First of all, thanks for reading it all! I’m actually surprised you managed to keep up with my scatterbrained third act 😉
But it’s been great, really rewarding to finish a story and give some real closure to these characters. The work’s not done of course, I want to do a final novel-style version with quite a few changes, but even if this is what I saw onscreen in December I would have been quite happy.
The biggest issue I still have with the story is that Ben’s death and redemption has never felt quite right, especially in light of my later decision to have him be the vessel for the Sith spirit. If he were to die and the Sith with him, the Force should return to balance and the Sith should not return. However, being vanquished in the first act without Rey even knowing about them is a massive miss, so I brought them back in the final act. On a related note, if Ben were to die then Rey should lose her power before she could bring him back.
As you can see, although it’s an interesting and crucial set of scenes they are fraught with complication and contradiction. After a lot of thought I have an idea for fixing them though: The mission of the Resistance is to capture the Supreme Leader and win the war. When this goes wrong, Rey tries to save Kylo after his attempted assassination but she cannot as he is already too weak. She makes the decision to put him into some sort of carbon freeze while she goes to the Knights of Ren to plead for their help in reviving him. The doctors are horrified at this as carbon freeze will keep him suffering as he slowly dies, but Rey knows that if his power dies hers will as well. So it is done. Kylo can still commune with Rey through the Force while his body is in stasis, and over the course of act 2 their power will weaken until he finally ‘dies’ at the end of act 2. It is at this point that he has the reunion with the Force ghosts and the spirit of the Sith flees from his mind.
Rey awakens in a pirate brig, a sinister voice inside her head…
That’s one of the new ideas I’m playing with right now.
Other ideas include turning Gramelon from a primordial fantasy forest into a primordial fantasy hellscape to better match the look of the Knights of Ren in Rey’s TFA Force vision.
Speaking of the Knights of Ren, I plan to have her actually beseech the gathered knights in their castle before the arrival of Hux since the knights are definitely underwritten right now.
The Jedi texts disappear from the story after act 1, so that feels like it should be more important going forward.
Thrawn’s master plan is still not worthy of a military genius, but this is a good time to plan something better, though I don’t know what right now.
There are a good dozen other things but you get the idea 😃 What I’m really interested in knowing is what you think of it in its broad strokes. Is there some big aspect of plot or character that is off base for you? If you were to write an Episode 9, what would you have done? What is the one thing that you would have really liked to see happen in a Star Wars saga episode?