Let’s talk Rey: The 4 best fan theories about ‘The Force Awakens’ hero
Editor’s note: Guys, seriously, you saw that headline and didn’t think “this probably contains spoilers?” What is wrong with you? Only read this after you’ve seen the movie, obviously.
Just as Daisy Ridley is the breakout star of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, her character Rey is the breakout star of Star Wars fandom. In part, that’s because of Ridley’s perfect performance, which really makes you believe a desert-planet orphan could have that much untapped Force within her.
But in large part, that’s because Rey delivers a hefty dollop of something Star Wars has always thrived on: mystery. At the beginning of the movie, you’re wondering who this intriguing scavenger is. At the exact midpoint, you’re floored by her strange, terrible and all-too-real lightsaber vision. And at the end, you’re led to think: Wait, is she …?
With the best part of a week to puzzle over the “is she” question, Star Wars fandom has coalesced around four possible answers — which will probably be debated over the next year and a half, before Episode VIII arrives in May 2017, far more intensely than questions of Jon Snow’s parentage in Game of Thrones.
You may have read in some outlets that there are two Rey theories making the rounds. Wrong! There are actually four, and those are just the main ones. One of these is way more likely than the others given the evidence so far, which may actually make it the least likely. Let’s start with that.
1. Is she … Luke Skywalker’s daughter?
It’s obvious — too obvious an answer, perhaps, for most filmmakers to feel it worth waiting 18 months for. Here’s why it’s obvious, followed by the con to every pro.
First, the parallel: She grows up on a backwards desert planet without any knowledge of her true family, just like Luke (only with no uncle Owen or aunt Beru to weigh her down with chores, she becomes more self-sufficient and a better pilot, faster). But … hey, that could be true of a lot of orphans. It’s a big galaxy.
Second, the “calling” of Luke’s lightsaber, and the fact that she receives a vision from it, would seem to suggest there’s a family connection. But … that’s not necessarily how the Force works. It surrounds us and binds the galaxy together — all of us. It’s not just a Skywalker-to-Skywalker telephone, as voices in the vision make clear. Nothing in that vision tells us anything about her parentage — it just suggests she was dropped on Jakku after Luke’s Jedi academy met its unceremonious end.
Thirdly, the fact that she’s sent off at the end to meet Luke, and they exchange meaningful looks in the last shot, while she remains with lightsaber held out to him for an indefinite period like Barney Stinson requesting a high five. But … hey, the lightsaber called to her, and who else is going to deliver it? Chewie is way too grief-stricken to go it alone.
Against all this “evidence,” you have to weigh the fact that making Luke Rey’s dad raises the question of whom her mother is — and that opens up a hornet’s nest in fandom.
In the Expanded Universe novels, now no longer part of the official timeline, Luke married an extremely popular character known as Mara Jade. So if you’re Episode VIII director Rian Johnson, you face a lose-lose proposition by making Luke the father. If you make Rey’s mother someone else, you risk fan outrage. If you make it Mara, you either have to show her or risk fan outrage that we never get to see her on screen (adding salt to the wound that she dies in the books).
Either way, you’ve distracted attention from what should be the focus of the trilogy — Rey’s hero journey — and you’ve compromised Luke’s apparent status in the plot as a Force-focused Jedi hermit. You’re also suggesting that Luke dumped her on Jakku and let her think “someone” was coming back for her, which is a bit of a dick move.
Besides, you’ve also thrown away the chance to surprise your audience with one of the following, less pedestrian answers.
2. Is she … Leia and/or Han’s?
Another possibility is that Rey is Kylo Ren’s secret sibling, and still inherited her Force powers — just from Leia’s side of the family, not Luke’s.
The problem with this is that you either have to posit that Han didn’t know, or that he went to his doom without telling her. You could think that his whole shtick of offering Rey a job on the Falcon was his way of expressing it — the man does have a history of coming up with different ways to say “I love you,” after all.
Another bonus piece of evidence: Daisy Ridley is the exact same age as Carrie Fisher’s real-life daughter Billie Lourd, who also appears in the film. Make of that what you will.
But there are just too many needles we have to thread to get to this resolution. Han didn’t appear to recognize her. Leia didn’t appear to recognize her. If General Organa and Rey had The Conversation, it was kept off screen, which is a pretty lousy storytelling trope. If they didn’t, see above complaint about the Jakku-dumping dick move.
The notion that Han had her without Leia is a possibility; we’d buy that of the old scoundrel. But again, that might raise too many questions about the (Force-sensitive?) mother. And if Leia knew, well, there were a lot more problems in their relationship than “every time you look at me, you see him.”
3. Is she … a Kenobi?
This theory was born of the fact that you actually can hear Alec Guinness, a.k.a. the OG Obi-Wan Kenobi, saying “Rey” during the lightsaber vision. (Guinness died in 2000; his word was artfully edited from the word “afraid” by Force Awakens producer Bryan Burk.) The NG Obi-Wan, Ewan McGregor, came in to the studio to record a line of dialogue for this scene too.
For this theory to work, you’d have to posit that Obi-Wan had a secret fling on Tatooine, and that Rey is the child of that lovechild. The novel Kenobi, which just failed to make it under the wire and into the new book-based Star Wars canon (it’s now the last of the books to be rebranded “Legends”), suggests such a romantic possibility for the still-young, still-hot “Ben” Kenobi when he arrives on the desert planet.
The appeal of this theory is that it has narrative complexity and elegance. It isn’t just one family passing down the lightsaber from generation to generation; after all, that lightsaber spent a good long time living with Kenobi in his hermit hut between Skywalkers.
And if the ongoing Rey vs. Kylo Ren conflict is actually another series of Kenobi vs. Skywalker lightsaber duels, that’s a pretty neat secret.
4. Is she … nobody special?
“I hope she’s just an ordinary person,” a female friend and casual Star Wars fan told me after seeing the movie for the first time. “Because then, she’s me.”
That really got me thinking about how elitist all these other possibilities are. Buy into them, and you’re basically saying there are just one or two Star Wars family dynasties worth our attention.
But what if, after a year and a half of assuming that Rey’s last name is Skywalker, it turns out that she’s just an especially Force-sensitive orphan? Sent to Luke’s Jedi Academy for training, perhaps, then taken to Jakku for safe-keeping after the Knights of Ren massacre. Told to remain there in hiding as long as she possibly could, young Rey interpreted the instruction as “my family is coming back.”
Well, then we’d get the far more meritocratic lesson that the Force can be strong with all of us. Some of us can just tap into it better than others, but any kid has the potential to be a Jedi.
This was what George Lucas was really trying to say with his misguided focus on “midichlorians” — those microscopic creatures were always supposed to be a symptom of Force power, not a cause, and the idea was that the Jedi had created a scientific test to pluck Force-sensitive younglings out of the galactic herd.
I don’t think any screenwriter will ever dare write a line of dialogue revealing that Rey is just “someone with a high midichlorian count,” but that may be effectively what we’re looking at. It would explain why her lightsaber vision includes snatches from Yoda, Kenobi and the Skywalker clan. She has simply taken her first step into a larger world.