Star Wars: The Last Jedi largely did away with the J.J. Abrams puzzlebox narrative tricks that dragged down The Force Awakens. What would Luke do with the lightsaber handed to him by Rey? Toss it away dismissively. Who was Snoke? Doesn’t matter. Who were Rey’s parents? Total nobodies. To be honest, it was pretty amusing from a personal standpoint, having written numerous speculative articles about what might be going on that were rendered completely redundant at the stroke of a pen (or in Snoke’s case, a lightsaber).
The Last Jedi actually left very few dangling plot points, but one of the most tantalizing is what’s going on with the ancient Jedi texts that Rey pilfered from Luke’s magic tree? We can’t say for sure, but fans are wondering whether these texts might be the fabled Journal of the Whills, an in-universe history of the galaxy AND one of George Lucas’ original concepts for the franchise way back in the first drafts.
At the time, Lucas thought the films would be more resonant if they could be connected to the real world, with the book’s contents telling the Star Wars story, which would slot into the distant past of our universe. Mercifully, this was quickly dropped and the Journal of the Whills soon became a super obscure bit of film trivia. They only truly resurfaced in 2015, when the novelization of The Force Awakens opened with an extract from the mythical book:
“First comes the day
Then comes the night.
After the darkness
Shines through the light.
The difference, they say,
Is only made right
By the resolving of gray
Through refined Jedi sight.”
Could this long-lost tome now be stowed in the Millennium Falcon’s glove compartment? And, despite Yoda admitting “page-turners, they are not,” who knows what deep secrets they could reveal about the ancient history of the Star Wars universe? Then again, if The Last Jedi‘s approach to dangling plot threads holds up for Episode IX, we’ll probably see them accidentally tossed out with the garbage in the opening scenes.
