What Rian Johnson did for Star Wars in The Last Jedi was very interesting. It challenged what we knew about the universe, but it also rubbed people the wrong way. Not only that, but it offered a very polarizing answer to one of the trilogy’s biggest questions: who are Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) parents.
Now we are learning that The Force Awakens and Episode IX director J.J. Abrams had a much different plan for who Rey’s parents are. Hit the jump to see how Johnson’s creative decisions may have hurt Episode IX. Spoilers below if you’re not caught up.
In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) revealed that Rey’s parents were nobody. “They were filthy junk traders,” Ren says to Rey. “Sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead in a pauper’s grave in the Jakku desert. You come from nothing. You’re nothing”¦but not to me.”
Not exactly the most reassuring thing to say to an orphan looking for her parents. However, in my opinion at least, had it been someone we known, it would have been a little disappointing. Perhaps it’s a case of setting our expectations too high or hoping it would be someone but it turns out it not that person. But I digress.
Simon Pegg was recently on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he revealed to Josh Horowitz that Abrams had a different plan to reveal Rey’s parents:
Now we can take this with more than a grain of salt because Abrams and Pegg worked closely together before The Force Awakens. Pegg appeared in both of Abrams’ Star Trek films. So it seems to make sense that the two would talk to each other and trust that they would not spoil any information. Until now, at least.
But the tweet says more than just that Rey’s parents would be revealed, it’s that she would also have a “relevant lineage” for her. So who could her parents be? Well, obviously we can guess that it would either be Han Solo, Leia Organa, and Luke Skywalker. Han and Luke would serve as father-figures to Rey, while Leia would play the motherly type. It stands to reason that it could have been Han and Leia, but the way The Force Awakens played out, it would seem very tragic for the two to just leave her on a nowhere planet.
Which leaves us with Luke. What could have caused him to leave Rey on Jakku, if indeed, that was the plan? His failure to control Ben did not come until the young Jedi’s teen years, and when we learned that Rey was left on Jakku, she was already a child. So, a lot of this is just theorizing and speculation.
But it should be interesting to see how Abrams will handle this now that he is back in the driver’s seat.
Episode IX opens in theaters on December 20, 2019.
As if having JJ back will be an improvement. He got us into this mess in the first place.
Comment by morphoyle — April 5, 2018 @ 9:10 am