Why Does Rey Care Who Her Parents Are Again?

The story of Luke Skywalker — how he struggles with fear and anger, grows up and into himself, and finally takes the reins of his own destiny — is intimately known by Star Wars fans. The promise was that the sequel trilogy, and the final turns in The Ascension of Skywalker, would give the same depth to Rey, a character crafted to be his successor both as a Jedi and every bit the lead of a genre-defining blockbuster franchise.

Fans accept focused with laserlike precision on the question of who Rey's parents are, a focus that raged on undaunted by the answers provided in The Concluding Jedi. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is hither, nosotros can finally look at Rey's journey in its entirety, and meet how its final installment definitively answers the question The Force Awakens proposed: Do Rey'southward parents matter? And what was the story of Rey about in the end?

The movie's last scene has one answer, but the rest of Rise has a very different one.

[Ed. note: This piece contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Ascent of Skywalker.]

Paradigm: Lucasfilm/Disney

In the final line of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey codifies her new identity, as Forcefulness ghosts of Luke and Leia look on — she is Rey Skywalker, and her destiny is what she makes of it.

Which wouldn't otherwise be and then confusing, if Rise hadn't introduced a large revelation well-nigh her parentage: Rey is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, and the primal to an apparently pretty big plot to bring nigh Sith domination of the galaxy. This huge story turn is set upwardly as if it will sow some self-incertitude in her mind — but Rey'south story has e'er been about letting go of her past.

Rey, her parents, and the path of The Force Awakens

Rey begins the trilogy not just by escaping the physical prison of her domicile planet, but by escaping a more psychological prison house she's created for herself.

The Force Awakens tells us that Rey longs to leave Jakku. In 1 of her early scenes, understated and effective, Rey is scrubbing grit from the machine parts she's gathered to merchandise for blank nourishment. She looks up from her work to meet a wrinkled old woman doing exactly the same. It's a vision of her own time to come, and the realization strikes her and then hard that she stops, lowering her artillery every bit if all of a sudden tired.

But at the aforementioned fourth dimension, nosotros learn that Rey is terrified to exit the planet, clinging to her last memory of her parents, who said they would come back for her. Rey begins The Force Awakens as the heart-tugging fusion of a young hero almost to embark on her greatest journey, and Fry's dog.

As the movie continues, it repeatedly emphasizes that Rey cannot fill both of these archetypes at once. No less a mentor figure than Han Solo gets in on the messaging. When they're landing on a lush planet and Rey says she never imagined there could be so much green, the camera lingers on him staring at her — then he immediately offers her a job. When she affirms her intention to go dorsum to Jakku, Han makes a quintessentially Harrison Ford-ian quirk of the oral cavity.

"That's too bad," he says, "Chewie kind of likes yous." Merely we all know how good Mr. "I Know" is at deflecting emotion.

Thanks to Solo: A Star Wars Story, we have a lot more context for Han here. His story was the changed of Rey'south Forcefulness Awakens arc. He spent years trying to become back to Corellia to find a babyhood friend, simply to find out she hadn't sat around preserved in amber waiting for him. She did what she needed to exercise to survive and thrive, instead of waiting around for a rescue. In the terminate, he was the one who'd held himself back, just by clinging to their past.

But where Han is characteristically vague, Maz Kanata, the closest affair The Force Awakens has to a Yoda, is equally blunt as a stormtrooper'due south helmet.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

"You lot already know the truth," she tells Rey, "Whomever you're waiting for on Jakku — they're never coming back." Rey's future is with Luke Skywalker, and training as a Jedi.

Every time The Force Awakens touches on Rey's parents and past, it is to say that she needs to stop thinking of them as a story with a forthcoming cease, and start thinking of them as a cage to escape from. Her arc in the flick is truly completed in two moments: When she realizes that she's plant someone who volition come back for her — Finn, who bends the entire Resistance around an ill-conceived and halfway unnecessary rescue attempt — and when she communes with the Force within herself, drawing on information technology for the strength to resist Kylo Ren.

She lets become of the thought of her birth family, and seizes a new identity for herself. What matters is not her parents, or the mystery of her past, but what she does with her nowadays.

Rey'south parents didn't ascertain her in The Concluding Jedi

Rian Johnson's motion picture, the middle child of the modernistic Star Wars trilogy, takes the thought that Rey needs to step across the past several rungs farther than where J.J. Abrams left her. Outset, with the revelation that Luke tin can't be the magical solution to the problem of Kylo Ren and the First Order, and Rey's insistence that he train her in the ways of the Jedi so that she can work in his identify. She is not a bit player seeking the hero; she is the hero.

But Rey's real graphic symbol moment is in the climactic scene between her and Kylo Ren. She's come to Snoke's flagship to bring him back to the Lite Side, a mirror of Luke's appeal to Vader. Different his grandfather, Ren rejects her — rejects the Jedi/Sith dichotomy entirely when he hisses, "Allow the past die. Kill it if you have to."

To assistance move her closer to his way of thinking, he seeks to destroy the last vestiges of her self-image. He tells her, brutally, that he's looked into her, and her parents were junk traders who sold their only child for a bit of extra money. A heinous act, but one of millions of pitiful stories in the hardscrabble underbelly of the Star Wars galaxy, in which even the Jedi turned a sad but tolerant middle to slavery.

Paradigm: Lucasfilm/Disney

Rey's triumph comes when she rejects Kylo'due south maxim. Her lowly origins don't make her want to tear the galaxy down, nor exercise they bar her from realizing her potential as a Jedi. She doesn't take to kill the past; she tin just let it go.

She has forged her own path, a theme underscored by Yoda himself, when he tricks Luke into thinking he'south burned the ancient Jedi texts. "That library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess." It's time for something new, Yoda says, and Rey is already fully capable of shaping the future of the Jedi.

The Rise of Skywalker undermines and completes Rey's arc

J.J. Abrams' render to the sequel trilogy feels defensive. Nosotros open on Rey executing the longest and well-nigh challenging plow on a training course that nosotros've ever seen a young Jedi complete on the big screen — coming out swinging not only against laser-firing orbs simply every video essay that insisted she hadn't earned her talent with a lightsaber the mode Luke had. Ii minutes of half-hearted blast shield training hammers the betoken home.

The Rise of Skywalker never quite gets on solid footing with Rey, considering, in a similarly defensive manner, it'southward trying to accept the outcome of "Rey'south parents" both means. From one side of its oral cavity, the movie insists that Rey is capable of forging her ain destiny, but from the other, it tells a story in which her lineage is the direct focus of the plot.

The moving-picture show delivers a sweeping retcon to The Last Jedi, establishing that Kylo Ren was wrong — that Rey'southward parents were not mere junk traders, but the fugitive son and daughter-in-law of Emperor Palpatine. Luke, in Force ghost form, tells her that he and Leia knew it the whole time they were training her, but chose non to tell her.

Both The Last Jedi and even Abrams' ain The Strength Awakens tell us a story about Rey realizing that her parentage is irrelevant to her destiny, which is hers to forge. The Rise of Skywalker turns that character development into a scarlet herring, a distraction from the fact that she's intimately connected to the biggest mover and shaker in the galaxy.

The movie does this with the expectation that we'll be worried that having a Sith lord for a granddad might cause Rey to cover this missing slice of her identity and plow to the Dark Side — even though we've spent two movies watching her realize that her past doesn't ascertain her.

She doesn't turn to the Night Side, of course, not even a little fleck.

The Rise of Skywalker tells us that Rey is the heir to the Sith legacy, and the belatedly-but-not-belatedly Emperor has been waiting 30-odd years for her to return to him, strike him downward, and become the vessel of every former Sith master. On the surface, she mirrors Luke in Return of the Jedi — but Luke'due south parental origins only became a concern after Darth Vader sprung the truth on him at the end of The Empire Strikes Dorsum.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

When Luke finds out Vader is his begetter, information technology gives him the emotional cardinal to bring a fallen hero back from the Dark Side and topple a galactic tyrant. By the time Rey finds out Palpatine is her grandfather, she's already spent two movies rejecting her past. The Rise of Skywalker tries to dial back Rey's character development — even her Forcefulness Awakens graphic symbol development — to brand a dramatic reveal that ultimately has no effect on the story.

The picture show'south last scene knocks any remaining legs out from under the idea that Palpatine's reveal impacted Rey. She travels to Luke's babyhood home on Tatooine — a place she's never been — to coffin the last remnants of the Skywalker family'southward past: Luke's and Leia's lightsabers, one of which belonged to Anakin. As she does so, she takes a bit of enjoyment from the twinning of her origins to Luke's, sliding downwards a sand dune on a piece of fleck, just every bit she used to on Jakku.

An old woman asks her who she is, and she gives her start name, earlier pausing meaningfully as Force ghosts of Luke and Leia announced in the distance. There's no indication that she gives any thought to her actual parents, who she now knows to have been two entirely loving people who made the ultimate cede to keep her safe.

She gives her surname as "Skywalker." Her destiny, and her legacy, is her own to arts and crafts.

And we knew that, because we watched 2 movies nigh information technology.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/20/21030542/rise-of-skywalker-rey-parents-ending-explained

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