- Kylo tells Rey that she’s destined to kill Palpy and take the throne, and then in the next scene, Rey declares to Finn that she’s going to destroy Palpatine? Why? Wouldn’t she not want to do that? Maybe we could lampshade it a little bit by slipping in an extra line to the effect of “Kylo says…I’m going to find Palpatine, and destroy him.” “That doesn’t sound like you…” blah blah blah.
A lot of good feedback, Sherlock.
Yeah, I know this scene was probably driving Spence crazy, trying to get it to work within the new context.
This is one scene that I think is handled better in a version of the movie where the revelation is that Rey killed her parents. Krausfadr demonstrated this well in his Resurgence edit by cutting the line about destroying Palpatine and instead had Rey say, “I killed my mother, and my father.” to which Finn responds, “That doesn’t sound like you…”
Honestly the whole interaction doesn’t make a lot of sense in the original film. Their mission from the beginning is to find and stop Palpatine, so Rey saying that she’s going to destroy him shouldn’t be really surprising to Finn. I guess it is the way she says it? But we never really get a beat of Finn looking at Rey and being like, “what’s gotten into her?”
This scene is one reason I sometimes revisit the idea of Rey killing her parents. While I personally think IX needed to move on from Rey parents, it genuinely seems like something Abrams and Terrio would have written, if that makes sense. Not a great storytelling choice, but still better than what we got. One downside is that you’d have to show the ship they tried to leave in, which looks just like Ochi’s, unless some future edit went through the effort to change the shot of it in TFA and TROS. It’d be annoying to bring up a second revelation about her parents in this movie, but it ties in well with ideas about her inner darkness, the threat she poses to the ones she cares about, that maybe she closed herself off to the force after that event until TFA… I think it would’ve been a lame decision but like I said, totally feels like something they would’ve done.
But I think in the context of Spence’s edit, I see it as Rey actually accepting the information Kylo just told her. Maybe she should take the throne, if it means stopping Palpatine. And it isn’t until she almost kills Kylo does she snap out of that mindset. When Rey says to Kylo, “I do [know what I need it do.]” it is actually Rey accepting that she will take the throne. And it is simply the way Rey says she’ll destroy Palpatine that creeps Finn out a little bit.
Maybe you could have Rey say, “I’m going to find Palpatine, and dethrone him.” But I think Finn is bothered by her using the word destroy rather than something like “stop”, so that may take away from Finn’s reaction.