The Rise of Skywalker: 5 most groan-worthy plot points

1. The Sith Dagger makes no sense at any point in time

To find Emperor Palpatine and stop his plan to punish and take over the galaxy, the Resistance needs to find his lair on Exegol, a hidden Sith stronghold. To find Exegol they need a Sith wayfinder, of which there are just two in the entire galaxy (that we know of). To find a wayfinder, they must find a Sith dagger. It’s National Treasure, intergalactic edition.

This dagger is in the possession of “Ochi of Bestoon” who has a relationship with the Sith and seeks out ancient relics when he isn’t hunting Jedi or Sith granddaughters. Ochi died below-ground years prior to the events of The Rise of Skywalker. Rey discovers on his person a dagger covered in carefully inscribed runes.

Those runes, once translated, lead to a moon of Endor, Kef-Bir. There the ruins of the second Death Star have settled in the ocean. To find the Sith wayfinder, Rey holds up the dagger, extending a piece from the crossguard. That piece fits the round exoskeleton of the Death Star ruins, pointing to the Emperor’s chambers. There Rey finds the second Sith wayfinder.

Everything about the dagger screams that it is an ancient relic, from the Sith runes to its possession on the corpse of a relic hunter. We know Emperor Palpatine to be a collector of Sith artifacts. Yet how, if this is a dagger from centuries past, does it contain a map to the wreck of a space station that touched down just 30 years ago?

Therefore the dagger itself is much newer than it looks, or had been modified recently to show the way to the Death Star wreckage. Who would have made the map — Ochi, or Palpatine? Yet if someone made a map to the wreckage, why not rescue the wayfinder and place it in a more defensible place? At least there was an army on Mustafar for Kylo Ren to cut through to acquire the other wayfinder.

The problems with this plot point keep pouring out. Wouldn’t the wreckage be shifting over time, often significantly, as the elements involved with sitting in an ocean take their toll? The site of the Death Star battle is a well-known fact; wouldn’t scavengers have picked the wreckage clean? Why did Palpatine hide his Sith wayfinder, a map to a hidden Sith world, on the Death Star? Again, Darth Vader was shrewd enough to hide it in or near his fortress on Mustafar.

Nothing about the Sith dagger makes sense, but we are expected to ignore our rational minds and go along for the ride. Honestly that’s not hard to do, because the visuals and music and action are all so good. A part of me doesn’t care how Rey found the Sith wayfinder because it’s too excited about the Darth Rey vision and the fight on the wreckage against Kylo Ren.

That’s what this movie has become, unfortunately. Instead of a delightfully fun movie with a well-crafted plot, the Skywalker saga ended with a delightfully fun movie with a groan-worthy plot. Not a disaster, but not Star Wars at its best. Perhaps there is a Sith dagger leading to a great storyteller to take up the Star Wars mantle.