Star Wars: She Finished What The Skywalkers Started – A Rey Breakdown
Going from trash scavenger to Jedi, Rey’s story is longer and more interesting than what we get a chance to see in the movies.
Whether you love her or hate her, Rey is one of the most important characters of the latest Star Wars trilogy. Going from trash scavenger to Jedi and finally ridding the galaxy of Emperor Palpatine once and for all (again), Rey’s story is long and a lot more interesting than what we get a chance to see in the movies.
Who is Rey?
Rey started her story as a scavenger on Jakku where she met Finn, found the Millennium Falcon and joined the Resistance, and started on the path to becoming a Jedi. During her youth on Jakku, Rey learned to work on and repair ships through trial and error on broken-down wrecks she found in the desert. She was also lucky enough to find a functioning flight simulator. Waiting out sandstorms and practicing flying, Rey was pretty much ready for the pilot’s seat of a starship long before she had a chance to actually get into space. These skills would prove useful when she managed to get off-planet. She got surprisingly good at skills that many had wrongfully assumed that she’d never practiced before. This made her a tremendous asset to the Resistance.
Star Wars: Rey & the Rebellion
Outside of what we saw on the big screen, Rey brokered relations with the Mon Calamari, freed the Zixon on Minfar from First Order command, and took on pirates. All while furthering her Jedi training. However, her on-screen battle on Crait would probably be one of the most formative of her character arc. The devastating loss of numbers to the resistance, the death of Luke Skywalker, and closing off communication with Kylo Ren forced her to face some hard truths.
Family History
Eventually, Rey’s parentage would come back to haunt her, creating perhaps the hardest truth for Rey and an exhausted movie audience. Though some of her earliest memories were of her parents selling her to Unkar Plutt for “drinking money,” they were, in reality, trying to hide her somewhere remote and sandy. They did this in an attempt to keep her safe from Emperor Palpatine, whom her father was cloned from. While her father had escaped from Exegol and rejected the Dark Side, Rey was seen as a possible vessel for her grandfather’s spirit which had been previously trapped in an imperfect clone.
After she (and we) grappled briefly with her family history, Rey went on to battle and defeat her grandfather. She earned the collective approval of the Force Ghosts of many former Jedi including Luke, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Kanan Jarrus. The last we see of Rey, she paid a visit to the former moisture farm of Luke’s Uncle Lars where she buried both Luke and Leia‘s lightsabers and introduced herself to a local as “Rey Skywalker,” brought peace by her choices determining who she is and not her family.
How do you feel about Rey? Would like like to have seen more of her childhood and background shown in the movies? How did you react to the Palpatine reveal? Let us know in the comments!
May The Force Be With You, Adventures!
