I was thinking about what changes needed to be made to the other films to remove Rey Palpatine, and I think one of the biggest things would be to cut Ochi’s ship flying away from Jakku in the TFA flashback.
I remember awhile back I had this idea of creating a new shot to replace that one in TFA, instead we’d see two people disappearing over the top of a sand dune, with the sun in front of them (making them dark silhouettes).
This could parallel beautifully with the end of TROS if you had Ben Solo live and meet Rey on Tattooine. We could see his silhouette coming towards her over the horizon, with the twin suns rising behind him. Not only would you get a reversal of that classic “cowboy riding off into the sunset” cliché (which Gary Kurtz wanted for Luke in ROTJ), but these two parallel shots would also be a nice callback to this line in TFA:
Whoever you’re waiting for on Jakku, they’re never coming back. But, there’s someone who still could.
Why can’t we just assume it’s Rey’s parents abandoning her?
That’s what I’m saying. You can’t remove Ochi’s ship from IX, but if you wanted to remove Rey Palpatine from the story, you would have to cut Rey seeing that same ship from her TFA forceback.
You can keep the ship and Ochi in IX, but you’d have to nix that connection to 7 so it’d just be a random ship and not one that Rey remembers. So my idea is to have Rey still see her parents leaving her, but not leaving on the same ship we see in IX.