Zardnaar
Legend
A line about Sith powers and something about technology.
Palpatine Was A Clone in RoS
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
A line about Sith powers and something about technology.
Nytmare
David Jose
Yeah, isn't that "Palpatine is a clone"?
Zardnaar
Legend
Not specifically. Technology alone could explain the clone, you would probably have to be familiar with the old EU essence transfer to get to this answer.
Before that cloning was just copying a body. Palps is doing that and transferring his spirit.
In theory Palps could do it again or they could outright clone him.
Legatus Legionis
< BWAH HA Ha ha >
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Last edited:
Zardnaar
Legend
Technically Rey didn't strike him down either, he kind of defeated himself.
RangerWickett
Legend
Honestly, the title Duel of the Fates is pretty cool. And the idea of having spirits of lots of Sith and Jedi clashing is pretty cool. And if you do a callback to how Episode 1 was titled "The Phantom Menace," you can make this work.
Things I'm taking from Ep 7 and 8 that are going to get highlighted:
Kylo saying to Vader's helmet "I'm going to finish what you started."
Finn being captured as a child and forced to fight.
Rey being the child of nobodies, who nevertheless makes a difference.
Rose being a First Order spy.
Poe being the commander who thinks about the long game.
Intro - It's five years later. Kylo Ren, with other First Order troops, conquers Canto Bight. Kylo's vicious. But as the fight's winding down he senses the kid from the end of Ep 8 (now in his teens), sees him fighting with innocent bravery, and he hesitates, reminded of his own childhood. But he's mostly just brutal and violent. His skin is starting to turn a bit sallow, his eyes slightly sunken.
The First Order troops capture the kid and drag him to a group of other kids, bound for being trained. Kylo pulls the kid out of line, saying to one of the Knights of Ren that the Force is strong with this one, but he's too old to be trained to be a knight.
Kylo: "You were the first of the knights Snoke trained. He usually sent away children who were unfit."
Knight: "Yes. The one time the previous supreme leader tried to train someone this old, that boy overthrew him."
Kylo: "Did he ever say where he sent them?"
Knight: "No, that was his secret. . . . Though you know he was always bragging. He said he dug the secret out of the heart of a dead star."
Act One - After the ship with the kids gets sent off Canto Bight, it's intercepted and rescued by Rey, Finn, and Poe plus some other resistance fighters that Kylo Ren can cut down, and Chewbacca.
During the action, Finn confronts some storm troopers who are guarding kids, and tries to reason with them, saying that they were taken too, that their lives were stolen. The troopers hesitate, then agree, and they help Finn get a group of kids to run to safety. As they run, Finn senses something, and dodges right before Kylo appears and swings what would have been a killing blow. Kylo kills one trooper who has defected and wounds another. Then he corners Finn and mockingly says he's going to kill all the deserters, all except Finn. He'll let him live to give his best wishes to Leia.
Finn snarls and says that Leia died two years ago. Kylo doesn't believe it, saying he would have sensed it. Then Rey shows up, says that Leia reached out to him, but the Dark Side had clouded him too much that he couldn't hear her. Kylo's a bit shaken, but as he's regaining his will to fight we get one of those handy explosions that gives the two sides a chance to split. Rey and Finn are able to escape with the kids. However, Chewbacca is captured.
I'm going to happily steal the idea from Nando v Movies where Kylo and some of his knights try to interrogate Chewbacca, but Chewie breaks loose and expresses all his rage that Ben, the son of his best friend, has killed or tormented everyone he loved.
The Resistance group flies to Coruscant, capital of the New Republic, which is currently free, but has a lot of propaganda painting the First Order as uncompromising heroes, the Republic as corrupt, and the Resistance as terrorists. They meet up with Rose (and 3-P0 and R2), who has been trying to get allies, but not doing so well. Poe and Finn try to explain to the kids they rescued that they need their help; the First Order has been slowly seizing worlds at the edge of the Republic, using children as hostages to cow people who might fight back, and now the Republic is considering a vote in two days to surrender to the First Order, hoping to avoid war. Poe hopes that by showing the kids to the Senate, they can force their hand and make them take a stand.
The kids don't want to do it, but Finn is able to bond with them over the fact that he was stolen from his parents. They agree.
Alas, they get stonewalled, and the senate refuses to hear testimony of the kids. Rose says she thinks one of the senators is working with the First Order, but she's evasive on why she thinks that. Worried that they might be targeted if they stay anywhere public, they decide to hide out. Rey senses a place that calls to her.
Act Two - Kylo meets with Hux, gives some orders, studies some relics that belonged to Snoke, and then departs for the ruined Death Star.
Rey and team takes the kids to Coruscant's Jedi temple, which is ruined and abandoned, but also strangely the only green space we've ever seen on the planet, since no one wants to build there.
They look for rooms to lay low, and Rey and the Force sensitive kid specifically they end up in the room where Anakin killed the younglings. The kid asks her to train him, and says he always dreamed of being a Jedi, to be a hero. She says she understands, that she always longed for something to belong to. But she's not a Jedi. The Jedi way is outdated. They rejected fear and anger and hate, yes, but also passion, joy, love. The kid is dejected, and asks if the legends about Luke Skywalker were false, and that gives her pause. She says no, it's true. All of it.
That's when we reveal Finn has been hanging around, trying not to eavesdrop, but charmingly awkward when Rey notices him. They walk to another spot, and Finn opens by talking about how he's felt something awakening in him recently. She thinks he's talking about the Force, and says yes, she felt they had a connection. He fumbles a bit, then explains that no, he meant what was awakening was his feelings for her. She's unsure what to make of this at first, and he keeps talking. He said it kept never seeming like the right time to tell her, but he was afraid of what he'd feel if something happened to her and he'd said nothing.
There's some palpable tension, which is right when 3-P0 butts in and delivers the good news: R2 has retrieved the flight plan of the senator, and Captain Dameron has a plan to sneak them on board! The moment ruined, Rey decides to go with Rose, Poe, BB-8, and Finn to undertake a spy mission.
Meanwhile, Kylo Ren finds the ruins of the Death Star in orbit around Endor, enters the throne room, and finds a shattered holocron near a hidden room. He touches it and is assaulted by memories of Palpatine, Vader, and Luke in the throne room, where Kylo is stunned to see Vader sacrifice himself for his son. The vision shifts to Kylo seeing himself kill Han Solo. He collapses to his knees in darkness, and sees Luke - not quite a Force ghost, but still here to talk with him.
Luke gets close to getting through to him, but Kylo rages and demands to know why he sees Luke but not his mother. Luke explains that she was pure, and could not reach through the cloud of the Dark Side. When they last met, Luke held on to his own anger at Ben - anger for the betrayal, and for killing his best friend. It's that anger, that darkness that connects them now. It's unclear whether this is working. Then Luke mentions the night Ben thought Luke tried to kill him, and we see snippets of visions around it, of Snoke reaching out to Ben, stoking his fear. Kylo concentrates, steers the vision, and sees Snoke years ago entering this same ruined throne room and finding the Sith holocron.
In the vision, Kylo sees the coordinates, but as the vision ends Luke warns him that if he goes there, he'll be destroyed.
In the spy mission, Poe and Finn fail the reverse Bechdel test when - while sneaking about the senator's ship - Poe asks about Rey and is ambiguously flirty toward Finn. Finn clearly doesn't know how to process those feelings, and tells Poe to focus on the mission.
The senator's ship links up with the First Order fleet, which is massing to attack Coruscant, and which is gathered around a facility that's constructing a new hyper-laser. The senator hands over to General Hux the tactical deployments of Republic ships across the sector and their command codes. Hux says that if the Republic is too proud to surrender, (he turns to look out the window at their partially completed hyper-laser), they shall be crushed.
The senator is horrified, but Hux laughs and says not to worry. He's not planning to destroy the planet; they need a capital, after all. No, this weapon isn't as devastating as Starkiller base, but it's easily strong enough to wipe the Senate building off the map.
Concurrent to this, the group sneaks off the senator's ship and try to get intel that can turn the tide. Rose is able to persuade a First Order officer to look the other way so they can get info about where the abducted children are being trained as child soldiers. This leads to Finn accusing her of being weird, and it comes out that originally Rose was a First Order sympathizer. She was only with the Resistance because her sister was, and when she died, she didn't know what to think, but wanted to blame everyone. But then the First Order tried to kill her, and she saw Finn's heroism, and she regrets ever helping the First Order.
Rey sneaks to Kylo's personal chambers, and finds Chewbacca there, tortured and weak but alive. She kills one Knight of Ren guarding him. But right as they're about to leave, Kylo Ren returns from his mission to the Death Star. Rey is enraged by what he did to Chewie, whereas Kylo is conflicted. We get a chance for them each to talk, but when he tries to explain how he feels, looking for help and empathy, looking for an excuse to turn away from his path, she thinks he's trying to justify his villainy. They clash just long enough to destroy Vader's helmet when storm troopers arrive and the other resistance folks show up too. They escape the ship, hotly pursued, but manage to get the tactical data the senator was bringing.
Rose warns them not to go back to Coruscant; the First Order will signal ahead and they'll be shot the moment they drop out of hyperspace. So instead they steal Kylo's ship and fly to link up with Maz Kanata. She can then tell Rey the story of how she got the light saber (it's brief: Lando, who's a co-owner of her destroyed business, found it on Cloud City after the Empire fell). Cue Lando showing up, reuniting with Chewie. Spirits are down, and we can get some more Finn-Rey emotions.
Then, on Kylo's ship, Rey finds a hand-drawn map Kylo map from memory, showing a passage down under the ruins of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
Act Three - The build-up to the finale comes in cross-cut, slightly asynchronous narratives.
The First Order arrives in orbit of Coruscant, along with its hyper-laser. They send a delegation to the Senate, complete with walkers in the streets and fighters overhead. Some people cheer, many boo. But when Kylo refuses to deliver a fascist dictator speech, Hux happily steps up and does that.
Kylo instead heads to the temple and finds the kids lingering there. He offers to show the Force sensitive one what a Jedi truly is.
We reveal that before this point, the Resistance folks decided to make a last ditch effort, which involves using the stolen tactical information to order the Republic fleet to attack the First Order (a command the Republic soldiers are quite eager to do, since they've been angry at the senate's wishy-washiness). Poe, with Lando and a small force of Resistance ships, goes to seize the hyperlaser. Rose fights aboard a ship too, serving as a bomber, just like her sister did.
While they were getting that attack ready, Finn goes to Senate and, right as Hux is finishing his (televised) speech, Finn calls him out, reveals that he was kidnapped and forced to be a child soldier, and that if the First Order succeeds they'll do the same.
And simultaneous to that, Rey goes to the temple to pursue Kylo. Deep under the temple, she approaches to find Kylo - a tight grip on the child - near a sealed well of darkness, which is surrounded by scorch marks in roughly the shape of children's bodies. Kylo says he knew Rey would come, knew he could count on her to want to destroy him.
He explains that before the Jedi were here, this was a Sith temple to the power of the Dark Side. The Jedi sealed it, but it holds the power of generations of dark Force users. When Palpatine tapped its power, he became Emperor. When he died, his spirit was drawn here. Snoke was only just beginning to understand it, and could call upon the ancient Sith magic to perform Force powers unseen in ages. He bonded Kylo and Rey with - he gestures at the scorched bodies - these offerings. What power could he claim with a stronger sacrifice?
Rey yells that she won't let him kill the boy, but he calmly shakes his head, and says he himself is the sacrifice. Anakin Skywalker destroyed the Emperor, but not the Sith. He says, "I'm going to finish what he started."
And he opens the well. Crackling red spirits pour out and infuse him with power. He attacks Rey, and we have a lightsaber duel. She initially can't hold him back, and flees upward with the kid. He pulls all the power out of the well and shatters it, then pursues her.
Hux gets word of the space assault on his hyperlaser, and he orders his men (storm troopers and some knights of Ren) to seize the Senate. A blaster battle begins there, where Finn will eventually get storm troopers and the locals on his side and probably kill Hux by dropping one of those hover daises on him, but not before he orders the hyperlaser to fire on the senate.
Poe, Rose, and company have an epic space battle, but they're unable to get to the hyperlaser in time. It charges.
When Rey reaches the top level and sees the stars overhead filled with explosions, initially she's overwhelmed, but then she hears Luke's voice: reach out. The kid holds her hand to strengthen her, and she extends a hand skyward. We see moments of all her friends from across the films sensing her, and closing their eyes at the same time. And their shared will strengthens Rey.
Kylo attacks again, and the battle is titanic in damage but intimate in scale. Rey doesn't fight to kill, but to wear Kylo out.
Overhead, the hyperlaser is aimed at the Senate. Poe radios to Finn to yell for him to get out of the Senate, but Finn calls out to Rey. Her lightsaber catching Kylo's, Rey gestures upward, and in space, the entire vessel tilts. The beam fires, aimed for the temple. And like Kylo Ren in the very first scene of The Force Awakens, Rey catches the shot with the Force. It hovers in the air.
Millions of people on Coruscant, from horizon to horizon, see the beam over the Jedi temple.
Kylo demands she let it strike, to destroy him, and the Sith with him. But Rey refuses. Anakin Skywalker was not meant to destroy the Sith, but to bring balance to the Force. To bring harmony.
She looks around, and throughout the temple, Force ghosts of Jedi appear, calmly, and Kylo realizes what has been offered to him. The Sith spirits attempt to flee, but he holds them in, and then lets the Jedi spirits join him, the light and dark swirling until they cancel each other out. The last that approach him are Luke, and beside him Leia. (Here we use the moment where he says "Mother...." and her response is (like Han Solo) "I know.") He collapses, emotionally drained. And Rey walks over and offers a hand to help him up.
Together, their final gesture is to hurl the hyperlaser bolt back into space, destroying the super weapon.
Aftermath - Rey reports to the Senate that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is dead. The First Order is defeated, and the children of the Republic will be returned. There's a celebration, no dialogue, maybe an Ewok in the background. Finn and Rey clearly are close to each other, uncertain (because dammit, I want to ship them but there hasn't been enough screen time to make it work).
The closing credits. And then, again, an idea courtesy of Nando v Movies: the one and only post-credits scene in Star Wars, where Ben Solo is out rescuing people held captive by the First Order remnant. Because dying a martyr isn't enough to redeem him. He has to, to quote the very first lines in The Force Awakens, make things right.
The First Order troops capture the kid and drag him to a group of other kids, bound for being trained. Kylo pulls the kid out of line, saying to one of the Knights of Ren that the Force is strong with this one, but he's too old to be trained to be a knight.
Kylo: "You were the first of the knights Snoke trained. He usually sent away children who were unfit."
Knight: "Yes. The one time the previous supreme leader tried to train someone this old, that boy overthrew him."
Kylo: "Did he ever say where he sent them?"
Knight: "No, that was his secret. . . . Though you know he was always bragging. He said he dug the secret out of the heart of a dead star."
Act One - After the ship with the kids gets sent off Canto Bight, it's intercepted and rescued by Rey, Finn, and Poe plus some other resistance fighters that Kylo Ren can cut down, and Chewbacca.
During the action, Finn confronts some storm troopers who are guarding kids, and tries to reason with them, saying that they were taken too, that their lives were stolen. The troopers hesitate, then agree, and they help Finn get a group of kids to run to safety. As they run, Finn senses something, and dodges right before Kylo appears and swings what would have been a killing blow. Kylo kills one trooper who has defected and wounds another. Then he corners Finn and mockingly says he's going to kill all the deserters, all except Finn. He'll let him live to give his best wishes to Leia.
Finn snarls and says that Leia died two years ago. Kylo doesn't believe it, saying he would have sensed it. Then Rey shows up, says that Leia reached out to him, but the Dark Side had clouded him too much that he couldn't hear her. Kylo's a bit shaken, but as he's regaining his will to fight we get one of those handy explosions that gives the two sides a chance to split. Rey and Finn are able to escape with the kids. However, Chewbacca is captured.
I'm going to happily steal the idea from Nando v Movies where Kylo and some of his knights try to interrogate Chewbacca, but Chewie breaks loose and expresses all his rage that Ben, the son of his best friend, has killed or tormented everyone he loved.
The Resistance group flies to Coruscant, capital of the New Republic, which is currently free, but has a lot of propaganda painting the First Order as uncompromising heroes, the Republic as corrupt, and the Resistance as terrorists. They meet up with Rose (and 3-P0 and R2), who has been trying to get allies, but not doing so well. Poe and Finn try to explain to the kids they rescued that they need their help; the First Order has been slowly seizing worlds at the edge of the Republic, using children as hostages to cow people who might fight back, and now the Republic is considering a vote in two days to surrender to the First Order, hoping to avoid war. Poe hopes that by showing the kids to the Senate, they can force their hand and make them take a stand.
The kids don't want to do it, but Finn is able to bond with them over the fact that he was stolen from his parents. They agree.
Alas, they get stonewalled, and the senate refuses to hear testimony of the kids. Rose says she thinks one of the senators is working with the First Order, but she's evasive on why she thinks that. Worried that they might be targeted if they stay anywhere public, they decide to hide out. Rey senses a place that calls to her.
Act Two - Kylo meets with Hux, gives some orders, studies some relics that belonged to Snoke, and then departs for the ruined Death Star.
Rey and team takes the kids to Coruscant's Jedi temple, which is ruined and abandoned, but also strangely the only green space we've ever seen on the planet, since no one wants to build there.
They look for rooms to lay low, and Rey and the Force sensitive kid specifically they end up in the room where Anakin killed the younglings. The kid asks her to train him, and says he always dreamed of being a Jedi, to be a hero. She says she understands, that she always longed for something to belong to. But she's not a Jedi. The Jedi way is outdated. They rejected fear and anger and hate, yes, but also passion, joy, love. The kid is dejected, and asks if the legends about Luke Skywalker were false, and that gives her pause. She says no, it's true. All of it.
That's when we reveal Finn has been hanging around, trying not to eavesdrop, but charmingly awkward when Rey notices him. They walk to another spot, and Finn opens by talking about how he's felt something awakening in him recently. She thinks he's talking about the Force, and says yes, she felt they had a connection. He fumbles a bit, then explains that no, he meant what was awakening was his feelings for her. She's unsure what to make of this at first, and he keeps talking. He said it kept never seeming like the right time to tell her, but he was afraid of what he'd feel if something happened to her and he'd said nothing.
There's some palpable tension, which is right when 3-P0 butts in and delivers the good news: R2 has retrieved the flight plan of the senator, and Captain Dameron has a plan to sneak them on board! The moment ruined, Rey decides to go with Rose, Poe, BB-8, and Finn to undertake a spy mission.
Meanwhile, Kylo Ren finds the ruins of the Death Star in orbit around Endor, enters the throne room, and finds a shattered holocron near a hidden room. He touches it and is assaulted by memories of Palpatine, Vader, and Luke in the throne room, where Kylo is stunned to see Vader sacrifice himself for his son. The vision shifts to Kylo seeing himself kill Han Solo. He collapses to his knees in darkness, and sees Luke - not quite a Force ghost, but still here to talk with him.
Luke gets close to getting through to him, but Kylo rages and demands to know why he sees Luke but not his mother. Luke explains that she was pure, and could not reach through the cloud of the Dark Side. When they last met, Luke held on to his own anger at Ben - anger for the betrayal, and for killing his best friend. It's that anger, that darkness that connects them now. It's unclear whether this is working. Then Luke mentions the night Ben thought Luke tried to kill him, and we see snippets of visions around it, of Snoke reaching out to Ben, stoking his fear. Kylo concentrates, steers the vision, and sees Snoke years ago entering this same ruined throne room and finding the Sith holocron.
In the vision, Kylo sees the coordinates, but as the vision ends Luke warns him that if he goes there, he'll be destroyed.
In the spy mission, Poe and Finn fail the reverse Bechdel test when - while sneaking about the senator's ship - Poe asks about Rey and is ambiguously flirty toward Finn. Finn clearly doesn't know how to process those feelings, and tells Poe to focus on the mission.
The senator's ship links up with the First Order fleet, which is massing to attack Coruscant, and which is gathered around a facility that's constructing a new hyper-laser. The senator hands over to General Hux the tactical deployments of Republic ships across the sector and their command codes. Hux says that if the Republic is too proud to surrender, (he turns to look out the window at their partially completed hyper-laser), they shall be crushed.
The senator is horrified, but Hux laughs and says not to worry. He's not planning to destroy the planet; they need a capital, after all. No, this weapon isn't as devastating as Starkiller base, but it's easily strong enough to wipe the Senate building off the map.
Concurrent to this, the group sneaks off the senator's ship and try to get intel that can turn the tide. Rose is able to persuade a First Order officer to look the other way so they can get info about where the abducted children are being trained as child soldiers. This leads to Finn accusing her of being weird, and it comes out that originally Rose was a First Order sympathizer. She was only with the Resistance because her sister was, and when she died, she didn't know what to think, but wanted to blame everyone. But then the First Order tried to kill her, and she saw Finn's heroism, and she regrets ever helping the First Order.
Rey sneaks to Kylo's personal chambers, and finds Chewbacca there, tortured and weak but alive. She kills one Knight of Ren guarding him. But right as they're about to leave, Kylo Ren returns from his mission to the Death Star. Rey is enraged by what he did to Chewie, whereas Kylo is conflicted. We get a chance for them each to talk, but when he tries to explain how he feels, looking for help and empathy, looking for an excuse to turn away from his path, she thinks he's trying to justify his villainy. They clash just long enough to destroy Vader's helmet when storm troopers arrive and the other resistance folks show up too. They escape the ship, hotly pursued, but manage to get the tactical data the senator was bringing.
Rose warns them not to go back to Coruscant; the First Order will signal ahead and they'll be shot the moment they drop out of hyperspace. So instead they steal Kylo's ship and fly to link up with Maz Kanata. She can then tell Rey the story of how she got the light saber (it's brief: Lando, who's a co-owner of her destroyed business, found it on Cloud City after the Empire fell). Cue Lando showing up, reuniting with Chewie. Spirits are down, and we can get some more Finn-Rey emotions.
Then, on Kylo's ship, Rey finds a hand-drawn map Kylo map from memory, showing a passage down under the ruins of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
Act Three - The build-up to the finale comes in cross-cut, slightly asynchronous narratives.
The First Order arrives in orbit of Coruscant, along with its hyper-laser. They send a delegation to the Senate, complete with walkers in the streets and fighters overhead. Some people cheer, many boo. But when Kylo refuses to deliver a fascist dictator speech, Hux happily steps up and does that.
Kylo instead heads to the temple and finds the kids lingering there. He offers to show the Force sensitive one what a Jedi truly is.
We reveal that before this point, the Resistance folks decided to make a last ditch effort, which involves using the stolen tactical information to order the Republic fleet to attack the First Order (a command the Republic soldiers are quite eager to do, since they've been angry at the senate's wishy-washiness). Poe, with Lando and a small force of Resistance ships, goes to seize the hyperlaser. Rose fights aboard a ship too, serving as a bomber, just like her sister did.
While they were getting that attack ready, Finn goes to Senate and, right as Hux is finishing his (televised) speech, Finn calls him out, reveals that he was kidnapped and forced to be a child soldier, and that if the First Order succeeds they'll do the same.
And simultaneous to that, Rey goes to the temple to pursue Kylo. Deep under the temple, she approaches to find Kylo - a tight grip on the child - near a sealed well of darkness, which is surrounded by scorch marks in roughly the shape of children's bodies. Kylo says he knew Rey would come, knew he could count on her to want to destroy him.
He explains that before the Jedi were here, this was a Sith temple to the power of the Dark Side. The Jedi sealed it, but it holds the power of generations of dark Force users. When Palpatine tapped its power, he became Emperor. When he died, his spirit was drawn here. Snoke was only just beginning to understand it, and could call upon the ancient Sith magic to perform Force powers unseen in ages. He bonded Kylo and Rey with - he gestures at the scorched bodies - these offerings. What power could he claim with a stronger sacrifice?
Rey yells that she won't let him kill the boy, but he calmly shakes his head, and says he himself is the sacrifice. Anakin Skywalker destroyed the Emperor, but not the Sith. He says, "I'm going to finish what he started."
And he opens the well. Crackling red spirits pour out and infuse him with power. He attacks Rey, and we have a lightsaber duel. She initially can't hold him back, and flees upward with the kid. He pulls all the power out of the well and shatters it, then pursues her.
Hux gets word of the space assault on his hyperlaser, and he orders his men (storm troopers and some knights of Ren) to seize the Senate. A blaster battle begins there, where Finn will eventually get storm troopers and the locals on his side and probably kill Hux by dropping one of those hover daises on him, but not before he orders the hyperlaser to fire on the senate.
Poe, Rose, and company have an epic space battle, but they're unable to get to the hyperlaser in time. It charges.
When Rey reaches the top level and sees the stars overhead filled with explosions, initially she's overwhelmed, but then she hears Luke's voice: reach out. The kid holds her hand to strengthen her, and she extends a hand skyward. We see moments of all her friends from across the films sensing her, and closing their eyes at the same time. And their shared will strengthens Rey.
Kylo attacks again, and the battle is titanic in damage but intimate in scale. Rey doesn't fight to kill, but to wear Kylo out.
Overhead, the hyperlaser is aimed at the Senate. Poe radios to Finn to yell for him to get out of the Senate, but Finn calls out to Rey. Her lightsaber catching Kylo's, Rey gestures upward, and in space, the entire vessel tilts. The beam fires, aimed for the temple. And like Kylo Ren in the very first scene of The Force Awakens, Rey catches the shot with the Force. It hovers in the air.
Millions of people on Coruscant, from horizon to horizon, see the beam over the Jedi temple.
Kylo demands she let it strike, to destroy him, and the Sith with him. But Rey refuses. Anakin Skywalker was not meant to destroy the Sith, but to bring balance to the Force. To bring harmony.
She looks around, and throughout the temple, Force ghosts of Jedi appear, calmly, and Kylo realizes what has been offered to him. The Sith spirits attempt to flee, but he holds them in, and then lets the Jedi spirits join him, the light and dark swirling until they cancel each other out. The last that approach him are Luke, and beside him Leia. (Here we use the moment where he says "Mother...." and her response is (like Han Solo) "I know.") He collapses, emotionally drained. And Rey walks over and offers a hand to help him up.
Together, their final gesture is to hurl the hyperlaser bolt back into space, destroying the super weapon.
Aftermath - Rey reports to the Senate that Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is dead. The First Order is defeated, and the children of the Republic will be returned. There's a celebration, no dialogue, maybe an Ewok in the background. Finn and Rey clearly are close to each other, uncertain (because dammit, I want to ship them but there hasn't been enough screen time to make it work).
The closing credits. And then, again, an idea courtesy of Nando v Movies: the one and only post-credits scene in Star Wars, where Ben Solo is out rescuing people held captive by the First Order remnant. Because dying a martyr isn't enough to redeem him. He has to, to quote the very first lines in The Force Awakens, make things right.
TL;DR - Kylo's character arc is to realize that his father sacrificed himself to save him, like Vader sacrificed to save Luke, and that he's on the wrong path, and must redeem the damage he and Vader did.
Finn's character arc is going from goofy sidekick to leader of people, because he can empathize with their trauma.
Rey's character arc is understanding that she has grown beyond pining for a family; she has one now, and she has to protect it, learn from the past, and make the right choice for the future.
LuisCarlos17f
Legend
I am not surprised at all because it happened in the expanded universe years ago. I bought myself Dark Empire comics by Dark Horse comics.
