THE FORCE AWAKENS: THE TRIALS AHEAD

The falling action from the climax of EPISODE VII is primarily concerned with setting up the sequel: Rey and Chewbacca return to the Resistance base with Finn, who is severely injured. While Chewie gets Finn to the med center, Leia and Rey have a moment to mourn the loss of Han Solo.

A lot of people balked at this scene because one would think Leia might hug Chewie instead of somebody who hardly knows any of them. This goes back to Chewie getting cheated out a medal in EPISODE IV, an injustice that still sits sour with some folks even though the new canon’s done its best to remedy it. But the bottom line is, Chewie doesn’t need a hug any more than he needs a medal. This scene is really showing Leia’s acceptance of Rey and the emotional connection this shared loss has created between them. It may also be happening because Rey is a kid who just got mixed up in this mess and may need a little consolation, while Chewie is a 200 year old man who is a veteran of two galactic wars, so he should be capable of seeing to his own feelings by now.

"Or maybe people just think that because I project such a gruff exterior... Or maybe it's the fact that no one has bothered to learn my language enough to ever ask me how I feel about anything..."

Speaking to Peter Sciretta in an interview for Slashfilm.com, JJ Abrams said that his intent was to have Chewbacca preoccupied with rushing Finn to the doctor. He conceded that it would worked better not to show Chewbacca at all, because reminding the audience that he was there inadvertently showcased that Chewie could have gotten a hug, but didn't.

R2-D2’s deus ex machina circuit kicks in at this point and he revives from his robot coma to reveal that he does, in fact, possess the missing piece of BB-8’s map. At this point BB-8 is probably a little annoyed that he specifically asked if this might be the case and Threepio basically blew him off, but they’re all so excited to move the underlying storyline forward that nobody cares or questions that this is all happening for no apparent reason.

In a 2015 article on EW.com, JJ Abrams admitted that R2's sudden awakening was timed for its emotional contribution to the story. Within the framework of the story, however, he explained that BB-8's attempt to question R2 about the map was what triggered his return from Sleep Mode. Judging from the amount of time it took R2 to exit Sleep Mode in story time, I'm guessing he must have a Windows Operating System.

Leaving Finn in what appears to be a full-on human coma, Rey takes R2-D2, the Millennium Falcon, and what is supposedly the super-secret all-important key to finding Luke Skywalker and saving the galaxy, then flies away with Chewbacca. This again feels like a lot less resistance than, say, the Resistance should be offering, considering that nobody there knows anything about her except for the fact that she has stolen the Millennium Falcon once already.

"Bye now. I'll be taking your robot, your spaceship, and your super-secret map to find that guy I never met, or whatever..."

I joke, but I actually like the simplicity of the STAR WARS ethic. They know that Finn was a stormtrooper, but instead of condemning his prior actions Leia lauds him for having the courage to defect. They extend the same inherent trust to Rey. If you’re with the good guys, you are a good guy, because your prior sins should not define you more than your current actions. This is the very heart of the redemptive ideal. So whatever how-do’s and what-next’s took place prior to this moment, apparently they were sufficient for the Resistance to accept Rey enough that they entrust her with fulfilling their original stated purpose.

Just to squash another potential Wookiee beef, I can see that some folks may take umbrage with the fact that Rey apparently took over the captaincy of the Falcon, when Chewbacca should have inherited that honor. Alan Dean Foster's novelization sheds some light on this also. According to the novel, it was at Chewbacca’s insistence that Rey took the Captain’s seat. He didn’t want to be Captain any more than he wanted a medal, because Wookiees are pretty chill when it comes to matters of prestige.

"Why bother with the hassle of being in charge? I get paid the same and no one puts a bounty on me when things go wrong. Nobody bothered to freeze ol' Chewbacca and ship him back to Jabba the Hutt after we dropped that spice shipment. Ever think about that?"

Needless to say, there is a lot going on at the end of this movie that we just don’t see. Rey finds Luke’s exact location down to the exact spot on the exact island he's standing on, using nothing more than a map of half the galaxy. It's safe to assume there's more to the process than we’ve been shown on screen.

One important item to recall is Kylo’s attempted interrogation of Rey, in which he saw her vision of an ocean and a remote island that sounds a lot like the one she flies right up to in the final scene of the film. From this it looks an awful lot like Rey has been drawn to this place by the Force since way before the map or the Resistance ever entered her life. This being the case, it’s possible that once the map led them to the planet, the Force helped to guide Rey to the island itself.

The question is: Does Rey know what she’s going to find when she ascends the stone steps to the peak of that island? For the sake of narrative flow, she and Chewbacca could have scoured half the system and most of that planet before finding the right island, but it wouldn't have been necessary to show us that. Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean they didn’t do it. But it’s just as possible that they knew they would find Luke there because he wanted them to. R2's convenient resurrection could have occurred because Luke originally left R2 behind to fulfill that specific purpose. This doesn't fully track with Abrams' explanation of R2's awakening, but he's not going to reveal anything that the movies haven't yet revealed.

It doesn't make much sense for Luke to have left R2 behind with that information, if he didn't want to be found. From Rey's vision at Maz's castle, we're led to believe that R2 was with Luke through his tragic attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order, so that would mean Luke deliberately dropped him off before heading out in search of the first Jedi Temple. And that doesn't make sense either, since R2 presumably has the map to find the place Luke is looking for too.

And why is the map so perfectly split into two pieces? R2's scans were taken from the Imperial archive before someone purged the record, but that suggests that R2 originally had the entire map. The fact that a portion of it was specifically removed and entrusted with an old friend on Jakku is a convenient plot device out-of-story, but in the story it implies pretty strongly that Luke wanted to be found by the right people under the right set of circumstances. R2's sudden revival with exactly the right information they need to find the exact spot where Luke is standing makes more sense if it is happening because that particular set of circumstances has come to pass.

So if there is a specific trigger that wakes R2 up, what is it? The lightsaber? Maz Kanata made a big deal out of the saber like it was Harry Potter's wand choosing its wizard. Could Maz have had the lightsaber for the same reason Lor San Tekka conveniently had the missing piece of the map? And could there actually be something in the saber itself that signaled R2 to wake up?

I doubt that, because the lightsaber is with Finn the first time he comes to the Resistance base, and R2 has no reaction to that. For the same reason (unless Abrams' delayed response explanation is true), it doesn't look like the return of the missing piece of the map compels R2 to act.

So if we choose to remain dubious about R2 taking 3 days to reboot and believe instead that his awakening is triggered by a much more immediate event, what's different when R2 finally wakes up?

A lot has happened that could be a factor. The death of Han Solo might have been reason enough for Luke to return, but unless he's actually in contact with R2, then he wouldn't be able to signal R2 to wake up for that reason. The heightened threat of the First Order might also be enough to get Luke back in the fight, but you'd think if that were the case he'd have gotten back on the job after learning about the destruction of the Hosnian system. It's a fair bet that Luke is not in direct communication with R2. As you know from the premise of just about every STAR WARS movie, it's not so easy to send data across that universe in real time. The whole reason they have to sneak the map around on a jump drive is because a fully rendered 3D  hologram of the galaxy would be a pretty sizable data file to send over WiFi. Even for simpler communications, the other reason people are always having to fly a million miles to tell somebody something they could have told them over the phone is security. Even an encrypted message can be detected and potentially tracked to its source or its destination. If R2 were in constant communication with somebody on a remote planet, one would hope the war room of Resistance tech experts ten feet from R2 would have noticed.

The only specific event that has occurred (other than it just being the end of the movie) is Rey's arrival at the Resistance base. When Chewie comes back with Rey, suddenly it is significant that BB-8 has the missing piece of the map and R2 comes alive to set everything perfectly in motion for Rey to find Luke.  As we see when they reach the mysterious planet, R2 is actually accompanying Rey and Chewbacca. This makes sense because we know it's a movie, but in the story Rey has no connection to the Resistance or Luke. She wouldn't be their first pick to send on this mission that they believe is crucial to their plight and she has no special interest in finding Luke herself. So why does she go? There's more to the story than we're being told here, and because it takes us exactly where we want to go, we don't stop to question why it's really happening.

For all we know, once R2 came back online and shared the rest of the map with them, they were actually able to make contact with Luke and arrange a rendezvous. That’s just as likely as searching the last place they heard he’d gone and finding him standing there like he’d been waiting for them all those years.

Full disclosure: Abrams is a bit of a loose constructionist when it comes to finding good story reasons for making things happen. He's much more interested in doing the scenes he wants to do than in providing proper justifications for them within the story. He's not above bending the laws of the fictional universe to get things where he wants them to be, which is why characters in his movies always seem to be running from one scene to the next just to give us the sense that something really exciting is going on. It's why Scotty could just beam Kirk halfway across the galaxy in the first Star Trek movie to get him back into the story (and why future Spock was in an ice cave on the same planet just to deliver Kirk the necessary exposition),

"Good point, Poindexter, now let me ask you this: Do you want a trailer shot that fans will get behind, or do you want an honorary doctorate in Astrophysics?"

It's also why everyone in EPISODE VII immediately recognizes BB-8 everywhere they seem to take him, and why they see the destruction of the Hosnian system from millions of miles away like the First Order is blowing up the moon. In his eagerness to get the story moving, JJ Abrams often makes the world it's happening in seem incredibly small, so it's completely possible that R2 wakes up because it's the end of the movie and Rey goes to find Luke because she's the hero of the story. But assuming that everything in the movie has a story reason for happening, it looks to me like R2 wakes up because Rey is there and he takes her straight to Luke.

Rey makes the ascent to the top of the hill by herself as well, suggesting that it is understood that she is the one meant to find and initially make contact with Luke. If there's a valid story reason for this, then there's a connection between Rey and Luke that we have not yet been been told.

"Wow, you worked that out all by yourself? Guess we'll just have to make a couple more movies to fill the story gap that nobody noticed but you. Nice catch on that one, Shamus."

Rey finds Luke at the peak, his cloaked back turned toward her. Luke is standing next to what appears to be a grave, but it’s not shown prominently enough to be sure. When he turns to face her, he pulls back his hood. This reveals not just his face, but also the same robotic hand seen in Rey’s vision. Rey offers him the lightsaber.

Luke’s face is haggard and weathered beyond his years. He’s gray-bearded and looks generally defeated in his countenance. His robot hand also hints at past trauma. When he first received the hand at the end of EPISODE V, the medical droid gave it a prick in the palm to verify that it could feel pain (presumably because it could send and receive impulses the same as an organic hand). The fact that it is now stripped of all synthflesh means something pretty terrible (and painful) happened to Luke to make it that way.

The possible gravestone and Luke’s expression when he sees his old lightsaber make me think of an alternate history that could, if mined from the LEGENDS canon, add an even more tragic dimension to the tired and sorrowful look he offers Rey. The look is justified anyway, considering this weapon is the bane of the Skywalker family even if you only consider what we have seen of it in the films. If you take into account the lightsaber’s significance in the old Expanded Universe, it is a revenant of an even more terrible time.

I’ve already mentioned the fact that Luke’s wife in the LEGENDS canon was Mara Jade, a former Imperial operative that Luke helped to instruct in the Force and eventually married. By a bizarre set of circumstances involving an evil clone of Luke that had been generated using his lost hand and was equipped with the lightsaber he lost with that hand, Mara ended up taking possession of the weapon as her own. Eventually Mara was killed at the hands of Han and Leia’s son, Jacen Solo, who had been turned to the Dark Side of the Force.

Remind you of anyone?

None of that story is part of the current canon, but if Rey turns out to be Luke’s daughter, then someone was probably her mother (but you never know for sure in the STAR WARS universe). The fact that Maz had the lightsaber means somebody recovered it, so the maybe-grave could belong to Rey’s maybe-mom, who maybe was a Jedi that at one time maybe had hold of that lightsaber and maybe died and lost it. So that may be another reason that Luke is not too pleased at having it shoved in his face.

Maybe.

Here’s another question: Is Luke even there?

In REBELS, Yoda can commune remotely with the Jedi who enter the temple on Lothal while he remains hidden on Dagobah. Even in EPISODE V, he says he’s been watching Luke for a long time (one assumes remotely, since he has no way to leave Dagobah and it would be kind of creepy if he's been physically stalking a young boy). Yoda also seems to believe that staying out of galactic events is actually better than fighting the Empire or the Sith. Even after his death, Yoda remains behind as a Force Ghost. Assuming he isn’t just hanging on so he can give an attaboy to Luke at an Ewok party, is it possible that Yoda is using his connection to the Force to have a positive pacific influence on the galaxy?

Luke appears to have come to a similar conclusion, leaving the Resistance on its own at a critical stage of their conflict with the First Order. Could his self-imposed exile be a means of communing with the Living Force and remotely projecting its positive effect on the rest of the galaxy? If so, Rey’s awakening might be less of an ambiguous mystic ripple in the Force and more of a direct connection to Luke.

But the film ends at this critical moment, so we won’t know the answers to any of these questions until we see EPISODE VIII.