What I see as the crux of this saga is how the Skywalker family has ended up as the linchpin in the Sith/Jedi conflict. So in some way the Skywalker family will end the age old Sith/Jedi conflict once and for all. The other thing I see is a fundamental change in understanding of the force. We have always taken Ben’s word from ANH that there is a dark side and light side to the force and the dark side is inherantly evil. What if that is not the case and the evil comes from how it is used. So if the Skywalker family can end the conflict and if Rey can start a new tradition of balanced used of both sides of the force, there will be no further conflict in the Galaxy, at least not for a very very long time (more like 3000 years instead of 30).
And what I see in the ST is a bunch of ideas floated in the EU (I haven’t adjusted to calling it Legends) and distilling them into an epic story to finish up the Saga. The Thrawn trilogy esentially did exactly what the First Order is doing, but lacked the dark side force master running things. Palpatine came back in a way in the EU. There were other dangers as well. So this trilogy has a lot of familiar things that I see no need to question. I was not a big follower of the EU, but I kept up on what the major books were about and read quite a few of them. I’ve also watched all of Clone Wars and Rebels. I try not to bring any of that up, but it does provide a lot of insight into where Lucasfilm may be taking the Saga, at least in terms of the force. There has been a big emphasis on balance, which cropped up in TLJ. And also having read the old Marvel comics, the original Star Wars scripts, and a bunch of other things, I’ve seen a lot of Lucas’s discarded ideas come back and seen just how much of the Star Wars universe has come from outside the films (and ended up in later films). So while Lucas as stated that the force is not like yin yang, the way things are moving very much make it a yin yang with the users being good or evil or even neutral. TPM introduced balance into the film canon and now it is time to see what that really means.
When it comes to Snoke, we already know that he is the leader of the First Order which rose from the ashes of the Empire. It has not been covered, but likely from a industrial complex on the outer rim where they at first kept the Empire alive and then decided to reconquer the galaxy. At what point Snoke came into the picture we don’t know. At what point Kylo Ren was turned we don’t know. At what point they came up with Starkiller Base we don’t know (though I can see this being one of Palpatine’s projects). Who Snoke is is only as important as the end of the saga needs it to be. That Palpatine was not completely defeated in ROTJ brings this back to the origin of the saga in TPM with Anakin (or his offspring) bringing balance to the force and the final defeat of Palpatine and the Sith. Just which of the Snoke/Palpatine relationship theories is accurate is immaterial to the ending. They will do something to tie things together that they think makes sense and that some will like and some won’t. But I think the ending of the Saga is going to be as personal as ROTJ was. It is going to finish the expanded story that grew from the battle between Luke, Vader, and Palpatine in ROTJ to the Jedi vs. Sith over thousands of years and bringing balance to the force. Lucas’s retelling of the end of ROTJ was pretty much shoehorned on to the existing movie and there is room for whatever Lucas had in his mind before he canned the ST for a decade.
Great post! From my point of view I think RoTJ trivialised the Dark Side somewhat. While TESB stated that the the Dark Side was “quicker, easier, more seductive”, it still implied (to me) that it was something of a process and a choice - whereas RoTJ made it seem more like a deadly virus that you catch if you get too angry. I prefer the notion that it’s more complicated than that, and that maybe the Jedi (and Sith) were being naive in even believing there was a ‘dark side’ as such. To that end I really like Luke’s speech about the light and the dark and the balance in-between that he makes in TLJ.