Rewind to a Post-Jedi world. Topple one dictator and the whole thing goes right to your head, so it’s easy to imagine Luke becoming just a mite sanctimonious.
But that self-righteous attitude blows up in his face when, at some point, he kills an Imperial. The Imperial himself doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that he has a baby, and that baby is now an orphan.
Rather than leave this child to a life of poverty and sunset-staring, Luke does what any reasonable, guilt-stricken person would do: he adopts this baby as his own, names it Rey, and says, “You will be better than me.” And together with Rey, Luke Skywalker retires from war and starts a brand-new Jedi academy.
As he watches the child grow, he realizes that every Imperial he’s ever killed was a person. People with homes, histories, families. This forces him to question the binary ideals of good and evil as taught by the Jedi. For the first time, Luke Skywalker starts to wonder if he is, in fact, the asshole.
But this soul-searching comes too late, and the rigid code of the Jedi good-and-evil binary bites him in the ass when his nephew, Ben, hits puberty. Rather than dealing with his darker instincts like a mentally healthy person would do, he decides to go all-in and embrace them. Here, we have another Anakin: someone so fed up with the restrictive dogma of the Jedi that he embraces their ideological opposite in the worst possible way.
So Kylo slaughters his Jedi classmates, as one does. But then Kylo happens upon Rey – a child, a friend, his cousin in all but name. And rather than kill her, Kylo holds his nose and does the unthinkable: he compromises. He wipes her mind and drops her off on Jakku.
And so Rey, blind to her abilities, spends ten years screwing around on Jakku as her Jedi powers lie dormant, waiting to be unleashed. By chance, she happens upon a BB-8 unit carrying vital information, and the subsequent events made $2 billion at the box office.
Luke, meanwhile, realizes that adhering to the dogmatic principles of the Jedi has created catastrophe yet again. Worst of all, he was in the perfect position to stop it, and failed. So he retreats, in exile and in shame, to die alone as the last of the Jedi.
Imagine Luke’s surprise when his long-dead-not-daughter shows up and hands him his father’s lightsaber.
Luke has a miracle on hands: one last chance to get it right. So what’s the first lesson for Rey? “It is time for the Jedi to end” – and, by extension, their archaic conception of good and evil.
Luke is one-hundred percent done with this shit, and his design for Rey is imperative: in order to amend the mistakes of the past, he must teach her to look beyond the Jedi code and carve out a new path for future generations. To do that, he has to tell her the truth about her past – he must dash her hopes against the rocks and make her hate him.
The revelation in The Empire Strikes Back turned the Original Trilogy on its head – it flipped the narrative from “Darth Vader must be destroyed” to “Darth Vader must be saved.” It opened doors previously unthinkable, and The Last Jedi might just pull off the same trick.
Here, the revelation is infinitely more complicated – we learn that Luke’s relationship with Rey is not one of love and fatherhood, but of murder and guilt. Rey will have to wrestle with the complexity of that relationship and the complexity within herself if she is to become the first in a new generation of Force-wielders: a generation that is not beholden to the rage of the Sith or the staunchness of the Jedi, but rather to a serenity that arises only from embracing the intricacy of human emotion and acknowledging the fundamental truth that we are all composed of instincts both dark and benevolent.
It is time for the Jedi to end – and something new, led by Rey, to begin.
|
Star Wars Episode VIII SPOILERS thread
(https://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=297754)