(Note: This article contains spoilers for and speculation about Rey, a major character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as other characters. If you continue reading, we’re assuming you’ve already seen the movie a time or three. If not, that’s on you now that we’ve warned you!)
Many questions remain to be answered about Daisy Ridley’s Rey in the movies that follow Star Wars: The Force Awakens. From the film’s final scene, she might be well on her way to learning the answers to why she has such a strong connection to the Force and why she was left behind on Jakku waiting for family who never returned.
That will be especially true if the most popular guess as to her parentage is correct. If Rey is indeed the daughter of Luke Skywalker, it effectively kills two birds with one stone, explaining why she is strong with the Force and probably determining why she was hidden away for so long — namely, because Luke was worried after his failure in training Ben Solo/Kylo Ren and was attempting to keep her safe. Still wouldn’t want to have to explain that logic to her, though!
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As a character from another major sci-fi franchise would say, Rey as a Skywalker is flawlessly logical, given what we were presented in The Force Awakens. Yet there’s been another fan theory that has been gaining some steam over the first weekend of release for The Force Awakens, especially after it was confirmed that Ewan McGregor recorded a line for the movie: what if Rey is a Kenobi instead?
For the benefit of those who didn’t hear and don’t want to click on that link, it was Obi-Wan’s voice calling to Rey toward the end of her Force vision on Takodana, saying, “These are your first steps, Rey …” Naturally, that doesn’t mean Rey and Obi-Wan are related — he spoke to Luke a bunch of times after his death, after all — but since they’ve never met, it did get people wondering.
The theory says that perhaps Rey is Obi-Wan’s granddaughter. We still haven’t learned everything that happened to Kenobi between the end of Revenge of the Sith and the beginning of Star Wars, so it’s possible he could have had time to start a family. That would require him to thumb his nose at the Jedi teachings about such things, but since he wasn’t a “practicing” Jedi and the order was more or less extinct, maybe he figured there was no reason to stick to the old ways.
Granted, that would raise a whole bunch of unanswered questions, including who the mother was and why she isn’t in the picture by the time Luke first meets Old Ben. It might make the story of how and why Rey was abandoned on Jakku a little more complicated too, though it would actually help with one thing that didn’t sit well with me or other fans: why would Luke just drop off Rey and take off, even if he was too scared to train her? Untrained Kenobi descendants panicking sounds a little better.
Next: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Who is Rey?
For the record, that doesn’t mean I think Rey Kenobi is actually going to turn out to be a thing, though it’s an interesting idea. It’s also not going to be the last Rey theory that pops up between now and the release of Episode VIII. You don’t need to use the Force to know that.