The Last Jedi: The Kids Are Alright

[SPOILERS for Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi]

“This is not going to go the way you think.”

Luke Skywalker said this to Rey, but he was talking to us. And by “us” I mean the Generation X folks who saw the original trilogy in the theater a zillion times, daydreamed about it endlessly, and made Star Wars a cultural fixture. He’ll forgive our skepticism. The new movies are packed with echoes of scenes we know by heart. We’ve seen this before. This is a Ring Cycle, the pattern is repeating. Until it breaks free. Episode VIII’s message is that the past is baggage, and it’s time to burn it down. Generation X had its own trilogies. Star Wars belongs to the kids now. It’s bittersweet, but it’s a good thing. That’s how passing the torch works.

Leia knows. The new kids, inspired by their elders, want to charge head-first into danger to pull off daring capers. But the war against the First Order isn’t like the fight against the blind stormtroopers of the Empire. For every mistake, entire fleets die. Every victory is Pyrrhic. Every significant blow is a suicide mission. The cost of repeating the past is unthinkable. Leia needs Poe Dameron to be less of a Han Solo, and more of a, well, General Leia.

Luke gets it. He didn’t fly off to the ancient, uncharted Jedi temple to unearth some secret knowledge of the true nature of the Force. He left because he had failed the next generation. Luke is the dad who suddenly realizes he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He was trained by the last remnants of the previous generation to be something he barely understood, an acolyte of a religion of which he was the sole surviving practitioner. Trying to rebuild the Jedi order, he feared he was doing more harm than good. His fears were justified. The old orthodoxies don’t stand up to modern scrutiny. Like Old Ben before him, Luke realizes that the best he can do for the next generation is to give his life to buy them time.

Supreme Leader Snoke is the ugly face of the past, building the First Order in the spitting image of the Empire. Is he really Emperor Palpatine, who survived his fall or cloned himself anew? Probably. But it doesn’t matter. This isn’t Snoke’s story any more than it was Luke’s. Snoke is dead and chopped to pieces in only the second act of the trilogy, because this time, Kylo’s redemption arc is more complicated than Vader’s dying act of love.

Kylo Ren is a man nearly crushed by the legacy of his grandfather. He wore a ridiculous helmet to honor it. Uncle Luke feared him for it. Snoke shamed him for not living up to it. He’s the last scion of an immaculate conception by a Sith lord, a living avatar of the Force. So many expectations. Kylo hoped to free himself of the past by literally destroying it: taking a new name, nearly murdering his mother and uncle, and murdering his father and master. But even when he does, he remains trapped in a role made for him, not by him.

And what is the secret lineage that defines Rey’s destiny? Who is she, and why is she so powerful? Wrong questions, Generation Xers. This is the new Star Wars, breaking free from the old. Anakin Skywalker’s bloodline may have been born of Dark Side voodoo, but in the new world, the Force isn’t the private domain of a couple of elite warring sects. The Force is in everyone, and can awaken in an abandoned girl with no special lineage, a young rebel who gives her life to drop bombs on a dreadnought, or an indentured boy sweeping stables. This Force isn’t a divided binary of Light and Dark, it’s a complexity, like the souls of people. The new Star Wars isn’t about Light vs. Dark, it’s about the future vs. the past. Rey doesn’t need an old Jedi Master to shape her — even if she wants him to. She is in the vanguard of the New Order, rising up everywhere against Kylo’s First Order.

In my generation’s Star Wars, the Rebellion fought to bring back the glory days of the Old Republic. It was motivated by looking backwards. Even the prequels looked to an ancient prophecy. This generation’s trilogy rejects that thinking. The new Rebellion, much like Disney’s Star Wars franchise, is fighting to become something completely new, on its own terms. This new generation embraces diversity. It distrusts binaries and understands moral complexity. It trusts itself. It harnesses the power of both anger and love. It opposes oligarchs as well as fascists. It listens to, but doesn’t always trust, anyone over 30. And it’s going to do fine.

The older generation just has to move out of the way.

 

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Star Wars: Who Is The Last Jedi?

Now we know that Star Wars Episode VIII will be called The Last Jedi. So who is the last Jedi? Let’s not belabor it. It’s Luke. The Last Jedi is Luke Skywalker.

I’ve laid out what the prophecy of “bringing balance to the Force” means in terms of Star Wars’ ring cycle. [In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Answers Hide In Plain Sight] It bears repeating that in Episodes I-III, we see Anakin Skywalker turned to the Sith — the dark polar end of the Force. In Episodes IV-VI, we see him brought back to the light polar end — the return of Anakin the Jedi. Structurally, it makes sense that the final ring in the saga will be the emergence of the prophesied balance between dark and light.

Luke Skywalker figured it out. He wouldn’t have saved his father in Episode VI had he not tapped the strength of the Dark Side to physically defeat Vader, but then brought himself back under control to spare Vader, once beaten. Luke was never indoctrinated into the Jedi’s pitiless stance against forsaking duty to rescue loved ones. Guided by his compassion instead of Jedi dogma, he was able to do what Obi-Wan and Yoda could not.

By Episode VII, Luke has suffered a disastrous failure trying to be a Jedi Master, and his students are dead by the hand of his Dark-seduced nephew. So he fled to an ancient and lost Jedi Temple, to learn something that neither Obi-Wan nor Yoda had taught him. It’s not a stretch to guess that, spurred by his experience with Darth Vader, he was in search of the true nature of the Force, one that neither Jedi nor Sith had mastered. He has learned about the Balance.

Now Rey has come to him, a Force-strong young woman in need of training. Luke won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. He will remain the last Jedi. The purple light that bathed Rey’s and Kylo Ren’s faces as their blue and red lightsabers clashed was no accident. When Luke trains Rey in the Balanced Force, she will become something new, requiring a new name. And after the Revenge of the Sith and the Return of the Jedi, I’m confident that the new name will figure into the title of Episode IX.

UPDATE 1

The non-English movie posters have revealed that “Jedi” in the title is  being used as the plural. So it’s not just Luke. But no matter how many there are, the fact that they’re the last is what’s significant. The reasoning stands. After this set, Force practitioners will be something else.

Oddly, the French translation of Return of the Jedi was Le Retour Du Jedi — singular. Which rather minimizes the impact of Luke’s journey.

UPDATE 2

I take the last line from the teaser trailer for The Last Jedi as confirmation of all the above.