This post contains frank discussion about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. If you’d prefer not to be spoiled, now is the time to leave. Seriously.

Though he’s often accused of an over-reliance on them, J.J. Abrams didn’t invent the idea of callbacks or repeated motifs in the Star Wars franchise. “You see the echo of where it all is gonna go,” George Lucas once said about how his prequel films relate to the original trilogy. “It’s like poetry, sort of. They rhyme. Every stanza rhymes with the last one.”

So how did Abrams and his screenwriting partner Chris Terrio “rhyme” the final moments of The Rise of Skywalker with the eight films that came before it? In some ways the echo is quite obvious, but there are some buried clues you might have missed that reveal what comes next for a central figure.

Okay, seriously, are you still here? Then that must mean you really want to know how it all ends. Here we go.

Having saved the rebellion (again) and defeated Palpatine (her first time, though not the alliance’s), the final sequence of The Rise of Skywalker sees Rey visiting the old homestead on Tatooine where Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen died and, once upon a time, a moisture farmer called Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) squinted into the horizon and dreamt of adventure. In a little nod to where Abrams and actress Daisy Ridley, all began, Rey slides down a little dune on some abandoned scrap metal. Just as she did when she was just a scavenger back on Jakku in the opening minutes of The Force Awakens.