No. Not a chance in hell.
How can I be so confident about this? Well, first off, this claim – that Star Wars: Episode IX will feature a flashback to a lightsaber duel between Luke Skywalker and Snoke – is being reported by The Daily Express. For those not familiar with the paper, it’s a right-wing tabloid with a notoriously loose grip on the truth. Secondly and more importantly, their source is notorious bullshit artist Mike Zeroh, who’s forged a career out of making stuff up on YouTube about Star Wars while claiming it’s coming from mysterious “sources.”
Seriously, you might as well use FanFiction.net as your source for what’s going to happen in Episode IX if you just want half-baked and poorly formulated guesses about what Rey, Finn and the gang are up to. The whole situation reminds me of the notorious ‘SuperShadow,’ who was famous in the late 90s and early 2000s for doing pretty much the exact same thing with the Prequel Trilogy (perhaps my favorite of his was a report claiming that the prequels would feature Lando’s grandfather, the wonderfully named Grando). While fans desperate for the inside scoop took him at his word for a while, the lies eventually became too big and he essentially vanished from the internet (this excellent long-form article tells the full story).
Fortunately, most contemporary Star Wars fans have wised up to Zeroh’s game and a news story that uses him as a source is generally met with a series of groans that the author could be so credulous. Zeroh has even become so infamous for making stuff up that The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, when faced with rumors that his in development Star Wars trilogy was in trouble, found out that Zeroh was the source and responded as so:
“Wait. Hahahahahaha this is all because of Zeroh? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. When we were in production we had a guy keeping an eye on online rumors. At some point we started using “Zeroh” as a verb. Like, “throws trash at basket, but it slips out of your hand and falls behind you.” “Zeroh’d it.”
So yeah, next time you see someone confidently asserting what’s going to happen in Star Wars: Episode IX, do a little digging and find out what their source is. If it turns out to be Mike Zeroh, you can bet the chances of it being true are… well…zero.
