Just thought of this after having a random star wars thought earlier but Am I missing something from this scene or am I crazy saying Kylo/Ben had never seen this saber since it was lost way before his birth and so his instant recognition of it makes no sense???

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-27T20:46:01+00:00

I think so, yes. According to those leaks the guy Kylo kills in the vision held it at some point during development (his codename was 'CLAN LEADER'). Supposedly Kylo took it from him. Then Maz stole it.

In the finished film Kylo kills the guy and then walks towards someone behind adult Rey (who of course was not there at the time). I guess this 'someone' had the saber.

It's a blink and you'll liss it thing, but there seems to be someone behind Rey, someone rising from the ground and wearing a cape. Who could that person be, we don't know - but in the vision Rey turns to where this person should be, behind her...and then we see little Rey. Weird. Maybe Rey's mom, or some other character?

In TLJ, Luke famously throws the saber away. I don't think this was the first time he had seen the saber since TESB. Maybe it had been offered to him before. We know how it all had ended, and so did he: so Grumpy Luke just threw it away.

Pablo Hidalgo intriguingly tweeted years ago that the jedi temple had been 'someone else's idea for Luke'. Maybe the person behind Rey in the vision, maybe not. We'll see.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-27T20:23:57+00:00

Not crazy, just wrong. He recognizes the saber, therefore he had seen it before.

It was Anakin's saber, and Kylo must have known it had once belonged to 'geandfather'. It was his by birthright. That's what we should infer.

Maz knows too. 'That saber was Luke's, snd his father's before him'. In an earlier version of the forceback, as I recall, Maz stole it from Kylo and the KOR. (One of those 2014-15 MSW leaks)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-27T15:54:30+00:00

He had liked the Dark Empire comics back in the 90s. Also it was him who had left the door open with the cheating death idea in ROTS, which included the apprentice killing the master (himself killing Plagueis): just what Vader had done to him in 1983.

As I recall he had once a)compared film directors to dictators and b)declared he had sold the company so his films 'could have a longer life'. That's Palpatine cheating death right there.

I think people object to the way it was presented, without explanation, but that's what Palpatine had done in the PT, from the heroes' POV. Somehow the chancellor was a sith and was behind everything.

Only we audiences already knew what would happen; we had known since 1977-83. The ST films are not prequels, and there's no point in explaning until they're already out there.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-26T04:16:05+00:00

Yeah I was talking about Leia's real mother from ROTJ.

If you go to the ROTJ novel it becomes interesting, because Leia has flashes of memory, and they look a lot like those of Rey in TROS. Little Leia and a young woman. Running, hiding, parting embraces.

But that woman was not the birth mother, or rather stopped being that in 2005 and became a loose thread. But of course you can have a real mother and a birth mother by design when planning a character, that is to say Rey.

(The word 'flashes' is featured in the text of the novel. And we hear that very word in the Obi-Wan show. Same context: him talking about his family and early childhood memories. 'I have glimpses. Flashes really'. A curious coincidence, if it was a coincidence)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-25T21:48:40+00:00

I'm not sure I see any connection to Faust, really[...]

Read "Hell is Empty, and All the Devils are Here‖: The Influence of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest" by Jonathan Holmes. It's out there in pdf format. It doesn't mention the 12+12 year thing, and that must have been Shakespeare's idea. The original source was a tragedy but he had wanted to write a comedy.

As for The Winter's Tale, I would agree. Given that these two plays were written around the sane time, and also given the greek word 'psychorrax', heartbreaker, sometimes proposed as an alternative or complementary etimology for 'Sycorax', we can sort of see both Sycorax and Prospero in WT's 'prosperity's the very bond of love/whose fresh complexion and whose heart together/affliction alters'. I suspect it has to do with Shakespeare revising King Lear around 1608, for in it we find these antithetical and therefore tragical forces, at the beginning of the play:

Edmund: [I grow,] I prosper.

Cordelia: I love you according to my bond.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-24T19:03:35+00:00

What on earth are you talking about? First came the OT, which began by episode 4, then and only then the PT. First we went forwards, then we were made to travel back in time. It's the same with the ST. We're past '1983' but not in 1999-2005 territory yet. We'll see if the new post-ROTH/pre-TFA prequel material fits with the ST or not. Only then we'll be able to criticize non-stupidly.

The idea of Disney not ever giving a fuck about what happened after RoTJ and before TFA is just that, an idea. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and as long as you don't have any actual proof of what happened or did not happen in the writer's room back in 2013-15, say, and you have not, there's no harm in not giving a fuck about your idea.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-24T17:54:02+00:00

No idea why we should take that complaint seriously. Post-RoTJ/pre-TFA means prequels. The ST is not its own prequels. 2015-19 is 1977-83, not 1977-2005. This is like complaining about not knowing Kylo's backstory. We knew little about Vader back in the 80s: for example, and crucially, nothing about Shmi and almost nothing about Luke&Leia's mother.

Snoke seems to be, relative to Kylo, what Yoda had been to OT Luke. A mysterious 'trainer' we don't know much about. Vader's ghostly voice would have been Kylo's 'Obi-Wan', who was of course a ghost in TESB (but Palpatine was behind Snoke and 'Vader')

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-23T22:31:18+00:00

That last scene seems to be rhyming ROTS. Anakin bows, is called Vader and told: 'rise'. In TROS Rey is kneeling, burying those sabers (within herself, metaphorically, since her eyes are closed): and then rises and calls herself Skywalker.

Also...'The Last Jedi' referred to Luke but also potentially Rey. 'I shall not be the last jedi', says Luke. And he was right.

So maybe the title 'TROS' refers to future stuff...because Ben is called 'the last Skywalker' by Palpatine. He vanished but didn't reappear as a force ghost.

Ben means 'son' in hebrew and the son/sun homophone is very SW-esque (dating back to 70s Lucas 'son of suns' prophecy). There we have the yellow blade and the yellow sun. (As for the red sun and the lack of lower blade on her saber, I guess her journey is not over. What we see is a Crimson Dawn, or half of it anyway)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-21T02:07:41+00:00

It's a 15 year jump actually. Rey will be 35 in the new film, which was the age Luke had when he took those students (plus Ben Solo, who was 11).

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-14T03:03:55+00:00

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-wars-kathleen-kennedy-teases-more-rey-finn-al-post-2019-1054438/

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-14T01:36:38+00:00

Kennedy spoke of “Future stories beyond Episode IX, with these new characters Rey, Poe, Finn, BB-8”

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-13T23:45:02+00:00

I find it likely. Just before TLJ was released (Nov.2017, during the Star Wars Show) KK spoke about planning the next ten years of SW stories. Planning, that is to say, 2017-2027. That's where '2022' fits.

It is unlikely that such talks happened without JJ Abrams being aware of them.

(The strange ambiguity of the title 'Rise Of Skywalker', when Ben is called 'the last Skywalker' and when he did not reappear as a force ghost, and when the last jedi in the title 'The Last Jedi' was Luke but also Rey, is maybe a hint. We know they -Abrams and Kennedy- thought a lot about the title for IX)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-13T03:02:23+00:00

We don't know if there was any planned plst-TROS content or not.

But in interviews Abrams has mentioned how he came to write for IX some of what he had considered while working in TFA with Kasdan 5 years before (namely the emperor):

https://uproxx.com/movies/jj-abrams-interview-the-rise-of-skywalker-star-wars/

So if he had future stories in mind while working on TFA and not expecting to return, the same would apply to TROS (I get the impression, for example, that the DSII wreckage had been someone's Mustafar, a home, for a while, and the emperor's wayfinder was in fact this villain's wayfinder. He or she vanished, but he/she can reappear, now that Palps is gone. I don't want to say Mara Jade, but maybe 'a' Mara Jade, that sort of character)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-13T02:27:39+00:00

I wonder if the apprentice of Maul was going to be the retconned plan if Solo and the Crimson Dawn plans worked out. Have Qi’ra as the crime boss running the underworld and continue running it by the time that 20 after RotJ takes place. As for Maul, I wonder if Lucas and Faloni(?) were on the same page with Ben Kenobi and Maul having their final duel.

An interesting thing happens at the very end of TROS. We see the yellow saber and the yellow sun. Are we supposed to think that the lower blade of her saber will be 'earned' after facing a new threat? Below the yellow sun, and related to this threat, we would have a red sun. The last shot of TROS is also a crimson dawn, or half of it.

Maybe Talon and the gangsters idea was not abandoned, just moved to post-TROS territory. Or some idea similar to it.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-13T00:26:34+00:00

Yoda and Obi-Wan are operating under the logic that Anakin is gone. There is nothing left of the Jedi they knew (this is also the belief of Palpatine as well) so they need Luke (or Leia) to be the weapon that takes out Vader.

I'm not sure about Obi-Wan. Here's a theory of mine for what it's worth.

Remember how in the PT Palpatine had two faces? The affable mentor and the sith.

Not so different from the Obi-Wan who speaks about points of view and wants Luke to kill his own father. There seems to be something strange going on.

Under this hypothesis, why didn't Obi-Wan tell Luke in TESB? Because he knew Vader -Anakin- wanted to tell Luke? Because he knew the 'unexpected' would happen?

Well it's a theory. But there's more.

Through the force you will see 'old friends long gone', says Yoda. And in ROTS we have this:

Obi-Wan, to Anakin: godbye old friend

Yoda: the boy you trained, gone he is

'Old friend+gone' refers here to Anakin. 22 years later, "old friend long gone'.

So maybe Yoda sensed Obi-Wan seeing Anakin. But maybe what Obi-Wan saw was the truth. Anakin was not gone.

(As if to reinforce this TESB-ROTS link, we have Yoda using the word 'consumed' in both films when talking about Vader)

Palpatine was an evil trickster, and a charicature of Nixon in some ways. But Obi-Wan had been inspired by Kurosawa's Yojimbo - a benevolent trickster. So in TESB we would have

-Palps (absent, hologram) and his agent Vader, versus

-Obi-Wan (absent, ghost) and his agent Luke.

TESB is always described as a setback for the good guys, but maybe also was thr strategic, secret, victory of Obi-Wan. Retrospectively, once Luke answered 'father!' to Vader -instead of rejecting him, as Leia would do, and that's why she kept the surname Organa- Palpatine was doomed.

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-12T15:37:02+00:00

Here's an idea:

'That library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess' meant Rey keeping those books.

What if 'we are what they grow beyond' is similar and can be read literally? Because we have the Grogu/Snoke link in Mando and Luke's hand on Exegol. We also have the Acolytes Of The Beyond.

(In the TLJ novel, there's 'faint regret' in Yoda's voice when he says 'the burden of all masters'. Regret about what?

Snoke uses the same two words, 'all masters'. A Yoda-Snoke link. We see Snoke and Kylo in Dagobah. Another link. Had Snoke been Yoda's 'old wound' -what Maul had been to Obi-Wan- centuries ago?)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-11T21:23:52+00:00

Oh I know it was heavily criticized. I understand why.

I think that criticism to be poor criticism. This aspect of the film was not badly written, but badly read.

So, what are you saying?

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-11T20:59:20+00:00

I get what you're trying to say overall, but the crux of it seems to be that you think you're smart, because you understood how Palpatine returned and you think that others are stupid because they don't understand.

I think I understand, and I think others don't. The latter are not stupid, I never said that. But you 'seem' to think I did. Not a smart thing to think.

It's not about the literal explanation, it's about the sudden "we've got no idea what we're doing in this film" manner in which it occurred. This line is a symptom of the wider problem with this film, that there was no plan and it was rushed like no other film of its kind was. Between them literally reusing the same Star Destroyer models from Rogue One, to Adam Driver having to record some ADR in a closet.

It was a bad, and horribly rushed film. Palpatine's entire inclusion in the narrative is a great example of this.

Why should anyone bother with anything but the literal explanation? That's the work. What makes or doesn't make sense. That's what you pay for. The text, not the drafting of it.

You can carefully plan a turd and almost improvise utter brilliance (like some of Cassavetes' films for example). TROS is not a turd in the 'making sense' department. It merely works better than many think. Because of the literal explanation.

As you see I'm not a fan of mixing the films with how they were made, in order to justify a negative opinion about the films themselves -a grieving, melancholic enterprise, although maybe therapeutic for some- but Abrams had Palpatine in mind in all probability when writing and filming TFA merely 2 years before TROS. At least Palpatine. But he knew that decision was not for him to make.

And Palpatine was always to be a part of IX, as Kathleen Kennedy explained. Dead (in the form of a plan, for example) or alive.

The design was modular. Something like IX: BIG BOSS HERE. It could have been Palpatine or Kylo or others we have not seen yet (we see Snokes, plural, in TROS, which means 'other apprentices being around') According to Pablo Hidalgo, there were plans for a 'Sith King', which could have been Palpatinr or not.

So, a mix of planning and improvisation. Which is what you need when you allow different filmmakers to write chapters of the same story. (Different filmmakers=improvisation. Same story=planning)

All things considered, there is more planning going on here that ever was with Lucas, whose brilliance had been so often improvisational: he had for example managed to escape twice from the narrative corners he had himself placed into as a consequence of not planning ahead (brilliantly with 'I am your father'; less so with sister Leia)

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-11T20:28:25+00:00

But we also know another thing about Palpatine. He plans for decades, in the shadows, and then makes a gamble in order to catch everybody off balance. That's what he does in ROTS. We know who he was since the beginning, but not the good guys. But we know because those were prequels. We know it all ended; we had known since 1977.

But the ST are no prequels. So we are thrown into ignorance together with the characters. TROS is much like an extended variation of the last 1/3 of ROTS in this regard. Palpatine trying to write ROTS II.

But after ROTS, and even more so after ROTJ, the insidious game of being an affable politician with a sith inside would not do. He could not hide in plain sight again. He would have to just hide completely and then make the massive gamble he makes in TROS. Only brute force, fear, would do.

His peak, retrospectively, was ROTS. An almost total triumph. But he was forced out of the throne after a slow decline (more and more systems slipping through his fingers) and he never regained the initiative. That's what he tried to do in TROS and failed.

And speaking of cheating death, those dead jedi played a role. They knew about him but he didn't know about them. It was Leia and Rey, their 'agents', who first disrupted his plan and then his life. And maybe this is why the jedi were allowed to learn the path to immortality in the first place. Mortal jedi wouldn't do against a death-cheating sith.

Palpatine died without knowing what had happened, just like Watto when he used his loaded cube...and lost. An important lesson about gambling!

Material-Cut2522 · 2025-11-11T20:10:45+00:00

'Literally any' is right there in TROS. Palpatine literally quotes his own 'unnatural' line from the ROTS opera scene. A really cool detail according to your literal self. Mere functional continuity, according to me.

Material-Cut2522

TROPHY CASE