatine when he tells her the
throne is her birthright and she instead allies herself with Ben to stand against the Emperor
and the Sith.
To understand Kylo Ren's redemptive arc, we need to go back to the beginning of The Force
Awakens where we find him already conflicted in his feelings of allegiance to the Dark
Side.
"Forgive me.
I feel it again.
The call to the light.
Supreme Leader senses it.
Show me again.
The power of the darkness."
In fact, there's an intriguing message underlying what Rey says to Kylo after he captures her
in The Force Awakens: "You're afraid.
That you will never be as strong as Darth Vader."
The hidden meaning in this line is that although Vader was a villain, he eventually found the
strength to turn back to the Light Side and stand against the Emperor.
Kylo, however, believes he needs to be strong to embrace the Dark Side, which we see in
what he says to his father Han Solo just before killing him:
"I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it."
But in Episode 9, Kylo eventually finds true strength when he talks to his father again
after his battle with Rey on the Death Star.
Han, who appears as one of his memories, reminds him that Ben isn't dead, but Kylo Ren is.
And using the same words that he said to his father on Starkiller Base, Ben now throws
his lightsaber into the water, finally rejecting his Dark Side identity of Kylo Ren.
That eventual redemption for him began in The Last Jedi, where Rey felt that the connection
she was beginning to establish through their Force Bond meant he could still be turned
back to the Light Side.
"You failed him by thinking his choice was already made.
It wasn't.
There's still conflict in him.
Just now when we touched hands, I saw his future.
Then he's our last hope."
And Ben does become Rey's last hope when he stands with her against the Emperor and then
brings her back by Force healing her after she collapses from the exertion of killing
Palpatine.
It was also Kylo's connection with his mother Leia that kept him from fully turning to the
Dark Side.
In The Last Jedi, he stopped himself from firing upon Leia's ship when he sensed her
presence.
And that moment is revisited in The Rise of Skywalker when Leia calls to him and stops
him from delivering a fatal blow to Rey during their duel on the Death Star.
Together both Leia and Han bring their son back, something that Leia told Han they would
do in The Force Awakens: "We can still save him.
Me.
You."
So basically, what Lor San Tekka told Kylo at the very beginning of the sequel trilogy
turned out to be right.
"You cannot deny the truth that is your family.
I know where you come from.
Before you called yourself Kylo Ren."
Ultimately, his Kylo Ren alter ego has been a performance, a big act by a person trying
to take on the enormous mantle of the infamous Darth Vader.
Unlike Vader though, Kylo didn't require his helmet to survive.
"Take off that mask, you don't need it" It was just another way to conceal who he
really was, while he tried every way he could to be something he ultimately wasn't:
"You're no Vader, you're just a child in a mask."
So although Kylo Ren had worshipped the legend of the Sith Lord Darth Vader.
"Show me grandfather, and I will finish what you started."
By the end, like Anakin, Ben rejects the Emperor and the way of the Sith and redeems himself.
Now, how do you feel about Rey and Kylo's endings in The Rise of Skywalker and their
arcs through the sequel trilogy?
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!