The promise was never fulfilled, for many reasons. Writing inconsistencies plagued the character – first she was no one, then she was Palpatine’s granddaughter, half of a force dyad. Throughout all she was powerful, but the sequel trilogy could never truly decide what the source of Rey’s powers was, or what story they wanted to tell with her. Was she her own hero, was she half of a whole with Kylo Ren, was she part of a new trio that fans were supposed to root for, or was she somehow all of those things?
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The audience never really knew, and the movies didn’t pick one side. Instead, it tried to tell all possible stories for Rey, with the end result that no story had any depth. Rey, the orphan who came from nothing and became one of the most powerful Jedi turned into Rey Palpatine trying to fix the mistakes of her predecessors, Rey the only one who could take on Kylo Ren became Rey Kylo Ren’s love interest of sorts, and the Rey that was Finn’s friend but had no ties to Poe became the Luke of a new trio.
But none of it really clicked, mostly because a character cannot be everything at once and still be relatable. At times Rey felt like a blank canvas people could project onto, but that’s not really a compliment. For Rey to be the hero this trilogy needed, she had to have an actual journey that the fans could follow and a clear goal for them to root for her to achieve.
Lack of coherent storytelling was a common theme in the sequel trilogy, one that ended up affecting all characters equally. Considering that Rey was, presumably, the main character in the trilogy, though, it’s even more egregious how inconsistent and, frankly, nonsensical her journey is. Presumably, of course, because these same inconsistencies led to a sense that the main character was actually Kylo Ren, and not Rey.
This ended up being a larger problem in the grand scheme of the story they were trying to tell – if this was about Kylo’s journey, why was his redemption so rushed and simplistic – but it hurt Rey too, by tying her destiny to Kylo’s in a way that felt reductive instead of celebratory. If the sequel trilogy wanted their connection to be romantic, they should have fully committed, and if they wanted it to be adversarial, they should have fully committed to that too. By choosing both and neither, they failed to give the relationship the nuance it might have had, and the grey areas made both characters journeys feel shallow. This, in turn, resulted in an unsatisfactory ending for both characters that was directly tied to the fact that the sequel trilogy never had a clear path for the story they were trying to tell, and by trying to please everyone, they pleased no one.
The moment at the end, with Rey, this time on Tatooine instead of Jakku, alone, but this time by choice, claiming the Skywalker name, a name the entire galaxy knows and that belongs to some of the people she felt closest to, Luke and Leia, should have felt emotional. It should have felt like a celebratory moment for a character who was told she was nothing, and then was given a name that she didn’t want to accept but had finally chosen who she was going to be.
Instead, it was a cop-out, a way to tie the most famous name in the Star Wars universe to a character who had a passing relationship with Leia and a complicated one with Luke, to say the least. She might have chosen the Skywalker name because of what she wanted to represent, hope for the galaxy at large, as the last Jedi, but it’s hard to argue this very generous interpretation actually comes through on screen.
The Star Wars sequels clearly had big hopes for Rey, their first female-lead. And though they delivered in some respects, and Rey is the kind of character a lot of little girls will look up to for years to come, they could have done so much more to make her journey emotionally resonant. And that might just be the biggest sin in the entire sequel trilogy.
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