Star Wars Novelist Wanted To Make Rey A Jedi Droid In The Rise Of Skywalker

There are countless plot points in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy that fans have plenty of issues with, matters that weren’t helped by Rian Johnson making sweeping changes to the mythology for The Last Jedi, only for Disney and Lucasfilm to panic in the face of how the movie split opinion straight down the middle, and as a result, The Rise of Skywalker was packed to bursting point with retcons and references designed to placate the naysayers.

In The Force Awakens, it was established that one of the major plot points would be Rey discovering her heritage, because no lead character in a multi-film franchise gets a vague and mysterious backstory without a big reveal being planned for further down the line. Kylo Ren then delivered the damp squib that she was actually just a nobody, before that was hastily changed to the twist that the rising star of the Jedi Order was in fact the granddaughter of Palpatine, another alteration that proved to be divisive.

Longtime Star Wars novelist Alan Dean Foster has already made his thoughts perfectly clear on The Last Jedi, and the author has now revealed his insane pitch for The Rise of Skywalker, which would have turned Rey into a cybernetically-enhanced Force-powered warrior.

“How come Rey has more Force powers than anybody after running around on that ocean world for 24 hours, or whatever it was? How can I explain that away? And can I somehow tie that into the fact that she was abandoned on her planet, on Jakku? Can I bring those two things together? And what I did was, she has a disease that was not curable unless they replaced part of her brain. It was done with electronics so that actually she is part android, or part droid, as they say in Star Wars. And that gives her the ability to learn remarkably quickly and also enhances her existing Force powers, and that’s how she could throw boulders around at the end of Episode VIII.”

That sounds completely ridiculous, but then again, the idea of having Rey positioned as what’s essentially the Terminator of a galaxy far, far away also seems so utterly bizarre that it generates a sense of morbid curiosity. And you never know, audiences might have reacted better to that than they did the forehead-slapping final moments of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker where she plucks her surname out of thin air.