Note: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Midway through Rise of Skywalker, a bolt of lightning cracks the sky in two. It’s a moment of illumination—or at least, it’s supposed to be—revealing a new, unexpected answer to a mystery the Star Wars saga had previously put to rest. Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi resolved the intrigue surrounding the heroine of this new sequel-trilogy, Rey, and her parentage with a gracefully simple, bold assertion: Rey is…just Rey. A scavenger from Jakku, descended from ordinary junk traders who left her behind on the planet, sold her off, and never looked back. Not the daughter of some space aristocracy or legacy lineage, but a hero of her own making. And that was enough, until that lightning strike.

Pushed to the limits of her abilities and desperate to save a friend, Rey shoots bolts of electricity from her fingertips—just the way Emperor Palpatine could before Darth Vader killed him at the end of Return of the Jedi. We soon learn that Rey from Nowhere is in fact Rey Palpatine, granddaughter of the sinister puppetmaster behind the Sith’s plots to take control of the Force in the original and prequel Star Wars trilogies. It’s a baffling twist, not least because the movie never touches on just when, exactly, or with whom Palpatine procreated. (Try purging that image from your head once it’s in.) To those invested in The Last Jedi’s ideas about the Force and heroism, it’s also a crassly cynical letdown.

Johnson’s installment dedicated itself to democratizing the Force, breathing new life into a mystical idea that had, until now, always appointed a Skywalker—Anakin, Luke, Leia, Ben—as the central heroes and/or antiheroes in the story of saving the galaxy. That Rey’s parents were ordinary people meant anyone from anywhere could be born a hero; what determined a person’s place in the world was who they chose to be, rather than their last name.

Rian Johnson Reveals Secrets of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’: On Rey’s Parents, Luke’s Fate and More

The Last Jedi’s parting shot underscored the beauty of that notion: a stable boy on Canto Bight—who, like Rey, was pawned off by his parents—uses the Force to summon a broom to his hand. The yearning notes of Luke’s theme play as he looks up in time to see the Millennium Falcon jump into hyperdrive. Inspired, he lifts the handle of his broom just so, evoking the silhouette of a Jedi and his lightsaber. The Force is for anyone, the scene seemed to say—and so is Star Wars. It was a bold, meaningful idea for the franchise, and necessary to opening up its future.

Having Rey confront the loneliest answer to a lifelong burning question felt like the dramatic equivalent of Luke learning that his father was actually Darth Vader, Johnson has explained. The Empire Strikes Back injected notes of gray into a previously black-and-white situation, denying the Jedi-in-training (and the audience) the easiest recourse: to hate the villain and want to see him die.

The Last Jedi pulls something similar with Rey’s story, denying her the luxury of a predetermined destiny. “Rey is our protagonist. And the truth is, in the story, the toughest possible thing for her to hear is, you know, you’re not gonna get the easy answer that you’re so-and-so’s daughter, this is your place,” Johnson told me after The Last Jedi’s release. “You’re gonna have to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this world. And you always want to throw the hardest thing at your protagonist.”

The resonance between Luke’s and Rey’s stories boiled down something essential about Star Wars’s appeal, rather than just replicating a plot point, the way Rise of Skywalker does. In separate ways, The Last Jedi jettisoned many of the new trilogy’s remaining, overly-literal parallels from past films—not in an effort to discard the legacy of Star Wars, but to build on it. To free it.

“Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be,” Kylo Ren tells Rey in one of the film’s many bits of meta-text, after he strikes down the First Order’s Supreme Leader Snoke. We knew little about the shadowy figure who seduced Kylo to the Dark Side, except that he seemed to fill the role of a Palpatine-type with sparklier taste in robes. His unceremonious death cleared the board for a renewed focus on the trilogy’s more compelling antagonist: Kylo Ren himself.

Story continues