SPOILER ALERT: This article contains SPOILERS for ‘The Rise of Skywalker’, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you may wish to turn back now or proceed with caution.
‘The Rise of Skywalker’ co-screenwriter, Chris Terrio, doesn’t think that the reveal that Rey (Daisy Ridley) is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine is a retcon of the explanation given in ‘The Last Jedi’, that she was the child of two random nobodies. He thinks it just embellished that original reveal.
As he has since told The Wrap:
“It’s not that it’s a meta-story or a rivalry between Rian and J.J. Rather, it’s about taking the ideas that came from ‘VIII’ and trying to complicate them and develop them and to have some new surprises.”
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Some fans and critics have bristled at the idea that Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) knew all along that Rey was a Palpatine by blood, but Terrio feels that this added to the heroic nature of the Skywalkers.
“When Rey learns that Leia always knew, that she was the grandchild of her greatest enemy, a Palpatine, she trained Rey anyway, because she understood that blood is not destiny. That moved us a lot, that a child of Palpatine should be the apprentice of two Skywalkers, and Rey, who is really royalty of the Dark Side, should be the one, raised as an orphan, a beggar, a scavenger, literally living in the ruins of the war that her ancestors created. That there’s this idea the royalty of the Dark Side was put in a basket and floated down the river, to then grow up in the most improbable of circumstances and then finally to be offered the throne, felt extremely strong to us.”
It’s no secret that ‘The Last Jedi’ divided audiences and Johnson’s supposed explanation that Rey was not important by birthright and was just the child of random junk traders was embraced by some, but rejected by others. ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ has also met with mixed reactions.
How do you feel? Does Luke and Leia knowing the truth about Rey make their agreeing to train her nobler?
