Back in the 1970s and 80s, Star Wars fans desperate to fill their time with Jedi-related adventures on mystical far-flung planets in the company of wise, syntactically challenged aliens of the green, hairy-eared variety were forced to turn to comics or novels from the Expanded Universe – or worse still, the execrable Star Wars Holiday Special – while waiting three years for a new film to come out. These days we have thrillingly unnecessary episodes, such as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a Death Star-sized slice of fan fiction masquerading as a movie, to keep appetites whetted. In fact, a new Star Wars movie of a sort is promised every year from here on in, with Alden Ehrenreich’s young Han Solo the next to get his own gap-filling spinoff, in 2018.



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But now that most fans have seen Rogue One and marveled at its miraculous ability to pump up dozens of minor characters we never knew we cared about into major players on a par with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia et al, we are surely ready to move on to the corners of a galaxy, far, far away that really matter. Star Wars: Episode VIII director Rian Johnson certainly seems to think so, and has been helping to fuel the hype machine with carefully considered hints about part two of the main Star Wars trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens in a new interview with USA Today.

Solid details are predictably few and far between, but it sounds like Rey’s relationship with Luke Skywalker will form a huge part of the new movie, with Johnson describing their encounter as a deeply affecting “dawning of this new chapter” in the young life of the Jakku-based scavenger. There are also hints that Star Wars’ fondness for inter-generational themes will continue, with the Brick and Looper director revealing familial connections will play “a huge part” in Rey’s story. So far, so tantalizing, but JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens left so many story threads unfinished that there is still plenty more to dig through. Here are some of the questions fans won’t forgive Johnson for failing to answer by the time the credits roll on Star Wars: Episode VIII.

Who is Rey and why is she so powerful?

Very few of the enduring fan theories about Daisy Ridley’s staff-wielding proto-Jedi are entirely satisfactory. If she is Luke Skywalker’s daughter, why did he abandon his Jedi vows to enter into the relationship that led to her birth? And why does she talk about Anakin Skywalker’s son in excitable, awed terms when he is first mentioned in The Force Awakens, when the natural reaction to someone raising the ongoing absence of your secret dad would surely be pursed lips and sheepish efforts to avoid looking anyone in the eye? For similar reasons, it seems unlikely that Rey is a Kenobi, unless old Ben got really, really bored with hermit-life during his self-imposed 30-year exile on Tatooine and began to engage in unwise forays to Mos Eisley in search of female companionship. Not that he would have had much luck in the sausage fest environment of the local cantina.

Trawl the internet for a parsec or two (yes, I know) and you’ll find theories that Rey is the reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader – a new chosen one – or that she is Snoke or Palpatine’s literal or metaphorical daughter. The Vader theory would help at least partly to explain the essential quandary surrounding our young hero, that she is somehow stronger with the Force than Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren (who has presumably been honing his darkling emo powers for decades) despite having had no training whatsoever beyond a few years in Luke’s Jedi academy as a very young child. Moreover, why do Rey’s powers emerge so rapidly, and with such raging intensity, when Skywalker’s had to be developed and honed over many years? Only if she is somehow a more powerful Jedi than anything we have seen in Star Wars since the birth of Anakin can any of The Force Awakens’ gaping plot holes be satisfactory filled.

Where has Luke been and what has he been up to?

The Force Awakens revealed that Skywalker went in search of the first Jedi temple, and that he ended up on the barren, windswept oceanic planet of Ahch-To, where Rey found him in the movie’s final scenes. We also know that Luke failed to stop the young Ben Solo turning to the Dark Side and becoming Kylo Ren, a development which would surely be enough to send even the strongest of minds catapulting into doubt and despair. But there must be more backstory to discover here.

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Might Luke have gone into exile to meditate over why his plans to retrain a new generation of Jedi ultimately failed? Is this why he sought out the temple, to wade through ancient repositories of knowledge about the establishment of the original order and work out what went wrong with his own teaching methods? Might the original apex of Jedi knowledge be the only place in the galaxy where it is now possible to communicate with the Force ghosts of past masters? Yoda, Kenobi and even Anakin were seemingly capable of popping up whenever and wherever they pleased in the original trilogy, but Rey was only able to experience fractured, fleeting, half-heard missives from Kenobi at Maz Kanata’s castle, and only when she came within range of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.

Has there been some kind of disturbance in the communication network between living and dead Jedi? This would all make a lot of sense, given the rumours that Frank Oz has been seen on the set of Episode VIII at Pinewood Studios. It would certainly be no surprise to discover in the opening frames of Johnson’s movie that Yoda’s Force Ghost has been keeping Luke company on Ahch-To, and now stands ready to help train a new apprentice.

Is Finn as much of a blank canvas as he seems?

The great thing about Star Wars movies is that inconvenient plot holes can always be explained away by referring to the omnipotency of the Force as a factor in ongoing story development. How did Finn manage to escape General Hux’s battlecruiser, or infiltrate the First Order’s base and capture Captain Phasma, if not for the aforementioned all-powerful mystical energy field guiding him on his path? Why was he even allowed to wield a lightsaber, with some success against trained stormtroopers using melee weapons – and even briefly against Kylo Ren himself – when previous Star Wars movies have never allowed non-Jedi to pick up a laser sword for more than a few seconds? Maz Kanata, who told us she knows a fair bit about Jedi matters, trusted the rogue stormtrooper with the dangerous weapon in the absence of Rey to wield it. Why?

Is Finn, too, in some way Force-sensitive? Or did the team behind The Force Awakens simply choose to sacrifice Star Wars internal logic on the altar of rapid-fire story beats?



How did Maz Kanata get Luke’s lightsaber and why does she know about The Force?

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Rogue One introduced into the Star Wars universe (at least on the big screen) the concept of Force acolytes who have no Jedi powers themselves, in the form of Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Îmwe. There were heavy suggestions in The Force Awakens that Kanata has a deep knowledge of Force matters, but no explanation whatsoever of how she came into the possession of a lightsaber that once belonged to Anakin Skywalker, and was passed to Luke in 1977’s Star Wars.

This is the laser sword that Luke lost in his Cloud City battle with Vader on the planet of Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than the one he constructed himself for their final father and son duel in Return of the Jedi. So there is no question of the younger Skywalker having passed the weapon to Kanata before going into exile – he did not have it in the first place. A plaque at a Star Wars display at California’s Disneyland revealed last year that the lightsaber was recovered from the depths of Cloud City by a scavenger, who one assumes must have sold it on to Kanata. So is she merely a renowned collector of old Jedi paraphernalia? That doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfactory explanation.

Who is Supreme Leader Snoke and how did he recruit Kylo Ren to the dark side?

Say what you like about the prequels (and I am far from a fan), but they did at least provide a logical, if bearly watchable, explanation for why Anakin Skywalker turned to the Dark Side: the young Jedi’s fear of losing his wife Padme to the grim reaper, and his growing distrust of the rigid and impassive Jedi Council. But we are a long way from knowing what possible reasons a young apprentice in Luke Skywalker’s school for young Jedis might have had for even listening to the monstrous, waifish, horribly scarred – possibly T-Rex-sized – Snoke. How was Ben Solo groomed, and why did he choose to turn? Did Snoke somehow manage the conversion from across the reaches of space? Or did he infiltrate in some as-yet-unseen, non-threatening guise, perhaps by proxy?

Anakin had a reason – at least initially – to trust Palpatine, the future Emperor, as a trusted, high-ranking politician, the leading light of the Republic in its fight against the separatists in the prequels. What reason could Solo possibly have had to trust Snoke?