Following the crash landing of Solo at the box office you may have read of “Star Wars fatigue.” It’s a phantom illness that is being blamed for audiences’ alienation of affection for Star Wars movies after 41 years of wedded bliss. The fans are not tired of Star Wars—they are in an uproar over the direction that the president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy has taken the franchise. The fans are centrally angry that after 30 years of waiting for the continuation of Luke Skywalker’s story, he never saw any action and died at the end (was killed by director/writer Rian Johnson). The other issue with fans has been the political shift from focus on authoritarianism/militarism toward identity and party politics. Snoke is Trump, Poe Dameron’s mutiny represents the Bernie Bros, and the leadership of the Resistance are all elderly, affluent women (Clinton, Warren, Pelosi). continued after break...
Fans are now reading the Holdo/Dameron plot as a metaphor for the relationship between fans and Kennedy.
The following supposition is an attempt at pleasing the fans and saving the Skywalker saga.
Episode IX: Echoes of the Dark Tide
We learn in the opening scrawl that a new Sith, Darth Meidus is plaguing both the Rebels and the First Order, Leia has died and both the Rebels and the First Order are working on super weapons.
We open with the funeral of Leia on Yavin-4 but Rey is missing.
Rey tracks down Lando for answers to her past and discovers he is running Cloud City again. When she arrives, she is greeted by Donald Glover's Lando (he is a clone). The double-cross happens and she is led into a trap where she must fight an evil clone of Luke Skywalker played by real-life Mark Hamill clone Sebastian Stan. She kills the Skywalker clone (every fan in the audience waiting for the "I'm your father" line exhales), she scans the mind of Lando-clone and she springs the OG Lando from his prison.
Meanwhile, Ren and Finn are both battling a new Sith Lord wearing a mask. The First Order’s secret weapon is a warp drive ring that connects to a ship and turns it into a time machine. The Rebels (Finn, Chewie, Poe and Rose) are on a mission to uncover the secret weapon. The Rebel super weapon is a Death Star which they have built from the stolen plans of the Endor station.
Lando tells Rey that he went in search of a secret project called Mara Jade. He says that that is where he found Rey, Luke's lightsaber and Luke's frozen hand. He couldn't find Luke so he left the saber with Maz and he left Rey with the Falcon on Jakku. He was then captured by the Emperor's Hands-- clones of Luke and Mace Windu. Lando can't tell her who her parents are but she extracts what she needs from the cloned-Lando, and she leaves Cloud City. OG Lando dies.
Finn and company learn that the warp drive/ring is filled with an exotic superfluid that requires a planet-sized machine to produce it (which the Rebels blow to kingdom come with their Death Star). It is also explained that the warp drive has a limited range of 40 years into the past and the fuel is depleted the further you go back.
Rey discovers she is Mara Jade. She was created-- not born. She was made from the DNA of Darth Sidious and Luke Skywalker. She is greeted by a 30-something Darth Sidious who has resurrected himself via a cloned body and dark side powers. He calls her his daughter and unlike Luke, he tells her to take her place as his apprentice and heir to the Sith. He promises that she will live forever by his side and they will rule the galaxy. She kneels and he crowns her Darth Meidus (meita is Latvian for daughter).
At this point it is revealed that the whole movie has been set in two different periods and that the Sith Lord that Finn and Kylo Ren have both been having encounters with is Rey.
Finn steals the time machine, goes back 30 years and tracks down Luke on Tatooine following the events of Return of the Jedi.
Episode X: Heir to the Empire
The first half of the sequel takes place in the past, and Luke and Finn defeat Snoke 30 years before The Force Awakens. When Finn returns to the future in the second half, he finds Luke is alive, Ben Solo is a Jedi Knight and neither know who Rey is. Rey was never rescued by Lando because Sidious returned early and Rey was raised by Darth Sidious from 'birth.' Mara Jade/Rey remains Darth Meidus.
The Rebels have crushed the First Order with their Death Star, the Sith are working in the shadows and the Rebels have declared Admiral Holdo as queen.
Out of the unknown regions (half the galaxy remains unmapped in Star Wars) a new threat rises—a reptoid species known as the Hive that exterminate other worlds using telepathically controlled, bioengineered weapons to cleanse planets (think of the xenomorph in Alien but reptilians instead of bugs). The Hive would be the central/surface conflict of the trilogy.
Episodes XI and XII
Luke and Ben kill Darth Sidious, and Finn faces Darth Meidus and turns her to the light by showing her his memories of Rey.
Meidus/Rey goes to the secret cloning facility, kills the newly reborn Sidious and destroys the facility (including tanks containing her own clones). She then trains with Luke and reveals to him her identity as Mara Jade Skywalker.
Meanwhile, Queen Holdo defeats the Hive with the Death Star, she becomes the villain (embracing the Kathleen Kennedy metaphor) and the mission of the Jedi shifts to destroying the Death Star. Finn and Poe infiltrate the Death Star and BB8 activates the evacuation sequence and infects the battle station with an AI that takes over its navigations. The heroes escape and the AI jumps the Death Star into hyperspace and dumps it right over a black hole which rips it apart.
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