TL;DR — what if Rey is a clone of Anakin Skywalker, and what if her upbringing on Jakku isn’t just an affectionate callback to the earlier films in the saga, but a deliberate attempt, in-universe, to reproduce the environmental background of Anakin Skywalker, and reverse-engineer the next Darth Vader?

After all the criticisms that The Force Awakens is just a ‘remake’, wouldn’t it be a delicious twist if Rey was, quite literally, intended to be a remake of Anakin Skywalker, and Abrams has just been biting his tongue this entire time?

Remember, the lightsaber Rey finds herself drawn to in Maz Kanata's castle may have been Luke's, but it belonged to Anakin first.

There are a few red flags here. The first is that, if we’re going full Boys From Brazil, Darth Vader isn’t Hitler — that’d be Sheev Palpatine.

But I think we can see, from Abrams’ comments above about Vader being a martyr for The First Order, and from Kylo Ren’s worship of Vader, that Abrams sees Vader in that role, which makes sense — he’s an OG fan who came of age with Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, so from his perspective The Emperor is something of a villain-come-lately.

And, hey, Vader’s just cooler.

There’s also the small matter that Anakin Skywalker is a man and Rey is a woman — but this really isn’t a big deal. There’s a long tradition of male-to-female cloning in sci-fi, where the male’s X-chromosome is doubled to produce a female clone, as in Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love or Ursula K Le Guin’s Nine Lives.

(Closer to home, Marvel has gone to this well twice in recent years – in the Ultimate universe, where Spider-Woman is a clone of Spider-Man, and in X-Men cartoons and comics featuring X-23, the female clone of Wolverine.)

There’s certainly evidence to suggest that there could be some cloning hijinks involved in Rey’s origin. Consider this passage from Pablo Hidalgo’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Visual Dictionary:

Jakku was once home to a secret Imperial research facility, and was the last rallying point of the Imperial fleet. Entering the atmosphere to tighten its cordon, the Empire fought determinedly to keep the New Republic from capturing the base. In its defence, doomed Imperial vessels used tractor beams to drag New Republic warships into the planet’s surface. The retreating Imperials destroyed the base before disappearing into the unknown regions.

We haven’t seen a cloned Force user in the films or the ‘nu-canon’ of books and comics, but that’s not to say it can’t be done.

After all, if Palpatine wanted to wipe out the Jedi, and he wanted an army that could be trained quickly, of course he cloned soldiers instead of Force users during the Clone Wars – but that doesn’t rule out the possibility of cloning Jedi if you’re sufficiently motivated.

In the old, pre-Disney Expanded Universe, Force sensitivity was definitely something that could be cloned. The Emperor inhabited a number of cloned bodies during the Dark Empire saga. Joruus C’baoth, the Dark Jedi who served as the secondary antagonist of the Thrawn trilogy, was a clone.

And then there’s the infamous Luuke Skywalker (note the extra ‘u’, in all its terrible glory), the clone of Luke Skywalker created by Joruus C’baoth in the Thrawn trilogy. Luuke was grown from cells extracted from the hand Luke lost during his duel with Darth Vader in Cloud City.