In the final scene of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey travels to Tatooine, buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers at Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s moisture farm, and takes their surname. With the Skywalker twins’ Force ghosts watching over her, Rey sets off to raise a new generation of Jedi and maintain peace in the galaxy after the fall of the Final Order. This didn’t really feel like the end of Rey’s story; it felt more like the beginning. If Daisy Ridley is willing to return, this could make a great limited series on Disney Plus.
There’s a lot about this scene that didn’t work as the conclusion to the entire Star Wars saga. Luke doesn’t share the fan base’s nostalgia for the Lars’ moisture farm. When he was there, he felt trapped and couldn’t wait to leave. And when he left, he swore he’d never return. Also, Leia had no emotional connection to Tatooine. Granted, her own homeworld was blown to smithereens by the Death Star, but her only experience on Tatooine was being the bikini-clad sex slave of a giant slug. Also, burying Anakin’s lightsaber in sand is just cruel, as is negating his redemptive sacrifice by resurrecting Palpatine, but that’s another issue. Essentially, nothing about the final scene of The Rise of Skywalker resonates in the context of the actual story. But that’s how the saga ended, so that’s what Lucasfilm is working with.
And as long as that’s how it ended, it set up a pretty promising off-screen arc for Rey. With Disney Plus greenlighting Star Wars streaming content like there’s no tomorrow, Lucasfilm should consider exploring Rey’s post-Rise of Skywalker adventures. The character faced all kinds of backlash from fans, with some valid complaints that she starts off so perfect at everything that she doesn’t have to overcome many obstacles throughout the trilogy. But simultaneously restarting the Jedi religion and vanquishing the remains of the Final Order to ensure evil will never return to the galaxy will surely present a few obstacles for her to overcome.
Daisy Ridley might understandably want to take a break from Rey after playing the character in three back-to-back movies. Being lumbered with the role of Rey has ironically prevented Ridley from enjoying the clout that comes with the star power of playing Rey. Shooting a limited series in live-action form might be too much of a commitment, but a Rey Skywalker series could easily be animated in the style of The Clone Wars and be just as satisfying. That way, Ridley could knock out all of her lines for a given episode in a single afternoon. Animating the series will also make it easier for other familiar characters to return, because voice work requires a lot less commitment than a live-action performance (and characters whose original actors have passed away can be more easily recast).
This would be an interesting way to follow up Rian Johnson’s deconstruction of Star Wars’ myth-making in The Last Jedi. That movie pointed out that the Jedi are hypocritical, but didn’t really do anything with that idea. The story of Rey rebuilding the Jedi Order with updated teachings could really dig into these themes. The Jedi’s current creeds don’t work, because they create villains like Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, but the Jedi themselves aren’t obsolete. In a post-Final Order world, the Jedi can finally fulfill their duties as guardians of peace in a world that’s already at peace. It’s difficult to maintain peace when there’s a war going on. Following the fall of the Final Order, the Jedi won’t have to become soldiers or starfighter pilots – they can be what they’re supposed to be, which is essentially Force-sensitive monks.
All throughout The Rise of Skywalker, Finn was trying to tell Rey something. And what’s even more egregious than that being Finn’s entire arc in the movie is that he doesn’t even get to tell her on-screen – J.J. Abrams had to tell fans on the movie’s opening weekend that Finn wanted to tell Rey he was Force-sensitive. A miniseries about Rey re-establishing the Jedi Order could flesh out this criminally underutilized plot point. After the final lightsaber duel in The Force Awakens set up Finn as an ex-Stormtrooper destined to become a Jedi, he got completely sidelined by the next two movies. A post-Episode IX limited series could give Finn the hero’s journey that the sequel trilogy deprived him of. Rey could also convene with Luke and Leia’s Force ghosts throughout the series and develop a closer relationship with them to justify taking their name at the end of Episode IX.
Like all the other characters in the sequel trilogy (Finn, Poe, Rose, Captain Phasma, the Knights of Ren), Rey had a lot of potential on paper, but got completely underserved in the execution. Switching hands between J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson didn’t help, because they both had contradictory ideas for the character. Abrams wanted to give her significant parentage; Johnson wanted her to be a nobody. With a Disney Plus miniseries, Lucasfilm could hire a storyteller with a singular vision for where Rey’s journey will go following the Resistance’s victory to guide her arc to a more satisfactory conclusion.