The Rise of Skywalker touted a marquee cast: Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega returning as the core team. Billy Dee Williams back as Lando Calrissian. Carrie Fisher resuming her regal role as General Organa thanks to the magic of Star Wars deleted scenes. Keri Russell, a J.J. Abrams favorite since the Felicity days, under a Boba Fett-like mask to play Zorri Bliss. The list goes on — and on and on and on.
Star Wars is the kind of property where name actors don’t mind filling small but important roles. Take Lord of the Rings and Lost star Dominic Monaghan, who shows up as a Resistance fighter who kinda sorta knows how the Emperor came back to life. Then there are the straight cameos: in Rise, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and longtime franchise composer John Williams both pop up in blink-and-you’ll-miss them moments, just because.
But perhaps the most fulfilling, inspired bit of cameo casting comes at the very end of The Rise of Skywalker, at a key moment that is definitely spoiler territory.
[Ed. note: the rest of this post contains major spoilers for Rise of Skywalker.]
As Rey stands down the Emperor in his dark chamber on Exegol, tempted to strike him down, the good-hearted warrior hears the voices of Jedi past.
“These are your final steps, Rey. Rise and take them.”
Like Korra in the Avatar: The Last Airbender spinoff The Legend of Korra, Rey is not only the obvious candidate to lead a new generation of Jedi, she’s literally possessing the power of every Jedi who walked before her. And as she faces her greatest enemy, her predecessors whisper words of encouragement through the ether. Some of the Jedi are recognizable. Others a viewer would only know if they’d kept up with the last decade of animated Star Wars television. Here’s a rundown of the surprising voices we hear in this key scene.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker
Though replaced by beloved voice actor Matt Lanter in The Clone Wars TV series, Christensen returns to his role as Brooding Older Anakin Skywalker to remind Rey that the Force “surrounds” her. It’s the first time he has appeared in a Star Wars movie since Revenge of the Sith (unless you count his Force ghost in re-edits of Return of the Jedi).
Christensen’s work as Anakin was not terribly well received, and in 2010, he took a four-year break from acting.
“I guess I felt like I had this great thing in Star Wars that provided all these opportunities and gave me a career, but it all kind of felt a little too handed to me,” Christensen told Los Angeles Times in 2017, while promoting the religious drama 90 Minutes in Heaven. “I didn’t want to go through life feeling like I was just riding a wave.”
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Olivia d’Abo as Luminara Unduli
Despite deepening Star Wars canon since 2008, the mythology of creator Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars has rarely crossed over into Lucasfilm’s theatrical blockbusters. Rogue One was a milestone, casting Forrest Whitaker to play a live-action version of Saw Gerrera and featuring a cameo by the Ghost, the main ship from Star Wars: Rebels. Rise of Skywalker brings the connections to the canonical animated universe to the Skywalker Saga for the first time, featuring a line-reading from Olivia d’Abo, who breathed life into Luminara after she appeared silently in Attack of the Clones.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd
Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka Tano
There is no bigger Star Wars fan favorite who has never to set foot on the big screen than Ahsoka. The padawan of Anakin Skywalker, the character was the lifeblood of The Clone Wars and later appeared on Star Wars Rebels to help guide the young Jedi wannabe, Ezra. (Both shows are now on Disney Plus, so no excuses.) When or if Ahsoka would appear in a movie has been a sticking point for fans, though they’d have a hard time separating Ashley Eckstein’s vibrant voicework from whoever might play her in a live-action setting. While we’ll hold out for a Mandalorian appearance, her voice cameo in The Rise of Skywalker is a bit heartbreaking. After Rebels, it was unclear what happened to Ahsoka, but by the time the First Order crumbles, we know she’s passed on.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Jennifer Hale as Aayla Secura
If you’ve spent an inordinate time looking at background shots of Jedi battles, you know Aayla Secura, who appeared in both Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Dave Filoni and his team of Clone Wars writers carved out more backstory and adventures for the Rutian Twi’lek, but Aalya is especially notable for not being a creation of George Lucas. She first appeared in Dark Horse Comics’ Star Wars: Republic, only becoming modern canon through her inclusion in the prequel films. Hale, who played her on Clone Wars, keeps the legacy of the character going into the sequel trilogy.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu
If viewers could pick out any of Rey’s motivators’ voices, it’s probably Jackson’s, who along with being a force of god on screen, has a reputation for great voiceover. After narrating Inglorious Basterds for longtime accomplice Quentin Tarantino, the actor delivered Oscar-worthy work speaking the words of James Baldwin in the recent documentary I Am Not Your Negro. The man can talk.
Mace Windu had a life after the prequel trilogy, with Terrence C. Carson performing the role on The Clone Wars for years. But in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Jackson he’d be interesting in returning to the role. “I’d really love to get one more run at Mace Windu in Star Wars,” he said. Lucasfilm, are you listening?
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi
No one in all of the Star Wars galaxy matched the concentrated charisma of McGregor, so it’s not surprising that Disney and Lucasfilm are actually giving the actor one more run in his old Jedi robes. August, Lucasfilm formally announced that Ewan McGregor, who filled the shoes of Alec Guinness in Lucas’ prequel films, would return to the Star Wars universe in a new Obi-Wan TV series for Disney Plus. We’re already dreaming of the possibilities, and his voice cameo in Rise of Skywalker only got us more pumped.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Frank Oz as Yoda
OK, we take that back about Sam Jackson: there’s no Star Wars voice more recognizable than Muppet veteran Frank Oz’s elderly Yoda voice. After appearing in the rubber flesh for The Last Jedi, the OG Yoda returned to inspire Rey in the Rise of Skywalker’s pivotal scene.
Fun fact: veteran voice actor Tom Kane assumed the role for The Clone Wars TV series, and while there wasn’t room to squeeze him into the voice-heavy Episode IX scene, he already has a place in the sequel trilogy pantheon: He picked up the role of Admiral Ackbar after original actor Erik Bauersfeld passed away.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Angelique Perrin as Adi Gallia
Like Aayla Secura, Adi Gallia was a Jedi who appeared on screen in the prequel trilogy but didn’t have much to do. Unlike Aayla Secura, the Adi of the Clone Wars series is, like her live-action counterpart, played by a woman of color. Angelique Perrin, who most recently voiced characters in Cannon Busters, voiced the role over seven animated episodes and returned for The Rise of Skywalker.
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Freddie Prinze Jr. as Kanan Jarrus
Easily the biggest surprise to any millennial Star Wars fan who didn’t keep up with the animated expanded universe, former She’s All That and Summer Catch heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. pops up for a second in Rise of Skywalker’s aural Jedi collage. We don’t want to spoil too much of Rebels for the uninitiated, but Kanan is the rare mix of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, a Jedi who put down his saber for a blaster and life as a smuggler after his brethren were killed in Order 66. His story in Rebels will pull your heartstrings, making his inclusion in Rise of Skywalker emotional for a certain sliver of fans.
Image; Lucasfilm Ltd.
Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn
Last but not least, Neeson’s formidable Phantom Menace Jedi returns to the sequel trilogy to hep Rey battle a villain he didn’t live long enough to know as a villain. While Qui-Gon’s untimely death at the hand of Darth Maul kept him out of the main narratives of The Clone Wars, he did appear as a Force Ghost to instruct his former padawan Obi-Wan. And unlike most of the prequel trilogy actors, Neeson actually returned to play him.
(This post contains basically all possible spoilers for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”)
The wait is over, and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” is here take over the discourse for a couple weeks. So far, the responses are all over the place with both critics and fans. We’re getting the full spectrum of opinions on this one. In our opinion, however, the so-called conclusion to the Skywalker Saga — the numbered episodes — is not up to par. And we’ve made a list of 20 things we don’t like about it for you to read. If you like the movie, you probably should not put yourself through reading this.
1. One thousand Death Stars
Late in the movie it’s revealed that this massive fleet of Star Destroyers that Emperor Palpatine pulled out of the ice on Exogol at the beginning of the movie was equipped with Death Star lasers. The reveal is made when one of them blows up a planet for no particular reason. The Resistance folks then briefly huddle up and decide that probably all those ships can do that. That seems like an illogical conclusion to draw, because that would mean the bad guys have an entire fleet of Death Stars, which would be easily the most ludicrous thing that has ever happened in a “Star Wars” movie. But since the issue is never mentioned again we aren’t sure what other conclusion we could come to.
To challenge all those Death Stars, the Resistance launches an attack on Exogol with only a Corellian Corvette and like one single fighter squadron and one carrier ship full of troops. Fortunately for them, Lando spent a couple hours flying around the galaxy and casually assembling the biggest fleet we’ve ever seen in any of these movies. That’s absolutely crazy. Lando was not even gone that long.
3. The Emperor returns before the movie starts
There’s a lot of creative decisions on this movie I can’t even begin to understand, and the most confusing of those is the decision to have Emperor Palpatine make his big return to the galactic stage between movies. How do you bring back a dead character and not even let us see characters reacting to that revelation as it happens? This one actually makes me mad. If you’re gonna cram a whole trilogy of stories in one movie, you still have to start at the beginning.
4. Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter
The climax of the “Skywalker Saga” was about two Palpatine family members fighting each other. Incredible.
5. Luke and Leia knew about Rey’s lineage the whole time
This is just a confusing bit. When did they learn this important fact? Why had they never done anything with that tidbit of key info? There’s a lot of weird ramifications to their possession of this knowledge, and “The Rise of Skywalker” has no interest in exploring any of them.
6. Leia died for no reason
They decided to kill off Leia in the strangest and low-key way: by calling out through the Force. It took Luke physically projecting himself across the galaxy and doing a lightsaber fight before the effort killed him. How weak are we supposed to think Leia is?
7. The Knights of Ren
Photo credit: Walt Disney Studios
Late in the film, Ben Solo/Kylo Ren is forced to fight his former bros the Knights of Ren in order to earn his redemption. It’s a powerful scene, the culmination of a character arc stretching back three films… is what we’d say if the Knights had like, any role before “The Rise of Skywalker.” They’re in this trilogy for less than 5 minutes, none of them speaks or has any personality, and they don’t even use lightsabers. They basically existed only so we’d know the origin of Kylo Ren’s dorky last name, and when we finally saw them up close, it turns out they dress like the corniest nu metal band of 1996. PASS.
8. The Resurrection
So Rey kills Palpatine, and then dies. Kylo Ren climbs out of the hole he fell into, and somehow uses the Force to revive her corpse. They can just resurrect people now! OK!
9. The Kiss
So Rey is alive again, and the first thing she does is make out with Kylo Ren. They haven’t had an ounce of romantic chemistry in these movies, but some “Star Wars” nerds shipped them so I guess they had to do it.
Immediately after this kiss, Ben rolls over and dies, apparently having given all of his life force to Rey to bring her back to life in what was supposed to be the film’s most dramatic and emotionally poignant scene. At that precise moment in our screening, the entire theater burst into hysterical laughter. Whoops.
11. The Force can do literally anything
All wounds are trivial now because Force users can easily heal them. If they’re too late and the person died, they can just bring them back from the dead. Need to ship a package? Just use the Force to teleport it! Wanna have a lightsaber duel with somebody a hundred miles away? The Force has online multiplayer. Rey is just a god now, the most powerful being who ever lived. But Leia died from yelling.
12. Chewie died but actually he didn’t
This whole sequence is strange. Chewie gets captured by the First Order when he’s like 30 yards from the rest of our heroes. Then Rey accidentally blows up the ship they were taking him away on. Except actually Chewie was on a different but identical ship because “The Rise of Skywalker” wanted to pull a stupidly manipulative misdirect.
13. C-3PO got his memory wiped but then got it back
So our heroes need to read something in the Sith language, which it turns out 3PO can read. Unfortunately, his programming forbids him from translating it. (Who did this? Doesn’t matter. It just is.) This forces them to reboot 3PO to override that programming, which will erase his memory and effectively kill him as he’s been known. It sounds sad, and 3PO even gets an emotional farewell out of it. Then the film pulls a movie length JK because not only is it played for laughs from there out, at the end 3PO gets his memories restored thanks to a backup on R2D2’s hard drive.
14. Poe has Han Solo’s backstory now
One of the 57 new planets we visit in “The Rise of Skywalker” is Kijimi, where we meet Poe’s ex-girlfriend, who reveals that Poe was a spice runner before becoming a Resistance fighter. Because for some reason they needed a new Han I guess.
15. General Hux
Speaking of criminally underdeveloped characters, Hux is revealed to be a mole within the First Order, feeding information to the Resistance, uh Rebellion two movies after his Reichstag speech on Starkiller base, because he hates Kylo Ren more than he loves the First Order. And then, literally the next scene after we learn this, he’s unceremoniously killed by his commanding officer who announces “we found the mole.” Hux joins Boba Fett and Captain Phasma in the pantheon of Star Wars bad guys whose deaths are as pointless as, it turns out, the characters themselves were. At least he got more lines than Rose Tico.
16. The Force told those stormtroopers to rebel
Finn meets a woman name Jannah, who was also a former First Order stormtrooper who had been stolen from her parents when she was a kid and then rebelled as an adult. And they have this fun moment where they talk about how they decided to rebel because they had this weird feeling that they should. And they decide that feeling was the Force. Not, you know, their conscience. Or guilt about helping out a fascist government. They’d have happily done state-sponsored murder had the Force not pinged them, I guess.
17. Ghost Luke
So Luke died, and is a ghost. But he can still pick up physical objects with his non-physical hand. And he can use the Force to lift his X-Wing out of the ocean. Sounds like being dead is all upside.
They got the amazing Lupita Nyong’o to play maybe the most pointless character in this whole trilogy. The only thing of note she does in this movie is give Chewbacca a medal in an egregiously annoying bit of fan service.
20. Chewbacca gets a medal
I’m not sure how Maz giving Chewie a medal for no reason whatsoever is supposed to make up for his snub in the original “Star Wars” film. This bit feels so shameless.
15 Best Stories Ever Told in the 'Star Wars' Universe (Photos)
With 40 years of movies, TV shows, comics, video games, novels and reference books, you'd be hard-pressed to ever run out of stories to read about the "Star Wars" universe, past and present. It's a big universe out there, and every story told in it is connected to all the others. Big stories are told as many different smaller ones, and small stories are told as chunks of a bigger picture.
These are the best chunks, big or small, in the history of the "Star Wars" universe.
15. The Rise of Admiral Daala in the "Jedi Academy Trilogy"
After "Return of the Jedi" in the version of the "Star Wars" continuity before Disney bought Lucasfilm, the Empire fractured into a bunch of splinter governments led by self-proclaimed rulers who would make up new titles for themselves like "high admiral" or "warlord" while still maintaining the pretense of Imperial legitimacy. Daala (a woman!) decided to try to bring it back together, and eventually was able to do so -- for a short time at least. Her brilliant machinations were a compelling as hell tale, and one of author Kevin J Anderson's only good contributions to "Star Wars" lore.
14. The Black Fleet Crisis
This is not referring to the "Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy" as a whole, since two of the three main narrative arcs in those books are unrelated to the event in "Star Wars" lore known as the Black Fleet Crisis.
The Crisis is great because it's the sort of cool scifi story that checks a lot of boxes simultaneously. In particular: unknowable alien force you've never heard of, weird galactic political intrigue with lots of backstabs from said alien force, and a grand mystery regarding how those aliens came to power in the first place. It's a really interesting scenario.
13. Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice
The "Star Wars" universe is full of stories about good apprentices going bad and wreaking havoc on the good guys, but we've very rarely gotten the inverse. That made "The Force Unleashed" a really novel experience. You play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice in the years between the original and prequel trilogies. You're a dark side force user and soldier for the Empire who goes rogue in a really epic way.
12. "X-Wing Alliance"
You're Ace, and you work for your family shipping company. You fly a freighter doing pretty boring things, until your dad's sympathies for the Rebel Alliance come back to bite the whole family in the ass.
You know how this goes: the Empire brings the hammer down, you join the Rebellion as a fighter pilot. But maybe the entire family isn't on board with facing down the Empire. This is the only "Star Wars" space combat simulator that gives you a personal story, and it turned out to be a great idea.
11. Admiral Thrawn
Not specifically thinking of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy here, but the story of Thrawn's life as a whole and his lasting legacy in the Expanded Universe. This guy was such a genius that even a decade after his death the plans he'd laid out were threatening to tear apart the fledgling New Republic. His fingerprints are everywhere.
10. The Battle of Borleaias
Late in the "New Jedi Order," famed Rebel hero Wedge Antilles is charged with holding the planet Borleias from the Yuuzhan Vong, and it's one hell of a thing. Massively outgunned, Wedge pulls a whole lot of seat-of-your-pants gambits out of his ass -- and this pair of books, authored by the late fan favorite Aaron Allston, is full of great and witty dialogue of the sort you just never got from other "Star Wars" authors.
9. Wedge and Friends Go to Adumar
As the war against the Empire winds down, Rebel hero Wedge Antilles and pals Tycho, Hobbie and Janso, are sent as diplomats to a newly discovered planet full of people who pretty don't give a shit about anyone who isn't a fighter pilot. If that sounds like a sitcom scenario, that's because it basically is. And it's great, incessantly funny and very awkward -- a great little side story that's as witty as they get in this universe.
8. Wraith Squadron
The story of the Wraiths, told over three books, is unique among "Star Wars" stories in a lot of ways. It follows famed Rebel pilot Wedge Antilles as he assembles a hybrid starfighter/footsoldier squadron of emotionally unstable washouts -- the idea being that such a group, when given some operational leeway, might approach apparently normal war scenarios in really unpredictable ways, and that's exactly what happens. It's the most human of all the "Star Wars" stories, full of truth.
7. The Tale of the Imperial Agent in "The Old Republic"
Many of the most interesting "Star Wars" stories are those that focus on characters who can't use the Force, and this is one of those. You play as a spy for the Sith Empire (thousands of years before the movies), doing awesome wartime spy stuff. And you get caught up in a galactic conspiracy to destroy both the Republic and Empire -- by a secret society tired of Force-using factions starting all these galaxy-spanning wars. It's a compelling-as-hell hook.
6. The Rise and Fall and Rise of Revan
Thousands of years before the movies, Revan was a Jedi who led the Republic military against invading Mandalorians -- only to turn to the dark side and wage his own war on the Republic, before turning away from the dark and defeating his own armies. That's the very short, very incomplete version. The story of Revan is thoroughly fascinating and ends up lasting hundreds of years across two video games ("Knights of the Old Republic) and a pile of books and comics.
5. The Jabba's Palace Heist in "Return of the Jedi"
It's become clear in the last few years that a lot of folks never really got what Luke, Leia, Lando and Chewie were doing during the first portion of "Return of the Jedi" -- and now we have all these thinkpieces about how it was reckless and haphazard. But no, that shit was an impeccable heist. They had a plan, and they pulled it off flawlessly and in style.
4. The Dark Wars
This story was told in the video game "Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords" -- a former Jedi who was exiled from the Order returns to known space only to find the Jedi gone from civilization and a pair of mysterious Sith lords wreaking havoc all over. It's a rare "Star Wars" noir story, and it's quite a doozy.
3. "Traitor"
In the '90s the "Star Wars" Expanded Universe got really moralistic and stuffy, and "Traitor" was a total refutation of that approach. It's the darkest "Star Wars" story ever written, but it serves a positive agenda in the end: one that asserts that maybe the Force isn't black and white and the Jedi don't need to stand around wondering about the moral implications of every little thing they do. It was a really great change for storytelling in the EU, and it's nice that it appears "The Last Jedi" might take a similar patch.
2. "Star Wars"
The one that started it all is a silly, not-particularly-well-thought-out movie, but it's tight as hell and covers all the ground it needs to. It establishes a completely new universe so casually, making it feel from the very beginning that this is a real, lived-in place. Everything you need to know about what's going on is right there.
1. "The Empire Strikes Back"
The lesson J.J. Abrams and friends should have learned from "The Empire Strikes Back" widely considered the best "Star Wars" movie, is that you don't make a"Star Wars" movie that stands the test of time by aping previous ones -- you have to go somewhere new. "Empire" functions as a total counter to the first movie, and that's why it's a perfect sequel.
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There are more “Star Wars” stories than even you can imagine, even if you think you can imagine quite a bit. These are the best ones
With 40 years of movies, TV shows, comics, video games, novels and reference books, you'd be hard-pressed to ever run out of stories to read about the "Star Wars" universe, past and present. It's a big universe out there, and every story told in it is connected to all the others. Big stories are told as many different smaller ones, and small stories are told as chunks of a bigger picture.
These are the best chunks, big or small, in the history of the "Star Wars" universe.
(Major spoilers ahead for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”)
There is a lot going on in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” and it moves at a super fast pace in hopes that you won’t have enough time to think about how the pieces fit together. Because they don’t. But it’s not frustrating just because it’s internally a mess. It’s because that mess is so, well, messy that it actually manages to tangibly affect its predecessors, “The Last Jedi” and “The Force Awakens.” Because this movie makes mistakes that retroactively makes those movies worse.
That’s not easy to do. But “The Rise of Skywalker” has managed to pulled off this feat, and it’s thanks in large part to the crazy reveal that Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) was behind everything all along.
From the moment last summer that it was announced, I had a feeling bringing back Palpatine was probably a bad idea. We’ve seen that story before, in the old “Dark Empire” comics from the early ’90s, and that certainly didn’t go well. And there were no hints whatsoever in “The Force Awakens” or “The Last Jedi” that there was some secret other power out there. But I figured it would all depend on how JJ Abrams and friends handled it. Maybe they could make this scenario complement the other movies, and add some extra layers to future viewings of this new trilogy. Hell, the original trilogy managed to make “from a certain point of view” not sound like an insult to your intelligence.
Palpatine’s presence, as it turns out, is super jarring, and makes so much of what happened in the previous two movies either meaningless or nonsensical. Watching the first two movies in this trilogy after seeing “The Rise of Skywalker” is a bizarre experience now. I’m not sure the “Star Wars” movies have ever been this much of a mess — the prequels are terribly made movies, but at least they have an over-arching plot that more or less makes sense. This new trilogy is pure madness.
A lot of that is just due to the sheer scale of what the Emperor does in “The Rise of Skywalker.” We’re told that Palpatine orchestrated the rise of the First Order after the Empire’s defeat at the end of “Return of the Jedi,” and that he literally created Snoke (Andy Serkis) to lead it. Created, as in physically made him — in the that big temple on Exogol we see a big tube with a half-made Snoke body in it. So we can, in theory, say that everything Snoke ever did was because Emperor Palpatine told him to do it. I don’t see any other way to interpret this turn of events with the minimal explanations we’re given in this movie.
Not only that, but as it turns out, while the First Order was out there building an army and a big fleet, Palpatine was hanging out on Exogol with a huge fleet of his own buried in the ice, each equipped with a planet-killing Death Star superlaser. The Emperor has had a thousand Death Stars, basically. And none of them were ever even used until one of them blew up a planet in “The Rise of Skywalker.”
This basic premise really messes up basically everything from “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi.” The entire conflict between the Resistance and the First Order becomes weirdly kinda low stakes with the Emperor lurking out there with his thousand Death Stars. Why would the First Order do all that work to hollow out a planet and build Starkiller Base, their own new and improved Death Star, when Palpatine could have just given them a few of the Death Stars he already had?
Maybe more problematic is the issue of Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) lineage. It’s not necessarily a problem that she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter. It is extremely an issue that, as we’re told practically as an afterthought, Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) knew about it. That little tidbit makes everything Luke has done in this trilogy seem extra bizarre and stupid.
Let’s break it down real quick. When Lando shows up in “The Rise of Skywalker” on the desert planet Pasaana, he tells the gang that he originally came there more than a decade before with Luke. The two of them were searching for Exogol, which that snow planet where Palpatine is hanging out in the movie.
They came to Pasaana because they were chasing an old Jedi hunter from the before times. But they just found an empty ship and no clues. Now, the reason this Jedi hunter was on Pasaana was because he had been pursuing Rey on Palpatine’s behalf. But the hunter only found her parents, because they had left her on Jakku. So he killed the parents and bailed before Luke and Lando got there. And I guess Luke and Lando gave up on the search since Lando is still there many years later.
Left unsaid is why Luke and Lando were trying to find Exogol, but there are a couple easy guesses I could make. The option that looks best for “The Rise of Skywalker” is that Luke knew there was a Sith temple there and wanted to check it out, but didn’t know that anything further was going on. But that doesn’t seem like a likely story, because they aren’t looking for clues — they’re looking for people who are alive and know things about Exogol. And since Luke in the present knew about Rey’s family, then this whole adventure looking for Exogol has to be where he learned about her.
So Luke knew about Exogol, and he knew that a Jedi hunter came out of retirement to actively hunt some folks. He probably, given his knowledge of Rey’s family in the present, knew that Palpatine had had a family and at least one grandkid, and that that family was running around the galaxy to get away from Palpatine’s agents, even though Palpatine was already long dead by then. The only possible takeaway from that collection of evidence is that something weird and probably bad is happening. Something that Luke, as the only Jedi at the time, would need to be wary of.
So fast forward to Luke was training Ben Solo (Adam Driver) and a bunch of others to become Jedi a few years before “The Force Awakens,” he and Leia both sensed the existence of Snoke (Andy Serkis). And they knew that Snoke was trying to turn Ben to the dark side by some means — the how of that situation has not been made clear in any movies or books thus far. But a new comic released this week, “The Rise of Kylo Ren #1,” appears to reveal that not only did Luke know about Snoke by that time, but they actually had fought before and Luke was responsible for Snoke looking all messed up in the movies.
It always felt like kind of a stretch that Luke would exile himself and cut himself off from the Force — let alone be cool with doing extrajudicial murder on his nephew — as explained in “The Last Jedi,” but when I’m in a generous mood I can allow for the idea that Luke thought he would do more harm than good after the stuff with Ben happen. But this new information makes that impossible to justify, unless you wanna argue that Luke is too dumb to put these pieces together. He had to have known, for decades before the emergence of the First Order, that there was some big shadowy threat out there.
Hopefully, when we eventually get a novel or comic book that tells the story of this little adventure he had with Lando, this will make more sense. But right now, it does not.
That’s the consequence of this weird, completely random addition of Emperor Palpatine to this trilogy. The fact that he was out there, orchestrating the creation of the First Order and hoarding a bunch of Death Stars, really alters the plot of the previous two movies in ways that those movies simply cannot support. This retcon just does not work.
Prince Williamand Kate Middleton are doing just fine despite some bad optics making their relationship seem rocky ... at least that's the story our Royal sources are selling.
Sources directly connected to Will and Kate insist there's been no falling out between the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge ... this after signs of friction in their marriage.
BBC
As you know, Kate seemingly denied William's PDA attempt with a super-awkward shoulder shrug this week on TV, bringing comparisons to Donald Trump getting swatted away by Melania.
The sources insist the whole interaction was taken out of context from the rest of the TV special, and what most folks didn't see was Will and Kate being very affectionate and close-knit.
Shutterstock Premier
The bad optics didn't end there, because as we reported ... William and Kate showed up to the Royal Family's Christmas lunch in separate cars.
We're told the couple rode separately because Prince George and William needed to be at Buckingham Palace 30 minutes earlier for a special event -- which sources say will soon be made public, and explain the whole car situation.
The Cambridge Household family Christmas card this year features The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with their three children, Prince Louis, Princess Charlotte and Prince George on a motorbike and sidecar ❄️🎄 pic.twitter.com/pNg3zPJXqS
The family certainly looks happy in their annual Christmas card. Still ... that's just a moment in time. Remember ... Princess Diana looked happy in her family Xmas card pics, and she was anything but.
The sources we've spoken with have generally been fair and accurate in the past, but we're not naive. There's a lot riding on that marriage, and damage control always looms.
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