WMG / The Last Jedi

New entries go to the bottom of the appropriate folder. And obviously, expect unmarked spoilers for all previous Star Wars material.

Pre-release Theories (Jury Still Out)

Snoke's Identity & Intentions

Snoke's ultimate goal is either an Assimilation Plot, a dystopia governed solely by him, or some combination thereof.

Quoth Supreme Leader Snoke: "I watched the Galactic Empire rise, and then fall. The gullible prattle on about the triumph of truth and justice, of individualism and free will."

• Jossed. He is Palpatine's puppet.

Supreme Leader Snoke is Darth Plagueis

Maybe Plagueis cheated death and decided to hide and observe what Sidious would do until he failed. His plan would then be to create a new organization from Sidious' ashes and get a new apprentice. And not only they look similar, but Snoke's theme is reminiscent of Darth Plagueis' theme from the opera scene in Revenge of the Sith.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is not Darth Plagueis, but he's from the same species.

While one suspects Darth Sidious, knowing his master's ways, would have done his best to Make Sure He's Dead, it's entirely possible that somebody else from the same species (who would understand Plagueis better in certain ways than his human apprentice Darth Sidious ever could, since he's from the same culture as Plagueis and Sidious is not) took up his research and succeeded in protecting himself where Plagueis failed. Just as there was some other gal from Yoda's race sitting on the Jedi Council, so too was there another from Plagueis' race among the Sith; that would be why he has a theme similar to Darth Plagueis'.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is the Sith Emperor.

He was active during the Clone Wars and he dosen't look like a Muun. And notice that Kylo's armor and lightsaber all originated in the Old Republic Era. We also have nods to SCORPIO in Maz Kanata's castle. The fact that Kylo Ren was corrupted by an entity from the Unknown Regions also invokes the True Sith hiding out in the Unknown Regions before the events of SWTOR and corrupting Revan. So what if Snoke is the Sith Emperor, who could be reintroduced into the new Canon from Legends not as the Sith Lord that mobilized the Sith remnants, but as the founder of the Sith itself whom the Jedi has long thought dead?

• As of the latest SWTOR expansion, Vitiate is dead. Really, truly, actually, finally dead. That could be retconned, of course. We're talking about a villain who has a hard time staying dead.
• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke isn't Plagueis, but he is working for him.

Snoke is actually Plagueis' apprentice. Plagueis actually Came Back Wrong, and is stuck as a specter trying to truly restore his body. Wanting to avoid the mistake of training another Sidious, he eventually found Snoke. Rather than being Evil All Along, Snoke was a Jedi who survived Order 66, which is where some of the scars come from. Plagueis used his fear of death and desire to be free of the Empire's bondage, twisting it into a desire for power. This is one of the main reasons why the First Order has a "for the greater good" mentality: Snoke isn't motivated by power-lust like Palpatine, but trying to escape his own pain by being domineering and tyrannical. He's just going about it the worst way. However, with Plagueis busy returning to life and trying to become a Force God, he's serving as the Dragon-in-Chief to Plagueis' Greater-Scope Villain.

The first thing Plagueis gets from this is revenge on Palpatine, not necessarily by killing him (though if Luke and Vader had failed, he'd send Snoke), but by stealing his Empire back into the First Order. The second is a means to restore/gain his great power. The third? To get back his greatest experiment, the Skywalker family. Plagueis and Snoke are motivated to gain control over, thus completing the Force Experiment Plagueis and probably Palpatine started over seventy years ago. However, Plagueis has learnt from his death. The moment Snoke is no longer a Dragon-in-Chief, Plagueis will be ready to dispose of him.

It would also fit the theme of each trilogy having a Man Behind the Man. For the prequels Darth Maul and Dooku were publicly the Big Bad, but it turned out that Sidious was their mastermind. The originals made it seemed Vader was the be-all and end-all Dark Lord, but it's actually Palpatine. Episode Seven makes it seem Snoke is in charge, however the twist here? It's none other than Plagueis, Sidious' own master, who's the true power of the First Order and waiting for his chance to strike, becoming the Climax Boss to the entire series/the direct Big Bad of a possible final movie series.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke was disfigured by Force lightning from Palpatine.

While this image◊ should do a lot of the talking, it's worth mentioning that all of the major victims of Palpatine's Force lightning - Mace, Yoda, Luke, Anakin, and even Palpatine himself - were zapped in the face. Aside from the scars themselves looking similar to Palpatine's (albeit much more severe), this would be consistent with the damage the other characters had to endure. Not to mention that Snoke's scars also look suspiciously like the ones inflicted on Anakin's skull at the end of Return Of The Jedi.

• Or possibly, he and Luke met prior and he was disfigured as a result of their battle.
• Jossed. He was intentionally created disfigured.

Snoke is an imperfect attempt to clone Darth Vader.

Snoke was created by Kylo Ren in an attempt to clone Darth Vader (he did manage to recover Vader's helmet and armor). However, the process was imperfect, and resulted in the creation of a new entity.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is the son of Ezra Bridger.

Or rather, Snoke is a being created with Ezra's DNA fused with that of a non-human member Inquisitor who wanted to harness his powers with the Force for the dark side and the Empire without it being corrupted by Ezra's morals. Being a fusion is what results in Snoke being Ambiguously Human.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke isn't from the dark, but the light.

Specifically, he is a survivor of Order 66. Snoke was a Jedi Master during the time in the Clone Wars, somewhere around his forties/fifties. He was a librarian or some other collector of knowledge, which is part of how he became so wise. When Order 66 happened, Snoke was nearly killed, resulting in his scars, but managed to flee into exile. As he wasn't in on the plan Yoda and Obi-Wan had with the Skywalker twins, Snoke gave up on the order and went into exile in the Unknown Regions. Over the years of the Empire, Snoke would study them and try to find a place in the Galaxy. Eventually, his embitterment over the state of the Jedi, the galaxy and himself, led him on a path to the dark side.

During the events of the Original Trilogy, he put his vast wisdom into motion, so he could be ready to scavenge the inevitable ruins of the Empire. The reason why Leia seemed to trust him, and how he managed to get so close to Kylo Ren, is because due to both his Jedi origins and covert opposition of the Empire, he seemed to be a great asset to their cause. Snoke wasn't even the public leader of the First Order until he had turned Kylo Ren against the Skywalkers. Through deductive reasoning, he came to the conclusion that Anakin and Vader were indeed the same person and used this as the time to strike. And with Kylo Ren being both of Skywalker blood and impressionable, he knew who to corrupt.

Snoke's Jedi origins are why he's more like Yoda than Palpatine, and why the Knights of Ren are not a rehash of the Sith; he's incorporating his own Jedi and light side teachings into a dark side order. He knows the Sith, he fought against him, and refuses to be like him (either out of principle, to not make the same mistakes or due to personal hang-ups). Snoke's villainy comes not from simple power-lust, but because he tried being a good person and it failed, so he feels that being a dark sider is the better course of action. The amiable relationship with Kylo Ren is a projection of the relationship he had with his own Jedi apprentice, way back in the age of the Republic.

Thematically, this backstory would serve many purposes; it would keep Palpatine relevant due to being behind Snoke's Start of Darkness, tie into both the Original and Prequel Era, give a good explanation for how Snoke rose to power, and make him a compelling villain. On a meta-textual level, this would make Snoke like the Legends villain Darth Krayt, though a lot more sympathetic. And being A Lighter Shade of Black to Palpatine, we'll be led guessing on how his relationship with Kylo will end up, and whether or not the student will surpass the master.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is Wedge and Phasma is Mon Mothma

• It's the only possible explanation for why they don't appear!
  • I can’t speak for Wedge, but “Bloodline” establishes that Mon Mothma is very old and has retired.
• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is actually SCORPIO.

There are nods to SCORPIO in Maz Kanata's castle. Snoke is just a hologram/AI to serve as a figurehead for the First Order while SCORPIO quietly pulls the strings behind the scenes. If Skippy the Jedi Droid and Shards are Force-sensitive inorganic beings, so is SCORPIO.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is Cronal.

Kylo Ren was already inspired by the legends Jacen Solo/Darth Caedus, so Snoke can easily be another new character inspired by a legends character. The one that fits best is Cronal/Blackhole/Shadowspawn, a member of an obscure Force cult who is described as a frail old man because his obsession with the dark side has caused his form to wither and because of that not many people see him and because of his paranoia preferred to stay on the move and communicate from the shadows via hologram. In Legends Cronal's mastery of the dark side gets the personal attention of Palpatine and he becomes the head of the Empire's intelligence network before disappearing to the Unknown Regions to study the dark side further and after the fall of the empire returns from the Unknown Regions becomes the leader of an Imperial splinter group and causes a lot of death and destruction. That sounds a lot like Snoke and the First Order.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Supreme Leader Snoke is Nom Anor or, more likely, an expy of him.

Snoke is an alien of unknown species, bears a passing resemblance to a Yuuzhan Vong (gaunt, greyish humanoid Covered in Scars, and Word of God pegs his real height as about seven feet, which would be just the right size for a Vong), manipulates conflict in the galaxy for his own inscrutable ends, and doesn't seem all that fussed when his superweapon blows. He's actually an Agent Provocateur sent by an outside force (more likely a new faction rather than a direct adaptation of the base-breaking Vong) to weaken the galaxy in preparation for an invasion. He may or may not be actually Force-sensitive, depending on how closely this follows the NJO story, but taking on the role of a charismatic Dark Messiah was one of Nom Anor's favorite tactics in any case. Either Snoke's true nature will be revealed at the end of Ep. 8 and Ep. 9 will be about the invasion (possibly with the First Order forced into an Enemy Mine with the Republic, Resistance, and Jedi once they realize they were had), or Snoke himself will be defeated at the end of the sequel trilogy but with his masters still on their way, leaving the invasion itself as an arc for a fourth series.

• The "Nom Anor Expy" theory might actually hold some water as of Thrawn: Alliances— said novel introduces the Grysk, a new race from the Unknown Regions (like Snoke himself) that is described as being very similar to the Vong, only with Umbaran-like "exotic" technology instead of Organic Technology. They seem to look just like their Legends counterparts, bald with sloping foreheads, and they're noted to be nomadic, travelling in vast fleets without a homeworld. Now look at Snoke— he really only has the forehead down, but we know for a fact that he's heavily disfigured, and the nomadic bit brings to mind how he ruled the First Order from the Supremacy rather than establishing a capital world. Recent "leaks" supposedly from Episode IX mention flashbacks of Snoke addressing the Senate (something Nom Anor is known to have done at least once) with Leia in the audience, and it would make sense for her apparent familiarity with him to have come from her time in politics. It's possible that Snoke was originally an Agent Provocateur sent by the Grysk to try and find weaknesses in the New Republic and make way for an invasion, and his plan involved taking over and subverting the First Order to serve as patsies. However, we also know that the Grysk are apparently totally lacking in Force-sensitive members, and yet Snoke himself is. In this case, he might also be an Expy of Onimi, being the sole Force-wielder among his entire race, whose powers allow him to manipulate those around him for his own agenda. Given the Supreme Leader's devotion to the Dark Side, it could be that he had his own goals separate from the Grysk's, but Kylo's betrayal put a premature to both his plans and whatever he was doing for his masters.
• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke's scars are seams, keeping together a skinbag that contain a Hive Mind of Force-sensitive snakes.

As per Plumbing the Death Star, Darth Plagueis reincarnates as Anakin Skywalker, and then reincarnated upon Vader's death as a horde of Force-sensitive snokes, oh wait, I mean snakes. The snakes then inhabited the withered husk of Mace Windu and controlled it in the style of Weekend at Bernie's, creating the force of darkness known as Snoke. This known as the "True Star Wars Ring Theory."

• "I've had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' star destroyer!"
• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is not an actual name

There's a theory running around that Snoke's name is actually an acronym for "Sith No One Knew Existed". This would fit with Andy Serkis' indications that Snoke is an original character, and accounts for his physical characteristics.

• Jossed. Snake seems to be his actual name.

Snoke will fill the role of both the Emperor and Jabba the Hutt.

And he’ll have connections in Canto Bight. The First Order had to somehow get all that money to fund a gigantic Death Star clone and keep it a secret from the New Republic, after all.

• Jossed. He doesn't seem to have any connections with Canto Bight personally.

We'll learn in a flashback that Luke gave Snoke some of the hideous scars on his head in a fight.

Considering that Snoke spent most of The Force Awakens trying to stop anyone from getting to Luke for fear that he might return from exile, I'm guessing he and Luke were probably about evenly matched in their abilities and that only having Kylo and the other Knights of Ren working with him enabled Snoke to win the previous battle against Luke and burn down his Jedi training academy/temple. Without Snoke, even all of the Knights of Ren working together would have been no match for Luke, while without the Knights to tip the balance, Snoke wouldn't have considered the odds of winning a fight with Luke to be in his favor. During the actual battle, therefore, I suspect Snoke was there in person to take on Luke in a lightsaber duel. Though Snoke technically won the fight, he did so at the cost of Luke's putting a nasty dent in his head and damaging his respiratory system, such that Snoke is not eager for a rematch.

• Jossed. He was created disfigured.

Snoke is actually the FIRST Jedi, in contrast to Luke, the LAST Jedi

Snoke appears ancient and frail and could be a species of alien that has ridiculously long lifespans, somehow used the Force to influence Ben Solo while he was still in Leia's womb, and was someone Palpatine feared in the new-EU books. Who else would Palpatine be afraid of, other than the oldest and wisest of the Jedi? He and Luke somehow worked together to re-establish the Jedi Order, but they parted ways over what Luke (and the audience) remember of the Jedi Order versus the way Snoke originally created it.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke was an Inquisitor for Palpatine

Rebels revealed that he had plenty, and not all of them were seen. Snoke may have been the second Grand Inquisitor (replacing the one who died during Rebels), was a true believer in Palpatine's teachings and may have even wanted to surpass Vader and become Palpatine's official apprentice. When Palpatine died, Snoke vowed to rebuild what the Sith Lord created, and formed the First Order from the remnants of the Empire.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke can jump from one body to the next.

But the possession isn't quick. Rather, he gradually takes over the body of the person he's possessed; without them realizing he's influencing them till it's too late. Kylo Ren is his next victim. We haven't seen the last of him.

• Jossed. Although Palpatine did have several Snoke bodies.

Snoke helped Palpatine's rise to power in the Dark Side.

Not that he's his Greater-Scope Villain, but he was an important ally. Dooku seemed to be trying to get an apprentice to help him overthrow Palpatine, Darth Vader planned to do it with Luke, it seems standard Sith behavior to get help with overthrowing your master. Palpatine realized that if he's to know more about his master's more arcane knowledge and overthrow him, he's going to need some help. Snoke was that help. Snoke would distract Plagueis so Sidious can kill him in his sleep and give information about the Unknown Regions, Sidious would guarantee Snoke a position of power and arcane Sith knowledge. They may have even done a Savage Oppress and Snoke would pretend to be Plagueis' apprentice.

Alternatively Snoke was already Plagueis' apprentice, but ended up siding with Sidious. Either way, he isn't a Sith because he can't fit in the Rule of Two, and would rather not become a rival. This would've happened over eighty years before The Force Awakens, explaining why Snoke is so aged. The two worked close enough that Snoke had knowledge on who Vader was and how he became Supreme Leader. The scars are the consequence of a falling out, since someone as strong as Snoke would inevitably become a threat. However it was too late for Palpatine and he already had enough connections to scavenge what remained of the Empire upon his death. Though there is a small chance they remained in each other's good graces, and for the most part he's just continuing his plans. They may even have had a Villainous Friendship, or as much as two narcissistic sociopaths are capable such friendship. And like Palpatine he would end up killed by Skywalker blood.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke is Kylo Ren's split personality.

Except for an extremely powerful Force-user it manifests as an Astral Projection up to eleven. Since it is maintained by his subconscious, it even looks genuinely chopped in half when he does it. This would explain why Luke has seen Snoke IN KYLO'S MIND and was so horrified. It would also explain how Snoke created a Force Bond between Kylo and a person Snoke himself has never seen. Direct mind-reading (in Conveniently Coherent Thoughts) is also new to Star Wars but would be understandable for something that inhabits the same mind that reads it. Snoke never takes physical action and likes to appear via hologram.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Snoke has a connection to whatever it was Palpatine sensed.

Star Wars: Aftermath established that Palpatine felt the source of his power lay beyond the Unknown Regions, which is where what was left of the Galactic Empire went to and eventually became the First Order. It's unlikely that whatever Palpatine sensed was the source of the Dark Side(it seems like the Force in general should be omnipresent), but he did discover a Negative Space Wedgie that acts as a nexus of the Force. Snoke originates from the Unknown Regions, where his people were closer to this nexus than the rest of the galaxy. He is(or was) part of an order that keeps watch and venerates his nexus, which is where his power in the Force comes from-people are more Force sensitive near this wellspring. It's likely Palpatine and Snoke knew each other, so the latter could set things up, and how he knew about the Skywalkers. He took advantage of the First Order's desperation to achieve the same goal the Emperor had; to unlock this wellspring.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Supreme Leader Snoke was driven insane by the Clone Wars.

He's old enough to have been involved in them. His scars are inspired by World War 1 veterans. Star Wars has a number of historical parallels. With the Galactic Empire, it was the Nazis, and the Original Trilogy Star Wars was in part inspired by old WW2 war movies. If the Galactic Civil War was WW2, what would be World War 1's conflict due to scope and the damage it did? The Clone Wars. Snoke isn't necessarily from the Republic, but he was from a planet involved in the Clone Wars. Whatever may be lurking out in the Unknown Regions would've attracted Republic and Separatist forces. The Separatists attacked first, the Republic entered second, and both left Snoke in a mess. Scarred and twisted by the conflict. The beginning of his evil.

It led him obsessed with the invasion, the central galaxy which had changed his entire world and left him scarred. He despises rebellion and sudden change, as he associates it with what happened to him. He despises the New Republic for being a successor to one of two factions that ruined his life. He despises the Rebellion and its Resistance successor for being like the Separatists who rebelled against the current authority. When the Galactic Empire's remnants came to him, he perverted the already twisted Old Republic, into his image. To get back at what happened to him and his people.

The First Order would allow him to crush the central galaxy, give them the same pain he felt. His endgame, which the First Order doesn't know about and would oppose if they knew, is to destroy the galaxy all to satiate his revenge. That's why he's described as "darker than Palpatine"-Palpatine wanted to rule, not destroy. Shaping Kylo Ren into a Darth Vader Expy will give him the satisfaction of crushing them with the grandson of the same hero of the Old Republic, the same enforcer as the Empire, and the same progenitor of the man and woman who made the New Republic possible. And ironically he would die by the hands of someone who resents the past like him.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine long after the Clone Wars.

Snoke is a Grysk

Thrawn: Alliances sets up the Grysk as a major threat from the Unknown Regions. That sounds awfully familiar...

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

The Princess Leia/Carrie Fisher Problem

What will be done about Princess Leia?

• Now that Carrie Fisher has unfortunately passed away they have to figure out a way to write Leia out. The kind of CGI they used for Tarkin in Rogue One can't be cheap enough to use on a character who gets Leia's screen time in this movie and Episode IX, so the best option would be to kill her off.
• Alternatively, it's Disney. Budget is a foreign word to them. They might just CGI her, and that might cross into Unintentional Uncanny Valley for some.
  • Jossed — Lucasfilm has confirmed that Leia won't be digitally recreated.
• Perhaps she will die or go into hiding in between Episodes 8 and 9.
• Elaborating on the above suggestion: My guess is they may handle it similarly to how Gilmore Girls handled the death of Edward Hermann: have Leia's funeral or the immediate aftermath at the beginning of Episode IX and have her loss hanging over part of the movie. And then, at the end when the heroes win (because they have to, it's Star Wars), we might see a glimpse of Han and Leia watching over the new generation, using archival footage to see them young and smiling.
• They will take a page from Furious 7 and give Leia a grand send-off to some faraway place akin to how Paul Walker's character was sent off.
• Actually, there's rumors from a leaked script that Leia will be killed off. If this is the case, no harm, no foul for Episode IX.
• If Leia has not been originally planned to be killed off in The Last Jedi, then with use of special effects, the ending could be re-written so that she dies or leaves for whatever reason (And if she does die, it could be a Heroic Sacrifice just to make it more effective), or it could happen at the beginning of Episode IX.
• As blasphemous as some fans might find it, they might recast the role, if only to give her storyline a proper conclusion, rather than abruptly ending it. Despite how iconic characters like James Bond and Indiana Jones are, there have been multiple actors to play them.
  • Instead of obvious recasting, they might disfigure her somehow, to justify a different actress and voice. Force-lightning or plasma blast to the face, for instance.
• Leia was supposed to play a major role in Episode IX. Given that fact, it's probable they'll either:
  • Change the plot of this movie to kill her off. There are rumors that Leia was supposed to be severely injured in a First Order attack and spend a good chunk of the movie in a coma, communicating with Luke and Rey through the Force. If so, it would be easy to change it so she dies instead.
  • Have her die offscreen in between this movie and Episode IX.
  • Use CGI and/or a body double to have her die heroically at the beginning of Episode IX. Yes, they did say they wouldn't recreate her with CGI, but a bit of this, possibly with recycled footage from TFA and this movie, and a soundalike, could give her a Heroic Sacrifice in an opening space battle. Having it at the opening would ensure she'd only have brief screentime, and giving her an awesome death would be respectful to the character.
  • Go the same route Star Trek Beyond did with Leonard Nimoy and have Carrie Fisher's death be part of a character arc, probably for Luke.
  • Have the events of Episode IX simply take place without Leia's direct presence, e.g. Rey, Finn, Po and Chewie undertake a dangerous mission to the farthest end of the galaxy while Leia stays behind and runs what's left of the Resistance back in the region dominated by the First Order. The film won't depict Leia herself via CGI, but audio and holographic messages from Leia will be presented that way using Stock Footage and a sound-alike.
  • The Force Awakens did a great job making Luke's presence felt without him uttering a single word and appearing only briefly. They might pull that off with Leia. I dunno, send her personally to gather some allies that trust only her, while Poe commands the Resistance in her stead. Finish the movie on the Big Damn Heroes note, with a massive fleet of Leia's allies (and implying she herself is on the flagship) annihilating the remnants of the First Order. Then, Episode IX could just say she peacefully died in her sleep or became one with the Force some time later, with her life's work done and last remnant of the Empire obliterated.
• All Jossed. She appears in IX though unused footage.

Leia will die protecting Kylo Ren

Before a killing blow, Leia will intercede and take the blow herself.

• Seeing as Leia was supposed to play a major role in Episode IX and all Carrie's scenes were filmed for this one, this might not happen. There may be reshoots though to change the ending so this does happen since Carrie died.
• Jossed. She survives this film.

Leia will suffer some kind of horrendous injury that forces her to wear a helmet with a mask, just like her father.

Since Real Life Writes the Plot and Carrie Fisher can no longer be with us, what better way to keep her character alive and active than to have her suffer her father's fate? Back before his big reveal, anybody could have been behind Darth Vader's mask, including his voice actor James Earl Jones. Anybody (or anything) could be under Captain Phasma's mask right now. So too, we could be shown Leia surviving her ship's having an accident or being shot down in battle, only to have to wear some kind of suit to keep her breathing. This would both cover her face (to avoid having to break that promise not to re-create Leia through CGI mentioned above), and possibly renew her prominence as an important character; just imagine some of the twists the plot could take with the good guys having a "Lady Vader" fighting on their side...

• Jossed.

Leia will be killed in a planetary explosion

• The First Order will develop a new superweapon which will destroy a new crucial planet for the Republic and Leia will be there. (This may happen in episode 8 or 9.)
• Jossed. She dies using the Force to bring Ben back to the light.

Leia will somehow, someway, get a happy ending.

• Confirmed in a sense. She passes on, but her son returns to the light.

Leia's death will cause Kylo to turn

We've seen in this movie that Kylo refrained from trying to kill his mother, so if Hux's forces will be responsible for her death in the next movie, Kylo will turn against the First Order because It's Personal.

• Partially confirmed. In The Rise of Skywalker, her death does cause him to turn, but it's because she died after reaching out to him in the Force.

General/Other

ME-8D9 was created by the same unknown builders as SCORPIO.

It would explain their visual similarities.

Prior to the Hosnian attack, the New Republic was ruled by a coalition government, which was why the Chancellor was so hesitant to act

Prior to Hosnian Prime's destruction, the increasing radicalization of the Centrists meant that a third, moderate faction called the Federalists was able to capture a significant minority in the Senate, acting as Kingmaker for the Populists seeking to form a government. The advantage here is that legislation can finally be passed, which is why Villecham is able to pursue his trade agenda, but the obvious weakness is that Villecham can't actually act decisively without upsetting someone important. Maybe an additional component to his inaction was that starting a war with the First Order was basically unacceptable to the Populists' political base, and he was worried that an insurrection against his leadership by the fringe of his party would take place if he started supporting too many of the Federalists' agenda, possibly leading to a Centrist takeover of the government. Securing trade deals with neutral systems was his way of securing the Republic the only way he knew how: through soft power.

It would also mirror the political situation of inter-war Britain, which the New Republic is a clear stand-in for, where unstable coalition governments were the norm.

A great many supposed "leaks" from the movie script will turn out to have been false information released by the writers themselves.

What better way to troll overzealous fans and other wannabes than to "confirm" some of their sillier hypotheses or release ideas the writers actually were considering but ultimately decided to discard? Might as well make some of your more annoying wannabes work for you!

• Remains to be seen.
• Looks like it's confirmed.

Post-release Theories

Post-release Theories (unmarked spoilers ahead)

By the time of Episode IX, the First Order will be weakened by internal strife

The situation of the First Order at the end of TLJ does not lend to a favorable future for them (beside, of course, that the good guys have to triumph by the end of the trilogy and stuff). True, they have technically won: the Resistance has been almost completely wiped out and their few survivors are on the run. However, with Snoke dead and Kylo having forcefully taken his place while Hux is clearly not happy with the situation (to say the least), the possibility of a faction of Hux loyalists (or simply people unhappy with Kylo's leadership) forming within the First Order may not be remote. On top of that, the loss of both Starkiller Base and so many Star Destroyers in a short span of time may have been a real hit on their military might that will take some time to recover, giving enough time for the Resistance to reorganize and strike back.

• Hux could have very well cultivated a loyal clique of officers, similar to many historical military dictators, to build up his own influence within the Order. In turn, they were rewarded with massive power and influence, perhaps even continually opposing Kylo in meetings. With Kylo's leadership not looking too good as of this film's events, it's possible the clique will launch another coup within the order. The resulting Enemy Civil War will be vicious, work greatly to the Republic and Resistance's advantage, and make those supporting and funding the First Order seriously rethink doing so.
• This seems to part of Luke's plan, to utterly humiliate the new Emperor. Instead of a powerful leader, he looks like a brash child, making extremely basic tactical errors and being led on a string by the enemy to prioritize personal vendettas instead of completing the mission. While Luke's surviving the initial barrage makes his More Dakka strategy seem justified, the subsequent swordfight is an embarrassment, with Ben swinging wildly with unbalanced footwork and leaving himself ludicrously open. Kylo Ren might inspire fear, but he does not inspire respect.
• This would make Rey's vision of the future come true: Her going to the Supremacy and reaching out to Kylo Ren results in the fall of the First Order, though not in the way she expected.

• Josse.

The New Republic, despite everything, will survive.

They are on their last legs, but prescient member states, the ones that haven't surrendered, will bolster the Resistance. One scenario: they will recanonize the plotline of Corellia building a secret armada in the Kiris asteroid belt, from Legacy of the Force. A character, a retired Corellian admiral who was anti-disarmament, had the fleet built on a black-ops budget, hidden from the Senate's knowledge. He'll remark that if the Senate knew what he had done, they would have had him arrested for treaty violations, but in the end, his endeavor might end up saving the Galaxy.

• Bonus points if this character is Wedge Antilles, now a Corellian freedom fighter (who may against both the First Order and the Republic, as he was to a degree in the Legends canon due to them being restrictive.) Note the somewhat lack of Corellian corvettes in the Resistance fleet, which were a mainstay of the old Rebel fleet. Maybe Wedge will bring them back with a vengeance.
  • Bonus bonus points if Disney can convince his original actor to come back. If not, a recast isn't unwarranted.
  • Extra special bonus points if they have him dogfight one last time, giving Poe a run for his money- he didn't survive two Death Star battles and the snowspeeder fight on Hoth because he had main character plot armour.
• If not Wedge, then perhaps it can be a re-canonized Senator Garm Bel Iblis— another Corellian who was very important in post-ROTJ stories back in the Legendsverse, and since he would probably be very old by 34-35 ABY, he would fit nicely with the Resistance's apparent theme of battered old veterans from the Old Rebellion taking the helm when no one else will.

• Unknown as of The Rise of Skywalker.

The Snoke that Kylo Ren cut in half was not the real Snoke.

He's been built as a formidable menace and has indeed showed that he's not to be underestimated: early in the movie he can choke and drag Hux with the Force while being who knows how far away. \Yet, his death is quick and sudden, and we have known absolutely nothing about who he was exactly. It's hard to believe he's gone in such an anticlimactic way, so the idea that the one we saw wasn't the true Snoke is definitely credible. Snoke may in truth be so powerful, he was controlling a corpse (which would explain his scarred, disfigured condition) and channeling dark side power through it; for all we know, Snoke may be a being that achieved so much mastery of the dark side, it doesn't even have a physical presence now. The death of Snoke and Kylo taking his place leading the First Order are unexpected and annoying setbacks, but this enemy may now play them in his favor (both to see how Kylo Ren will fare as Supreme Leader, and to give the Resistance a false sense of security since Rey will surely tell them Snoke is dead) before revealing himself in Episode IX.

• Alternatively, Snoke has a secret cloning facility on another planet (possibly even Byss) to provide him with a nigh-unlimited supply of bodies for him to transfer his consciousness to after one dies, much like Palpatine in Dark Empire. Once he picks a new body, odds are he'll get right to plotting his former apprentice's downfall, preparing to retake his throne, and eventually start whipping up Force Storms like no one's business.
• Snoke being from a cloning facility is Confirmed by The Rise of Skywalker. Palpatine make him. Who he a clone of, remain unknown.

General Hux never commanded that much respect in truth

The Last Jedi may leave many viewers confused as how that villain we mostly remembered for his chilling speech before Starkiller Base fired, is now a Butt-Monkey who's kicked around by Snoke and Kylo in several scenes. But if you think about it, we didn't see that much of Hux beside that scene in the previous movie, and being good at giving speeches doesn't automatically mean you're also a good strategist; the First Order's military successes may be rather due to the many other officials serving under Hux. Moreover, thanks to other canon sources we learn that Hux's position is mostly due to his father being one of the founders of the First Order (Hux was just a little kid at the time of the Battle of Endor), and that Hux also took it after killing his father in a conspiracy along with Phasma - who, not coincidentally, is another case of a villain proving to be much less than she seemed at first. He's still good for Snoke, as long as the First Order follows his directives, but it obviously doesn't sit well for many people within the First Order. The biggest proof of his incompetence is how in his hubris, he doesn't even think about firing some shots at the evacuated Resistance cruiser to destroy it, thinking of it as a non-threat, before he realizes what Holo intends to do too late. It may even be a voluntary deconstruction: that villain that left you in awe and gained many female fans, is in truth a buffoon.

• Seems to fit with The Rise of Skywalker, were he becomes a spy for the resistance only so That Kylo will lose and Eventually get killed for it.

Hux rightly suspects Kylo of killing Snoke, but...

Kylo tells him it was Rey but Hux isn't buying it. However, if he exposed Kylo as The Starscream of the situation, he'd have to admit that he acted exactly the same with his father in the past, so he has to bite, at least for now.

• For that matter, it could just be that Hux knows better than to go Challenging the Chief when said "Chief" can telekinetically strangle him to death without working up a sweat.

The climax of Episode IX will feature a full-fledged confrontation between the Knights of Ren and the reborn Jedi Order

The ending of The Last Jedi shows people across the galaxy beginning to manifest Force abilities. Rey, who has the original Jedi scriptures from Ahch-To in her possession, will have gathered some of these Force-sensitives as a nascent Jedi Order to help the Resistance rebuild their forces in the aftermath of the Battle of Crait. Meanwhile with Snoke and Phasma dead, the Knights of Ren, who have yet to be shown in the trilogy beyond flashbacks, will take a more central role in the story as Kylo Ren's elite and devoted followers in the final battle to come.

• Perhaps, by the time of IX, they will have the beginnings of the "Old" Republic setting (as Knights of the Old Republic), rather than the "new" Republic of the Prequels, with a new Jedi Order just beginning, leading a number of old 'rebel' planets, fighting a new Sith Empire formed from the First Order, led by the Knights of Ren.
• Jossed. The Knights only fight Ben.

Snoke himself wasn't that important but what he was and where he originally came from is.

The anti-climactic death of Snoke may seem like a let-down but there are too many loose strings for that to just be it. The obvious being who he was, where he came from, how he became Supreme Leader to begin with, etc. The Disney EU between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens establishes that Palpatine felt a powerful source of the dark side in the unknown regions. That there just so happens to be a powerful dark side user out in the unknown regions who takes over the First Order after the fall of Sidious' empire is too much of a coincidence. Disney isn't going to end Star Wars after Episode IX and if they're going to continue after the trilogy of Rey vs. Kylo Ren then they're going to need another threat. I think that there are powerful dark side users in the unknown region that Snoke was affiliated with and that it was them that Palpatine was sensing. Snoke himself was just a hint at the group that will become the new enemies of the future Jedi Order now that the Sith are extinct and the Knights of Ren will likely be defeated in Episode IX.

• Jossed. He was crated by Palpatine.

Captain Phasma is still alive.

True she had a very Disney villain-like death scene, falling into the ruins of the destroyed cruiser, but Disney built up Phasma as a backstabbing survivor who will do what ever it takes to live on. So it's likely that she survived the fall, though seriously wounded, and managed to escape.

• I mean, she survived being stuffed into a trash compactor on a planet that exploded soon after. This seems minor by comparison.
• Bear in mind that according to the back-story explored in the comic book and novel, it's established that Phasma got out of that trash compacter pretty quickly and off the planet before it exploded, whereas here she took a long drop into a fiery mass on a ship that was falling apart around her. Even so, I can see how she might survive; that armor she's wearing was tough enough to shrug off several direct hits from a blaster. Considering the hole Finn punched in it with one of those batons, however, I'm guessing her face is going to be rather badly disfigured if she does survive... not unlike Boba Fett, whose Mandalorian armor saved him from a number of things that would have killed anyone else, but was still badly scarred under his helmet from all the occupational hazards he'd encountered over the years.
• It also wouldn’t be the first time a villain in Star Wars survived horrific burns all over their body…

• Jossed.

Kylo Ren was honest and accurate enough, but his understanding of who Rey's parents were is somewhat imprecise.

• The way I see it, it's likely everything he tells Rey is something he plucked from her mind while they were bonded, meaning he's only telling her what she already surmises but didn't care to admit to herself. While this impression was accurate on the whole, her parents might just as easily have sold her for gambling money as for "drinking" money as Kylo claims, and their paupers' grave might just as easily be on some other planet rather than Jakku. (Her flashback in The Force Awakens did show them taking off from Jakku in a ship, though I'll concede it might just have been a local transport.) This also leaves open the possibility that while they were indeed her birth parents, there were some things they didn't know about her any more than anyone else. Snoke might have been manipulating Rey's conception and gestation, or the parents might have stumbled across some of Palpatine's old Sith artifacts while scavenging, with the artifacts briefly influencing the unborn Rey before her parents sold them ridiculously cheaply, not realizing what they were.
• Confirmed. It turns out that her parents chose to be nothing to protect her.

Episode IX will begin with Leia's funeral.

• The way Episode VIII ended sort of implies that there will be a significant (i.e. a few years) Time Skip between Eps. VIII and IX - time enough for the Resistance to rebuild from a couple of dozen into a force that has some level of chance at holding off a First Order attack. Also, time for Rey to delve into those Jedi books she stole - not to mention somehow come up with another lightsaber. Given that Leia survived the movie but won't feature in Episode IX due to the death of Carrie Fisher, that's easily enough time for Leia's character to die relatively peacefully offscreen. Also, Leia more or less gives Poe her endorsement at the end of Ep. VIII after he undergoes some Character Development so he would be a natural candidate to take over as leader of the Resistance. (This could be used in Episode IX to create some narrative tension between Poe the Military Maverick Ace Pilot and Poe the mature, thoughtful commander.)
• Jossed. She dies during Epsiode IX.

The Resistance's allies in the outer rim include former Imperial factions.

• After the destruction of the New Republic's capital and fleet, the Resistance leaders mention calling for help from their allies out in the Outer Rim. There's no indication of whether these allies are surviving Republic forces, other neutral parties, or even factions of the Empire opposed to the First Order.
• Jossed.

Kylo is not fully on the dark side at the end, but rather an example of Grey is not nice.

• Note that this does not mean he would or would not still have a chance of being redeemed, rather instead of being a full on Darksider after killing Snoke, he is more of a Grey Jedi extremist that feels balance must be imposed by force upon the galaxy, or even seeking to destroy the Force to achieve true balance. Essentially a genderbent (and younger) expy of Kreia/Darth Traya. He himself outright states that the Sith AND the Jedi are among the old things that must be destroyed in his We Can Rule Together speech to Rey. Essentially, Episode IX will have "good" Grey Jedi led by Rey vs. "bad" Grey Jedi led by Kylo and the KoR.
• Jossed.

Kylo is fully on the dark side, but he's sincere enough about that whole "wipe out the past" plan.

• Just as Luke and Rey acknowledge the Jedi had their faults, so too does Kylo Ren seem to figure the Sith weren't always right about everything either. Every reason he gives for everything he does and plans to do in this movie is credible enough, though he doesn't seem to have worked out all the particulars of his plans yet. I should mention that in addition to the Sith and Jedi, he also talked about ending the Resistance and First Order too. Seeing how the Resistance is now the Rebellion again and the First Order took some heavy losses too, Hux had better watch his back: with Snoke out of the way, Kylo Ren may well just decide to institute a purge and burn the First Order to the ground so he can found some new Order on its ashes that's more to his liking.

Holdo was a First Order spy

• Holdo's plan, to run away until they were picked off one by one, without consulting her officers or modifications, was disastrous and stupid, and only made sense if she was trying to cost the Resistance ships, equipment and manpower. Her grand plan was to run to a safe location in regular space and wait for backup. The fleet had the option to jump to any location in the Galaxy, say the asteroid field from Empire Strikes Back or a dangerous nebula, equaling the odds while transmitting for help (they already had the ability to transmit, as Maz was able to talk to Poe and Finn from across the galaxy). The only way it makes sense is that she was doing it intentionally, but had a last-minute change of heart due to seeing the slaughter.

Everything that happened with Snoke was Just as Planned

• When he learns that Luke is intending to let the Jedi die with him, Snoke praises his wisdom. Given his poetic descriptions of the dark rising and the light rising to meet it, he may have intentionally done the same for the Sith (if he is a Sith). Alternatively he knows that both Kylo and Rey have the possibility to surpass him (calling back to Yoda's comment that a master is what a student must grow beyond), and there can only be two...
  • Reasons aside, after frankly admitting to Rey how he's been manipulating Kylo's emotional state all movie he spends the rest of the conversation goading him with backhanded compliments. "You thought he could be turned, but failed to realize what a titanic wimp he is! He's far too loyal of a simpering lapdog to ever turn on me!" (paraphrased) Plus his dialogue when he's reading Kylo's mind at the end only make sense if he knows the victim will be himself; "he turns the lightsaber on his true enemy!" especially makes no sense in relation to Rey.
    • On balance, however, the dialogue Snoke has with Rey about Ben makes sense whether he is a true Sith, a fake Sith, or a non-Sith dark-side force-user. If he is a Sith, he gloats about tricking Rey, and forcing Kylo to feel conflicted because he wants to enact the rule of two. If Kylo kills him, Kylo becomes the Sith Master, and maybe recruits Rey as his apprentice. If Kylo kills Rey, he proves that he is still a powerful and, therefore worthy, apprentice. If Rey gets angry and kills Kylo, she falls prey to the dark side and he recruits her as his new apprentice. And if Rey kills Snoke in anger, she falls to the dark side and either she or Kylo will recruit the other as their Sith apprentice.
• Jossed.

DJ is Boba Fett

• As a bounty hunter, it is indeed "Just business."
  • It’s unlikely, seeing as Boba would be nearly two decades older than the age DJ seems to be (he looks around 40-50, whilst Boba was born shortly after the Battle of Naboo, which took place in 32BBY, which would make him around 66 years old by the events of The Last Jedi, provided he survived his encounter with the Sarlacc thirty years before) and, as a clone, would probably look nearly identical to his dad, Jango (who looks like Temuera Morrison). That is, unless he got some advanced, age-reducing plastic surgery or something…
• Jossed.

Snoke corrupted Ben Solo using a Force Bond.

• As seen in the movie, Snoke can create Force Bonds and manipulate what is perceived through them. This allowed him to influence and guide Ben, who otherwise would have been too closely guarded first by the Solos and then by Luke to physically approach. He could also manipulate how Ben perceived certain things, such as making Luke's moment of weakness seem more monstrous.
  • On a related note, Snoke could have also used this to deceive Luke when he tried to read Ben's heart. Using the Bond, Snoke made Luke see his worst nightmare made flesh rather than an innocent boy.

Luke’s words to Kylo are Foreshadowing for Episode IX

Think of the last things he says. “See you around, kid.” And earlier, he also said a variation of Obi-Wan’s line about always being with him, even if struck down. Those lines aren’t just witticism or call backs, but promises. He’s already told Leia that he still believes Kylo isn’t beyond help, so he’s planning to stick around as a Force Ghost to that end, which we’ll see in the next movie.

• In addition, Luke promised Rey three lessons. He only gave her two.
• He was actually supposed to give her a third lesson-see the Trivia page. Still, I like this theory.

• Technically confirmed.

The movie takes place over a longer period of time than it first appears

• The Stern Chase of the Resistance Fleet is taking place over a significant fraction of C. Ergo, just like in Gunbuster, any analysis of internal chronology must take relativistic time dilation effects into account. This means that Rey has had longer (possibly a lot longer) than a few days to try to get Luke Skywalker back Leia, consult sacred texts, and/or wheedle more lessons from him.
  • Leads to a Fridge Horror possibility: The reason other elements of the Resistance didn't arrive when called for could possibly be that other fleets of the First Order had had the time to already wipe them out. Leia, Chewie, and Rey would truly be starting from scratch.

Rey is going to build a double-saber

• From the pieces of Anakin’s lightsaber. Because I need this, dammit.
  • It will have both a blue and a green blade; one crystal from Luke's first lightsaber (his father's), and the other crystal from the saber Luke constructed himself (the green one, which was strangely absent from the whole movie save for flashbacks).
  • If so, she'd be well-advised to make the blades detachable: as others have pointed out already, Darth Maul's double-bladed saber was Awesome, but Impractical for being a constant danger to his own limbs and being a lot trickier to swing (thereby nullifying his advantage in having the higher ground when Obi-wan made his comeback from hanging by his fingers in the pit below).
  • Rey making a double-bladed lightsaber might not be as farfetched as it seems, as least when it comes to handling; she's already had experience with a similar fighting style from her time wielding her staff, all she needs to do is adapt that style to the weight and handling of a lightsaber (which she is shown experimenting with during her training on Ahch-to).
• Jossed.

Rey is still a Shan!

Who's to say her complete random parents weren't still of the Shan line of English accented brunette women skilled in the Force and partial to staff weapons? I didn't write the WMG above but I also need that double-bladed lightsaber.

• Jossed. She's Palpatine's granddaughter.

Snoke will return.

It seems unlikely that Snoke will have been Killed Off for Real. His body may be destroyed but he may have taken a spirit form like Valkorion from Star Wars: The Old Republic and will subtly manipulate Rey into the Dark Side.

• Jossed. He only appears as a bunch of bodies in vats.

The First Order was secretly being led by someone behind Snoke, who will show up as the Big Bad in Episode 9.

Supplementary novels have revealed a greater threat existing beyond the Unknown regions, and it can't have been Snoke considering how easily he went down, though Snoke may be connected to it in someone. Plus, Kylo Ren just doesn't really seem like Big Bad material to me.

In IX, after Ren's leadership begins to drive the First Order into the ground, said true leader will step in and take control, invoking an Eviler than Thou on Ren in the process.

• Confirmed. It's a revived Palpatine.

Snoke (If He Does Comeback in IX) will be revealed to be Darth Plagueis' Father's Brother's Nephew's Cousin's Former Roomate.

• Or perhaps his solicitor's wife's best friend's former suitor's mentor!
• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

A future movie will feature a Lanai Jedi.

"I first discovered my ability to use the Force while I was helping my sisters to clean up the mess YOU made of the Temple. Do you know how long that hut you blasted a hole in had stood, exactly like that? Not that it matters now that Master Skywalker ripped the whole thing down. Or that tree? Do you know how hard it was to keep it alive all this time? Not that it matters to you! We worked to preserve that temple for a thousand generations, and when two Jedi finally show up they see all of our work as nothing but garbage to be discarded!"

Leia's jaunt from freakin' outer space back into the cruiser was just basic survival instincts on her part.

Sure, we've known for a while that she's Force-sensitive, but the whole being blasted into FREAKIN' OUTER SPACE without any kind of suit and proceeding to use the Force to survive and return to the ship thing seems wayyyyyyyy too out-of-nowhere. Sure, she could've been training in the Force in the past thirty years, but that doesn't sound right. If she was so obviously powerful, why would they need Luke? Watching the scene again, it looks like Leia is basically unconscious at that point, and she definitely is right after the fact. She has to spend much of the rest of the act in intensive medical care, after all.

Leia is a Force Lich

When she was blasted into space the Force bonded with her soul in a manner similar to a lich's phylactery, allowing her to survive despite the vacuum and draw herself back into the ship.

Snoke's Praetorian Guards are the Knights of Ren

- Snoke attempted to turn all of Luke's rogue students to his side but whatever Snoke did to Kylo Ren had... unpleasant side effects for the less powerful students, leaving them as broken shells, still highly skilled and fiercely loyal to Snoke. He then adopted Kylo as an apprentice and the rest of them as bodyguards.

• Jossed. The Knights appear in the next movie.

All this time, Lando Calrissian has been trying to reform the New Republic.

Because honestly, they'd have to address his fate somehow and not leaving it hanging, and fans would be in uproar if he turns out to have died offscreen or something, so he has to appear. Maybe it will turn out that all this time (from TFA to TLJ) he had been gathering new allies from all over the galaxy and doing what he could to reform the broken New Republic. Given that he was a Baron of Cloud City, a key figure in the Rebel Alliance, an a former smuggler with insights to the galaxy's underworld, he will have a lot of allies. He'll show up in a Big Damn Heroes moment to assist the newly formed Resistance in the next episode.

• Jossed.

Kylo was possessed by Snoke's spirit after the latter's physical form was sliced in half.

Admittedly, it is a rather far-fetched theory that also begs the question of why Snoke-in-Kylo's body would leave Hux in the dark about the whole thing if this was the case, but it would potentially explain why Kylo went from looking close to doing a Heel–Face Turn to straight-up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, in addition to taking on a somewhat more Evil Overlord-esque demeanor. Besides, what better way to get revenge on your killer than to make their body your own?

• Jossed.

Snoke is truly Killed Off for Real, but he was engineering a situation where Kylo Ren would replace him as Supreme Leader, with Rey as his apprentice.

Fair warning: this is part-theory, part interpretation.

Snoke may not be a true Sith Lord, but he is a being of the dark side, and therefore can only think of success in the context of one trope: Kill and Replace. The reason his plan failed in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi is not merely because Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, but also Pure Evil Cannot Comprehend Morally Conflicted, Emotionally Unstable Evil.

Snoke assumed that every step in his plan to connect Kylo and Rey through a Force Bond, manipulate Kylo into killing his own master, then taking the throne of Supreme Leader the first chance he had, with Rey willingly accepting his offer to join him would work because that's the way he would think.

Snoke assumed that connecting Rey and Kylo through the Bond would make them understand each others' plights and join forces in the end. He assumed that the reason Kylo Ren became emotionally compromised after killing Han Solo was not because he had just, you know, killed his father, but because Han Solo "meant nothing" to him — that he needed a real father figure, the person who raised him, to kill. He assumed that making Kylo Ren hate him, bullying Kylo and metaphorically castrating him by forcing him to take off his mask and feel ashamed of his connection to his grandfather would strengthen Kylo's connection to the dark side through anger and hate, not resentment and self-loathing.

Snoke's smile just before Kylo kills him, and the odd emphasis he places on Kylo Ren "striking down his true enemy", is not an example of him misreading the situation. Up until his death, he believes he has won. The first signs of his plan falling apart only happen after Rey refuses Kylo Ren's offer, which reveals that even after everything Snoke has done, Kylo Ren is still not ready to conquer the galaxy. Perhaps he will never be ready.

Snoke assumed everything, understood nothing, and paid the ultimate price — not just his life, but any chance of the First Order succeeding in his apprentice's incompetent hands. If Snoke wasn't a villain, it would be tragic.

• Jossed.

We will be hearing from DJ again.

For all his scuzzy behavior, he does seem like a True Neutral, and his prediction that "They'll blow you up today, you'll blow them up tomorrow" definitely seems likely to come true. Come next movie, he'll probably use that ship he stole from a weapons merchant to set up shop as a weapons merchant himself, and start selling weapons to both sides the same way as the previous owner.

• DJ might even pull a reverse of what he did in The Last Jedi....He'll be hired by The First Order only to betray them to The Resistance (Perhaps out of guilt, Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal or some other reason).
• Jossed. He's never even mentioned.

DJ is not really a straight-up villain, he's just a guy who was a bit in over his head who felt he had to save his own skin.

DJ in the promotional material is described as neither a hero nor villain. He is truly morally Neutral and favors neither side of the conflict. He betrayed Finn, Rose, BB8 and the Resistance because he's simply a coward and knew the other choice was a brutal certain death. He seemed to kind of like Finn, Rose & BB8 and gave Rose back her necklace (he likely had every intent on keeping it, at first). There's a fan fiction that proposes a fan theory that DJ may have downloaded some info on First Order weaponry into BB8, thus explaining how the droid managed to commandeer the AT-ST. If anything; DJ seems to just be a jerkass misanthrope who's sick of the nonstop war/peace cycle and The Man and would "use" both sides to make a living outside polite society. He's a bad person but not a super-evil bad person. Benicio del Toro himself doesn't consider himself a villain.

Snoke wanted to make Kylo Ren his successor. Even if he had to die for it to work.

Similar to the above theory, but with a Xanatos Gambit mixed in with a Thanatos Gambit as well. The Force Awakens establishes that Snoke seems genuinely interested in Kylo Ren's potential. He is also very old physically and chronologically (minimum of late seventies if he's lived to see the rise and fall of the Empire), very scarred and thus nearing the end of his life. Palpatine attempted to find immortality and bypass succession, not caring what happens to the Empire after his death. Snoke does want the First Order to continue, but it needs a proper leader. And that's Kylo Ren, grandson of Darth Vader and heir to the most Force-sensitive being known to have existed.

He needs to get him away from attachments (a Jedi sentiment) by having him killing them (a Sith measure). He doesn't have much time left. Han Solo's death was a failure in that regard. He couldn't kill Leia, and assumes she died. Snoke knows he has little time left before he passes away, getting Kylo to be a proper successor and dedicated to the cause is absolutely necessary. So he does something risky-give his apprentice two paths to solidify him on the path of evil, which requires him to be put in harm's way-murder the woman he may love, or kill and usurp him. Kylo chooses the latter.

Snoke dies content, his plan having worked. Time will tell whether it will stick, or he has reached too far.

• Jossed.

Snoke is dead, but Death Is Cheap for him.

While I can fully believe Snoke was playing The Long Game in some manner, and provoking Kylo Ren to strike him down, and I can fully believe his death on-screen was real enough (seeing as he didn't get back up after being cut in half), maybe he's the kind of guy death doesn't really slow down all that much. While we're not told whether he had anything to do with Darth Plagueis or not, that might just be the form of "immortality" Plagueis discovered and Snoke learned (either by being him, or just by studying his research): how to die, and then spring right back to life in a new body as soon as your killer leaves the room. This ability might also come with some handy Mundane Utility: when you're as old and horribly scarred as Snoke (and Emperor Palpatine before him, for that matter), temporarily dying in this manner could be an easy way of shedding your worn-out old body and getting a fresh new one.

• Jossed.

The opening of Episode IX will be a case of The Cavalry Arrives Late, and briefly explore why.

Shortly after the end of Episode VIII, the remains of the Resistance will suddenly find themselves flooded with returns to the distress call, with all the Resistance's allies proclaiming their allegiance and willingness to help. Offers of ship maintenance, free weapons, surplus armed spacecraft, army training, volunteers for military service and safe havens will all come through. Amidst all the relief, one of the Resistance members will angrily ask why no help came during the Battle of Crait. Then one of the allies - perhaps Lando - will explain that many wanted to help, but chickened out when they heard about all the firepower the First Order was packing. However, reports of the return of Luke Skywalker have restored hope in many, and now they're willing to finally assist the Resistance. Cut to several months later and they've made good on that promise, with the Resistance forces being built up well enough until they almost resemble the state that the Rebellion forces were in during episode IV.

• Given Battlefront 2's revelation that Leia sent the remaining members of Inferno Squad on a mission to contact Resistance allies in the Outer Rim, it could be that Zay and Shriv were in the middle of negotiating with them when the Battle of Crait happened, and seeing the utter slaughter of the Resistance forces led to their allies abandoning all talks out of fear.
• Jossed.

"Snoke" is supposed to be a Meaningful Name (or possibly an Ironic Name).

Because it sounds like "smoke," and that's ultimately all he was.

Kylo Ren wasn't unconscious when Hux entered the throne room.

We're not shown how Rey escapes, though we know she took the lightsaber pieces and left on a shuttle, after which she reunited with Chewie on the Millennium Falcon.

After their Force-scuffle for the Skywalker lightsaber, Rey and Kylo Ren are blown away when the lightsaber breaks, but neither is knocked out for long or at all. Despite Rey's refusal to join him in ruling the galaxy, Kylo still is not truly willing to kill her and allows her to escape, possibly even pointing her to the right door to wherever the shuttles are stationed, because she probably wouldn't know the Supremacy's layout after just one visit. That or he just stays down while Rey picks up the pieces and departs. Hux later walks in on an apparently unconscious Kylo Ren, who wakes up right as Hux is reaching for his blaster. Kylo lies that Rey killed Snoke and escaped, and then quickly changes the subject to focus on Hux's failings.

• Considering Kylo Ren seems to be getting a bit more pragmatic and savvy, it would make sense that he's keeping secrets from his obviously untrustworthy subordinate in this manner.
• A possibility for how Rey knew the layout of the Supremacy: it was confirmed that she could use the Jedi Mind Trick in the first film because she accidentally pulled the knowledge out of Kylo's head. Given that he's obviously been on this ship before, perhaps the same happened here.

Rey's parents were Imperial officers

Kylo told Rey that her parents sold her for drinking money and they were buried in a pauper's grave on Jakku. So we know they were poor and alcoholic, but that doesn't explain one thing: where did Rey get her posh accent? Maybe they were typical Evil Brit Imperial officers who survived the crash of their Star Destroyer, and being stranded on Jakku and the collapse of the Empire drove them to drink.

• Jossed. Her father was Palpatine's clone.

Rey and Kylo formed a real Force bond

Snoke created the Force bond between Rey and Kylo as part of a trap. After Snoke dies his fake bond should have stopped, yet they have a moment at the end where it appears to still be there. They formed such a strong connection that they created a real Force bond though Snoke's fake one.

• Jossed, because they always had one all along. See the theory about Snoke lying in "Confirmed".

Rey actually is a Skywalker

She's just not descended from Shmi and Anakin Skywalker, but from Shmi's sibling or cousin or some-such. Shmi was a slave who changed owners at least once before the events The Phantom Menace, so her having family that Ani and, by extension, Obi-Wan never met (and therefor never freed) isn't out of the question.

• Jossed. She's Palpatine's granddaughter.

Kylo Ren’s Frame-Up of Rey for killing Snoke is actually going to work in her favor

If you follow Kylo’s version of what happened to its logical conclusion, Rey is so badass she single-handedly assassinated Snoke, incapacitated Kylo Ren and took out a roomful of Praetorian Guards before escaping unscathed. To the First Order and their supporters, she’s walking Nightmare Fuel. To anyone who would support the Resistance, she’s poised to be a figure of near-mythic status just like Luke Skywalker and exactly the sort of person you’d want in your corner.

• Jossed.

Rey's parents are nobody

Literally she was created by Darth Plagueis the Wise. She just went along with the anonymous dead people theory put forward by Kylo.

• Jossed. She's Palpatine's granddaughter.

DJ is Rey's father

Honestly this troper kept waiting for that reveal, because once her parentage was revealed, he fit into it perfectly (sans both parents supposedly being "dead"). We saw in the end how selfish and amoral DJ was, and it would be exactly in character for him to sell his own child and never give her a second thought. He and Rey look similar enough for him to be her father. And his incredible skills with hacking could come from some level of Force sensitivity, that Rey inherited.

• Jossed. Her father was Palpatine's clone.

Rey is a Fett

Bob Fett is hugely popular, and very well could have survived the Sarlacc pit. However, the trauma of the experience would have led him to fading from the galactic stage and becoming a horrid drunk on Jakku.

• Jossed. She's Palpatine's granddaughter.

The premonition about Rey and Kylo turning was in fact correct

Rey is using the dark side of the force, and Kylo is on the light side. But... dark is not evil and light is not good. Kylo has adopted the view that the only way to be strong is to dispose of your attachments and let go of everything, a philosophy recommended by no less than Yoda! [https://youtu.be/tUPD1w78D5I?t=12m39s] Meanwhile Rey is fueled by her emotions, she walked straight into Dark Side hole on Luke's planet without any hesitation. Luke never even had a chance to tell her what the Dark Side is.

• Jossed.

Rey is a Skywalker after all.

Anakin actually had a long-lost sibling who had their own children, and was force-sensitive as well. However, this Skywalker never amounted to anything, and Kylo's description of Rey's parents is true.

• Jossed. She's Palpatine's granddaughter.

One or both of Rey's parents were from Luke's Jedi Order.

One of Luke's Padawans escaped Kylo's purge, but was traumatized into alcoholism. Kylo downplayed them even more because he hated Luke's other students.

• Jossed. Her father was Palpatine's clone.

Snoke is a child of Maz and the master codebreaker

An unauthorized Force usage by them and/or third parties allowed this abomination to happen. The end result got somewhat twisted, aside from basic physique being mostly combinational, and made the two break up so that they avoid temptation to try again. Maz at least keeps making favors to her ex-partner, such as claiming he's the only chance to break Supremacy security while in reality it's a relatively common skill.

• Jossed. He was created by Palpatine.

Porgs are Force-sensitive creatures

Like vornskrs and ysalamiri. They are native to Ahch-To, which was the birthplace of the Jedi Order.

Luke gave the dice to Leia for a practical reason

Luke, presumably, used the Light Side of the Force to create the illusion on Crait. Although little is explained about how the Force works, it is entirely possible that positive thoughts, especially by someone who is Force-sensitive, strengthen the Light Side. Luke used up a little of his energy to create the dice, which reminded Leia of Han Solo, and her thoughts about Han strengthened the Light Side, from which Luke could maintain his illusion during the fight against Kylo Ren a bit longer.

Snoke forced Luke to draw his saber on Kylo

Seeing as Snoke could even Force Bond Kylo to a person Snoke himself has never seen (presumably), and is a very powerful telepath in general, it is possible Snoke might have personally broken through Luke's mental defenses that fateful night and influenced him to draw his lightsaber. Luke was so shaken by his own actions and the horrors that followed that he never actually caught on what happened.

Alternately, Snoke forcefully woke Ben Solo up the night of the temple attack

What are the odds that Ben would wake up the exact second his uncle had drawn his lightsaber? Luke only hesitated for a few moments, after all. It could be terrible luck, or it could be that Snoke, whom Luke saw in Ben's heart/mind, seized advantage of the moment and used his telepathy to "warn" Ben to wake up.

Snoke is Killed Off for Real, but will serve as a Posthumous Character with a Villainous Legacy.

His death raises a lot of questions and makes it seem like They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character. However if he survives somehow, it undermines Kylo Ren's development as a villain. A middle ground would be that Snoke will have an impact post-mortem, and Kylo/the Resistance will learn that he's already set up methods of achieving his real motives beyond the conquest we see, whatever they may be. Unlike Palpatine whose plans after his death were Taking You with Me, Snoke has goals beyond himself and his lifetime. Maybe we'll see more Knights of Ren that are loyal to his cause. Andy Serkis could play the character again using hologram recordings or sentinels like Palpatine used.

• Jossed. It's revealed that he was just Palpatine's puppet.

While Snoke didn't create the bond, he did expand and exploit it.

If Snoke didn't actually forge the bond, one would have to wonder why Rey and Kylo Ren kept unexpectedly and unintentionally dropping in on each other; clearly, the bond wasn't under their control. The way I see it, Snoke probably sensed their connection and figured if he wanted to learn Luke's location, tracing Rey through her connection to his apprentice was likely to be most effective strategy. Therefore, he used a bit of his own skill with the Force to strengthen their connection, meaning that he did have a hand in "forging" their bond after all... Metaphorically True.

Rey is a Force sponge.

One aspect of Rey as a character that has been bothering a lot of people is how she picks up various Force abilities so easily; by the end of The Force Awakens she's learned the Jedi Mind Trick, managed to snatch the blue saber away just as Kylo Ren was going for it, and developed an empathic bond with Leia through the Force. By the end of The Last Jedi, she's still got her odd Force bond with Kylo (revealed after the movie to have been forged during her interrogation back in The Force Awakens), she held her own in her struggle with him for the light saber (ending mostly in a draw, though she ended up retrieving both pieces of it), and she managed to lift a massive number of rocks, rivaling even Yoda's talent for lifting heavy objects in Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back.

So how did she manage to learn all these skills with so little effort? Simple: unknown to Luke or Kylo or Snoke or anyone else, Rey has the passive and yet incredibly useful ability to absorb other Force users' powers whenever people use them around her. Luke barely gave her anything, since he'd cut himself off from the Force; yet Kylo Ren's interrogation in which he tried to manipulate her mind gave her the ability to manipulate others, which is how she learned the Jedi Mind Trick. She also absorbed Kylo and Snoke's ability to lift and manipulate objects using Force telekinesis: Kylo could snatch a saber, and Snoke's power to lift and fling heavy objects clearly rivals Yoda's, as he was flinging Rey around like a rag doll without working up a sweat throughout most of his encounter with her.

Bottom line: Rey didn't start off particularly powerful in the Force, but she's been soaking up powers from every Force user she's met, such that anything they can do, she soon has the ability to do too. That's why Kylo was able to paralyze Rey and put her to sleep the first time they met, but not during their later fight on Starkiller Base or any time thereafter. From all the time she's spent around Kylo and his former master, Rey may even have soaked up his ability to freeze blaster bolts in the middle of the air by now; one can only wonder whether she'll be able to keep control of herself, considering how many of these powers she's absorbed so far have come from dark-siders.

• Partially Jossed, partially confirmed. Word of God is that the bond lets her access Kylo's knowledge and memories, so that's how she's gotten so strong so quickly. She is absorbing knowledge, but only from him, and it's via the bond, not a latent ability of her own.
• Of course, if Snoke was manipulating that bond, isn't it possible she was also "soaking up" powers from him by proxy?

Snoke is just dead and gone

Call me cynical, but modern film audiences can't seem to get over their obsession with giving every movie a thick coating of obnoxiously-blatant self-awareness and beating the Subverted Trope to death, making them more cliche'd than the original cliches ever were (and certainly nowhere near as satisfying), under the delusion that it automatically makes everything perfect.

• Confirmed.

Rey's extreme Force power is the Force's natural state.

It seems that both Kylo Ren and Rey have far greater potential in the Force than those who came before. While Kylo's power is assumed to come from his Skywalker blood, Rey's power has been a source of contention in the fanbase, with many wanting an explanation of Rey's power level.

Both the original and prequel trilogies take place during a time when the Force was cast out of balance. The Sith were manipulating events behind the scenes, while the Jedi had grown complacent and had fallen out of touch with the Force. Several characters point these facts out. Mace Windu at one point believed that "[the Jedi's] ability to use the Force [had] diminished." Barriss Offee claims during her trial that the Jedi had become an army fighting for the Dark Side. Yoda's dark self criticizes him, saying that he lives "in the decadence of war." The Jedi are weakened because of the Force's unbalance, unable to foresee or prevent the Sith plot. But when Anakin Skywalker finally brings the Force back into balance, the Force is no longer in the corrupted, unbalanced state it had during Palpatine's reign, and it now speaks clearly to anyone who listens, so those who wield it can do so with much greater power. Rey, born into this era, is merely one of a new breed of Force-sensitives far stronger than those who lived when the Force was unbalanced.

Rey's power is simply a result of the Force being in balance. The reason she seems so powerful is because our frame of reference is based on the Force's unbalanced state.

The Praetorian Guard have a Force-based Conservation of Ninjutsu as their power, like the Huntsmen of Annuvin from The Chronicles of Prydain.

Basically, the Huntsmen's special power is that each time one of them falls in battle, the rest become more individually powerful. Now, in their battle against Rey and Kylo, we see the Guards going from struggling when they outnumber the duo 8-2, to nearly gaining the upper hand when it's down to 2v2. Granted, the Praetorian Guard don't seem to be Force users, but as we saw in Rogue One and Guardians of the Whills, it is possible to feel the Force even if you're not a Jedi-level of Force-sensitive. The Legends expanded universe already gave us battle meditation (basically, stat-buffing your allies with the Force), so it's not implausible if the new canon decided to give us a Dark Side variant that relies on the deaths of others to fuel your own strength (especially since it's mentioned in Aftermath that Sith Lords could indeed drain Force energy from others).

DJ was in jail because he was picked up on a complaint of drunk and disorderly conduct

It's a casino planet, it probably wouldn't be the first time someone on Canto Bight got liquored up and made an ass of themselves in public. Plus it accounts for his slurred speech.

The Luke of this movie is Luuke/the infamous Bigger Luke.

A few months after Grogu left, someone managed to clone Luke, and tried to pull a Kill and Replace on him. However, the clone wasn't perfect-beyond being a few inches too tall, the Clone also had all of Luke's memories and strong morals.Part of the reason for Luke's sheer apathy Despair Event Horizon was because he learned that he wasn't the original-and that the Original hadn't been around for decades. He is afraid that him trying to kill Ben was the result of "Programming" that the cloners implanted into him, so part of the reason he closed himself off was to protect his friends. (The reason he gives for why he's closed off and withdrawn from the Galaxy IS the truth-but it's not all of the truth.)(Sadly, Bigger Luke is still a reflection of how Original Luke could have turned out-they're still the same person, so Original Luke could have turned out that way under similar circumstances.)

• Original Luke is frozen in Carbonite somewhere. Bigger Luke/Luuke found out where he was when he became one with the Force, and after TROS, pushes Rey to un-freeze his original self.

Confirmed

Confirmed (also unmarked spoilers ahead)

Kylo Ren or Snoke will rebuild the crossguard lightsaber

Also from the same released pictures, we see William and Harry dueling with prop lightsabers, one of which is the crossguard saber. It could well be that Snoke had the remnants of Kylo's saber recovered when Kylo was, and either Kylo will rebuild it or Snoke will provide a new one of the same model.

• Confirmed — Kylo has it in the trailer and on one of the Vanity Fair covers.

Rey will get a vision of Kylo Ren on Ahch-To similar to Luke's vision of Vader on Dagobah.

Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, and Mark Hamill have been photographed arriving in Ireland together.

• Sort of confirmed; so long as your definition of "vision" includes Rey and Kylo arguing through a Force bond, and Kylo paying her a visit via Astral Projection.

Also, "It's like poetry..."

Rey becomes the Last Jedi at the climax, when Luke sacrifices himself.

Luke is in exile because, after the trauma of Kylo Ren’s betrayal and his students’ massacre, he feels that Jedi only make the galaxy worse in the long run. Concentrating that much power and connection to the Force in a single individual is too dangerous. While a good Jedi can do a lot to make the galaxy a better place, every Jedi that’s trained runs the risk of turning to darkness and becoming an incomparable force for evil. There’s almost nothing that a Jedi can do which a group of good-hearted and committed heroes can’t accomplish without the Force (albeit, with heavy sacrifices, as seen in Rogue One), but there are evils that only a darksider can accomplish. While some darksiders can only really be stopped by a good Force user, that’s a problem that only exists because people were being trained to use the Force in the first place.

Rey’s initial challenge is to convince Luke that he should train her, because there is in fact a great darkness that has emerged in the galaxy (Snoke and Kylo Ren) that only a Jedi can effectively stop. To illustrate this point, while Rey is going through her training arc, the story will keep cutting back to the Resistance, who are faring badly in their fight against the First Order. With the destruction of the Republic, the galaxy has become a dark and fragmented place, and the First Order is thriving in the chaos—Kylo returns (both darker and more conflicted than ever), Snoke is terrifying worlds into submission, Poe is fighting against all odds, and Rose is a Resistance survivor who has her own sub-plot trying to get Finn’s medical pod to safety while keeping it running (an arc that possibly includes escaping to a frontier world where Finn finally wakes up and they have to engage in some pseudo-pod-racing so they can get a ship to take them off-world).

Towards the end, in a moment that directly mirrors The Empire Strikes Back, Rey experiences a vision of her friends in danger while doing telekinetic meditation (that would be the scene in the trailer where she is panting and distressed while crouching on the stone—it’s probably preceded by the scene later in the trailer where shards of stone are rising around her hand, as well as the dialog about breathing and seeing). She wants to go to them, but Luke tries to warn her against it, remembering his own experience in the same situation. She pleads with him, and he makes the decision Yoda didn’t: he goes with her. In the climax, during the Resistance’s darkest hour, Rey arrives out of the blue with the legendary hero in tow. They win, but only after Luke’s final sacrifice (a price he knew he would pay when he chose to go with her), possibly made along with his sister Leia. Thus, Rey becomes The Last Jedi.

• This is now confirmed in some parts. As Luke himself states while confronting Kylo Ren, Luke is not the last Jedi because Rey will carry his legacy on. Finn and Rose's arc goes differently however, while Rey has no visions and leaves her training with Luke for different reasons.

That scene in the latest trailer showing Rey picking up Kylo Ren's lightsaber is a Red Herring bit of Superdickery.

While some fans are already speculating that the scene means Rey is going to tumble to the dark side, or has gotten powerful enough to snatch the saber away from Ren, or he's actually tossed it to her because he's changing sides, my guess is that this scene is actually less significant than people think, and Rey is merely picking up Kylo Ren's saber because she fumbled and dropped her own saber in the middle of a fight and needed a weapon quick and his saber just happened to be the one closest at hand. This might even be played for a moment of comic relief as it turns out Kylo Ren also fumbled his saber and went grabbing for it and came up with her saber instead. When Force users need a weapon fast, they can't be choosers, and it would be rather amusing to watch hero and villain trying to take each other on with each other's weapons.

• Now that the movie is out, this is confirmed in broad strokes: she ends up picking up his blade only momentarily while Snoke is toying with her; and though Kylo doesn't grab hers directly, he makes use of it to chop Snoke in half via a little Force telekinesis..

Kylo Ren is going to get into a fight with Snoke's Praetorian Guards for some reason.

A new publicity photo shows that Snoke has some successors to those scarlet-clad Imperial Guards Emperor Palpatine had, guys holding staffs with some kind of energy blade on the end of them. The recent "behind the scenes" footage from D23 shows (among other things) Kylo Ren's actor Adam Driver practicing sparring with a mockup of his cross-bladed saber against two other combatants holding their mockups like staffs. Rey's actress Daisy Ridley is also shown practicing with a mockup of her saber against three combatants, at least two of whom are swinging their weapons like staffs. My prediction? While Rey obviously has some reason to be fighting with Snoke's guards, we're also going to get to see Kylo Ren go up against them for one reason or another; either he's maybe having second thoughts about that whole decision to go to the dark side, or maybe he's just not feeling so loyal to Snoke anymore and we're finally going to see some of that Chronic Backstabbing Disorder the books have always indicated to be so common to dark-siders up on the big screen.

• And it is confirmed: after Kylo unexpectedly kills Snoke, the guards attack both him and Rey, who have to face them off.

Kylo Ren will team up with Rey to defeat Snoke

The apprentices of the Sith will always plot against their master. In the ending of the second trailer, we see what looks like Rey wanting to join Kylo Ren.

• This has been partially confirmed: Kylo kills Snoke also thanks to Rey, but not because of her active help but rather because she ends up being useful as a distraction. Also, while he does make the offer while holding his hand out to her as shown in the trailer, she doesn't accept it.

Kylo Ren is not a double agent, but is studying hard to be The Starscream, and will be turning against Snoke at some point.

Aside from the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder we know to be common to Force users on the dark side, I'm thinking Kylo wants to follow in Darth Vader's footsteps in another specific way: namely, he wants to enlist Rey to help him overthrow Snoke the same way Darth Vader tried to convince Luke to join him in overthrowing Palpatine. His training is almost complete, and if he completes it, then Snoke and Kylo have each outlived their usefulness to each other and it's time for him to put his plans in motion. Also, considering that this movie is likely to have its share of Call Backs to The Empire Strikes Back while doing some zigging where it zagged, maybe it's going to show us what would have happened if Vader had succeeded in either capturing or convincing his son; just as Vader would not have brought Luke back to Palpatine but instead would have tried to finish his training so they could overthrow the Emperor together, so too Kylo Ren will not bring Rey to Snoke as ordered, but rather try to team up with her to overthrow his former master.

• This is almost completely confirmed: he kills Snoke, takes his place, and tries (unsuccessfully) to have Rey join. Along the way, he does bring Rey to Snoke, but not in quite the manner or for the reasons Snoke ordered him to.

Luke will be killed in this movie.

• Every trilogy they have a strong Jedi killed off (Qui-Gon, Ben, Mace) to show off just how powerful the enemy has become and how real things have gotten. Luke's pretty much the only one left and once he's done being Rey's Yoda he's not going to have much plot purpose left. It might also serve to legitimize Kylo as a threat since he's been mostly a chump for the first act.
  • Now that Carrie Fisher is dead, if they're gonna kill Luke it will probably happen only in Episode IX. Otherwise there will no one left of the original trilogy's Power Trio in that movie.
• Confirmed, although he's not really killed, he rather dies after using up all his strength, and in a way that ends up still defeating Kylo Ren and lessening his threat.

Kylo Ren is going to rescue Rey from Snoke to further his own ends.

Furthering the above WMG concerning his impending disloyalty, I'm thinking the scene in the trailer showing Kylo Ren picking up his light saber is a Chekhov's Gun moment, and that it follows on the heels of another scene in other trailers showing Snoke torturing Rey. Specifically, I think he's picking up that saber to use it against Snoke, and that part of why he might actually succeed in persuading Rey to join him where Vader failed to persuade Luke is that cutting down Snoke in the middle of his torturing Rey would be reminiscent of Vader's Heel–Face Turn against Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, even though Kylo would be doing this out of Pragmatic Villainy rather than genuine reform. Moreover, it would be far less coercive and obviously manipulative than Vader's Don't Make Me Destroy You speech to Luke. Having Kylo and Rey strike out on their own as Dangerous Deserters might also greatly increase the story's moral complexity: what happens to the Force if both Snoke and Luke lose control of their successors?

• This is mostly confirmed: Kylo kills Snoke and Rey fights with him against the guards that attack both of them immediately afterward. While not for lack of sincerely trying, Kylo Ren fails to convince Rey to join him and turn against Luke, however.

Luke will be an Eccentric Mentor.

Both deliberately and unintentionally. Luke teaches Rey the ways of the Force the way Yoda and Obi-Wan did: with vague, frustrating advice given with a hint of mischievousness. However, his years of isolation also affected his mind, making him a bit kooky. Plus, that would allow this to happen for real in the movie.

• Confirmed; who knew Luke Skywalker had such a sense of humor?

Luke will give a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Kylo Ren.

The movie will be In Memoriam of Carrie Fisher.

• I’m not ready for this.
• Confirmed. There is a dedication to Fisher at the end of the film.

VIII will be an Immediate Sequel.

It'll start with Luke either accepting or declining the lightsaber from Rey, and possibly affirm Rey's parentage right off the bat with a line (maybe Rey tentatively saying "Father?" or the like).

• Star Wars don't really lend themselves to a timeline like that, since both sides need some time to shore up their resources in time for more star warring. The closest thing would be...
  • 2 years?
• Confirmed. Rian Johnson announced at Star Wars Celebration 2016 that the movie will pick up right where the last one left off so we'll get to hear that conversation between Luke and Rey.

The film will start with Finn waking up from his coma.

Ending the story with Finn unconscious from getting sabered in the back by Kylo Ren feels like an obvious setup to have Finn maintain his Audience Surrogate status with the Resistance. When he wakes up, some time will have passed, Luke will have been training Rey for a while, and Kylo Ren will be dividing his time between learning from Snoke and trying to reunite the scattered First Order.

• Confirmed

The Last Jedi does not mean one specific person.

Remember that the plural of "Jedi" is "Jedi". "The Last Jedi" will a group of Jedi; maybe just Luke and Rey, maybe other Jedi Luke has trained, maybe Leia too. The title was chosen specifically to troll the audience, because the producers know what most peoples' first reaction would be to the title.

• Confirmed: "Last Jedi" can be either singular or plural in the English language, but the Spanish language has no ambiguity. The official name in Spanish is "Los Últimos Jedi", in plural.
• And in all other foreign language translations, the "last" is in plural as well.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt will make a cameo

• Joseph is a well established member of Johnson's Production Posse, and he dressed up as Yoda for the premiere of The Force Awakens. He will show up as a one-off character, such as a bartender or merchant, and dressed up as an alien so no one recognizes him, similar to Simon Pegg in The Force Awakens.
  • He's been confirmed to appear as a voice cameo.

Finn will be back on his feet quickly.

What did they do with Luke in Episode 5 after the wampa mauling that they didn't do with Finn? Dunk him in a tank of Bacta. Because the Resistance is on a shoestring budget during the time frame of Episode 7, they did not have a bacta treatment tank. However, with the destruction of the Republic Capital, support for the Resistance is galvanized, and by the time of Episode 8, they will have a bacta tank to dunk Finn in.

• The article in the summer 2017 issue of Vanity Fair seems to support this, that he starts off the movie in something called a "bacta suit", but recovers fairly early on.

The bodycount of named characters is gonna rise bigtime

To put in a Gundam reference, this movie will kill off so many characters it'll make Zeta Gundam look like a kids show by comparison!

• psst Zeta Gundam was a kids' show.
• Confirmed. Phasma, Snoke, Admiral Ackbar, Vice-Admiral Holdo and Luke Skywalker all die in the course of the film. So do the Praetorian Guard, if a named unit counts. Death also comes very close for Leia and Rose, though both either outright survive (Leia) or are very heavily hinted at surviving (Rose)

The future films will have increasingly crazier Force powers.

Kylo's "Force freeze" was already unlike anything seen in the OT and PT, and both he and Rey have immense raw power, though not the training to use it well. So we may see stuff like:

• Teleportation.
• Telekinesis developing into true flight.
• Force freeze developing into true ZA WARUDO time-stopping.
• Kylo making a sword out of Force lightning, possibly after his saber is destroyed.
• Rey performing a Kame Hame Hadouken as a Light side counterpart of Force lightning.
  • Expanding on the Teleportation above there was a force power in the old EU that allowed a dark side user to open up wormholes trough space-time known as Force Storm. A similar power may be introduced in future films being used by Kylo Ren or Snoke. Perhaps even by Rey or Luke. This would be a visually stunning force power to use and would be something we haven't seen in any of the films while emphasizing the power of the force users in this trilogy.
• Ability to nullify all other Force abilities in the immediate area for a short amount of time/as long as it's being used (a la a Maximum Drive from the Eternal memory)
• Confirmed, though with different powers: we get Astral Projection, Weather Control, and forging Force Bonds in Last Jedi.

Kylo Ren was not the only one of Luke's apprentices to fall to the dark side.

The Knights of Ren are actually a gang of failed Jedi apprentices who collectively fell to the dark side and killed the ones who refused to go along with them.

Perhaps the First Order were attempting to create Force-sensitive clones to use as soldiers, but the process seemingly failed. If Finn is Force-sensitive, he might have been part of the same project, which the First Order dismissed as a failure but was actually successful.

• Confirmed, albeit only in passing, by Luke in discussing what Kylo Ren did with his other apprentices. As to any First Order programs seeking Force-sensitive soldiers, none such spotted so far and Hux and Phasma don't seem to know about any, but who knows what projects Snoke and/or Kylo Ren may have left on the back burner for the duration of this movie?

We will see more Prequel references

With much of the Republic fleet destroyed, they will probably Break Out the Museum Piece to replace what they lost, including prequel-era ships and battle droids.

• There's only one very sparing reference to the Prequels era (Luke referring to Emperor Palpatine as Darth Sidious, a bit of trivia he must have learned from digging up some old Jedi archives from somewhere, since nobody else seems to have found out about Palpatine's Sith title), but at some point in the movie the Resistance finds shelter in an old Rebellion base, thus reactivating the machinery there. Also, in the final part of the movie, there is some talk abut "allies in the Outer Rim", which doesn't rule out the possibility of something like this happening in Episode IX.

There will be 5 main characters or groups

Take a look at the pattern so far:

Ep. 4 - Luke (1).

Ep. 5 - Luke (1), Millennium Falcon crew (2).

Ep. 6 - Luke (1), Lando and the rebel fleet (2), the ground assault on Endor (3)

Ep. 7 - Finn (1), Rey (2), Poe (3), Kylo Ren (4).

Therefore ... Ep. 8 - Finn (1), Rey (2), Poe (3), Kylo Ren (4), ??? (5).

• The Millennium Falcon crew were already main characters in the first movie. As was Obi-Wan.

The story will quite deliberately not reveal something everyone really wants to know by the end of The Last Jedi.

Either we're not going to learn who Snoke is, or who exactly Rey's parents are, or Finn's origins will remain a mystery; or some combination thereof, because the cast and crew just like yanking our chains that way.

• By the sound of interviews with the cast and director, we’ll learn Rey’s parentage but not Finn’s origins in this film. Snoke's whole backstory may be left to other media such as books and comics...
  • Rian Johnson said her parentage would be "addressed" in this movie, but hedged a bit when the interviewer pressed him for clarification... which suggests the movie's going to reveal something, but not everything we want to know about her biological family.
• Confirmed after a fashion: Rian Johnson quite deliberately did not reveal anything about Snoke, Finn's origins (before being a stormtrooper, that is) remain unrevealed, and though the story pretty clearly and explicitly makes Rey's parents out to be nobodies, we're never actually shown these nobodies, and the story leaves open the possibility that these nonentities might have achieved something memorable off-screen.

The writers of these stories haven't decided some (or all) of these things everyone really wants to know yet.

That's why (among other things) Abrams flip-flopped on his claim about Rey's parents shortly after he made it; probably, one of the higher-ups at Disney sent him a message to the effect of "Don't go closing off any of our options too soon."

Kylo Ren has a Villainous Crush on Rey.

The Force Awakens had enough subtext to leave this a possibility, but there may be more to it than initially suggested. If/when Rey is revealed to be Luke's daughter, the revelation won't deter Ren's affection. Rather, he'll take their shared lineage (specifically both of them being descendants of Darth Vader) as a sign they're "meant to be together". Snoke may even encourage Ren in his pursuit, believing his and Rey's potential child could be one of the most powerful force users ever and an ideal apprentice.

• Jossed in regards to them being Kissing Cousins and Snoke encouraging his pursuit, pretty much confirmed otherwise. He's certainly desperate to have Rey at his side, with lots of Ship Tease from their psychic encounters.

Lando Calrissian will not appear.

It's because he died offscreen.

• We don't know if he's still alive, but he didn't appear in TLJ.
• Confirmed. He appears alive and well in The Rise of Skywalker.

Alternately, Rey and Kylo always had a real Force Bond, and Snoke lied

They accidentally created it by diving too deep in each others' minds in the interrogation scene in The Force Awakens—the script actually mentions "a feeling" and "an energy" that passes through them at that moment. That could possibly be the moment the bond, if this theory is true, was created. Snoke was aware of it, since he's always been in Kylo's mind, but had no part in its creation; either out of his overblown Pride or an attempt to demoralize them, he still took credit for it anyway.

• Confirmed. Pablo Hidalgo and Rayne Roberts have something rather interesting to say about it: "...but when he peers into her mind there’s something profound that happens between them ..." and "It feels like there’s definitely a door opened between the two of them in The Force Awakens where they pull from each other in terms of skills and memories..." That definitely suggests the bond was born during the interrogation, by them, and not Snoke.

Jossed

Jossed (also also unmarked spoilers ahead)

Episode VIII title guesses.

• The Power of Anger. ("Fear leads to anger.")
• Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back both refer to attacking or retaliating. The same could apply with episode VIII.
  • Going with this, the title will be Charge of the Dark to fit with the theme of the Sequel Trilogy being more focused on the nature of the Force and the title of the previous film explicitly referencing the Force. This title references the dark side of the Force.
• Return of the Empire Could deal with the return of the Empire but in a more enticing form. Strict , but fair. Powerful but even handed. Composed of multiple planets and races , the new Republic could run the risk of losing to the more attractive lure of Order and peace by any means. When planets start defecting to the Empire willingly the Republic must question what lines it will cross to maintain its mandate.
• Into Darkness, No, Really, This Time We Mean It. It is a J.J. Abrams sequel, after all.
• Heir to the Empire: A reference to Snoke (who hopefully will appear in-person in Episode VIII) inheriting Palpatine's position as leader of the First Order, rather than a reference to Grand Admiral Thrawn.
  • Heir to the Force: As the Force has awakened again, its champion (regardless of Light or Dark Side alignment) will be revealed.
• The Knights of Ren. It follows Empire's own Antagonist Title.
• Rise of the Empire or Rise of the Order or Rise of the Force... Point is that this will be the build up phase of the saga that raises the stakes for the finale of the third act. Also now that the Force has Awoken it's time for it to Rise up again.
• Wrath of the New Republic: The EU reveals that in the years following Starkiller's destruction, the First Order won some victories with their blitzkrieg tactics and the lack of a military for the Republic. Yet the Republic got its act together, reversed some of the victories and struck hard. By Episode VIII the war is at a stalemate and the Reublic is planning an major assault on the First Order......
• Knights of the Force: A double meaning title referring to both the Jedi Knights and the Knights of Ren. We'll probably be learning a lot more about both factions in VIII due to the first Jedi Temple and us (most likely) meeting more Knights of Ren so a title focused on this aspect could work very well.
• The Force Balance Push: A double meaning to the conflict between the light and the dark side, also an Incredibly Lame Pun of "Fus Ro Dah".
• Fall of the Resistance: The film's transition to Darker and Edgier and being a second installment in a Star Wars trilogy will probably feature the Resistance losing a huge battle and getting scattered about, like the Rebels in The Empire Strikes Back.
  • ALL Jossed. The title has been confirmed as The Last Jedi.

Benicio del Toro is playing Thrawn.

• The mysterious admiral in Aftermath is all but stated to be Thrawn, and Kylo Ren implies that Snoke is considering using cloned Stormtroopers, one of Thrawn's trademarks.
  • And he'll still be accompanied by Rae Sloane.
    • The Admiral in Aftermath has been revealed to be Gallius Rax, whom dies in Empire's End, and rumors point to Benicio Del Toro's character not being Thrawn. However, it's possible a different actor could play him, and an appearance from an elderly Sloane is not out of question.
  • This is, of course, assuming he survives the crew of the Ghost.
  • Jossed. He's playing a human character, code-named "DJ", who's some kind of shady type.

Finn and Poe will develop romantic feelings for each other.

• Because not only is the fanbase shipping them like crazy, there are also quite a few hints in Episode VII that there might be more of a simple Bro Mance between them. Besides, it would go nicely with J.J. Abrams' desire to include more minorities in the saga, a gay protagonist couple being the next logical step.
  • Jossed. Boyega confirmed in an interview after Star Wars Celebration that it won't end up happening.

Snoke is Darth Maul

The hologram and Andy Serkis saying Snoke isn't someone introduced in the canon before is to throw people off. Going with the theory that Ezra is one of the founding members of the Knights of Ren and Maul is his master, it could be that Maul in order to hide from his former master and his new apprentice started going by a false name and using a hologram of an old and scarred old man to keep word from getting around about a Zabrak who claims to use the dark side of the force. Still using this identity even after Palpatine's death, he was able to infiltrate and claim control over the First Order while converting Ben Solo into Kylo Ren so he could become one of his apprentices along side Ezra since they are not Sith anymore and don't have the rule of two to prevent having multiple apprentices. Ezra (going by another name ending in Ren) will be the enemy in Episode VIII possibly meeting Leia again at which point it will reveal who he is and by extension Snoke/Maul.

• Jossed since Maul is killed by Obi-Wan in Rebels.

Luke WILL be in the trailers this time, but he won't have any lines.

A slight step up from his (understandable in hindsight) Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer status in the marketing for The Force Awakens. But leaving off from his silence in the last thirty seconds of the movie, we'll have to wait until Episode VIII itself until we finally get to hear him speak.

• Jossed. He speaks in the trailer.

Part of the movie will take place on Cloud City.

Several leaked set pictures show characters in a futuristic urban environment.

• Looking jossed — the urban environment seems to be a casino planet called Canto Bight.

Captain Phasma is a droid.

Specially, Phasma is a high-end droid built for both combat and training, this explains how she "miraculously survives" the destruction of Starkiller Base. Since she is a droid, the First Order can always rebuild her. Not to mention that of all the First Order Stormtrooper, Phasma's helm is the only one which doesn't feature a breathing vent, and her armor's hand is exactly the same as C-3P0's ^note This is probably due to prop reuse.

• Jossed.

Laura Dern is Evaan Verlaine

She is a blonde woman close in age to Carrie Fisher.

• Jossed — she is playing a pink-haired Vice Admiral named Amilyn Holdo.

Luke is The Last Jedi the title refers to.

It refers to him in general rather than any events in this film that would lead him or anyone to be the last Jedi, as he was the last Jedi at the end of the orginal trilogy as welll as prior to The Force Awakens.

• That seems unlikely. In every previous Star Wars movie, the episode title refers to some plot development that happens in the movie itself. But Luke was already the last Jedi in the previous movie, so if the title refers to him alone, it wouldn't tell us anything about this movie.
• It could still refer to Luke if he decides to train Rey in the Force, but as something new and not as a Jedi. Just like how the Knights of Ren and Snoake are not Sith but a new collective of Dark Side users.
• Jossed: "Last Jedi" is plural. See "'The Last Jedi' is not one specific person" above.

Guesses for Kelly Marie Tran's character.

• She will be one of the few survivors of the massacre of Luke's new Jedi order by the Knights of Ren.
• An Adventurer Archaeologist who once worked with Lor San Tekka who will explain to Finn, Poe, and Leia what Luke was looking for.
• She is replacing Adam Driver in the role of Kylo Ren, in order to emphasize the effect Snoke's training has had on Ren. Adam Driver will continue to play the character in flashbacks regarding how he came under the apprenticeship of Snoke, then known as Lord Lobot.
  • ...what
• She is a Resistance or New Republic spy who will infiltrate the First Order alongside Finn, who is her Love Interest.
• All Jossed. She's a Resistance maintenance worker named Rose who becomes an "unlikely hero" when she teams up with Finn.

Leia dies and it was always planned that way

Her "having a big role in Episode 9" was just clever misdirection on part of the marketing team and/or something they made as a contingency in case Carrie Fisher dies, so that her on screen death is even more of a gut punch. Or maybe her force ghost was planned to have a big role in Episode 9 and that's now out of the question for all intents and purposes.

• Well the idea it was always planned that way is jossed, as the profile on the movie in the summer 2017 issue of Vanity Fair confirms that Episode IX has had to undergo significant rewrites due to her death.

Kylo Ren will have a beard.

Many commented that his boyish appearance added a Narmy quality to his scenes. Having him literally grow a beard would both diminish that effect, and be an effective means of visually communicating the fact that he's matured as a villain - especially when coupled with his new scar.

So far, in all the promotional material that's been release for the film, they've very deliberately only shown the top half of his face, so him having grown a beard for this film seems like a pretty good bet.

• Jossed — not only is he shown without a beard in photos at Star Wars Celebration Orlando, but in the new 40th anniversary covers for Vanity Fair.

Bail Organa was not on Alderaan when it was blown up by the Death Star and will make an appearance in The Last Jedi.

• Jossed by the fact that in the Canon EU material (Star Wars: Bloodline, for example) it is outrightly stated that Bail died on Alderaan.

Rey is NOT related to anyone from previous movies.

She's not the daughter of any Jedi or Sith Lords or any other main characters. Her parents were nobody important; because seriously, people, does it always have to come back to Skywalkers and the like?

• Jossed Rey is a Palpatine.

Snoke has a master of his own.

And it's Darth Maul, who's taught him the ways of the Sith, having become Older and Wiser since his fateful duel with Obi-Wan.

• Jossed. Maul dies in the penultimate episode of Rebels' third season, in a Single-Stroke Battle with Obi-Wan. Subsequent works have confirmed that Obi-Wan gave him a Jedi funeral afterwards.
  • Turns out Snoke's master was Palpatine.

Phasma is in love with General Hux.

Specifically, she has a crush toward General Hux since their childhoods, only to be betrayed by the latter and gets killed in an arranged suicide mission. In short, she is Carta Issue in all but name.

• Not sure about all of the specifics, but Hux's having her as his Dark Mistress would certainly make sense:
  • It might explain how Phasma got her position despite her apparent incompetence throughout The Force Awakens.
  • Wanting to keep her could well be an additional personal motivation for Hux's insisting on continuing with Phasma's training and indoctrination program for stormtroopers when Kylo Ren suggests maybe they should just go back to using a clone army instead.
  • If she has anything to do with Rey's origins as suggested in the theories above, having Hux as her partner in crime would make a certain measure of sense there too: if she's Rey's mother or surrogate mother, then he might just be Rey's father or step-father. (Maz did refer to Rey's absent family in the plural sense, suggesting she might be waiting for both of her parents to return.) Quite notably, when walking back his claim that Rey's parents weren't in The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams basically said she just hadn't met them yet. Two fairly important characters in ''The Force Awakens'' that Rey has never actually met? Hux and Phasma. Hmmm...
  • Jossed with the release of the Phasma novel. Hux and Phasma conspired together to murder Hux’s father. Brendol Hux was the person to give Phasma her position after she helped him off Parnassos. Also, Phasma is implied not to be interested in romantic or sexual relationships.

Captain Phasma will be back... as Lieutenant Phasma.

• Having her former subordinate, Finn, humiliatingly outwit her, which led to the loss of Starkiller Base, Supreme Leader Snoke, or another higher-up, will have her scapegoated by being drastically demoted. Thus, Phasma will want vengeance against him in their next encounter.
  • Phasma will remain a captain because in the Captain Phasma comic she frames someone else and murders everyone that knows the truth about her lowering the shields.
  • Also Jossed: Phasma is ultimately Killed Off for Real.

Phasma will do a Heel-Face Turn by taking off her helmet like Finn.

• At some point, Phasma will decide to abandon the First Order like Finn did, especially when she encounters Finn again and again and realizes how free he is. She will also fall in love with Finn, starting a love triangle between Finn and Rey, or Finn and Poe that will resolve in the final film.
  • Jossed with the Phasma novel. She could very well abandon or betray the First Order, but not to join the Resistance. Instead, she will leave for the purpose of self-preservation and survival.

Supreme Leader Snoke does not actually exist.

The good guys think that Snoke was the one to corrupt Kylo Ren to the dark side. The truth is, however, that Kylo fell on his own, and created Snoke as a hologram/AI to serve as a figurehead for the First Order.

• Jossed by the trailers. Snoke himself appears in person.

"The First Order" was the name Luke gave to the apprentices he was training

In The Force Awakens, it is heavily implied that Luke was training a large group of apprentices, before Kylo Ren rebelled and turned some or all of the apprentices into the Knights of Ren, and partnered with Snoke to start the First Order. Luke is also on a search for the very foundations of the Jedi Order, having rejected the dogma and bureaucracy that led to their downfall in the Prequels. Perhaps the name "The First Order" was meant to be a sign of Luke's new philosophy for Force-sensitives, showing a reverence to the ideals the Jedi Order were founded on rather than what it had become.

Ren and Snoke founded their organization with the intent of destroying the Jedi once and for all, and so co-opting the name Luke had meant to serve as a mission statement and turning it into a threat would be a natural consequence of that.

• Jossed. The First Order rose from what remained of the Empire after the Battle of Jakku. Luke had no involvement.

The First Order is not the only Empire successor faction

The other remnant faction would of be founded by Imperials who made peace with the Alliance at the end of the Galactic Civil War and decided to adhere to the Galactic Concordance but was allowed enough military and economical power to remain independent from the New Republic. This group would differ in the they acknowledged that they lost to the Alliance and tried to move on the change in the political sphere of the galaxy by focusing on having peaceful relations with the new republic. They try to emulate positive aspects of the now fallen Empire but distance themselves of the negatives of Palpatine's regime and as a result see the First Order as dangerous fanatical throwbacks.

• A related possibility is that the First Order is the only meaningful Empire successor faction... at the start of the movie. There might well be elements in the First Order that thought that 'emulate positive aspects of the now fallen Empire but distance themselves of the negatives of Palpatine's regime' was exactly what the First Order was (especially since supposedly a fair chunk of the First Order's territory consists of worlds that only recently separated from the New Republic) and be horrified over Hosnian to the point of breaking away from the First Order, maybe even allying with the New Republic while remaining a separate Imperial-themed faction.

The Raddus Battlecruiser is actually the Viscount-Class Star Defender from Legends

Both ships do have a striking resemblance. However, it is possible that the Raddus is the Viscount-Class Star Defender.

That freezing-the-blaster-shot-with-the-Force thing Kylo Ren did in The Force Awakens? He learned it from Luke when he was his apprentice.

Kylo was the one who decided to use it to freeze people, however (possibly with Snoke's encouragement). And if Luke freezes a blaster shot in Episode VIII, he won't just stop it in mid-air with it struggling from the strain like in TFA. No, he'll stop it — or multiple shots — from moving entirely. This will be a Moment of Awesome, proof that Kylo Ren still has much to learn, and a sign that Luke has taken yet ANOTHER level in badass and has grown extremely powerful in the thirty years since Return of the Jedi.

• A demonstration of power like this would be a simple yet effective way of showing just WHY the First Order are so terrified of his return.
  • No such thing occurred in The Last Jedi.

Rey is not a Skywalker, but is a Kenobi.

She could be Obi-Wan's grand-daughter. It would be a huge and interesting twist to the entire series, that maybe the movies have been about the Kenobi lineage all along.

Rey is descended from Palpatine, not Luke

• A lot of WMG has postulated possible ways Rey is related to the Skywalker family. However, Rey's motifs, powers and fighting style resemble the Emperor's a lot more than Luke's, Anakin's, or Kylo Ren's.
  • Force Powers: The first Force power Luke and Anakin manifested was telekinesis (as well as Kylo Ren's Establishing Character Moment being stopping a blaster bolt in midair), while Rey's first power was the Mind Trick, where she lowers her voice and cadence to a calm murmur, then instantly masters to the point that she is able to invert Kylo Ren's Mind Rape attempt and start reading his thoughts and emotions, despite any lack of formal training.
  • Fighting Style: Rey and Palpatine are the only Force users who use aggressive thrusts while wielding a lightsaber, with both employing a horizontal stabbing motion with a shoulder thrust. Every other Force user that has been seen in lightsaber combat generally uses slashing moves. Rey is also able to quickly adapt to Kylo Ren's fighting style in their lightsaber duel, similar to how Palpatine managed to hold his own in his duels with Mace Windu and Yoda.
  • Motivation: While we don't know Kylo Ren's Start of Darkness in full, Anakin turned to the dark side trying to save Padme, while Luke's closest brush with the Dark Side came when Vader directly threatened harm on Leia and hit Luke's Berserk Button, the common theme being they wanted to protect those close to them. Rey, meanwhile, had a look on her face that was halfway between Death Glare and Power High the first time she fired a blaster and killed several Stormtroopers, and again when she had defeated Kylo Ren in the lightsaber fight. The novelization takes this one step further, saying that Rey heard a mysterious voice telling her to strike Kylo Ren down.
  • Musical Motif: There are subtle similarities between Palpatine's musical theme from Return of the Jedi and Rey's in The Force Awakens, especially if they are played on piano. Pay special attention to the ostinato in Rey's theme compared to the opening notes of Palpatine's theme.
• Confirmed in Rise of Skywalker.

Rey and Snoke are the First Order's imperfect attempts to clone Palpatine.

If the theory of Rey being a Palpatine was correct, since Palpatine doesn't have any spouse or children on-screen, the likeliest explanation of why Rey's combat style is extremely similar to Palpatine's would be that Rey is actually an Opposite-Sex Clone of Palpatine. This cloning origin might also extend to Snoke.

The First Order, in order to resurrect the Galactic Empire, attempts to create clones of Palpatine as their symbol of authority. Rey and Snoke are in a way, both Flawed Prototypes and Super Prototypes in their own right. Rey inherits the combat prowess, Force power and memories of Palpatine, but not his appearance and alignment to the dark side. Snoke in contrast inherits the cunning, appearance, and alignment to the dark side because he's almost a genetically perfect clone of Palpatine. However, his frail old body renders him unable to partake in physical combat on his own. In fact Snoke, unlike Rey, might not even possess the past memories of Palpatine, making his role merely a figurehead position. Hence the reason why he urges Kylo Ren to capture Rey alive and teach her the ways of the Force. Basically, Rey is the only remaining component necessary to creating a perfect Palpatine clone.

• The canon novel Aftermath: Empire's End has some details which might support this idea. To make a long story short, Grand Admiral Rax of the Empire chose for the Empire to make its last stand on Jakku because there was an Imperial Observatory on the planet, which Palpatine frequented. This facility was known to house a replica of Palpatine's personal yacht, as well as several Sith artifacts. It was very heavily guarded by sentry droids and blaster turrets, and sealed by what seems to be handprint scanners. Unbeknownst to the Imperial remnant, Rax's orders were to use the facility to destroy the entire planet. This was due to a contingency Palpatine set in place to annihilate the Empire in the event that it outlived him, and prevent any of the items in the observatory from falling into the hands of the rebels. This raises the question: what was in that observatory that Palpatine so desperately wanted to keep out of the hands of the New Republic? Perhaps one or more imperfect clones of himself? Maybe one might have managed to escape the facility at a young age with no memories except implanted ones of being abandoned by her family, and then lived on her own for decades?

Rey is not a Skywalker nor a Kenobi, nor a Jedi.

She's a Female Time Lord!

Rey is not a Skywalker nor a Kenobi, nor a Palpatine, nor a Time Lord.

She is a descendant of Bastila Shan and Darth Revan.

Kylo Ren and Rey are the reincarnation of Bastila Shan and Darth Revan.

Gee, Kylo. Strong in both Dark and Light? Thinks he's in charge, when he's really been played like a cheap whistle by every power broker in the galaxy? Mentally unstable at best? Those identity-concealing robes and mask? And Rey - product of treasure hunters/salvagers, abandoned at a young age by those parents due to poverty? Brown robes, fights with a staff? Equally powerful Force prodigy. Similar accent. And they end up with a Force Bond that pushes them into a Ship Tease that may or may not be manipulation by someone above them. Then, factor in their physical appearances, which are suspiciously similar to Driver and Ridley.

Rey is Darth Plagueis reincarnated.

Rey's parents don't realize she's their daughter yet because she has a surrogate mother.

A lot of the above theories seem to assume that Rey's parents must already know she's their daughter, but thanks to modern reproductive technology, that wouldn't be a safe assumption even in a contemporary soap opera. In a hi-tech galaxy long, long ago and far, far away, it's that much more likely her biological parents don't realize who she is because nobody had to ask their permission to get their genetic material to make a child. (For just one example, Luke lost his hand along with that light saber somebody recovered that Rey's returning to him by the end; that's plenty of his genetic material right there that somebody could have used without his permission.) Good old-fashioned theft of genetic material, which we have right now, could also have contributed to Rey's conception.

If anything, I suspect this film is going to make some kind of departure from the Luke, I Am Your Father reveal in The Empire Strikes Back so as to keep us from anticipating the big twist. Therefore, Rey's surrogate mother will be the first "parent" to be revealed. Only then will we get around to the part about her biological parents; and if one of them is Luke, it'll be in more of a "Luke, she's your daughter!" way.

Rey's parents were two of Luke's Jedi.

Her mother and father were Force sensitives, a bit younger than Luke. Canonically, we haven't seen how strong the offspring of Force sensitives are compared to a standard Force sensitive. Considering Luke is implied to be incredibly powerful, possibly near the level his father could've reached (in spite of her mother not being Force-sensitive), the offspring of two Jedi is probably even more powerful and gifted. Galen Marek had this as a plot point, and while a very different character from Rey they could still adopt the principle like they have many things from Star Wars Legends.

Because her family are Force-sensitive, Rey has a high potential. As she was born into Luke's Jedi, it explains how Kylo knows her and recognizes her potential. Her parents ended up being killed, abandoning her or whatever, but they did end up dropping her off at Jakku. She thinks of Luke as a myth because her parents didn't want to talk about connections to their master, probably to keep her safe (much as Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru did with Luke). As the scion of a Jedi, it adds to the parallel of her being the Luke of this generation.

Making her a child of Luke's Jedi would serve to form a connection to him without resorting to the expectation of her being of Skywalker or Kenobi lineage. Luke could still serve as a relation, though in this case as her adoptive father and/or godfather. It would also give room for the mystery of her biological parents, and their ultimate fate. Maybe she'll learn one of her parents is a Knight of Ren?

Rey's parentage will be revealed Anticlimactically.

It'll be something offhanded like "Oh, and by the way, I'm your father." in the first act, from Luke. To subvert quite deliberately any kind of dramatic reveal as part of this trilogy's efforts to shake things up meaningfully, and to distract from the real twist, whatever it is. The Force Awakens did this with The Reveal of Kylo Ren's parents.

• Better yet, this will be confirmed in the Opening Crawl.
• Jossed. The reveal itself was anticlimatic—her parents were just scavengers who sold her for money—but it comes at one of the film's climaxes, when Kylo is attempting to persuade her to join him

Rey's identity will be revealed via a flashback to Maz and Han's conversation about her in The Force Awakens.

Remember how the scene cut away as soon as Maz asked: "Who's the girl?" In this movie, we'll find out how that conversation went down, possibly through Rey having a Force vision.

The Last Jedi is going to reveal that Rey is the product of Villainous Incest by proxy in an Ass Pull.

To throw off everyone expecting the writers to repeat the Luke, I Am Your Father moment from Episode V which has become an It Was His Sled to virtually all Star Wars fans these days, Rey will be revealed to be Luke and Leia's daughter that neither of them ever knew they had. A female will be revealed to be the Woman Behind The Man Behind the Man, pulling Snoke's strings the same way he's pulling Kylo's, and it'll turn out she arranged to gather (shall we say) Luke and Leia's genetic material during routine physical checkups, and then impregnated herself with whatever she considered the best result of her sick experiments. After raising Rey to be about five years old, she abandoned her on Jakku with a false promise to return in order to maximize the odds she'd turn to the dark side later.

Her primary motive will be to break both Luke and Leia and seduce Rey to the dark side. Her Wham Line to Rey will be "You honestly don't remember I'm your mother, do you, Rey?" followed with a credible We Can Rule Together offer along the lines of "Snoke and Kylo are fools. We can rule the galaxy far better than any mere men!" Her (later) Wham Line to Luke (though not Leia) will be something like "Oh yes, I gave birth to her, but she's all yours. Of course, you wouldn't know--would you, Luke--that she's Leia's daughter... by you!!!" (Luke's likely response: first denial "But I never...! She never...! We didn't...!" and then after the villain explains how this happened, "Suddenly, I'm not so sorry Leia didn't live to see this day.")

The female villain's secondary motives for doing this will include one or more of the following:

• She figured the best way to maximize her surrogate child's Force-sensitivity was to recombine the genetic material from Darth Vader's children, since he was the most powerful Jedi/Sith ever to have lived.
• She also figured the more twisted and evil the way she conceived her offspring was, the more easily she could turn the resulting child to the dark side.
• She was just so plain perverse that the thought of making a child from Sibling Incest gave her the ultimate sick thrill.
• She (also) got a sick thrill from the thought that maybe she could get Rey and Kylo together for even more inbreeding and perversion.

As for the writers' motives for pulling such an Ass Pull on us, how the characters come to grips with this horrible revelation will serve to deconstruct Sins of the Father and the Jedi's stupid rules against falling in love and getting married in the prequels. The big moral lesson Rey will learn from all this is that despicable origins don't force you to be immoral (as she ultimately rejects the villain's claims that she has to turn to the dark side just because she was conceived for its purposes and by its means). The big lesson the next generation of Jedi will learn in the meantime is not to make stupid rules against love and marriage and having children because those are what the Sith and Knights of Ren used to corrupt Darth Vader and Kylo Ren and others, and how they nearly seduced Rey as well. (Oh, and did I mention that one more big revelation from all this will be that this pointless celibacy requirement was one more motivation for Kylo Ren to turn against Luke? "Maybe your father would have made a better Jedi if the other Jedi had let him be your father, Luke; sounds to me like Vader had a point about those prigs.")

The Last Jedi is going to zig where The Empire Strikes Back zagged.

Specifically, instead of the villain giving us the classic Luke, I Am Your Father line, it's Rey who'll reveal the parent-child connection in a Luke, You Are My Father way, and probably with her mother instead of her father. I'm thinking The Reveal will go something like this:

Rey: Mummy? Mum, is that you!? That is you, isn't it? Mum, where have you been all these years?

Rey's Mother: I don't believe it! You can't be my little girl...! How did you find me? How did you recognize me!?

Captain Phasma is Rey's surrogate mother.

Another problem with a lot of the theories above: a lot of them don't offer very credible answers to the question of who'd do such a cruel thing as abandoning a very young Rey to fend for herself in the harsh physical and social environment of Jakku. While we don't know a lot about Captain Phasma yet, we know that she commands the stormtroopers and has apparently been overseeing much of their development and training from a position that seems rather in loco parentis. From how she treats Finn, it seems unlikely she'd make a very good mother.

My speculation: Phasma started out as a lowly nobody on Jakku, and somebody from the First Order offered to get her off the planet and kick-start her career in the military in return for carrying and giving birth to Rey and raising her for a few years. When Rey was just barely old enough to fend for herself, the First Order made good on its offer, but insisted that she leave Rey behind. While Phasma promised Rey she'd return for her someday and was maybe even half-intending to make good on that promise... well, she's a bad mother, and probably her career ambitions kept getting in the way; that's why she never came back for her, even when she happened to be near Jakku again.

• This has probably been proven untrue with the release of the Phasma novel. Captain Phasma has no interest in having children and murdered her own niece to keep her past from being uncovered.
  • Of course, having no interest in having children would make her an even worse mother if she did have any as would her being willing to murder any such child just to protect a secret. While her nigh-sociopathic callousness means she probably wouldn't have a child out of any love or goodness in her heart (since she obviously doesn't have any), she might still have something to do with Rey if it was some kind of purely mercenary deal, especially if she didn't actually have to give birth to Rey.

Following up this last point...

Rey is a Designer Baby.

Whatever the exact nature of her parentage, who says her biological parents have any idea that they're her biological parents? With all the cloning and genetic engineering technology shown to be available in this universe in the prequels, it's possible she was actually patched together from three parents (or even more), and genetically engineered to have lots of Force sensitivity. If whoever was raising her on Jakku didn't actually conceive or give birth to her, it would be that much easier for them to abandon her later and never look back.

Rey was left on Jakku as a Barrier Maiden.

Aftermath: Life Debt revealed that Palpatine was searching for something on Jakku. Knowing Palpatine, it was probably something bad. Rey was left there as her power would prevent it from emerging. This is why Luke looks so angry when he sees Rey on Ahch-To.

Rey is both a Skywalker and a Kenobi.

While on Tatooine, Obi-Wan met someone (possibly a female Jedi) and they had a short relationship, before Obi-Wan remembered his duty to Luke and broke things off with her. The woman was pregnant when she left (it doesn't really matter if Obi-Wan knew this or not). She gave birth to a daughter and raised her in secret. At some point after ROTJ, the daughter, all grown up, met Luke. They began to train the new generation of Jedi together and fall in love. They had Rey. Then when Kylo Ren slaughtered the Jedi, the woman left Rey behind for her own safety and either went into hiding or was killed almost immediately afterward by either Kylo Ren or the First Order.

• And if this theory turns out to be true, it could be one of the subjects the rumored Obi-Wan spin-off covers.
• Daisy Ridley says that Luke has no idea who Rey is, so it's seeming less likely that she's his daughter.
  • Unless, of course, Luke was unaware of Rey's conception and/or birth.

Rey is a Skywalker...

...but she's not Luke's. She's Han and Leia's daughter, and therefore Kylo's sister.

If Rey is Luke's daughter, he will outright say "I am your father" during the reveal.

It would serve as a funny Call-Back and role-reversal of the reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, and the line itself is natural enough that it wouldn't (necessarily) feel shoehorned in.

• Then again, Mark Hamill has already done this in The Flash (2014) as The Trickster.
  • Of course, he hasn't done it in a heroic role yet. Not to mention that saying the famous line again naturally in the Star Wars saga itself is almost too good to pass up, especially for Hamill.

Rey was cloned from the hand Vader chopped off of Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, and was originally meant to be a sleeper agent for the First Order

Since someone found the lightsaber that was in Luke's hand when Vader chopped it off, it makes sense someone might've found the actual hand too; and since cloning technology is highly advanced in the Star Wars universe, creating an Opposite-Sex Clone shouldn't be too difficult. As for who found the hand, most likely it was someone from the Empire, since they were controlling Bespin at that point; but before this someone had figured out what to do with the hand, the Empire fell. However, this person could've been one of the Empire loyalists who eventually formed the First Order, so (s)he eventually decided to create a clone who'd be able to kill the hated Luke Skywalker and decided to make the clone a woman, so that no one would notice how similar the clone looks to Luke. (This also explains why Rey looks so similar to Padme◊. That wouldn't be the case if she was cloned from Anakin, which is another popular WMG.) When Rey was old enough, she was enrolled in Luke's Jedi Academy as a sleeper agent who would eventually kill Luke once she'd learn enough Jedi tricks.

However, at some point Luke discovered who Rey was and decided to hide her on Jakku so the First Order couldn't find her. There Rey would be raised by loving parents, which Luke hoped would be enough to counter the sleeper agent brainwashing done to Rey. However, for some reason Rey's foster parents had to leave Jakku and she was left to care for herself. At this point Luke himself had already gone into hiding, so he didn't know what had happened to her.

This origin for Rey would explain why she had such profound reaction when touching Luke's lightsaber, because she was literally cloned from the hand that was holding it. It would also explain why Kylo Ren seems to have an almost personal relationship with Rey: he may subconsciously (or even consciously) remember Rey as one of the other kids in Luke's Jedi School. It's even possible he knows Rey's sleeper agent background, but decides to keep it a secret for the time being, in the chance it might be used against her. And Rey having an origin like this would also make her and Kylo into neat mirror images: Kylo was child raised in Light Side of the Force who turned to the Dark Side, while the opposite happened with Rey.

Rey is neither a Skywalker or a Kenobi, but a Palpatine.

Plans within plans...

• Actually confirmed by The Rise of Skywalker.

The identity of Rey's parents will be revealed by the end of this film.

The prevailing fan theory regarding Rey's background (due to the hints from her vision quest and her innate abilities in VII) will be confirmed: Rey is Luke's daughter, and thus Kylo Ren's cousin. This would also imply that Rey's mother is Mara Jade, or at least Mara Jade in all but name.

The "Rey is a Solo" Theory 2: Electric Boogaloo

Not going to take credit for this; I first saw the idea on Reddit and it buried itself in my thoughts.

So between Bloodlines and other post-RoTJ / pre-TFA works it's extremely unlikely that Kylo and Rey are siblings — the timelines just don't match up; but who said they have to be full-blooded siblings? THEORY: Han Solo had a daughter out of wedlock. It'd go a long way to explaining the familial problems of the Organa-Solos — Han and Leia's split takes a much more serious turn, and Kylo's anger towards his father becomes that much more believable.

It also helps explain his sudden anger at hearing there's a girl on the Millennium Falcon - he realistically doesn't have any way of knowing about Rey and her being on Jakku (crackpot theories aside), and hearing that some random woman was on the Falcon wouldn't be much cause for rage. But if he knows he has a half-sister, then suddenly hearing that his father's ship was spotted with a young girl on board becomes something he'd be very interested in.

Now the big question this raises is why Han didn't react to her, and I think there's a simple explanation — he didn't bother to keep track. Han's not exactly the most upstanding guy in the galaxy; hell, he's kind of a sleazeball. It wouldn't be that far-fetched to learn that he just abandoned his paramour after — or even before — he found out she was pregnant.

Rey was conceived from the midi-chlorians the same way Anakin was. Luke's Jedi Order took her to Jakku to prevent her from becoming another Darth Vader.

Kylo Ren will be tormented by overwhelming jealousy over her special nature, which will cause Snoke to regard her favorably.

Rey's parents are Luke and Phasma, and Phasma's specific role is to act as a shield to prevent the First Order from getting her power.

Since we're days away from release, might as well throw a Hail Mary!

Just for the record, the film confirms that Rey's parents were two nobodies who abandoned her, so obviously all other theories are Jossed.

Rey will lose her right hand to Kylo Ren.

• In both The Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones, the second films of their respective trilogies, the protagonist loses his right hand to the dark side villain- if they follow the pattern here, it'll be Rey's hand on the chopping block next.
  • Or perhaps to add a unique twist to the tradition, she'll lose her left hand instead.
  • Or she could lose a leg.
  • Or maybe Kylo loses his right hand as it's a Skywalker family tradition. And if Rey's a Skywalker maybe they'll both lose a hand to each other.
  • Or Kylo loses his hand to Rey because she's falling to the Dark Side.
  • In a twist, it won't be a limb she loses, but rather, one of her eyes.
• Jossed. She's come out of The Last Jedi whole (though she does get a cut on her right shoulder arm above the elbow by one of the guards which doesn't appear to be healed that appears to serve as a callback), we'll see for Episode IX.

Rey will begin training her own apprentice near the end of the movie

Luke with be killed or otherwise rendered unable to train anyone directly during the course of the movie, leaving restarting the Jedi order to Rey. It will likely be a situation similar to Kanan and Ezra from Rebels. Rey won't be a Jedi Master by any reasonable definition, but with a little help from force ghosts and people like Maz Kanata and Leia, she'll be able to make do and there won't be any better options.

• And this is confirmed only with Luke dying, jossed for the rest; no apprentice for her so far.

Rey will fight Kylo Ren and have to be rescued by Luke.

Since as the second film in the trilogy it must contain some allusions to Episodes V and II, we can safely guess that Rey will rush into a duel with Ren, which she isn't ready for and will lose. She will then be rescued by Luke, who will show up and fight Ren the same way that Yoda rescued Anakin and Obi-Wan in Episode II, but Ren will run away since he can't beat Luke (thus allowing Rey to defeat him in the next movie). This would make up for Luke having nothing to do in the last movie.

Shocking twist: Ren kills Luke in front of Rey. There is a Big "NO!". Rey then flies into a rage and tries to defeat Ren, but he escapes.

Even more shocking twist: Rey manages to defeat Ren and Episode IX is about her going after Snoke. Perhaps Ren comes back to the Light Side out of guilt for killing Luke and because Defeat Means Friendship, and helps her take on Snoke. Luke appears as a Force ghost to offer sage advice. Ren gets killed while the two of them fight Snoke because Redemption Equals Death. Rey defeats Snoke and eventually becomes the new head of the Jedi Order. The galaxy will rejoice.

Extremely shocking twist: Rey will get so angry that she will straight up behead Kylo Ren and fall to the Dark Side. She will join Snoke and betray Finn, who gets murdered and thrown out a window by Snoke like Mace Windu. Luke will then have to try to convince her to come back to the Jedi and they will get into a duel that ends with her getting dismembered like Anakin did. She will remain evil until the end of Episode IX when she will have a Heel–Face Turn and help Luke defeat Snoke. Also, Leia will die being strangled by evil!Rey the same way Padme died, right before dueling Luke, who is too late to save her.

• All of these possibilities have been jossed. Rey and Kylo's dueling throughout the movie is mostly mental (as in, through telepathy); when they meet again in person they end up fighting a common enemy, and afterwards they'd duel against each other but external events break them up.

The final battle will not be between Rey and Kylo or Snoke, but between Rey and Finn.

Judging by the latest trailer, it's possible that Rey will abandon Luke, because of how he lost faith in the Jedi and came to see them as a destructive force who need to die out of existence. However, Rey won't accept this, believing she is meant for something greater, and like Anakin Skywalker, these thoughts will lead to her joining Kylo, Snoke, and the Dark Side. Not long afterwards, Finn is revealed to be a Jedi, and out of his desperation to save Rey from herself, he will be forced to fight her in the final film.

• I hate this theory with a passion! It’s not in Rey’s character to join the dark side. And unfortunately, it has been confirmed that Finn will not be a Jedi. It is much more likely that Rey will trick Ren that she is interested in joining him to get to Snoke.
  • Chill, we barely even know her. You have no way of knowing whether it is in her character or not.
• This is now jossed. We'll see for the next movie.

Rey will die.

Many are expecting Luke to undergo Mentor Occupational Hazard, but it'd be neat to see this movie play with expectations by having the Rey be a Decoy Protagonist of the Sequel Trilogy.

• Doubtful since Kathleen Kennedy recently confirmed that Rey, Finn, and BB-8 will probably be back for future installments in the series.
• Jossed. Things have gone as others expected and Luke has passed on.

Rey really will join the First Order... but only by mistake

Rey's plan will be to join Ren, but only to gain his trust. When he takes her before Snoke, she'll assassinate him and deal a crippling blow to the First Order.

• Now that the movie is out, this is only partly confirmed. Rey voluntarily goes to Kylo, but in the hope of turning him to the light, and she ends up being instrumental in Snoke's death, although it's Kylo who kills him.

This is what Luke is talking about when he says that it won't go the way you think. He doesn't believe that she can:

• Manage to kill Snoke. Whatever he is, he is highly trained and powerful within the Force, and Rey despite her power isn't there yet.
• Convince Ren or Snoke that she's sincere. Rey is not really good at lying.
• Resist the Dark Side. Her plan requires hanging out with Ren and probably fighting for his side for a while. Learning from him. The Dark Side is seductive, and Luke knows this better than most.

That last part is what will doom her. She will think that she can just play in the Dark Side and come back. But it consumes her; whatever her original intentions, they will go very wrong.

• This dark side Rey theory is pretty ridiculous. If anything, she’ll trick Ren, who is pretty desperate to get her to join him, fall into a trap laid by Snoke (knowing this was her intention), learn some truth about her past, and then barely escape à la Empire Strikes Back.

Rey will not be happy about her parentage and so Luke will eventually offer her the Skywalker name.

After he warms up to her, of course. Then Rey can be a Skywalker without actually being Luke’s daughter. Hence, future installments could still focus on descendants with the Skywalker last name.

Rey will prove to be a princess.

Rey has a few similarities to Anastasia. Both are stuck where they were left by circumstance. Both watch other people leave the place they are (difference is Rey doesn't want to leave Jakku but Anastasia wants to leave Russia). Both leave because of being influenced by a dishonest man. Both even have memories triggered after a box is opened! If Leia has to be removed from the story, Rey being a princess would fill the slot of "royalty" in the story.For now, this is jossed. We may have surprises in Episode IX, but in a very anticlimatic dialogue with Kylo, Rey herself admits being a nobody, daughter of two equally nobody parents who sold her.

Rey will experience a vision of her friends in danger and will temporarily abandon her training with Luke to assist them.

Rey could also fall into a trap and experience a Curb-Stomp Battle with Snoke or Kylo Ren similar to The Empire Strikes Back.

• This is jossed. Yes, she leaves Luke, but does it because she wants to meet Kylo in person, after being in telepathical contact with him for some time.

Snoke is not a Force user

Snoke is a Dark Side equivalent of Chirrut. He has vast theoretical knowledge of the Force and has trained to gain some minor Force abilities but isn't as naturally Force-sensitive as Kylo.

• Considering that it looks like Snoke's using the Force to torture Rey in the trailer, this has likely been Jossed.

Luke will come face to face with Kylo Ren... but instead of trying to reach him, he'll Force choke him, then pull him close, hold his lightsaber to Ren's throat, then drop the lightsaber and beat him within an inch of of his life.

Yes, it is out of character. But remember, O.O.C. Is Serious Business. This will really hammer home how badly Ben's betrayal affected him.

• Instead of beating him, Luke will slap him.
  Luke: *SLAP* One word - and I hit you again.
  Kylo Ren: I'm telling mother!
  Luke: *SLAP* Do you understand?
• This is now jossed, although Luke ends up humiliating Kylo in a different way.

Kylo Ren will switch sides in this movie.

Then he will join the main characters as the Token Evil Teammate.

• Eventually he'll have to answer for his crimes, however. Murder, torture... not really things the entire galaxy can easily forgive.
• It is apparently confirmed for a little while, but then it doesn't happen: Kylo kills Snoke but only to take his place.

Kylo Ren will switch over to the light side...

...and then instantly get killed by one of the heroes who just arrived to the scene and didn't know he was redeemed.

• I don’t see where this redemption idea really works. Even if Kylo Ren turns back to the light in the end, like Darth Vader, he’d still have to answer for crimes like murder and torture. Hardly “redemption.” Maybe the final film will be a court drama...?

Kylo Ren turned to the Dark Side as a teenager but didn't reveal it until he was in his twenties.

Star Wars: Bloodline implies that Ben Solo was still loyal to Luke well into his twenties. However, this only means that as far as Leia knows he is loyal. He switched sides as a teenager but acted as a double agent for Snoke and the First Order before finally revealing his true colors and attacking the other Jedi.

This would also line up with the theory that it was Ben who left a young Rey on Jakku.

• Not really "line up." If Rey was four when she was abandoned, then Ben Solo would have been only 14/15 when he left her...
• This is semi-confirmed. Luke sensed a powerful dark side taint within Ben on the night the latter turned, but Ben hadn't completely fallen yet. It was only after he saw Luke standing over him with a lightsaber raised^note (It was a moment of weakness, and Luke was already reconsidering it) that Ben finally went over the edge.

Kylo Ren will not be redeemed.

After the murder of his father Han Solo, Kylo will no longer have any trace of humanity left. The next time Kylo is asked to kill his loved ones, he will do it with no remorse.

• Looking more unlikely, with the trailer shot of him hesitating and looking upset at the thought of firing on his mother.
• Personally, I hope this is the case. Bloodline made a point that if Vader had survived, even if he had turned to the light in the end, the galaxy still wouldn’t have forgiven him for all the atrocities he committed. Luke and Leia realized this and decided not to tell anyone what happened (besides Han); no one would have believed them. Kylo Ren should by this logic, mirror this. It’s pretty difficult to be “redeemed” after committing murder, ordering the slaughter of a village, torturing captives, and who knows what else. Killing Han was symbolic in that Kylo Ren was offered forgiveness but didn’t take it.
• With the movie out, this is zig-zagging: he can't indeed muster the courage to fire at Leia (his wingmen do it), but after he kills Snoke he decides to stay firmly on the Dark Side and take his master's place. So it's still unclear whether there is a chance of redemption for him or not, and hopefully the aforementioned point about redemption after committing so much crimes will be taken into consideration.

Snoke will task Kylo Ren with personally killing Leia

To remove any remaining doubts about his convictions as well as deprive the Resistance of their leader and symbol, Snoke will order Kylo to kill his remaining parent personally to complete his conversion to the Dark Side. Eventually, Leia will die. But far from turning completly, Kylo will end the film feeling more conflicted than ever to the point he begins doubting his master, while Leia's death will turn her into a martyr that the Resistance/New Republic uses to rally the rest of the galaxy into fighting the First Order.

• Looks likely with the new trailer release, though it’s up in the air whether Ren will actually kill her.

Building on the above, Kylo Ren will fail to kill Leia

...and Snoke will send him into exile, making him an enemy of both the Resistance and the First Order, and driving him to the point where he believes killing Rey/Luke/someone is the only way to redeem himself.

• It has been jossed, in the sense that while Kylo can't indeed find the courage to fire at Leia, there are seemingly no consequences for him failing to do it.

Luke will be an expy of Kreia/Darth Traya.

Luke will train Rey in the 8th movie the ways of the Jedi but he will not hold back on the problems and flawed nature of the Jedi. Kylo (Zuko) will leave the first order and teach Rey in the ways of the dark side in the 9th movie but Kylo's experience with it will show the inherit flaws and dangers of the dark. By the end of the 9th movie Rey will be the first Jedi to find balance in the light and dark side of the force. While Snoke is the main antagonist of the trilogy, Luke is the greater slope villian. Luke will eventually attempt to kill the force to force Rey to confront him. If Luke's and Kylo's teachings worked Luke will die and Rey will teach the new Jedi the balance. If he fails then luke will kill the force.

Luke will pilot the Millenium Falcon at some point.

Not only does a new mini-trailer show Luke entering the Falcon's cockpit and activating the controls, but the trailers show the Falcon in action but seem determined to not show who is actually flying the ship — the closest is the shot of Chewie as co-pilot (along with a Porg). Not only would we see Luke back-in-action as the Ace Pilot we saw in the original trilogy, but it would be our first time seeing him fly the Falcon in the movies.

• Very, very sadly Jossed. Luke never leaves Ach-to.

Kylo Ren will turn against Snoke

Kylo Ren will want revenge on Snoke for making him kill Solo.This is only partially confirmed, since the motivation is a different one, though he does seem to take it personally that Snoke doesn't accept his murdering of his own father as proof of his worthiness.

Luke's new artificial hand is actually part of a whole artificial arm or forearm

Kylo probably cut off Luke's arm when he bailed from the Jedi Academy.

• Jossed: Luke rather got a ceiling collapsing on him.

There are more Jedi than just Luke and Rey.

It will be revealed that Luke has been running a secret Jedi Academy on Ahch-To, hidden from Snoke and the First Order.

• Jossed.

Luke has become the ultimate chef.

Instead of the ways of the force, Luke will teach Rey the ways of the perfect pastry, and the entire film will be a three hour long cooking show, with Kylo Ren trying to make the food taste worse. (I really should make the next film, obviously.)

• Is there a cooking show with Harvey Korman involved?

Luke disappeared because he was put in suspended animation

While exploring the first Jedi temple, Luke triggered a Jedi artifact that put him in suspended animation. He was awoken by a powerful disturbance in the Force, possibly the destruction of the Hosnian system.Jossed. Besides, from his brief apperance at the end of The Force Awakens, he was clearly aged.

What are Luke's first words after Rey gives him the lightsaber?

• "That is no longer mine. It is yours."
• "I knew one day this would return to me."
• "Welcome...my daughter."
• "Knew I shouldn't have put an address label on that!"
• "Who are you again?"
• "So, why didn't you take the elevator?"
• "Sorry you went to all that trouble, but I already built a new one like, three decades ago."
• "So... what happened with the hand wielding it? Was it already rotten after more than 30 years?"
• "Please don't tell me whoever found it also found a hand with it."
• "Didn't expect someone would find it. I thought it was just banging randomly in vents on Cloud City."
• "Thanks, but I already have one. Also, you're holding it wrong.." [cue training]
• "I hope you do a better job of keeping hold of it than I did."
• Perhaps a Call-Back to one of Obi-Wan's lines in A New Hope, like "Hello, there..." or "You've taken your first step into a larger world."?
• "Oh, that lightsaber..."
• Or, perhaps taking inspiration from a certain meme based on fake spoilers from The Force Awakens, he could say "My baby girl!" as a way to reveal the truth.
• Or, emphasizing the generational aspect of the three trilogies, "That lightsaber was created by my father, passed on to me, and now, it has found its way to my daughter."
• Or it could be something simple like: "...Rey?"
• “...Get off my lawn.”
• People who were treated to a screening of the first footage from the movie in early March 2017 are saying he says "Who are you?"
  • It should be noted that, since said scene took place in a completely different location than the cliffside, these are not Luke's first words to Rey.
• If his first words to Rey are "Who are you?", then the scene could maybe go like this:
  Luke: Who are you?"
  Rey: My name is Rey. I've been sent by the Resistance to find Jedi Master Luke Skywalker.
  Luke: Luke Skywalker? Now that's a name I have not heard in a long time. A long time.
• "Have you come to kill me, Rey?"
• "So... once again, the sins of the past have returned to haunt me." (Luke making an allusion to the rather checkered legacy of that lightsaber, and maybe Foreshadowing some of what is to be revealed to have gone wrong between him and Kylo Ren, and/or some of what's going to go wrong for Rey.)
• According to the latest reports, his first line is intended to be "more iconic than 'May the Force be with you.'" So it's going to have to be something pretty epic (and, as the article points out, it's going to have to look good on The Merch).
• "At last, I am forgiven. The Force can redeem anyone, Rey."
• "I've got a bad feeling about this…"
• "Go away. I'm tired."
  • Only semi-confirmed for the last one. His first line is "Go away!" but it comes several scenes in. His reaction upon being handed the lightsaber is simply to toss it over his shoulder and walk off without a word.

The Last Jedi refers to a different group of Jedi

it's been argued that the Knights of Ren were based on an earlier group and that Snoke could have been part of that group. Could be that we learn more about the origins of the Jedi in VIII and that the Jedi we see from the first two trilogies that included Obi-Wan, Yoda, and finally Luke weren't the only Jedi. We find out that there were another group of Jedi, different from the ones we're used to, with a different view of the force. The Jedi orders couldn't stand each other and eventually they went to war. The Jedi order we know was eventually the victor and wiped out the others with Snoke surviving in some form of suspended animation (perhaps some others survived and created the Sith). Thus it's revealed that Snoke is trying to recreate his version of the Jedi with Kylo and the Knights of Ren (with Ren perhaps referring to the founder or an important member of Snoke's order) which is why he talks about balancing the light and the dark instead of just giving in to the dark side. This would give the title a double meaning because it's talking about the last Jedi from both orders.

The Last Jedi means new Light Side orders will come.

Similar to how the Knights of Ren have replaced the Sith as an organization, Luke has decided to try to form a new Light Side order. He suspects the reason the Jedi failed was that they lacked other Force-sensitive orders as allies; canonically we haven't seen any other light-side organization with them, though neutral or dark-side groups like the Nightsisters are present. That, and they were too dogmatic, lacking diversity. His goal on exile is to plumb back into the origins of the Jedi, and create new light-side orders so light side users are a less exclusive group. Luke's the "last Jedi", but only due to being the last of the old order of keeping peace, or even just the version of the Jedi that he inherited from Obi-Wan and Yoda. New defenders of peace and justice will begin to rise and take the Jedi's role.

• At the end of the first trailer, Luke gives the rather ominous statement that it's time for the end of the Jedi.

The title The Last Jedi refers to Luke making public appearances to fight against tyranny while all the other Jedi are hiding.

The Last Jedi subtitle refers to the end of the Jedi Order — not because of a character's death, but because either Luke, Rey, or both of them find some way to balance the Light and Dark Sides of the Force.

• The original Star Wars films were made in a time where a clear-cut good-versus-evil dichotomy was still acceptable to a wide adult audiences. Last Jedi? Not so much. So what better way to embrace the now-normalised "shades of grey" storytelling of modern media than by having one (or more) of the "last Jedi" find an equilibrium with the Light and Dark Sides of the Force?
  • Such an approach would also tie into the Prequel Trilogy, at least thematically. The Jedi Order's strict adherence to its own dogma ultimately helped a Sith Lord take over the galaxy. If the Jedi Order had found a way to explore the Dark Side without giving into its temptations, they might have found a way to prevent Palpatine's takeover before it had even begun.
    • You could argue that the Jedi Order's rigid way of doing things created Darth Vader - or at the very least, created the situation that isolated Anakin from his fellow Jedi Knights and gave Palpatine/Darth Sidious much more room to influence him. And it may be that Luke's initial attempt to reform the Jedi Order tried very strictly to uphold those traditions, now with even less understanding and knowledge of their origin. (This in contrast to the Legends continuity where Luke was much more progressive and the Order was much healthier as a result.) This second failure created the Knights of Ren and Luke disappeared to try to find out exactly what the hell kept going wrong.
  • This theory is gaining serious traction because of a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of an image that eagle-eyed fans recognized as the symbol of the Gray Jedi.◊
    • Actually, that's the symbol of the Jedi Order. The symbol that the linked image identifies as the symbol of the Jedi Order is actually the logo of the Old Republic, the one from over a thousand years before the movies that, in Legends, ended due to the Ruusan Reformations. As I understand it, there isn't a "Grey Jedi" symbol.

Luke's line about how "it's time for the Jedi to end..."

...Is taken out of context. In the final movie, he's follow it up by saying something like "...the First Order's tyranny." Please?

• This person had a similar idea.
• Superdickery in a trailer, in other words?

Luke just means he's going to start a new faction.

Maybe just as the Sith have apparently given way to the Knights of Ren, Luke is thinking to have the Jedi give way to some new faction with Rey as its first initiate; maybe something that omits that pesky "no personal attachments" Jedi rule that got his father (and himself by proxy) into so much trouble.

• Might be more likely. Luke was seeking the first Jedi temple. Maybe he was looking to learn more about the doctrine and ideals of the first Jedi before the attachment rule was made.

Luke's line — "It's time for the Jedi to end" — will be a Missing Trailer Scene.

• Considering the lengths Lucasfilm takes to avoid spoilers and the fact that two-thirds of Rogue One's trailer content was missing from the film, I wouldn’t be surprised...

Luke wants to end the Jedi because he's afraid of falling to the Darkside

There's a rumour going around that Luke will wear a necklace in this movie that has a red crystal set in it. What if that crystal comes from Luke's lightsabre? According to the new EU, lightsabre crystals held by a Darksider will "bleed", changing from their normal colour to red. Perhaps when Luke's academy was destroyed, he went massively Darkside against Snoke (explaining his injuries and why he's so afraid of Luke). But then Luke noticed his lightsabre was changing from green to red. Seeing what he was becoming, he went into exile and removed the crystal from his lightsabre, wearing to always remind himself of what he did. He now refuses to restore the Jedi Order because he believes he is too unfit to keep students from falling.

• Bleeding a kyber crystal takes more than just being held by a darksider. For example, Anakin's lightsaber stayed blue even after he turned to the Dark Side. A crystal only bleeds through deliberate effort.

When Luke tells Rey in the teaser trailer that the Force is "so much bigger" than the light, the darkness, and the balance, he means...

...not that he's embracing some kind of Graying Morality as some fans seem to believe (as that would be "the balance" Rey mentions), but that the Force has more dimensions than just the light and the darkness he learned from the Jedi and the Sith. Just as the political spectrum can involve more than just the Left and Right and Center, so too the Force has more than just darkness and light, maybe involving such dichotomies as:

• order vs. chaos
• emotion vs. logic
• slumbering vs. awakening
• maybe even some kind of Blue-and-Orange Morality.

He might also have discovered the Force has an equal and opposite "anti-Force" (just as matter has its equal and opposite in anti-matter) that was mentioned in one of the Legends novels, and has discovered a way to tap into this inversion as well that he's now going to teach to Rey.

General Hux will be the Big Bad of this movie

Since Kylo Ren will be under training by Snoke this time around, Hux is the most High Ranking person to take the role in this movie.Jossed, Kylo is even more relevant. Hux even ends up being a frequent Butt-Monkey.

Nines (FN-2199) will be modified into a First Order Executioner

He's still alive after his confrontation with Finn, but he receives a cybernetic augmention against his will, becoming a First Order Executioner - a branch of specialists made for hunting traitors, with augmented bodies, absolute loyalty, and a laser axe designed for execution. As a side effect of the cybernetic augmentation, Nines himself might become a little bit out of his mind. In short, he will become what essentially is Ein Dalton in a Stormtrooper armor.

Taking one step further, he would also be amputated and forcefully installed into a customized AT-ST as a Wetware CPU, giving him amplified reflex, more firepower and speed to strafe around on the field, to the point Nines himself is fully capable of fighting evenly against Rey, in a similar fashion to the Graze Ein, a case where the pilot himself becomes the Ace Custom.

The other Knights of Ren will be major antagonists in this film.

While Kylo's making his recovery for the third act, the other Knights who appeared briefly in the flashback will serve as the baddies hunting down the heroes. They will be like the Boba Fett of the new films but a whole badass squadron of them. Expanding on this...

• Jossed. Also beside Luke's narration that Ben took some of Luke's other pupils with him, there is no other mention of them in the movie, and no mention of the Knights of Ren in general.

The major Knights of Ren that we meet will be women.

• Since we already have a female Stormtrooper in Captain Phasma, a female X-Wing pilot in Jessika, and a female Jedi in Rey, it makes sense that the film would continue its attempts at gender parity by introducing female Knights of Ren.

Han Solo will return as a villain.

• Han actually survived the attack his son Kylo Ren did to him at the Starkiller Base, he was probably stabbed in a non-vital bodypart which lead to him falling alive to the trash compactor and cured in a strange way like the Empire did with Anakin before turning into Darth Vader, he was picked up and evacuated with Kylo Ren and General Hux and taken to another New Order base. The cure will lead to him turned into a villain and fighting along for the New Order with his son.
• Or Han actually died in the attack but he was picked up and evacuated with Kylo Ren and General Hux and taken to another New Order base and he will be revived with a strange drug or with an artificial organ transplant and will be revived as a villain to fight along with his son and his memory as a good guy will be erased or at least he won't remember he fought for the Rebel Alliance / Resistance in the past.
• Jossed. You know, with him being impaled through the chest by a lighsaber, falling into a Bottomless Pit, on a planet which then explodes, maybe, maybe they wanted to leave no doubts he's dead.

Phasma will take off her helmet to reveal her face only before she commits some of her worst atrocities, the same way Kylo Ren does.

• She's not going to forgive Finn for dumping her down that garbage chute. The teaser trailer suggests she had something to do with the destruction of Luke's new Jedi temple, and (considering how seemingly underused she was in The Force Awakens) she's probably going to get some more dastardly deeds to do before we get finished with this movie.

Jossed. She does little more than being a Mini-Boss for Finn to fight, and only an eye of her is seen because her helmet gets broken, before she falls into a fire.

Johnson will take cues from the Prequel Trilogy for VIII, with more focus on Finn than Rey

As The Force Awakens was a Deconstruction of the Original Trilogy, VIII will deconstruct a lot of the elements explored (or, as this article argues, unwittingly ignored) in the Prequel Trilogy:

• A dichotomy enforcing a strict, distinctive split between Dark and Light.
• A discussion/criticism of the Old Jedi Order and what exactly went wrong, especially with regards to Anakin, the originally perceived Chosen One.
• The politics explored in the PT.

Additionally, while Rey was the core focus of The Force Awakens, Finn will be the focus in VIII, as he adjusts to a new role with the perceived freedom of choice he was robbed of ever since he was an infant. TFA established him as a curious if somewhat weak-willed individual, who is easily swept up in the grandeur of things—but just as easily is dispelled when things don't go right or contradict his expectations. He is the first character to respond visibly along a moral spectrum, but is kept in the grey area despite his Heel Realization (he kept running, wanting nothing to do with the First Order, despite the obvious "good guy" thing to do being to actually join up with the Resistance and fight back). The narrative will jump back and forth between Rey's and Finn's development, and while her training will explore where Kylo went wrong, Finn will stand opposite of Poe—the star fighter pilot of the Resistance—and be the one to pose the hard questions like why they're doing what they're doing and if they're any different from the Empire or the First Order in the long run.

Eventually this will lead to the third and final installment being a Decon-Recon Switch, where while the first two films twist the expectations to the point of becoming something different, the third will restore it—not exactly back to what it was, but to something that could be better. And then the franchise' goal will be achieved: balance will have been brought to the Force. Or it can play Deconstruction straight and express how the battle for balance is a constant, with the Light and Dark sides of the Force always pushing and pulling against each other, and its participants needing to constantly react to the shifts in to adjust accordingly. For a time it will go well, until the Force is disturbed again...

TR8-T0R (FN-2199) will return.

He will return due to the raw power of his loyalty and sick spins.

FN-2000 will be an antagonist in the sequel.

We already saw FN-2199 (or TR8-TOR as he is called on the internet) fight Finn and nearly win in The Force Awakens. With both him and "Slips" dead and Finn joining the Resistance, FN-2000 may track Finn down and try to kill him for his betrayal and the death of his comrades (possibly blaming Finn for Slips death as well). During the film Finn will have the lightsaber again or some other type of melee weapon during which it will reveal that FN-2000 has a similar weapon to what FN-2199 had in The Force Awakens and also reveal that he is even better with it than FN-2199 was, leading to one of the duels of Episode 8 with both Finn and Zeroes in a fight to the death. This would be great character driven drama as Finn has to kill his former subordinate and someone he once thought of as a friend knowing that Han won't be here to save him if he holds back like he did with FN-2199.

• Alternatively, FN-2000 will use a slug-throwing assault rifle, such as the FN F2000.

Many in the Republic will blame Leia and the Resistance for provoking the First Order into attacking their capital.

There would be some truth to this as Hux used Republic backing to justify the attack on their capital.

• I don't think we need to make the New Republic even more unsympathetic than it already is. They've already lost points in audience sympathy for not listening to Leia's every word (remember: if you don't kowtow to a hero, you're wrong, end of story). Making them still blame her will just breed more First Order fanboys.
  • Still, there'll probably be a lot of Teeth-Clenched Teamwork if what remains of the Republic join the Resistance.

Threepio will be non-lethally dismembered

In the second film of the original trilogy, he got blown up. In the second film of the prequel trilogy, he got decapitated. In the second film of the sequel trilogy...

• Maybe chop off that ugly red arm.
  • It wasn't very noticeable, but he had already got completely gold again by the end of The Force Awakens.

The First Order will be losing, if not beaten, when Episode VIII starts

They put all their eggs in one basket with Starkiller Base and as such only have a handful of ships. They did some serious damage to the Republic with the destruction of the Hosnian system but, having woken up the sleeping giant and losing their trump card, will be on the ropes if not completely beaten. Snoke and the Knights of Ren will still be an issue, but the First Order will be all but gone.

• Jossed, the First Order decimated the Rebellion to the extreme and reigns supreme.

The reason Luke stood on the edge of the cliff at the end of The Force Awakens?

He felt Rey's presence and approached the cliff after seeing a distant object in the sky, which turns out to be the Millennium Falcon as it flies by. This will be what opens the movie — Luke will be shocked at seeing the Falcon again, then sadly reminded that Han isn't on that ship, then will be wondering what to do about such a familiar presence in the Force approaching, since the script for The Force Awakens confirmed that Luke knows exactly who Rey is — then she is stood behind him with his father's lightsaber. Basically, since this will be an Immediate Sequel, TFA closed with Luke and Rey's meeting from the latter's perspective, while this time TLJ will open with the former's.

The first shot of the movie after the Opening Crawl will be the camera panning down to show the Millennium Falcon flying towards Ahch-To.

It'd fit with the usual Star Wars tradition of panning down to reveal a planet or a ship flying towards a planet.

• OR, maybe there'll be something akin to The Empire Strikes Back, in that the title crawl sets up something, and the first shot is of a ship doing something mentioned in the title crawl.

A major character will come back as a Force ghost: Han

No, I swear I'm not crazy. The first sign that Anakin was force-sensitive was his piloting ability. And who's a better pilot than the man who made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs? Plus, it'd be hilarious. Han was the first person we saw explicitly doubt the force (other than the poor force-choked officer on the death star), so having him be revealed as force-sensitive would be very unexpected.

• That runs the risk of generating a Broken Base because fans love him for not having Force potential.
  • Perhaps non-Force-sensitive people can appear as Force ghosts but only if "summoned" by a Force-user.
• Jossed on-screen, though Luke Skywalker broadly hints in his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Kylo Ren near the end that Han Solo has been haunting his son in some manner off-screen.

Anakin's Force ghost will come back, appearing to Luke, Rey and Kylo

It would make up for his unexplained absence in the previous one (see its Headscratchers page) - dare I say a Plot Hole - if he appears to Kylo only to be ignored or rebuffed. It would be an Author's Saving Throw.

• To go with the above, bonus points for Anakin saying "There's someone else who wants to talk to you", then Han shows up too.
• There's a problem with this: Sebastian Shaw is dead.
• Hayden Christensen isn't.

Besides the Force ghost, Hayden Christensen will also come back as a clone Anakin

Luke wasn't alone on that planet. Some time ago he rescued a clone of his father from another Imperial remnant faction. That way, Rey gets to build her own saber and New!Anakin gets his saber back. He can be like the Quattro of this new trilogy. (Meta reason: it would give Hayden a chance to "redeem" himself in the eyes of the fans if he played a mentor-type too.)

Hux is going to die.

It's basically a given that Kylo Ren's The Heavy, and Phasma has been confirmed to have a bigger part in VIII. There's no really telling just where Hux will fit into this, and the movie could very well end his rivalry with Kylo Ren by Kylo killing him for Snoke in a Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work fashion.

• Jossed for now; he's still kicking, though Kylo Ren may very well "fix" that in the next movie.

Noah Segan will have a noticeable role

He's a friend of director Rian Johnson and part of his Production Posse, appearing in all of his films and a big scene in one of Johnson's Breaking Bad episodes. He'll likely appear as a Han or Lando-type rogue.

Vader will be the villain, but in a rather different form than the original trilogy.

Anakin was an entity created from the Force itself, so his Force Ghost/soul is likely rather different in structure to normal Force users. While redeemed, Anakin still had the history of being Darth Vader within him. Due to his inherent Force Powers, this dark side of him gained a life of his own, separate from the redeemed Anakin Skywalker. As a spirit, Vader is attempted to corrupt/manipulate his grandson in order to gain a life of his own, becoming The Heartless. He will be defeated in a battle between him and Anakin Skywalker, who will finish Luke's job of redemption by slaying the manifestation of his dark side. Snoke knows this, and wants him back as part of research.

It will be revealed in a flashback that Kylo and Rey knew each other at the old Jedi Academy.

Kylo and Rey (who are possibly cousins) were close at the Jedi Academy. When Snoke ordered Kylo to kill the Jedi, he was unwilling to kill Rey, which is why she saw him save her in the flashback. However, Kylo still wanted to prove himself to Snoke so, to hide his act of compassion, he left Rey on Jakku.

• I don't know where anyone got this idea of Kylo "saving" Rey in the flashback, because she didn't exist as anything more than an observer at any point during the vision (including the parts that actually included her younger self), Kylo just killed some guy; Rey wasn't there at that moment because otherwise we would have seen what happened from the further perspective of little Rey when she was being saved.
• Unless someone tampered with Rey’s memory, “Bloodline” confirms that Rey had been on Jakku for at least 8-10 years before Kylo Ren betrayed Luke.
• Jossed. They never met before, and she was indeed ditched by her nobody parents, not Kylo.

Luke and Rey will travel to Malachor where they will meet Ahsoka Tano

In an effort to understand what they face and to teach Rey about the Dark Side, Luke will take her to the Sith temple on Malachor. There they will encounter the now very old (but no less badass) Ahsoka Tano.

• Jossed.

The Dubrovnik planet will be where...

...Luke meets Lando for the first time since Kylo's takeover.

• Impressive. Every word of that sentence was... entirely wrong. Canto Bight is instead where Finn and Rose have their caper trying to get a codebreaker. Lando doesn't appear at all in the movie, and the scenes take place before Kylo kills Snoke and takes over.

Rey, Luke, and Leia will disagree on whether or not Kylo is worth saving.

Leia and Luke will want to redeem him while Rey will not.

• Jossed and initially inverted. Rey wants to save him, while Luke and Leia think he's beyond help. By the end of the film, Luke's come around; Leia's and Rey's opinions are ambiguous (Leia doesn't answer her brother, just smiles, when he says that nobody is beyond help, while Rey firmly goes back to the Resistance but doesn't kill him when she has the chance).

A-Wings from the Republic will help out the Resistance

This WMG is based on one of the pictures released today of Prince William and Harry's visit to the SW 8 set. One picture shows William sitting in a cockpit of a fighter that looks a lot like an A-wing, suggesting that we will see the Return of the Jedi fighter in the new movie. It may be that the Republic, having decided to get in the fight after Hosnian Prime's destruction, have sent a squadron of A-wings to aid the Resistance. It may even be that the Resistance and Republic are now reintegrating their military forces to keep up a unified fight.

Boba Fett, of all people, will return and go completely ballistic against the First Order

Either for notwithstanding his latest mark being killed by none other than the said mark's son, or an Even Evil Has Standards scenario, where even the most ruthless Bounty Hunter couldn't withstand how the First Order raise their Stormtroopers, reminiscent of how the Clone Troopers were so casually expended. ^note Bear in mind, Fett himself was also a clone and when he was told to shoot his brothers, he outright refused. Alternatively, someone scavenged Fett's armor and carried his title. Anyway, he can go either way.

Extensive wild guess about the whole plot of episodes 8 and 9

We all know that the prequels were panned because they were too different from episodes 4, 5 and 6. Disney knows too, so it made episode 7 as a loose remake of episode 4. If we follow the assumption that Disney will keep making the same thing with minimum changes to pander to nostalgics and make easy money, a complete outline of the remaining two episodes can be inferred.

Episode 8:

• Kylo Ren is not dead.
• Luke Skywalker trains Rey, while Finn and Poe fall into a trap while attempting to kill Kylo Ren.
• Rey interrupts her training to rescue her friends, fights Kylo Ren and loses a hand.
• Poe tries to escape, but gets captured again.
• Rey gets a bionic hand implanted.

Episode 9:

• Finn frees Poe.
• There is a new Starkiller Base, larger than the first one.
• Rey goes back to Luke Skywalker to resume her training, but Luke gets killed in an attack and vanishes into the Force.
• Rey decides to go and kill Snoke.
• Snoke tries to lure Rey to the Dark Side, revealing her to be Kylo Ren's sister, daughter of Han Solo and Leia.
• Rey refuses the offer and starts fighting against Snoke.
• Before Snoke can kill her, Kylo Ren redeems himself and kills Snoke to save her, at the cost of his own life.
• Poe, flying the Millennium Falcon, destroys the new Starkiller base.
• Poe makes a heroic sacrifice and explodes with the Millennium Falcon.
• Rey and Finn marry, "and they lived happily ever after".
• Luke's ghost appears.

Finn will be sporting obvious cybernetics down his back.

It's very likely that last lightsaber strike Kylo delivered against him severed his spine, and to restore his ability to walk he'll have an external cybernetic "bridge" between the upper and lower portions. The cybernetics will be relatively clunky on account of the Resistance's limited resources. Nope. Bacta works its magic again.

Lando will appear as a politician.

He will be part of a provisional government formed after the destruction of the Hosnian system.

• Jossed. No appearance or even mention of Lando in the movie.

Anakin's Force Ghost will appear during the climax.

The final battle of the film will be a battle between the hastily put together New Republic and Resistance fleets and a group of Star Destroyers from the First Order. While Leia and directs the Republic forces Rey will reunite with Finn in the midst of the chaos only for Kylo and the other Knights of Ren to find them again. In the ensuing rematch Ren will pretty much lay waste to the both of them and be unwilling to show Rey mercy this time.

Things will look grim until the Force Ghost of Anakin Skywalker intervenes and confronts his grandson. While Finn fights off the other Knights of Ren and helps Rey get away Anakin will attempt to reason with Kylo. The increasingly dark and vengeful kid will of course rebuff him, rejecting the Light Side once and for all and fulfilling his status as the "anti-Luke" he has been described as.

But Anakin's distraction will enable Finn and Rey to escape at least as the Republic barely manages to defeat the First Order, causing them to retreat.

• Anakin appears at no point in the film.

Hundreds of new Force-Sensitives will emerge.

The destruction of the Hosnian System will have resulted in a massive disturbance in the Force that awoke the Force sensitivity in hundreds, maybe even thousands of individuals across the Galaxy. Rey, or maybe even Leia, will sense them and try to save as many as she can. For added irony, one of them will be a Corrupt Politician who was one of her old enemies from her Senate days, who is genuinely looking to make a fresh start after narrowly avoiding the Starkiller attack.

A hidden Jedi order exists a la the Hidden Temple from the Star Wars Legacy comics.

Think about the Rebel Alliance had a ton force sensitives working for them and a few Order 66 survivers among those. Assuming that some of them survived after the Bsttle of Jakku. When Luke founded tje new Jedi order he told the others to form a seperate hidden temple away from both First Order and the Republic in case something would happened and come out of shadows to fight.

Boba Fett will team up with Captain Phasma.

• That would have been crazy awesome, but sadly no.

Leia will become violently anti-democratic in her frustration with the New Republic

• Her aims will be to rule the Galaxy as a military dictator, believing that only she knows how to rule the Galaxy. She will start having her old political enemies, if any survived, hunted down and killed.

Darth Ruin and Darth Bane will appear.

Darth Ruin will appear as himself revealing that he's Not Quite Dead and give some insight of the mysterious New Sith Wars and reveals some details on the untouched 1000 years period between Ruin and Bane.

Battle droids will reappear.

With most of the Republic military destroyed, they'll probably be desperate enough to use battle droids as a stopgap measure as quick replacements for their lost soldiers.

Kyber crystals will be an important plot point.

Though Kyber crystals have been mentioned in the animated series and supplementary materials, Rogue One is the first time they've been mentioned in the movies, exposing them to general audiences.

Kylo and Rey will train at the same time, and their individual trainings will teach the audience about the history of the Sith and the Jedi respectively.

While Kylo is off training, Phasma will take up the role as the driving antagonist

• I also suspect that Phasma will be revealed to be inhuman to some extent, be it a robot, a cyborg or an alien, this is mainly to put Phasma on the same physical threat level as Ren. Other things I suspect are a fight between Chewbacca and Phasma, and a major character dying at her hands.
  • Partially jossed, Phasma has been confirmed to be human, just a really tough one.

A battle scene will occur on an ocean planet.

A battle will occur with both sides rather evenly matched in tech

The heroes will actually field Tanks and the like against the empire, instead of just starfighters and troops. I say this not because the plot needs this, but because Battlefront needs some damn rebel tanks to balance their stuff out.

When Finn wakes up, he'll ask where Rey is — to find that she left a message for him on BB-8 before she left for Ahch-To.

Of COURSE Finn will be worried about Rey, since the last time he saw her before his coma, she'd been sent flying twenty feet into the air and right into into a tree by Kylo Ren — and for all he knows, he could have killed her. However, Rey will leave a hologram message for him, apologising for not being there to speak to him in person, telling him that she's okay and that the map to Luke Skywalker was completed and she's been sent to find him. Ending with her thanking him for coming back for her and that he was the first one to do so. All of this would be a Heartwarming Moment, and would also be a nice Call-Back to Leia's message projected from R2-D2 in the first movie.

• Even better, Leia could have been the one who suggested she do that!

We will see a member of the Ghost crew or their offspring and it won't have anything to do with Rey

For some reason Ezra+Sabine=Rey seems to have gained currency in some circles, but this blatantly overlooks that both are Ambiguously Brown and Word of God says they are indeed supposed to be some kind of mixed race. Rey clearly isn't and while white people do sometimes have non-white genetic parents, I don't think the movie would get away with such a stretch of the willing suspension of disbelief. While certain statements by Yoda in the OT would seem to indicate that at the very least Kanan and Ezra would have to be killed off prior to the events of Episode V, this would not be the first time Yoda has lied about crucial details. Furthermore, we know that at the very least Hera Syndulla is alive as of the events of Rogue One and even if Yoda was speaking the truth about the number of remaining Jedi, there are examples in Canon of force wielders who are no longer Jedi, e.g. Ahsoka. Ezra would be a bit over fifty, Sabine would be a year older, we don't know either the age of Zeb or the life expectancy of Lasats, so he might have died in the interval (which solves the issues of bringing a species thus far only seen in animation onto the Live Action screen) Kanan would probably be around the age Obi Wan was in A New Hope and he already has the "wise mentor" down pretty well, so if he has survived, he is as good as place as any for Luke to get advice from (though he may have taken on the alias "Lor San Tekka" and already be dead). Now as for offspring, we would probably only care if they were already introduced before Episode VIII hits the theaters or if their parentage is a mystery until later on.

• Not saying this isn't going to happen, but a) Ezra and Sabine has been Jossed, and b) Kanan is definitely not Lor San Tekka, as Tekka is too old and still had his eyesight, to say nothing of not being a Force-user.
• Also, ages: Ezra would be the same age as the Skywalker twins, 53. Sabine would be 55, Hera would be 63, Kanan would be 67 and Zeb would be 78.
  • Ezra+Sabine=Rey may have been jossed, but has it been jossed that they ever have any children or become an item? Also, none of the ages you mention (well except for Zeb's depending on the life expectancy of Lasats which we do not yet seem to know) indicates them being dead or frail. Fair enough on the Lor San Tekka thing, though. That seems at the very least incredibly unlikely given that Kanan is blind and does not seem inclined to get bionic eyes or the like
  • First off, Ezra and Sabine getting together has been jossed by both Sabine's VA Tiya Sircar and the Rebels showrunners. Second, the age listing was just because the OP was wondering about that, not because they're supposed to be frail or anything. If the members of the Ghost crew are still alive, not having been killed in the Galactic Civil War or some other conflict, that's how old they'll be.

There is another... another tentacle monster

As is becoming obligatory for new Star Wars movies, at some point in the film some sort of tentacle monster will briefly appear and then soon be forgotten.

The Ghost of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader will appear to Luke and Rey on Ahch-To when fighting Kylo Ren.

Imagine the disappointment Anakin would have in his grandson idolizing and making a martyr out of the worst decisions of his life. He may engage in a reversal of the classic reveal from The Empire Strikes Back. The revelation would potentially send Kylo into a planet-shattering horrified meltdown so much so that he would have no reason to live anymore.

Luke Skywalker: [hurt] How could you do it, Ben? How could you turn on us like this?!
Rey: [at a loss] What good can come of you murdering your own parents?!
Ben Organa Solo/Kylo Ren: [raging] How can you ask me those questions?! All of your beliefs in truth, justice, individualism and free will as if they were real - your pursuits of them murdered My Grandfather, DARTH VADER! [Just then, the Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader appears to them all.]

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader: [sadly] Ben, if only you knew how much pain and heartache the Dark Side brings on you. Supreme Leader Snoke never told you the truth about Darth Vader.

Ben Organa Solo/Kylo Ren: [defiantly] He told me enough! He told me you MURDERED him to save your son!

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader: [sorrowfully] No. I was Darth Vader. I wasn't born him, but I did become him - only out of the mistaken belief it would help me save your grandmother. But boy, was I wrong.

Ben Organa Solo/Kylo Ren: [horrified] No... no! That's not true!! ... That's IMPOSSIBLE!!!

Rey: [nervously] Search your feelings, Ben. You know it to be true.

Ben Organa Solo/Kylo Ren: [despairing] NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Nooooooooooooo!!!!

• Would have been awesome but unortunately nothing of the sort happens in the movie. We can still hope to see a Force Ghost Anakin in Episode IX, though.

Poe will become General Dameron.

After with Leia resigns or dies in episode eight. Poe is constantly described as being her right hand man and it's canon that Poe's parents shared a close bond with Leia herself. Plus, it would be a nice send off by having Leia hand down the role to a member of the new trio.

• Maybe not a general, but the Poe Dameron comic really hints that he’s going to get promoted. Leia keeps asking him to understand what being a leader really means because many members of the Resistance look up to him.
• Jossed. Leia even demotes him as punishment for his reckless actions in the opening part of the movie.

Finn is a Prince.

Both of the previous trios have had a member of royalty. It's obviously not Poe, and it's unlikely to be Rey - because why would anyone willingly abandon a princess on a planet in that way. Because of Finn's memory wipe, and name change, it would be impossible for anyone to know. Plus, if Finn went missing circa twenty-three years ago, it's likely that his home planet have stopped looking for him with the belief that he's dead. It also explains why Phasma keeps a close eye on him and why Finn is considered a better stormtrooper than most; it's in his genes to be trained in combat.

• There’s a rumor in which Amazon released the track titles of the soundtrack too early. One of these titles was “The Prince and the Scavenger.” I’m not sure if Finn will find his roots in this film, but it’s pretty confusing for the track to refer to Kylo Ren since Alderaan was destroyed long before he was born and Leia hates being referred to as a princess since she has no planet to rule. This theory would also mirror nicely with media materials from “The Force Awakens” called “The Scavenger and the Stormtrooper.”

The final battle of the film will take place on Ahch-To

One scene in the trailer◊ features a Resistance or New Republic fleet combating First Order TIE fighters over what appears to be a green/aquatic world. Presumably Snoke eventually learns where Luke and Rey are and dispatches his forces including the entire Knights of Ren to Ahch-To in order to kill/capture them, leading to the Resistance/New Republic fighting them off to buy time for Luke and Rey to escape.

• Jossed.

Rose will be Force-sensitive and will ultimately be trained either by Luke or by Rey

She was described as the most important of the new characters being introduced in Episode 8 when the character was formally unveiled at the 2017 Star Wars Celebration. In addition she was directly compared with Luke in that she's a hero that comes from humble beginnings. And if Rey is going to have any chance of helping rebuild the Jedi Order (or whatever her order of force-users is ultimately called), then more force sensitive characters are going to have to appear.

• Jossed. There are no signs she's attuned to the Force in any way.

The Last Jedi will pull a switch and will end up being Dark Jedi vs Light Sith

There's two parts to this theory.Firstly Snoke is a Dark Jedi and "the Last Jedi" (plural) actually refers to him, Kylo and the Knights of Ren. If nothing else his method of training Kylo Ren certainly seems more Jedi than Sith. This is the easy part of the equation. Snoke is training himself an army of enforcers to support the First Order. A genuine dark reflection of the Old Jedi.The Light Sith require a bit more tinfoil. For one thing for this to work it requires that the Light Sith are a possibility in Canon (they are in Legends so it's not that much of a stretch) and that rule of two not withstanding one of them existed and managed to persuade Luke that the Jedi way was flawed and being passionate was not in and of itself evil. So at this point there are no Light Jedi or Dark Sith and everything has spun around.

The very last shot in the final trailer is actually part of the ending of the film.

Theories about Never Trust a Trailer aside, if the re-meeting between Rey and Kylo Ren does happen, it'd be after they're both disillusioned with their respective teachers: Rey for seeing Luke as a Broken Pedestal, and Kylo deciding that he has had enough of Snoke, most likely after crossing one too many Moral Event Horizon to 'fulfill his destiny', and so the two will meet each other again, a fight might or might not be happening, but it'll be near the ending of the film where the two decide to stand down and consider joining each other.

• Possibly this scene is towards the middle of the film. It’s more likely that Rey’s trying to get to Snoke by trying to convince Ren that she wants to join them. She may offer Ren a chance to go back to the light though.

Kylo Ren and Rey switch sides

Rey is a Decoy Protagonist, who turns to the dark side with Kylo Ren's help, but Ben then realizes that he is just lying to himself, undergoes an Heel–Face Turn and returns to the light side, while she remains evil.

• Doubtful. It's not in Rey’s character to join the dark side and Kylo Ren is just as unlikely to join the Resistance. It’s far more likely that Kylo Ren’s fate will mirror Darth Vader’s, with him killing Snoke but also dying in the process.
  • We barely even know her. You have no way of knowing whether it is in her character or not.
• Jossed. If anything, the events lead them to firmly reaffirm their respective sides.

Rey and Kylo's meeting will be an Anticlimax.

Kylo is thrilled that Rey intends to join him... until Rey turns out to be asking Kylo, an earlier student of Luke's, to clarify a technique that Luke mentioned to her during training, but didn't demonstrate or teach. After a mildly uncomfortable silence, Kylo demonstrates, followed by Rey thanking him. Then Rey escapes her present surroundings before Kylo can react.

• Yes please.

Benicio del Toro's character will be another character who zigs where a character in the original trilogy zagged.

Specifically, I'm thinking this "DJ" (if that's a proper abbreviation for his character's name) will be a gangster like Jabba and running a criminal organization every bit as despicable as Jabba's ever was, but will decide to accept whatever deal the Resistance is offering him instead of blowing them off the way Jabba did with Luke and his friends from the Rebel Alliance. A possible Freeze-Frame Bonus in the official trailer seems to show "DJ" standing behind Poe Dameron on his ship and cradling a blaster rifle in his arms during Poe's little voice-over speech about burning down the First Order, suggesting that he's decided to take a personal hand in their operation on Poe's behalf. The point of having this as a subplot will be to explore the benefits and drawbacks of what might have happened had Jabba decided to accept the Rebellion's offer: on the one hand, they'd have gotten Han Solo back without Luke having to slaughter so many outlaws who would potentially have been a great help with taking on the Empire at the battle of Endor, but they'd also find themselves allied with rather despicable criminals that the Empire did have rather morally acceptable reasons to want to eliminate. "DJ" will be just such a dubious ally.

• Jossed. DJ turns traitor and betrays Finn and Rose to the First Order.

The Salt Crystal Foxes are sentient Kyber Crystals.

And Rey can control them through the Force or something along those lines. They'll be key in helping rescue her from some sticky situation during the film. It's the best reason I can come up with for their supposed significance and supposed 'spoiler' species name. Their usefulness is confirmed, but this theory is Jossed; they end up useful during a sticky situation because the few surviving Resistance members find an alternate exit from the cave by following them.

The Porgs will be the next scrappy.

They may end up being similar to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.

• Too early to tell but contrarily to the Ewoks, the Porgs are irrelevant to the plot - there are no "the Porgs save the day" moments in the movie. They are just Ugly Cute little critters you occasionally see.

The Resistance and what remains of the New Republic will form the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances.

Re-canonizing the Galactic Alliance into the new continuity.

The trailers are setting us up for a Kylo Ren/Rey romance... but it’ll be a Finn/Rey romance in the end.

Brace yourself for the ship wars.

The ''Corvus'' will make a cameo in a space battle.

This would be similar to the ''Ghost''’s cameo in Rogue One. It wouldn't be be directly pointed out, but hardcore fans would recognize it instantly.

This full extent of this speculation is that, after defeating Hask and recovering the Corvus from Pillio during the Resurrection expansion, Iden takes the Corvus and head for a rendezvous with the Resistance Fleet, joining the fight against the First Order.

Lando Calrissian will turn up unexpectedly near the end.

Billy Dee Williams hasn't given us any reason to think he won't return to the Star Wars franchise at some point, and while he's not been a top priority in all of the fans' speculations, a fair number of fans have been quietly wondering what became of his character between the end of the last trilogy and the start of this one. I'm thinking that with everything else going on in the movie (and to keep any leaks about it from getting out before we actually see the movie), his appearance will be somewhere right near the end (just like Mark Hamill's in The Force Awakens) after several other major mysteries have been resolved, so as to leave fans asking (until the next movie rolls out) "Hey, is Lando Calrissian going to turn out to be Finn's father?" Jossed, but there's always the next movie.

Loss of Limbs...

It's a star wars movie, they rarely end without some hands (or occasionally feet) getting chopped off... I am guessing Kylo Ren will get one hand chopped off - by himself. Why? To emulate Vader, of course! Oh and there'll be a joke in the training where Luke says to Rey "and that's your hand" and she's like "Yeah, you would know". Come on... Just to lighten the mood.

• Jossed; no losses of limbs during the movie. Snoke gets bisected, though.

Chewbacca will attempt to avenge Han by attacking Kylo Ren

And it will cost him his life.

• Jossed. Chewie comes out still alive and well from this movie, but we'll see what Episode IX has in store for him. Would be amusing if the Original Trilogy hero who died in the old Expanded Universe, gets out alive from this trilogy.

Kylo Ren will start having hallucinations of Han

After Kylo Ren murdered his father, the fact wherever he showed some remorse for his actions was either implied (movie) or flat-out stated (novelization). In the next film, we'll go through Kylo's thoughts on his actions in the previous film. Probably he'll have hallucinations of Han Solo appearing would be a manifest of his guilt as he attempts to try to blot the manifestation and go further into the Dark Side. Much like Azula's nervous breakdown, he might start interacting with Han as if the latter never died or try to strike Han down again. Of course Hux and his subordinates will think he's just having another tantrum and think nothing of it.

• This did not occur in this film, but it might in IX.

Kylo Ren outright lied to Rey about her parents.

• He just played to her insecurities about her parents, think about it: Why else would they cut away when Maz Kanata asks Han who she is? Or why Leia comes up and hugs her after Han dies? He knows who she is, but is being manipulative. Plus, does he really come off as the most reliable person?
  • Leia hugged Rey because Rey reminded her of a certain young woman with unusual hair who also suffered major trauma and the loss of someone close to her. Except it was Han instead of, y'know, Leia's entire home planet.
  • Except Rey outright admits he’s right: she always knew the truth deep down and pretended otherwise to deal with the pain of abandonment.
  • Jossed. Wordof God is that Kylo Ren was telling Rey what he believed to be the truth. So he definitely wasn't lying about them being nobodies, but it does leave open the possibility that he was mistaken about why they left her (which ties into the WMG below).
  • Something to keep in mind, Rey was just a child of 4, maybe 5. So between emotional turmoil and just the passage of time, her memories and thoughts might not be entirely trusted.
  • Though, something else to keep in mind: Maz Kanata already said in The Force Awakens the Rey's parents were never coming back, and that Rey already knew it, which ties in with what Kylo revealed. Seeing as Maz is not just Force-Sensitive, but also far older and wiser than them, she can probably be trusted as a reliable source.

Rey will never be maimed or scarred throughout the whole sequel trilogy.

Because girls and young women don't get maimed or scarred like men and boys, as already demonstrated by The Force Awakens.

• Stuff like Mind Rape is fair game, though.
• Women have lost limbs in the comics, though, and Zam Wessell (an alien female, granted) lost a hand in Attack of the Clones.
  • Confirmed. Rey's limbs are still intact.
• Rey gets a Lightsaber Wound on the shoulder, so I'd argue this is Jossed.

Kylo was lying about Rey's parents, but was truthful about the sentiment behind it.

Kylo has shown contempt for the previous generation(except Leia). All his father figures(his actual father, his uncle Luke and Snoke) have let him down in his eyes. Rey is a Skywalker, either Han and Leia's kid or Luke, that was given away on Jakku to be looked after because of family drama. When Kylo says her parents were no-one, it's not because he's trying to manipulate her. Rather it's because he doesn't want her wasting her life chasing after her biological or adoptive parents, and escape the tragedy of the Skywalker family line. Her parents are nobody to HER, and she should focus on the future. Episode IX will have a parallel to Episode VI where Luke will confirm he's her biological father/uncle like Yoda and Obi-Wan did, but tell her not to dwell it and make her own destiny. He should know, given how his interest in his father led to a disturbing revelation and got him to teeter on the edge of the dark side. Or how Kylo's obsession with his lineage as Vader's grandson was what led to his turn to the dark side.

• Jossed. Rian Johnson confirms he's telling the truth, and in [[subsequent interviews has gone on to talk about how her parents being nobodies is meant to be the hardest thing for Rey to hear—her parents were not great, did not have any good reason to abandon her, and never intended to come back.

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