Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Star Wars: The Last Jedi."
"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" moved the narrative of our new heroes Rey, Finn, and Poe forward with several major lessons — all mostly learned through failures. The biggest of these is centered around Rey and her desire to find a place in the story of the rebellion. She turns to Luke Skywalker and Kylo Ren for answers, and is handed a brutal reality about her past.
Once Rey's parentage (and therefore place in the world) is revealed, fans can be forgiven for thinking it's not really the final answer. But I believe "The Last Jedi" delivers the truth about Rey's legacy. And not only is it likely the truth, but it's the best possible answer writer and director Rian Johnson could have given us.
How "The Last Jedi" reveals Rey's parentage
After confronting the dark side of the Force in that trippy cave on Ahch-To, and then fighting alongside Kylo Ren in the epic throne room scene, fans were were given an answer to Rey's parentage.
Kylo Ren tells Rey her parents were nobodies. Rey admits this fact herself during their emotional conversation.
"Do you know the truth about your parents?" Kylo asks. "Or have you always known? You've just hidden it away."
When Rey doesn't immediately reply, Kylo gets more aggressive.
"Say it," he demands.
"They were nobody," Rey says while on the verge of tears.
"They were filthy junk traders," Kylo elaborates. "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."
The choice to reveal this truth (and yes I think it's the truth but more on that in a moment) in this precise and cruel way is important to its impact on Rey.
Kylo tells Rey about her parents as part of his attempt to manipulate her into taking a place by his side. He wants her to focus on the despair she may feel about coming from a legacy of nobodies and being cast aside by her parents. Kylo believes they can rule together — but only if Rey thinks she is insignificant to the world first.
Rey is a much more compelling hero if she truly comes from nothing
"Star Wars" has never been apolitical, and "The Last Jedi" didn't premiere in a vacuum. This movie came at the tail of a year marked with a surge of progressive political activity, protesting, and cultural movements.
Again, Johnson was conceptualizing Rey's journey before we knew what kind of year 2017 would be, but it's timing seems serendipitous. "The Last Jedi" is teaching a new generation of "Star Wars" fans about the realities of believing in a fight against a larger power. We come away from the movie understanding how the combined voices of "nobodies" in the world can effect change.
The new trio of heroes — Rey, Finn, and Poe — are on a complex journey of self-discovery and coming into their own as leaders of the rebellion. Finn's subplot in "The Last Jedi" serves to finally bring him to a point where he's acting out of true altruism for the cause (instead of simply wanting to save or help Rey).
Rey, the unwanted child of two drunks from Jakku, is now the biggest hope for the Resistance. She's an independent scavenger who spent her life obsessed with tales of heroic acts against the Empire. She has wound up creating her own important place in the universe instead of having a role she inherited from her family.
The Rey we met at the start of "The Force Awakens" eating a meager dinner while wearing an old rebel pilot helmet is mirrored in the young "Broom Kid" shown at the end of "The Last Jedi." The ways of the Force belong to them just as much as it did to the Luke Skywalkers of the past.
The future of the Resistance doesn't lie in legendary heroes — it only lives in the nobodies of the galaxy who dare to believe they can grow to be something more.
To take away Rey's new origin story and hand us a new tale of Skywalker or Kenobi bloodlines would rob the new generation of "Star Wars" fans from the real meaning of this trilogy. "The Last Jedi" was all about failures and growth and hope being found in unexpected places.
"We are the spark that will light the fire that will bring the First Order down," Poe says in "The Last Jedi."
Rey is a much more powerful hero if she is just another young child who was Force sensitive and found it in herself to rise above her circumstances and enter the fray. She started her journey by simply wanting to help the heroes she had heard about and along the way discovered that it would be up to her — not Luke Skywalker — to try and preserve the light in the world.
To dismiss Johnson's decision about Rey's parentage as a misdirection would mean casting aside the message of this new "Star Wars" trilogy. Our importance isn't dictated by where we come from, but by our willingness and daring to fight for the good in the world.
Director Rian Johnson's reasoning for his choice is incredible
The brilliance of Johnson's idea to make Rey's parents unimportant characters in the history of "Star Wars" lore lies in the fact that most fans didn't see it coming.
Johnson wrote "The Last Jedi" while "The Force Awakens" was in production, so his choice wasn't an intentional response to all the fan theories that emerged after the first chapter in this trilogy. But it feels like it could be, which is an incredible coincidence.
At a time when fan theories or set leaks are dominating a large section of pop culture conversations, Johnson's ability to produce an answer both unexpected and perfect is thrilling.
And his explanation for how he arrived at the decision makes the reveal even more poetic than you might realize. Johnson revealed at a Q&A how he came to the choice, as Entertainment Weekly reported.
"I was thinking, what's the most powerful answer to that question?" Johnson said. "Meaning, 'What's the hardest thing that Rey could hear?' That's what you're after with challenging your characters."
The Rey reveal works as an inverted version of the iconic Vader and Luke scene in "Empire Strikes Back."
"I think back to the 'I am your father' moment with Vader and Luke, and the reason I think that lands is not because it's a surprise or a twist but because it's the hardest thing Luke and thus the audience could hear at that moment," Johnson said. "It turns someone into a bad guy that you just hate and want to kill into suddenly, 'Oh my God, this is a part of our protagonist. We have to start thinking of this person in more complex terms."
"In ['The Last Jedi'] it's kind of the opposite," Johnson said. "The easiest thing for Rey and the audience to hear is, 'Oh yeah, you're so-and-so's daughter.' That would be wish fulfillment and instantly hand her a place in this story on a silver platter."
While the Vader reveal helped create a redemption arc between Luke and a former one-dimensional baddie, the Rey reveal is like an adrenaline shot to the heart of the message in "The Last Jedi." The future of a rebellion or resistance or political movement doesn't lie only with elite mythical families — the heart (or spark) of it comes from the everyday people willing to fight for something they believe in.
Johnson saw Rey's storyline in "The Force Awakens" and knew both she and "Star Wars" fans were hoping she had a bigger destiny than being a scavenger on Jakku.
"The hardest thing for her is to hear she's not going to get that easy answer. Not only that, but Kylo is going to use the fact that you don’t get that answer to try and weaken you so you have to lean on him," Johnson said. "You're going to have to find the strength to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this story."
But Rey's parentage is not an ironclad part of the "Star Wars" canon yet
In the same Q&A, Johnson said that he was given the opportunity to take Rey's parentage in whichever direction he could reasonably argue. "The Force Awakens" director J.J. Abrams had laid some groundwork with Rey's pull to Luke's lightsaber and the mysterious Force-vision that followed.
But Disney still left Johnson room to work in his own ideas into "The Last Jedi." Now, Abrams will pick up the mantle again for the next movie. And since Disney reportedly left Rey's origin as unestablished, technically Abrams could change the answer given.
"I can't speak to what they're going to do," Johnson said of Abrams and his co-writer Chris Terrio.
For Johnson's part, he says Kylo believes it's the truth.
"I don't think he's purely playing chess," Johnson said. "I think that's what [Kylo] saw when they touched fingers and that's what he believes. And when he tells her that in that moment, she believes it."
We'll have to wait until Episode IX to see where Abrams decides to take Rey's journey next, but in the meantime we're grateful for the incredible launchpad Johnson has in place for our hero.
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