The Rise of Skywalker: Heirs to the Throne (WIP) — Page 10

Alright, through some clever re-ordering of scenes, I think I can just completely avoid Finn talking about Ochi needing to go to Jakku to find Rey. I think it’s really important to not muddy up that sequence of events any more than it already is - Ochi should never know about Rey thanks to her parents protecting her with their lives. I think it works much better if we assume Palpatine only realizes Rey is his granddaughter during the sequels themselves. So here’s how it would work:

The last scene before we go to Rey on Ahch-To is when Finn and D-0 talk about missing Rey. Finn says: “So what’s your name?” and then we go right into the Ahch-To sequence.

When we come back from there, and do the Threepio memory restoration scene, we slip in the scene where Poe promotes Finn and Finn says that D-0 has a bunch of information on Exegol. Instead of then talking about Ochi for no reason, we go right into them learning that information. Here is a rough test of how this would work:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nSoEkH1KPgiF0IE_qD9f8dUm7DBsrq9p/view?usp=sharing

I’d probably just remove the music from the scene I moved over so that it transitions into the next part more smoothly.

I’m going to double-post. Sorry, not sorry lol.

Two more things that I’ve been running through my head over the past week or so.

1. Palpatine says: “Long have I waited…” and can’t clarify what he has waited so long for because in this version he hasn’t known about Rey until relatively recently. I may try and create a Palpatine AI voice model to say something like “For a worthy heir to the Sith” or “I knew you could defeat Kylo Ren”. Recall that his following line will now be reinstated - “I never wanted you dead, I wanted you here, with me, Empress Palpatine”.

2. Half of the scene immediately after the destruction of Kijimi is technically usable even with Kijimi’s exclusion. All that happens is Palps blasts a message to the whole galaxy to surrender or die, and Poe is notified that Leia made him General. Do we think that Palps doing this is a stupid move, or does it make the civilian fleet showing up make more sense? I’m just curious on people’s thoughts regarding this small scene. It would lead right into Poe going to Leia’s body.

On a thematic level, it may feel better if people don’t rise up simply because Palpatine is threatening them, but rather because Luke’s legend has inspired them to stand up against any possible threat. Logistically though, it’s impossible that Lando personally reached out to so many people regarding the situation lol.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

It’s from the canon Vader comics that it’s on Exegol. One of the last lines said by Palps before this moment is “I made Snoke”. Without the vat of Snokes (which doesn’t make sense because Snoke should have been his own one-time creation), the hand is meant to explain the source of the majority of Snoke’s DNA. It also canonically helped in the creation of Palpatine’s clones, like how Grogu’s blood was wanted in The Mandalorian.

My personal head canon is that both the Skywalker blade and the hand made their way to Exegol. Perhaps one of the Emperor’s agents was spying on Vader during Cloud City and managed to get both of them. When Rey’s father escapes Exegol, he takes the Skywalker blade with him. He trades it off and it ends up in Maz’s possession. This is why the Skywalker blade calls to Rey, as her father rescued it from the Sith.

Your idea for Luke’s hand and saber is very good! 👍

I was able to upscale the video of the hand to 1080p so it shouldn’t look as sketchy now. Might have to put some slight film grain over the clip in order to blend it, though.

Here is what I’m leaning toward for the dialogue (will generate it this weekend). I wanted to make sure it was clearer and easier to understand for a very casual viewer of Star Wars:

“Tell me where you are. You don’t know the whole story… Your father stole Ochi’s ship to escape from Exegol. He took your lightsaber from there, too. But he sold it, because he couldn’t use the Force. So Palpatine granted Ochi revenge…”

Here’s the line generation I’m leaning toward on Ahch-To. Does this sound natural to everyone?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tfa31hHzUwS6iMTOHTm1DbD3w458jXNr/view?usp=sharing

Very nicely done. It has the feel of a line that was ADRed in which considering how common the practice is for TONS of movies, it feels very natural and also the word choices, inflections and such feel like something that properly came from Luke.

Sounds/looks absolutely natural.

Good to hear! ADR quality is what I’m shooting for with all the lines I’m adding in. If it wasn’t obvious already, the line is meant to be a callback to one of their last interactions from TLJ:

Luke: “I failed. Because I was Luke Skywalker. Jedi Master. A legend.”

Rey: “The galaxy may need a legend. I need someone to show me my place in all of this…”

So Luke reminds Rey of her first point, and then the rest of the sequence is him helping Rey understand her place in things despite being a Palpatine.

Luke is implicitly teaching Rey that galactic fear and personal fear operate the same way, but they wear different masks. The galaxy fears the First Order, Palpatine’s return, and that resistance is pointless. Rey fears her own power, her bloodline, and that she’ll hurt those she loves. Both fears lead to the same result of withdrawal, inaction, and isolation. Luke tried to solve galactic fear by removing himself from the equation, incorrectly believing that the Jedi were causing more harm than good. Luke’s personal fear didn’t keep him on the island, as that would portray him as a coward and retcon his character arc from TLJ in its entirety. Rey is trying to solve her personal fear by removing herself. Same mistake, but at a different scale.

The galaxy sparked to action thanks to Luke’s return. But Leia was the one who helped Rey find her place in everything. Thanks to Ascendant, now she, not Luke, is the one to have that same personal fear of giving in to hatred like her dark relative, and so stopped training as a Jedi. Despite learning that Rey was related to her mortal enemy, she still showed love and overcame her fear by training Rey as a Jedi once more. She even offered her a place in the Skywalker legacy with her new line: “You are family.” This works especially well because she herself was adopted by the Organa’s, so she knows the importance of this.

Another thing I’ve come to understand is that fundamentally, the reveal of Rey being a Nobody in TLJ is just about Rey’s sense of self-worth. Having that reveal only hurts for her because she thinks it means she doesn’t have a place and people to call home. Having Rey as a Palpatine is not a full retcon because it preserves the thematic meaning of the original reveal for Rey; she still feels that she doesn’t deserve to have a place and people. Perhaps now even more so because of her dark power and legacy. This is why I don’t necessarily agree that a Rey Nobody edit is necessary, because I’m more concerned about prioritizing established character arcs over every story detail.

On a completely unrelated note, I remembered that a part of the reason Ascendant opted to have Palpatine always want to kill Rey is because he, as Snoke, tried to have her killed. But the nice thing about my new sequence of events is that Palpatine doesn’t even need to know that Rey is his granddaughter until after TLJ since Ochi never discovers her existence. I’d imagine it would be hard to sense relatedness through a meat puppet. He could just think she’s some random Jedi prodigy that made her way to Luke, the same as Kylo thought initially. It’s not until he gets the same vision as Rey (“He saw what you would become”) that he puts the pieces together. This could have even been the signal to him to start deploying the Final Order fleet.

I had considered the fact that we don’t know about the galaxy rising above its fear until later, and to that I’d point out the changes we already made on Kijimi and the puppet show. Zorri says that things have been crazy on Kijimi “ever since Skywalker”. The puppet show shows that Luke’s legend gives the people hope.

Without Palpatine’s message going out to the whole galaxy that he is about to attack, we need to understand intuitively in the moment why the civilian fleet has arrived. Or else there’s not much of an explanation why people would bother showing up. I understand there’s a fine line between spelling it out too clearly to the audience and laying breadcrumbs, but in this instance my intention was to retroactively explain why the Deus Ex Machina happens.

That being said, your line alternative seems decent. The only problem is that it implies “the weight of [his] legend” was something that Luke feared.

To me, that reads as more of something he resented. There was no fear there. He simply wished it didn’t exist at all.

In other words, your line alternative reframes his exile as insecurity, not misjudgment. It drifts dangerously close to TLJ misreadings that paint Luke as avoidant. Luke didn’t fear being a legend. He misunderstood what legends are for. They’re something to strive toward, not the standard. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be present.

Luke isn’t narrating current events. He’s explaining cause and effect. He’s saying that fear isolates people, legends give people permission to hope, and removing himself increased fear instead of reducing it. It’s not a spoiler because it’s the lesson that Rey needs right now, because she is about to make the exact same mistake.

TL;DR - TLJ frames Luke’s exile as a philosophical mistake, not an emotional one. My line reflects that growth - he didn’t fear being a legend, he failed to understand how legends help people overcome fear. That lesson is exactly what Rey needs in this moment, as he’s about to tell her the legend of Leia to help her out of her own fear.

To be clear, I do appreciate your feedback, Thrawn. Here are some options that solve both issues we’ve addressed:

“Legends exist to push back fear”

“Legends aren’t a standard. They counter fear.”

“Legends give people something to face their fear.”

Thoughts?

Conquer is a bit of negative word, and it also implies finality. If we want to avoid creating the impression that Luke’s legend has assured the galaxy victory, we should avoid anything that suggests finality.

So among these options:

“Legends can push back fear.”

“Legends give courage against fear.”

“Legends give courage in the face of fear.”

“Legends inspire action in the face of fear.”

“Legends inspire action, even in fear.”

I like Legends inspire action in the face of fear.

Idir, I like how that does theoretically solve the issue of Luke telling the audience what’s guaranteed to happen next. The only problem is that uncertainty you’ve added in also extends to Luke himself, making him seem less sure of what he’s learned since TLJ. His return there was pretty definitive, so I’d like to imagine his conclusion on the purpose of legends was also definitive.

EDIT: What about - “Legends inspire hope in the face of fear.” ?

I think relying an AI to deliver a line in a very specific way is kind of asking for trouble. I have to generate it like 50 times just to get something that sounds natural, let alone delivered a certain way. So maybe your idea could work if we were on set with Mark Hamill, but in this case we need to consider my limitations.

Also, in TLJ, Luke’s decision to make a projection on Crait is not contemplative, it’s decisive. He isn’t testing whether legends matter, he immediately acts on the conclusion that they do after his conversation with Yoda. So when he appears here as a Force ghost, the audience expectation is that he understands the cost and the value now of what he did. Adding any sort of language that is uncertain (ignoring delivery) retroactively implies he’s still unsure and that his sacrifice might have been experimental.

I think I’ve landed on: “Legends inspire hope in the face of fear.” Mostly because it’s the thesis of Luke’s entire final lesson, so it feels appropriate to place at the beginning. He does a similar thing in TLJ: “Lesson two: now that they’re extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, and hubris.” His refined worldview is the inverse of this.

Changing the topic, I’d like to discuss the final Knights of Ren (KoR) lines. I do really enjoy the “Traitor!” line and how it mirrors Kylo saying the same thing to Finn in TFA. The only problem is that it creates the false impression that Ben is a traitor for wanting to join Rey in defeating Palpatine. Even in the original Ascendant edit, I believe we positioned things so that Kylo’s plan was to have Rey join him and the Knights in killing Palpatine. So here’s how we can fix this:

Knight 1: “We sense no Shadow in you…”

Knight 2: “Traitor!”

The line “We sense no Shadow in you…” is intuitive because it communicates three things at once without exposition. Firstly, the Knights are Force-attuned enough to perceive alignment, thus explaining how they can beat the snot out of Ben at first. Secondly, in canon, the “Shadow” is the KoR’s term for “dark side of the Force”, and that’s important because we want to separate what Kylo and his Knights had planned from the philosophy of the Sith. And finally, Ben’s internal state has fundamentally changed. In that moment he isn’t conflicted, he’s resolved, and the absence of “Shadow” signals that the rage, hunger, and dominance they once admired in him are gone. By following that observation with “Traitor!”, the betrayal is clearly spiritual, not political; he hasn’t betrayed a plan, he’s betrayed the darkness itself. The audience doesn’t need lore to understand it. They simply register that something about him feels different, the Knights can sense it, and that difference is why they turn on him.

The only trouble, of course, will be locating whoever voiced the original line: “Well look who finally made it…” I suppose I don’t necessarily need it to be the same person since there are like 2 other Knights on screen when the line is said, but that still leaves the issue of figuring out how to replicate the Kylo Ren voice effect.

I’ve also gone ahead and made the changelog on the first page fully up-to-date! There are some new surprises at the bottom 😃