Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker brought to a close the sprawling, intergenerational chronicle first conceived by George Lucas in 1977 in as cohesive a manner as fans could have hoped for, returning its focus to the central contentious relationship between the Skywalkers and the Palpatines and revealing the parts that each of this new trilogy’s principle participants had to play in that conflict.
The film’s final scene involves Rey returning to the Skywalker homeworld of Tatooine and burying the lightsabers formerly belonging to Luke and Leia in the sands near Luke’s childhood home after having used both of them in tandem to defeat her grandfather on Exegol. Just as Rey and Ben were revealed to represent a dyad in the Force, the power demonstrated in the simultaneously wielding of both Skywalker sabers implies that Luke and Leia were likely also such a dyad.
The brief funeral is a deeply symbolic gesture, both personally and narratively, as she inters the legendary weapons of the fraternal twins forever together in the place where their grandmother raised their father, while also laying to rest the entirety of the episodic Skywalker cinematic saga, for better or worse, where it all began.
Having buried the last physical remains of the past, to some degree fulfilling Ben’s obsessive mission to “let the past die,” Rey signals the commencement of her unknown future by igniting her own lightsaber, which bears an unconventional yellow blade not previously seen in a live-action Star Wars production. The new personalized weapon may have seemed somehow familiar despite never having been seen before, however, because its hilt is, in fact, built from the hardware that once served as the head of the staff that Rey began carrying as a Jakkuvian orphan.
The lightsaber ultimately represents her final rejection of her own lineage as a Palpatine as she reclaims her identity as an unknown scavenger before assuming the Skywalker name and legacy. The weapon very much signifies Rey’s own transformation, being a physical piece of her past that has been deliberately reworked and repurposed to serve as an integral part of the journey she has yet to take, which one report suggests will involve her eventual return to train a new generation of Jedi, some of whom may fall prey to the temptations of the Dark Side.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker can still be seen in theaters, and is scheduled to be released on digital home media on March 31st of this year, with physical editions available by mid April.
