Star Wars Episode 9: Rise of Skywalker has everyone trying to figure out what that ‘Skywalker’ refers to, and most people have come up with the same theory.
Yesterday, we got our first look at the last Star Wars movie for a good long while, the end of the Skywalker era, but not before putting the name in actual title of the movie for once.
The film is called Star Wars Episode 9: Rise of Skywalker, which has led to a flurry of speculation about what exactly that means. The immediate theories that first leapt to everyone’s mind are all, no doubt, wrong. They include:
All of these theories were encapsulated in a single tweet from Mark Hamill, which is the final nail in the coffin that should tell you that none of them or true, or he wouldn’t be egging people on with potential spoilers.
Once you move past the idea that anyone is a secret Skywalker or reclaiming the family name, a second theory forms. I thought of this on my own, until I went on the internet and saw that roughly a hundred million people had come up with the same idea.
The theory is that ‘Skywalker’ is going to replace the term ‘Jedi,’ as Luke gets his wish when he said that the Jedi must end. As in, you can now train to become a Skywalker rather than a Jedi, and hopefully it comes with some important distinctions.
While the Jedi were not flat-out evil like the uber-facist Sith going around torturing people and destroying planets, they were not exactly great either. They effectively created Darth Vader by ripping Anakin away from his mother, not allowing him to visit or bring her with him (leading to her death) and forbidding love so he had to keep his relationship with Padme a secret (leader to her death as well). The Jedi’s rules about attachment to family or significant others are ludicrous, which leads to a bunch of lonely force hermits who become at best, members of the Jedi council who are dumb enough to be blind to a galaxy-wide conspiracy to wipe them out, or at worst, actual Sith. Luke, when he was in full Jedi teacher mode, was the one who ultimately caused Ben to fully flip to the Dark Side, leading to that cascading chain of horrible events.
The point is, Luke is right, the Jedi should end. Not that everyone has to stop using the force and throw away their lightsabers, but if Rey becomes the first of a new order of Skywalkers that truly brings balance to the force and bridges the divide between creepy arrogant monks and murderous tortured souls, that would probably be better for the universe at large.
