Film / The Rise of Skywalker

Due to the sheer volume of spoilers, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Luke Skywalker: Rey, the Force will be with you, always.^note Clockwise from top right: Kylo Ren, Rey, Zorii Bliss, Lando Calrissian, Rose Tico, D-O, C-3PO and R2-D2, BB-8, Jannah, Chewbacca, Finn, and Poe Dameron.

The dead speak! The galaxy has
heard a mysterious broadcast,
a threat of REVENGE in the
sinister voice of the late
EMPEROR PALPATINE.

GENERAL LEIA ORGANA
dispatches secret agents to
gather intelligence, while REY,
the last hope of the Jedi, trains
for battle against the diabolical
FIRST ORDER.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader
KYLO REN rages in search
of the phantom Emperor,
determined to destroy any
threat to his power....

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker^note also known as Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is the third film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the final chapter of the Skywalker Saga. It is directed by J. J. Abrams, who returns after having directed The Force Awakens, and written by Abrams and Chris Terrio.

One year after the events of The Last Jedi, the Resistance has replenished many of its forces and the First Order's conquest of the galaxy begins to stagnate, with neither side having a clear upper hand. Suddenly, Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) releases a message revealing that he has come back from his sudden demise, promising to unleash a fleet of warships, each equipped with the firepower of the Death Star, upon the galaxy from the hidden Sith world of Exegol. Supreme Leader Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) makes a move to ally with the man pulling his strings, with a plan to betray him later.

With only 16 hours to enact a plan to find and infiltrate Exegol before the Final Order can be unleashed upon the galaxy, both sides assemble their forces for a crucial battle that will determine the course of history. Rey (Daisy Ridley), the last Jedi, goes on a journey alongside her allies Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to chart a path to the planet, while all three are targeted by the First Order and its Supreme Leader. While confronting Kylo Ren once again, Rey learns of her true origins, and both must face their pasts and confront the Dark Lord of the Sith as the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance.

Most of the sequel trilogy's cast return, including Carrie Fisher (brought back posthumously via repurposed footage from the previous Skywalker Saga films) as Leia Organa, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Domhnall Gleeson as Armitage Hux, Lupita Nyong'o as Maz Kanata, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, and Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico. Hassan Taj and Lee Towersey replace Jimmy Vee as the primary actors for R2-D2. Billy Dee Williams, Denis Lawson, and Warwick Davis reprise their roles as Lando Calrissian, Wedge Antilles, and Wicket W. Warrick, respectively. New additions to the cast include Naomi Ackie as Jannah, Richard E. Grant as Enric Pryde, Keri Russell as Zorii Bliss, and Dominic Monaghan as Beaumont Kin.

It was confirmed in 2023 that Daisy Ridley would return as Rey in a new film set fifteen years after this installment to rebuild the Jedi Order. The film will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy of Ms. Marvel and written by Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders

The film was released on December 20th, 2019.

Previews: Teaser, Special Look, Trailer.

---

NOTHING WILL STOP THE RETURN OF THE TROPES!:

Tropes # to D

• 10-Minute Retirement: To prevent herself from falling to the Dark Side and hurting her friends, Rey attempts to exile herself on Ahch-To as Luke did. Luke's Force ghost appears and dissuades her from making the same mistake he did, and she rejoins the fight.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Rey and Kylo using their Force connection to teleport nearby objects to each other's location. They eventually take advantage of this ability in the climax to get the unarmed Kylo a lightsaber when he's about to be killed by the Knights of Ren.
• Abandoned Area: Rey goes to the Lars homestead on Tatooine to bury the Skywalkers' lightsabers in the sand at the end. No one has seemingly inhabited it for decades since Luke left it after the death of Owen and Beru in A New Hope, and it is partially silted up.
• Aborted Arc:
  • The budding romance between Finn and Rose, established in the previous film, is abandoned in this film. After a brief shot of Finn standing watch over a recuperating Rose, the pair barely interact. Star Wars: Resistance Reborn, which was released in the lead-up to the film, indicates that Finn and Rose decided that they were Better as Friends.
  • Luke promised to give Rey three lessons in the prior film. He gets as far as two before Rey decides to leave the planet to help her friends and Luke dies helping the Resistance in the final act. Although he does return as a Jedi Spirit in this film, and tells Rey a different lesson, whatever the third lesson would have been remains untold.
  • Luke's parting lines to Kylo Ren in the prior film, "See you around, kid," was meant to set up a subplot in Colin Trevorrow's version of Episode IX that would have had Luke's force ghost haunting Kylo. This was scrapped along with the entirety of Colin's version and Luke and Kylo never interacted again in the trilogy.
• Adaptation Expansion: The novelization addresses several things not touched upon in the movie.
  • Palpatine was resurrected via transferring his essence into a clone body, as in Dark Empire.
  • Rey's father was Palpatine's attempted replacement clone body, hence why he wasn't heard about prior, defective for lacking Force ability.
  • Rey and Ben's story arc wasn't about romance; their kiss is described in emotionally heightened but non-romantic terms.
  • Rey isn't retiring to Tatooine in the final scene; she's just burying the lightsabers and will continue being a hero across the galaxy.
• Adventurer Outfit: Because the new Resistance base is located on a jungle planet, most of the Resistance personnel wear khaki shirts, and a few wear the Star Wars equivalent of pith helmets. Poe Dameron, in particular, looks much more like a traditional adventurer in this movie with the shemagh he wears around his neck and his satchel with pouches on the strap.
• Advertised Extra:
  • The Sith Troopers were heavily advertised as being elite and powerful Stormtroopers, only for them to barely appear in the final film.
  • Dark Rey, who appears as The Stinger for the Trailers and builds up that Rey will fall to the Dark Side and gain a collapsible Double-Blade Lightsaber similar to Pong Krells'. She only shows up as a vision to Rey inside of the Vault on the Second Death Star that Rey briefly scuffles with.
  • The Knights of Ren make their highly awaited and heavily promoted first appearance, but they do nothing of note and nothing about them is explained before they're killed off by the reformed Ben Solo. To add insult to injury, they never even interact with anyone besides Kylo Ren.
  • Similar to Captain Phasma, Zorii Bliss was advertised as being the next big scoundrel character, only to be given a couple of scenes of minor significance.
• Alien Blood: Boolio has green blood, as shown when we see his severed head.
• All for Nothing: The first half of the movie is consumed by a Fetch Quest — get the Sith dagger from Ochi's body, get 3PO to Babu Frik so that he can translate the dagger, use the dagger to find the wayfinder in Palpatine's throne room — which becomes completely pointless because Kylo destroys Palpatine's wayfinder and Rey ultimately goes to Exegol by using Vader's wayfinder that Kylo got from Mustafar at the beginning of the movie.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Visual Dictionary for the film explains some of the more oblique plot points that the filmmakers didn't have enough time to cover due to the tight production deadline (i.e. more detail on how Palpatine came Back from the Dead, how he was able to amass the Final Order's massive fleet on Exegol and clarifying that the Final Order Star Destroyers are not mini-Death Stars as the film implies, the name and nature of his cult of followers, how Rey was able to repair Anakin's lightsaber and learned Force Healing, a more clear explanation for why Hux suddenly began to betray the First Order, Poe's backstory and past as a spice runner prior to joining the Resistance, etc.)
  • Palpatine's broadcast to the galaxy is only mentioned in the opening crawl but actually appears during a Fortnite event, of all places.
  • The novelization clarifies that Palpatine's spirit is possessing the body of a clone, but it wasn't strong enough to contain his power. It also states that the "son" who went on to be Rey's father was another unsuitable clone that went rogue and escaped.
  • It's only clarified in supplementary material that the opening scene takes place in the ruins of Darth Vader's castle (first seen in Rogue One) and that the Sith wayfinder Kylo retrieves belonged to Vader. And without playing Vader Immortal or reading The Visual Dictionary, there's no explanation for why the area looks so drastically different from Rogue One (or why Mustafar as a whole looks different from Revenge of the Sith, making it hard for casual viewers to recognize).
• All Your Powers Combined: Rey, wielding the power of all the Jedi, fights Palpatine, wielding the powers of all the Sith.
• Ambiguous Situation: The trilogy has hinted that Finn is force sensitive, and it ends without resolving this, just giving a final hint when he "just feels it" that the command signal has been transferred from the ground tower to one of the ships of the Exogol fleet.
• Androcles' Lion: On Pasaana, Rey and the group are briefly attacked by a beast known as a Vexis snake in the planet's underground tunnels. However, when Rey sees the snake is wounded, she uses the Force to heal it. When the snake sees its wound is gone, it calmly slithers away, though not before revealing an exit with its tail.
• And Starring: The cast roll here ends "with Ian McDiarmid and Billy Dee Williams".
• And the Adventure Continues:
  • Lando's "Let's find out" to Jannah implies they will go on an adventure to find out her origins.
  • Rey buries Luke's (actually Anakin's) and Leia's lightsabers at the Lars homestead on Tatooine, but she has constructed her own lightsaber, and closes the film watching the binary sunrise, promising a new generation of Jedi with her to lead them.
  • The Final Order has been destroyed, and the First Order has been dealt a massive blow by the Free Worlds and the Resistance. However, according to supplementary material, there are still many systems under their control, including those that voluntarily submitted to their rule.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Kijimi suffers a Physical Annihilation on a planetary scale thanks to the Final Order star destroyer's cannon.
  • The galaxy is placed under threat of the same by the Final Order.
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: The returned Palpatine managed to somehow fund an entire Final Order organization which built a fleet of Star Destroyers with miniature planet-killing superlasers. Associated lore suggests that this was a process that took a long time to pull off, hence why he didn't try to enact his Evil Plan earlier — with the third volume of the Darth Vader comic confirming that he'd been working on this plan for decades.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Stormtroopers mostly go down in a single shot despite their armor, which is pretty much par for the franchise.
  • Somewhat averted with Palpatine's bodyguards. One of them takes a direct blaster hit to the chest and is only staggered for a second, while others get knocked down after being shot but are up again several seconds later. It seems to take at least a few blaster hits or being smashed with the Force to put them down permanently.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Kylo Ren asks why Rey didn't take his hand after he killed Snoke even though she wanted to. Later, she tells him she wanted to take Ben's hand.
• Artistic License – Physics: The quicksand pit that dumps our heroes into an empty cavern. It would have been filled with gravel if this were not Star Wars.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: The Reveal that Palpatine is a body surfing Sith Lich, able to possess those who murder him in an act of rage or hate. Considering all the times he goaded others like Anakin and Luke into striking him down, if they had, we'd be looking at a horrifying timeline with a Sidious-possessed Skywalker: one of the most powerful bloodlines controlled by the most evil man in the galaxy.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Maz Kanata gives Chewie a medal at the end, acknowledging the fact that fans have lamented for years how Chewie was the only one who never got a medal at the end of A New Hope. This retcons previous information explaining that Wookiee culture prevents Chewbacca from accepting medals from non-Wookiees, although he may just have accepted it due to being something that he can remember Han, Luke, and Leia by.
  • The invokedFan Nickname "Holdo Maneuvers" (i.e., ramming another starship at lightspeed) is used onscreen by Beaumont Kin. The fan questions about "why didn't the Rebels use this before" are also acknowledged by Snap Wexley, who points out that the high cost versus the low chance of success makes it prohibitively impractical. (Though we later find out that it didn't stop someone over Endor from trying it — and succeeding!)
  • General Pryde complains about how investing all of the nascent First Order's munitions into a superweapon like Starkiller Base was a massive waste of time and resources compared to just constructing a viable fleet. This same point has been brought up by many fans over the years, especially in the Old EU (where the Empire was practically addicted to building Death Star clones).
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • Leia dies after her efforts in communicating with Ben drains her life energy, becoming one with the Force and reuniting with Luke.
  • Ben himself ultimately gives up his life force to revive Rey at the end of the film, and becomes one with the Force.
• Attack Its Weak Point: It turns out that the planet-busting cannon on a Sith Star Destroyer is its biggest weakness, as destroying the cannon destroys the entire ship. An attack run by a single Y-Wing on an unshielded Destroyer does the trick quite nicely.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Subverted: instead of a single massive space station serving as a Planet Killer, Palpatine's fleet consists of countless Star Destroyers each equipped with a Planet Killer.
  • The planet Exegol is hidden away from outside interference, but its atmospheric conditions prevent shields from working and require an easily-targeted signal beacon to reach orbit. Subverted again: the Final Order has redundancies in place, which they immediately activate when the Resistance destroys one in the first minutes of the battle.
• Back for the Dead:
  • Snap Wexley. The X-wing pilot appeared in The Force Awakens but was away on a mission during The Last Jedi. He appears here but is shot down by overwhelming Final Order forces in the final battle.
  • Tantive IV, Leia's ship from the very first movie (and the very first ship to appear on-screen in the entire saga), reappears as a central part of the Resistance's fleet, but doesn't survive Palpatine's giant Force Lightning storm.
• Back for the Finale:
  • Lando Calrissian makes a triumphant return, just in time for the third saga's end.
  • Harrison Ford makes a surprise cameo as Han Solo in a vision of Ben Solo's, giving his son the final push he needs to turn from the Dark Side once again.
  • Denis Lawson briefly returns as Wedge Antilles, as part of Lando's crew on the Millennium Falcon.
  • And, as stated in the Opening Scroll, Palpatine himself.
  • Palpatine impersonates the voices of Supreme Leader Snoke and Darth Vader, giving Andy Serkis and James Earl Jones brief appearances.
  • An abundance of Jedi from prior movies — and even television series — appear as voices that guide Rey, including Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka Tano, Freddie Prinze Jr. as Kanan Jarrus, Olivia D Abo as Luminara Unduli, Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, Frank Oz as Yoda, Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn, Jennifer Hale as Aayla Secura, and Angelique Perrin as Adi Gallia, with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker closing the speech. In the cases of Tano, Jarrus, Unduli, Secura, and Gallia, this is the first time that any of those characters had lines in the films.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Palpatine confirms that he did die before, meaning that he was not faking his death and had to be resurrected through Sith practices (his soul channeled into a cloned body).
  • Rey is also resurrected by Ben with Force healing at the cost of his own life.
• Backup from Otherworld: Palpatine claims to have all the dead Sith inside him and Rey defeats him by calling upon the souls of all the Jedi.
• Badass Bystander: A good chunk of the galaxy. During the climactic battle, Lando is able to gather a giant fleet to help the Resistance battle against the Final Order. This fleet is made up entirely of civilians and veterans (or, as the film puts it, "Just people") who want to help fight for the common good.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the teaser, Luke's reassuring "No one's ever really gone" is followed by an Evil Laugh from the previously dead Emperor Palpatine.
  • Chewbacca is captured and then the ship he's on is destroyed, so everyone watching is certain that he's dead. Soon after he's shown to be alive due to actually being on a second ship, previously seen in the background but not shown in character view taking off.
• Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: Poe, Finn, and Chewie are captured by the First Order and facing death by firing squad. Hux takes a blaster from one of the troopers, saying he wants to do it himself. We hear three shots, then our heroes turn around to see the stormtroopers dead, and Hux confesses to being The Mole.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Palpatine orders Kylo Ren to kill Rey in exchange for his fleet. In reality, he needs Rey alive for his plan to work, and he knows that Kylo Ren is going to defy his orders and bring Rey to him alive as part of a betrayal scheme. The alternative — that one of the two actually kills the other and then goes to Exegol — still works as part of his back-up plan to essence transfer into one of their bodies.
  • Later, Palpatine almost gets Rey to kill him, despite explaining that it plays into his plans, because she knows the Resistance is being slaughtered, and all she can do is hope that enough of her is left that when she inherits the Final Order that she can spare them.
• Bearer of Bad News:
  • Played for Laughs with Temmin Wexley when he informs Leia and Rose that they lost contact with the Falcon crew, only to be told by the two women to be more optimistic. He somehow misinterprets this and tells them this is good news with hilariously fake optimism.
  • Played more seriously with Commander Larma D'Acy as she is the one tasked with telling the crew of the Falcon that Leia had died while they were gone.
• Benevolent Boss: Shockingly, this time around Palpatine seems to incline more to this than the trope he's better known for. The first thing he does after restoring himself to power is rally his army and obliterate their enemies with a torrent of Force lightning, taking care not to target any of his own troops. It likely isn't altruistic though since he still needs an army to rule the Final Order with.
  Emperor Palpatine: Do not fear their feeble attack, my faithful. NOTHING WILL STOP THE RETURN OF THE SITH!
• Big Bad: Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine is not only the primary villain of the film, but it's also revealed that almost every villainous action in the sequels (Snoke, the rise of the First Order, Ben's fall to the Dark Side, the death of Rey's parents) is directly due to his machinations.
• Big Damn Heroes: Just as it looks as if the First Order has overpowered the Resistance, the Millennium Falcon shows up out of the blue just in time, along with a huge fleet of ships.
• The Big Damn Kiss: As Rey is revived, she shares a kiss with Ben Solo (formerly Kylo Ren). That happy moment is short-lived, as he has given his life force to save her, and dies, making him one with the Force.
• Big "NO!":
  • Finn lets one out after the tug-of-war on the First Order shuttle containing Chewie between Rey and Kylo Ren ends with the craft destroyed by Force Lightning cast by Rey. Chewie was actually not on board that craft.
  • Poe responds to the death of Snap Wexley with one during the battle of Exegol.
  • Rey — three times.
    • First, in reaction to the reveal in her mind of her parents being killed by Ochii through a vision. (Not to mention her mother's big "No!" in the vision)
    • The second in anger gives one out when Ren crushes Palpatine's wayfinder before charging him.
    • The third when rejecting Finn's plea — followed by a Force push of Finn back.
• Big "WHAT?!": Poe's reaction to Hux revealing that he's the spy helping La Résistance.
• Big Word Shout: Rey lets out an anguished scream of "CHEWIE!!!" when she accidentally uses Force Lightning to destroy the transport she thinks Chewbacca was held on.
• Binary Suns: Unlike the binary sunsets seen on Tatooine in A New Hope and Revenge of the Sith, and much like what was shown with Luke's final moments in The Last Jedi, the last shot of this film is Rey and BB-8 watching Tatooine's binary suns rise.
• Bittersweet Ending: Emperor Sheev Palpatine/Darth Sidious is permanently destroyed, the Sith and the Final Order are eradicated, and the First Order has been dealt a massive blow and is on the retreat as ordinary citizens rise up to help the Resistance. However, Leia dies after using up her remaining energy to make Ben pull a Heel–Face Turn, and Ben himself saves Rey at the cost of his own life, thus the Skywalker and Solo bloodlines are extinct. However, upon his death, Ben completed what his grandfather Anakin Skywalker set out to do, which is to gain the power to stop the people he cared about from dying. Also, the Skywalker name lives on, as Rey adopts it for herself to honor them, turning the foul lineage of Palpatine she must live with into the power to aid her in her task to restore the Jedi as the guardians of peace and justice to the galaxy, expanding the name as something greater than the concept of a bloodline.
• Black Dude Dies First: Inverted. By the end of this film, the black character, Lando Calrissian, is the last one standing after all the other original human heroes died throughout the saga: Obi-Wan, Anakin, Han Solo, Luke, and Leia. It's implied he doesn't have long left to live either, given that he's well into his 70s and struggling with his health.
• Black Speech: The Sith language was treated as such and was forbidden by the Republics, and C-3PO can't translate it without having his memory wiped.
• Body Horror: During Palpatine's first scene, we're treated to a quick look at his hands, revealing that at least one finger isn't completely finished. The rest look none too healthy as well. His eyes also appear to be permanently glazed.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Palpatine:
  • Sending out a broadcast announcing his return served no purpose (other than bringing Kylo Ren to him and yoking his Sith fleet to the First Order) and removed his element of surprise.
  • When Rey confronts him, he tells her that he wants her to kill him so that he and all the dead Sith can possess her. She probably would have killed him if he hadn't told her that.
• Bookends: This film is called the conclusion of The Skywalker Saga for several reasons.
  • The central conflict of The Phantom Menace began with a fleet of ships blockading a planet, preventing the citizens from leaving or receiving aid from teh Republic. The central conflict of The Rise of Skywalker revolves around preventing a fleet of ships from leaving a planet and potentially blockading thousands of worlds if they escape.
  • The family saga chronologically started on Tatooine for the Skywalkers in The Phantom Menace. The last scene of the Skywalker saga in The Rise of Skywalker happens on Tatooine.
  • The first released Star Wars film, A New Hope, also started on Tatooine with Luke's life-changing adventure starting at his home, the Lars homestead. The last scene of The Rise of Skywalker happens at the abandoned Lars homestead with Luke's Force spirit watching as Rey takes the name "Skywalker".
  • A memorable scene from A New Hope has Luke watching the twin suns of Tatooine, which was also referenced in Revenge of the Sith when he was a baby. The final movie of the Skywalker Saga has Rey Skywalker watching both suns from the same spot.
  • Anakin's lightsaber was first introduced on the planet Tatooine in A New Hope. More than 30 years later, Rey brought it back to the desert planet and buries it beneath the sand. Furthermore, the Lars Homestead is also the burial site of Shmi Skywalker in Attack of the Clones, reuniting a symbol for Anakin, and the family as a whole, with the family matriarch.
  • C-3PO's last line in the film is identical to his first line in A New Hope: "Did you hear that?"
  • Early in the film, an Aki-Aki child asks Rey her family name, and she explains she has none, it's "just Rey." At the end of the film, an elderly human woman asks her the same question, and she introduces herself as Rey Skywalker.
  • In Rey's Force vision in The Force Awakens, she heard the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi^note Featuring archive audio of Alec Guinness and Ewan McGregor, plus new recordings from James Arnold Taylor. telling her "Rey... these are your first steps." In the climax of this movie, when she hears the voices of all the slain Jedi calling out to her, Obi-Wan is among them and tells her "Rey, these are your final steps."
  • One of Rey's first scenes in The Force Awakens has her and BB-8 walking towards the sunset. The sequel trilogy ended with the pair watching Tatooine's twin suns rising.
  • Rey's first scene in The Force Awakens has her passing by the remains of an Imperial Star Destroyer. One of the last scenes of the film shows a First Order Star Destroyer about to crash-land in the deserts of Jakku, just behind it.
  • When the trailers for The Force Awakens premiered, the first time we ever heard Rey speak was someone asking who she was and her answering that "[She is] no one." The Rise of Skywalker closes with someone asking Rey the same question, but this time she answers with "Rey Skywalker."
  • The opening words of the film are "The dead speak!", referring to Palpatine announcing his return. A key moment at the climax has the dead Jedi speak to Rey.
  • Kylo's first scene is the opposite of his last. In The Force Awakens, he descended from the sky and brought death for the First Order. In his last, he ascends from the ground and gives his life to save the last hope of the Jedi.
  • Rey's first scene in The Force Awakens has her sliding down a sand dune on a sheet of scrap. At the end of this film, she slides down sand on a piece of scrap to look around inside the Lars homestead.
  • A fairly subtle one with all three trilogies — they all end with Leia and Luke .
    • The prequel trilogy ends with baby Leia being taken to Alderaan to meet her new family, and baby Luke being taken to Tatooine to meet his new family.
    • The original trilogy ends with young-adult Leia and Luke (having discovered they are twins) celebrating with the others while the Force Ghosts of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin look on.
    • The sequel trilogy ends with elderly Leia and Luke, as Force Ghosts, approving Rey adopting the Skywalker name, under the twin suns of Tatooine.
  • The prequel trilogy ends with a Skywalker (Anakin/Darth Vader) and a Palpatine (Sheev/Emperor) coming together to bring ruin to the galaxy and the eradication of the Jedi. The sequel trilogy ends with a Skywalker (Ben Solo) and a Palpatine (Rey) coming together to save the galaxy and begin a new generation of Jedi.
  • Anakin's fall to the Dark Side only seriously begins when his mother dies in his arms and there's nothing he can do to save her. Ben's redemption is complete when Rey dies in his arms and he is able to bring her back to life (albeit at the cost of his own).
  • The Skywalker Saga chronologically began with a woman with the name Skywalker (Shmi Skywalker, the mother of Anakin Skywalker) and ended with a woman with the name Skywalker (Rey taking up the name Skywalker).
  • Rey started her story wearing a Rebel pilot helmet while dreaming of a greater galaxy and a family she's never known. It ends with her flying to Exegol in Luke's X-Wing, wearing his old helmet, having found her family.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Palpatine builds his Final Order fleet on the planet Exegol, whose storms prevent the ship's taking off without a destroyable navigation tower; the novelization says that storms also block the ships' Deflector Shields. They'd be near unstoppable anywhere else.
• Bowdlerise: The film was only allowed to be released in Singapore and Dubai if a same-sex kiss was edited out.invoked
• Breaking Old Trends: The past 8 movies have proudly upheld the tradition of ending with an extended scene or montage either devoid of dialogue or light on it, with it not being the focus of the scene. This one has that with Rey, Finn, and Poe hugging... And then follows it up with an epilogue that ends with Rey having a short conversation with an elder on Tatooine, with it being significant to the end of her character arc.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • D-0 is an antiquated little droid and gets revived by BB-8.
  • Luke's Force ghost retrieves his old X-Wing from Ahch-To's sea, so Rey can reach Exegol. The Resistance is even surprised to see the signal of such an old fighter leading them to the planet.
  • Similarly, Ben Solo uses an old Galactic Empire's TIE Fighter to escape from Endor and joins Rey on Exegol.
  • The Allied Fleet that arrives to aid the failing Resistance is full of spacecraft from all over the galaxy, many of which are pretty outdated, dating back to the Imperial era and earlier.
• Brick Joke:
  • During a meeting, Beaumont Kin proposes using "Holdo maneuvers" against the enemy fleet (as in, ramming enemy ships when entering lightspeed, like what Admiral Holdo did in The Last Jedi), only for this to be dismissed by Finn because such a maneuver has a Million to One Chance of success. At the end of the film the Ewoks look up at the sky at a First Order Star Destroyer that's been bisected lengthwise by a Holdo maneuver.
  • When faced with the dilemma of C-3PO losing his memories, the team offers to make a backup for R2, though 3PO declines by saying that R2's storage is useless. After the amnesiac droid meets with R2 again, R2 immediately restores his memories.
  • Leia tells Rey "never be afraid of who you are" when the latter is set to depart to find the wayfinder. When she finds the wayfinder, she encounters a dark version of herself who says "don't be afraid of you are". We learn later that Leia knew that Rey was Darth Sidious's granddaughter but saw her spirit and trusted her.
  • A franchise-wide one. At the end of the film, Chewbacca finally gets his medal.
  • Also franchise-wide: Luke finally Force-lifts his X-Wing from the water.
  • BB-8 offering to give the saber to Rey. Rey declines it, resulting in Leia saying "Never underestimate a droid". During the chase on Pasaana, BB-8 launches a canister of dust above a stormtrooper's speeder, which explodes and blinds him, resulting in him crashing. Rey repeats the line in response.
• Burying a Substitute: At the end Rey visits the abandoned Lars homestead on Tatooine and buries Luke and Leia's lightsabers, symbolically laying the Skywalker family to rest in the place where their story began.
• Call-Back:
  • In The Mandalorian, The Child's Healing Hands (properly shown in Chapter 7, the episode that was released shortly before the movie) end up foreshadowing Rey's ability to do the same.
  • Ben Solo's vision of his father is deliberately staged identically to their final confrontation on Starkiller Base — right down to the camera angles, the dialogue, and the progression of shots — only the outcome is deliberately reversed.
  • The first thing Luke did in The Last Jedi was to throw Anakin's lightsaber off a cliff above the ocean. This is referenced twofold: One, the first thing Luke does in this movie is catch that same lightsaber when Rey tries to throw it away — on that exact same island, no less. Two, the last thing that "Kylo Ren" does (before Ben Solo is reborn) is angrily throw his Dark Side crossguard-saber into the sea.
  • In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren returned Anakin's lightsaber to Rey using the Force after using it to kill Snoke. At the end of the subsequent fight, she threw that lightsaber to Kylo so he could use it to kill the last Praetorian Guard. In this film, Rey uses the Force to transfer that same lightsaber to Ben Solo so he can use it to slay the Knights of Ren.
  • Also from The Last Jedi, it's revealed that the First Order developed miniaturized Death Star tech, along with ships that have cannons that can bombard the surface of the planet. The Final Order combines these technologies for the Xyston-class Star Destroyers.
  • In The Force Awakens, Rey's first display of Force powers came when she pulled Anakin's lightsaber away from Kylo Ren and caught it. In this movie, she gives it to Ben Solo for him to use against the Knights of Ren.
  • In Revenge of The Sith, Palpatine was left scarred by having his Force Lightning deflected back at him by Mace Windu's lightsaber. In this film, he ends up being totally disintegrated by it because its power had been increased when he drained part of Rey and Ben's Force dyad.
  • In Attack of the Clones, Anakin swears (in response to his mother's death) that he will one day become powerful enough to stop people from dying. In The Rise of Skywalker, his grandson Ben actually does it. Just how potent this is can be gauged from yet another call-back, the dying Yoda's words to Luke on the matter: "Strong am I with the Force... but not that strong."
  • Epic lightsaber duels at locations of deadly "forces of nature", where the fates of a person became decided. In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin dueled Obi-Wan over rivers of lava, and it ended with him (seemingly) forever being a Sith of the Dark Side. In The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren duels against Rey over a raging sea and comes out of it a changed person back into the Light.
  • This line by Palpatine:
    Palpatine: The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural.
  • And of course, once again he urges a Skywalker to "Do it!"
• Came Back Wrong: Downplayed Trope. The effort of resurrecting Palpatine was not precise, resulting in him having milky white eyes and a need for life support. Outside of that, he is still an expert manipulator and sorcerer (though less subtle than before — possibly he has grown more unhinged from his resurrection).
• The Cameo:
  • Various ships from the animated shows make cameos in the Gondor Calls for Aid scene, most prominently, the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels. The Fireball, Yeager's ship, and Torra's ship from Star Wars Resistance have also be seen in blink-and-you-miss-it moments.
  • In the novelization, the ships/pilots that check in include the Phantom Squadron, Zay with Inferno Squad, Alphabet Two, and Kaz in the Fireball and implicitly Yeager.
  • The voices of the Jedi past that Rey hears are Anakin, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Yoda, Mace, Luminara, Aayla, Adi Gallia, Kanan, and Ahsoka.
  • The voices of Snoke and Vader are heard as Palpatine echoes to Kylo Ren in the open.
  • Series composer John Williams appears as the bartender on Kijimi who shakes his head when the protagonists walk in to see Babu Frik. (Presumably, he was killed when the Final Order destroys the planet later in the movie.)
  • Denis Lawson returns for a 2-second shot at the end as Wedge Antilles, who turns up manning one of the Falcon's quad-gun turrets.
  • Harrison Ford makes one last appearance as a hallucination of Ben Solo's.
  • One of the Ewoks in the celebration montage at the end is Warwick Davis reprising the role of Wicket. (The Ewok standing next to him is Wicket's son Pommet, played by Warwick's son Harrison.)
  • Ed Sheeran, Karl Urban, Dhani Harrison^note Son of the late George Harrison, Nigel Godrich, J.D. Dillard, and Dave Hearn briefly appear as stormtroopers.
  • In visions/flashbacks, Rey's mother is played by Jodie Comer, appearing for less than 30 seconds total.
  • During the "reunion" scene near the end of the movie, in the shot where Chewbacca hugs Rose, to their right Lin-Manuel Miranda hugs a female pilot.
• Canon Immigrant: According to All There in the Manual, each of the Sith Legions is named after an ancient Sith Lord. The names of these legions include Revan, Andeddu, Tenebrous, Phobos, and Desolous (and for completion's sake, the new Tanis, who instead may be from Star Wars Rebels). Apparently, this history was hidden from the rest of the Galaxy and only the Sith Eternal cultists know the significance of these names.
• Cast from Lifespan: The ability to heal using the Force requires the expenditure of life force from the user. When Ben brings Rey Back from the Dead, he ends up dying soon after.
• Cast Speciation: While the last two movies put R2 and BB-8 in different places and states to keep the role of tech-savvy droids from being redundant, here they just switch out without explanation other than redundancy.
• The Cavalry:
  • The Millennium Falcon shows up with a massive fleet of ships just in time to assist the Resistance.
  • Also the only literal example in a Star Wars film, as Jannah and her people ride cavalry mounts for the final assault.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • One that was loaded but left unfired in the previous movie: Rey saw Luke Skywalker's X-Wing sunken in the ocean at the edge of the island on Ahch-To, but neither she nor Luke ever used it. In this movie, Force Ghost Luke lifts it out of the water just like Yoda did in The Empire Strikes Back, and Rey flies it to Exegol.
  • We also learn where Rey's parents were going when they left in her vision from The Force Awakens.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Jannah and her friends first show up on one of Endor's moons. They then join the Resistance for the attack on Exogol.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Rey's ability to heal the Vexis snake comes in handy to save Kylo later, which Kylo later uses to bring Rey Back from the Dead.
  • Kylo using his and Rey's psychic link to steal objects through teleportation comes back again when she sends him a lightsaber. The water from Ach-To that he received in the face in The Last Jedi while being on Snoke's ship also counts.
  • Rey's years of experience scavenging the crashed ships on Jakku come in handy when she has to climb the remains of Death Star II.
• Comic-Book Adaptation;
  • Alessandro Ferrari wrote a graphic novel for IDW Publishing.
  • Marvel have announced a five-issue miniseries written by Jody Houser and drawn by Will Sliney starting in June 2020.
• Continuity Cavalcade:
  • The Millennium Falcon charges into battle at the head of an enormous fleet composed of ships from all over the galaxy, a VCX-100 light freighter being among the most prominent. It's actually pretty much the whole galaxy finally answering Gondor Calls for Aid.
  • When Rey reaches out to all Jedi before her, many Jedi voices call back to encourage her including Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin, Qui-Gon Jinn, Yoda, Mace Windu, Luminara Unduli, Aayla Secura, Adi Gallia, Ahsoka Tano, and Kanan Jarrus.
• Continuity Nod: Has its own page.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Palpatine is revealed to have been searching for Rey, who was within travel distance of the map to Luke Skywalker the Resistance and First Order sought, and the Millennium Falcon which Han Solo sought. The Force Awakens and the Sequel Trilogy happened because three things that were supposed to be hidden and all the major characters were searching for wound up in the same place with no-one the wiser.
  • Near the start of the movie, Poe triggers a series of blind hyperspace jumps with no prior calculation. Each time he comes out not only near a planet (which would already be astronomically long odds), but in atmosphere, within metres of smashing into something. The idea that this would happen three times in a row completely randomly beggars belief.
  • Rey, Poe, and Finn are chased out into the deserts of Pasaana and the exact spot where their transports are destroyed happens to be in quicksand, which is right over the remains of the Jedi hunter they were searching for, allowing them to stumble upon a dagger that will point them to the location of the last Sith wayfinder.
  • When searching for the Sith wayfinder on Kef Bir, Rey happens to wind up standing in the exact spot where she needs to be in order to fit the dagger into the outline of the Death Star II's wreckage (which somehow has not shifted, collapsed, and/or been scavenged in the decades since Return of the Jedi).
• Cool Sword: In a vision, Rey sees herself holding an Old Republic-era foldable lightsaber pike, like the lightsabers used by Pong Krell in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Jedi Temple Guards in Star Wars Rebels. In the final scene, she also constructs her own lightsaber with a golden blade, unique from every other saber seen also in that it ignites with a flick-switch rather than a button press.
• Creator Cameo:
  • The newly introduced droid, D-0, is voiced by the film's writer/director J. J. Abrams.
  • John Williams, the iconic composer of most of the Star Wars soundtracks including this film's, appears in a cameo when the heroes are on Kijimi. Supplemental materials give his character the name Oma Tres, which is an anagram of "maestro".
  • Admiral Ackbar's son Aftab is voiced by screenwriter Chris Terrio.
• Creator Thumbprint: Palpatine's fleet of Star Destroyers are built on the ground, like the USS Enterprise was in Abrams' previous movie Star Trek (2009), and emerge from underground in much the same way that the Enterprise emerged from underwater in Star Trek Into Darkness.
• Cthulhumanoid: The Aki-Aki natives of the planet Pasaana have tentacle-covered faces not unlike the Quarren. Unlike most of those species that we've seen in the franchise, however, (and this trope in general), they seem to be entirely friendly and peaceful villagers who happily welcome the heroes to their festival.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Rey and Ben each deliver one of these to the Emperor's Red Guard and Knights of Ren respectively, at the same time.
  • When Rey and Ben turn to face Palpatine together, the decrepit Emperor disarms and immobilizes them both with a single Force push. Ironically, this actually saves their lives when Sidious unintentionally drains some of their lifeforce and realizes Reylo comprise a rare Force dyad...
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: This film reveals Rey's parents "sold her to protect her", leaving her on Jakku to hide her from Palpatine's agents.
• Damaged Soul: Although it's not explicitly stated, it's strongly implied that Palpatine suffered mental damage in between his "death" and resurrection. Whereas in previous interpretations he was a political mastermind (and always careful to hide his Force abilities from the public), here he is a public Sith and officially broadcasts his intention to rule through naked tyranny. His attempts to tempt Rey to darkness also look very feeble, compared to his analogous approaches to Luke in Return of the Jedi and Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. Although Palpatine's approach to Luke — who already viewed him as a mortal enemy — was already sledgehammer-subtle in comparison to his seduction of Anakin, who never saw the threat until it was far too late. It's also worth noting that once he absorbs the Dyad and his soul is repaired, he's able to pull off one of the most powerful displays of the Force in the franchise — but is also unable to stop firing his lightning at Rey as she deflects it back at him.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: While piloting the Falcon, Poe performs a sequence of rapid jumps to hyperspace, a technique called "hyperspace skipping", in order to escape pursuing First Order fighters. The strain is almost more than the battered old Falcon can handle, and by the time he lands the ship is on fire from stem to stern. Rey thoroughly chews him out.
• Dark Lord on Life Support: Palpatine, drained of much of his power, finds himself on this until he harnesses the powers of both Rey and Kylo to restore himself to full health.
• David Versus Goliath: The Resistance attacks thousands of destroyers with just a handful of fighters and a paltry corvette as their flagship, hoping that their plea is answered before they're wiped out.
• Death Wail: Chewbacca roars out loud when he learns that Leia is dead.
• Defector from Decadence: On Kef Bir, the heroes meet a group of people who are revealed to be ex-Stormtroopers. Like Finn, they all refused an order to fire at civilians.
• Demoted to Extra: After being an important player in The Last Jedi, Rose barely gets a handful of lines and her romance arc with Finn from the previous movie is abandoned.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • General Pryde is completely flabbergasted that a fleet of starships have come out of nowhere to fight.
  • Palpatine didn't know that a Force Dyad existed between Rey and Ben and is surprised as they are when it rejuvenates him. He quickly adapts, chalks it up to the will of the force and goes with it.
• Dies Wide Open: When Rey dies, there are several shots of her open, glazed eyes to indicate that she's dead.
• Digital De-Aging: Used to recreate the 1980s faces of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher on body doubles for the flashback of Luke training Leia in the ways of the Jedi. Leia's body double is Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd, who also plays Kaydel Ko Connix.
• Do a Barrel Roll: Plenty, but notable is a Y-Wing fighter that takes out several TIEs followed by blowing up a Final Order Star Destroyer through destroying its Planet Killing Cannon.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: After being repaired, D-O spends the film acting skittish like an abused child or pet.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Rise of Skywalker refers to both Rey, who takes the name Skywalker after defeating Palpatine and coming fully into her Jedi abilities, and the Heel–Face Turn of Ben Solo, the last of the Skywalker bloodline, who rises from the dark side and returns to the light before becoming one with the Force. It can also be applied to Leia, who manages to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence with her son, to Luke, who finally becomes what Leia needed him to be, and Han, whose memory rises to ensure that the meaning of his sacrifice finally got through to his son.
• "Down Here!" Shot: When Maz Kanata delivers her first line in this movie — "If we want to stop him, we must find him. We must find Exegol" — the camera at first cuts to a couple of random Resistance members, then pans down to Maz standing in the foreground because she's shorter than everybody else.
• Dual Wielding: Rey uses both Anakin's lightsaber^note which is also Luke's, hers, and Ben's by extension and Leia's lightsaber in the battle with Emperor Palpatine.
• Due to the Dead: Since there aren't bodies to bury, Rey goes to the Lars Homestead on Tatooine to bury Luke and Leia's first lightsabers after the Battle of Exegol. In a twist of fate, she does so near where Shmi Skywalker, their grandmother, was buried.

Tropes E to H

• Early-Bird Cameo: In the early minutes of the film when the Final Order Star Destroyers emerge from the ice, we get an extended shot of both one of their superlasers and the control tower, which would become central much later in the film.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Once again there are planet-destroying weapons, this time miniaturized to fit on Star Destroyers by the miracles of Sith science and miniaturized Death Star tech from the First Order. Each one of them can destroy a world, and Palpatine's fleet has tons of them, which makes it the most colossal concentration of firepower ever seen in the Star Wars franchise. Kijimi is destroyed by one of them.
• Eerily Out-of-Place Object: Rey, Finn, Poe, and company go to an ocean containing the destroyed remnants of the second Death Star.
• Elite Mooks: The Final Order's forces of the Sith Eternal are far deadlier than the First Order's military.
• End of an Age: By the end of the film, Palpatine and the Sith are finally eradicated thanks to the efforts of Rey and the Resistance. What's more, the Skywalker and Solo bloodlines are no more thanks to the deaths of Leia Organa and Ben Solo. Rey instead opts to carry forward the Skywalker legacy by accepting the name as her own, having "Skywalker" transcend the idea of a traditional bloodline.
• Environmental Symbolism: As Anakin had his trial-by-fire on Mustafar and came out of it both physically and spiritually ruined, Rey and Ben have their trial on a stormy sea and both come out spiritually cleansed.
• Epileptic Flashing Lights: The sequences on Exegol contain many lightning strikes and flashing lights that could trigger seizures in some people, which Disney forewarned theatres and the Epilepsy Association about.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Downplayed. In contrast to the old Empire, which was portrayed as subtextually Nazi-like and whose soldiers were mostly British Nazis, the First Order (at least as portrayed in this movie) is fairly multicultural and diverse by human standards, with seemingly more of their officers and Stormtroopers being women, black or South Asian than white men, and coming from every planet in the galaxy. One of the top generals seen in the Chiefs of Staff meeting early in the film is a black woman. However, like the Galactic Empire, they still do maintain Fantastic Racism (in contrast to the visibly multi-species Resistance), with no non-humans among their ranks (aside from maybe Snoke, though his species is unclear — he might pass for human). Most still have English accents though. Presumably (going by a Doylist view) any racism which they had toward other kinds of humans prior took a back seat to simply getting personnel. They keep the pseudo-Nazi aesthetics though.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When the Knights of Ren make their entrance, one of the Stormtroopers refers to them as ghouls.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Both the Skywalker and Solo bloodlines are extinct by the end with the deaths of Leia and Kylo Ren/Ben, although Rey now chooses to bear the "Skywalker" name instead of "Palpatine" with the blessing of the Force ghosts of both Luke and Leia.
• Everyone Is Related: Turns out Rey's lineage wasn't just made of nobodies, as she is revealed to be Emperor Sheev Palpatine's granddaughter.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: The lighting on Exegol can be summed up as "intermittent lightning strikes".
• Evil Overlooker: The D23 poster◊ shows the spectral visage of Palpatine, complete with evil grin, looking on as Rey and Kylo duel.
• Exact Words: How the revelation about Rey's parents is handled without making a liar out of Ben:
  • Rey's parents were indeed nobodies... because they chose to be nobodies and her father intentionally worked hard to keep being that. Because her grandfather isn't.
  • Rey's parents did sell her for drinking money... so they'd have a plausible reason for leaving her on Jakku that wouldn't make the likes of Unkar Plutt suspicious. Because they knew Ochi, the Sith assassin, was on to them.
• Extremely Short Time Span: The whole film, with the exception of the first two and last two scenes, takes place over the course of sixteen hours.
• The Faceless: Poe's old friend/flame Zorii is never seen without her helmet. The closest we get to seeing her face is when she raises the helmet's visor, revealing her eyes.
• Face Palm: Poe does this when he sees that they've arrived on Pasaana in the middle of a huge festival.
• Facial Dialogue: Poe and Zorii at the end of the movie. They spot each other in the crowd and have a wordless exchange through facial expressions and body language.
• Fake Shemp: A necessity to finish Leia's story without the late Carrie Fisher. Beyond the repurposed footage from previous films, Billie Lourd body doubled for some scenes where Leia is seen from her back, she's conveniently darkened when concentrating to call Kylo/Ben through the Force, and her dead body is covered with a sheet the last time she's seen.
• Family of Choice: Though she's a Palpatine by blood, Rey's last line in the movie (and the last line chronologically in the entire franchise) is responding to the question of her identity that's dogged her for the entire Sequel Trilogy.
  Rey: I'm Rey Skywalker.
• Fangs Are Evil: In Rey's vision, Dark Rey abruptly hisses at her and reveals her mouth is filled with sharp, predatory teeth, much to Rey's horror.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The Aki-Aki Festival of the Ancestors closely resembles the Indian festival of Holi, especially the practice of throwing colored powder into the air.
• Fat and Skinny: BB-8^note (whose lower base is spherical) and D-O ^note (whose lower base is a flatter compaired to BB-8's) get paired together after the main heroes flee Pasaana.
• Fetch Quest: The first couple of acts are about finding the location of Exegol. The first stop is Pasaana, picking up where Luke left off on his search for the planet. They discover a dagger with Sith language on it, but C-3PO is restricted from translating it. So the next stop is Kijimi for the services of a droid-hacking specialist. After a side mission to rescue Chewbacca from the First Order clutches, it's on to the Endor System, as the translation of the dagger stated that the second Sith Wayfinder was stored in a vault on the second Death Star. The quest seems to end in failure when Kylo Ren destroys the Sith Wayfinder before Rey could recover it, but Rey steals Kylo Ren's ship with his own Sith Wayfinder still in it and leaves a trail for the rest of the Resistance to follow.
• Field Promotion: Leia designates Poe Dameron as "General" of the Resistance in her passing, which leaves him in charge of the final assault on Exegol (which, mind you, is all happening in less than a single day's time so it's a jarring position to be in). Poe ends up naming Finn as his equal, rationalizing that he just doesn't have the breadth of leadership needed to do the job by himself as Leia did.
• Fighter-Launching Sequence: The Resistance fleet launching from their base to attack Exogol, accompanied by Poe and Finn giving a Rousing Speech.
• Fingore: Palpatine's fingers are black and rotten, with the bone visible at the tips.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Kylo Ren announced to the Supreme Council that there's a traitor among them, he sensed that Hux is uncomfortable and asked if that's because of his repaired mask. In this scene, it only appeared that Kylo was messing with Hux, but it's later revealed that Hux is the traitor, so of course, he became uncomfortable when Kylo announced that there was a traitor among them.
  • General Pryde has a Traitor Shot where his face is in shadow save for a patch of light across his eyes. This is reminiscent of the lighting on Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, hinting at Pryde being a Palpatine loyalist.
  • Happens substantially on Pasaana, twice, both times indicating Rey's ancestry
    • On Pasaana, Rey uses Healing Hands on a vexis's wounds, thereby getting it out of the way of an exit from the cave system the gang is trapped in. After thinking on this for a bit, the connection to Palpatine, who indirectly admitted to being taught by Darth Plagueis how to create life with the Force, is clear.
    • Rey destroys the First Order frigate with Force lightning during a struggle to bring it down against Kylo Ren's attempt to break the hold on it. We later find out Palpatine is her grandfather. The ease with which she's drawn on the Dark Side, both subtly and obviously, throughout the trilogy also counts.
    • Rey takes out a First Order frigate with Force Lightning by accident. In the climax, Palpatine disables the Resistance fleet with a far larger, sustained blast of lightning.
  • The first words of the Opening Crawl are "The dead speak!" In the climax of the movie, the voices of the dead Jedi council speak to Rey in her moment of greatest need.
  • Kylo's Heel–Face Turn in the third act is hinted at earlier in the film; some of his body language starts to become reminiscent of Han Solo's, he's noticeably calmer compared to his explosive temper in the previous films, he never even considers Palpatine's offer to kill Rey in exchange for the Sith Fleet and his quarters are decorated very brightly for a Dark-Sider (especially compared to his quarters from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi), looking closer to a Rebel/Resistance ship's interior than the decor usually found in Empire/First Order ships.
• Forgot About Her Powers: Rey has proven to be able to lift tons of rock in weight even after an intense battle, but for some reason, she doesn’t lift her group out of the sand pit.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • There's a very brief scene of two women sharing a kiss in the background as the Resistance celebrates the First Order's destruction. This is the first on-screen depiction of any LGBT people in the Star Wars universe, albeit barely noticeable. It was nonetheless cut for the Singapore release since their law mandates a higher rating for depictions of homosexuality, and in Dubai where homosexuality is illegal.
  • In Rey's vision after she grabs Palpatine's Sith Wayfinder, the Dark Side version of her abruptly hisses at her and her face momentarily takes on a monstrous appearance◊ with sharp teeth which can only be properly seen if one pauses the scene.
  • Kylo Ren never uses his Upsilon-class command shuttle unlike in the The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. We don't see it — except parked to the side of a hangar when the resistance group parks Ochii's ship in it and briefly behind Kylo Ren as he confronts Rey in the same hangar.
  • When Chewbacca is being captured by First Order stormtroopers, a long shot shows three identical transport ships parked in the desert. This becomes a plot point when Rey unintentionally destroys one with Force Lightning and thinks she's killed Chewie. Without this shot, it's very easy to think the explanation when he turns up alive (that he was on a different transport) was an Ass Pull on the part of the writers.
• Generation Xerox: Like his grandfather before him, Ben dies saving someone from death at the hands of Palpatine.
• Ghost Reunion Ending: It ends with Luke and Leia's ghosts watching Rey bury their lightsabers.
• Gilligan Cut: C-3PO "introducing himself" to R2-D2 post-memory wipe. He then reacts to R2 insisting on a restoration of said memory, said reaction cuts to 3PO rebooting post-restoration.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex:
  • Overlapping with Victory Sex, and hilariously Defied in the post-battle celebration. Poe and Zorii lock eyes from across a crowd, and he gives her a suggestive look. Zorii shoots him down with a firm shake of her head. Poe takes it in stride.
  • On a more positive note, Commander D'Acy and Lieutenant Tyce share a celebratory smooch (a lesbian interracial kiss that had to be cut from the film in some nations due to legal standards, not to mention that D'Acy is Tyce's superior officer).
• Glass Cannon: Each one of Palpatine's Star Destroyers packs a planet-destroying cannon. It can easily be attacked and destroyed by smaller ships if it's not protected by flocks of TIE fighters and deflector shields (all ships are unable to raise their deflector shield due to the interference of Exegol's turbulent atmosphere), and when it gets destroyed, it causes a chain reaction that makes the Star Destroyer explode from the inside.
• Golden Super Mode: Downplayed example at the end. Rey reveals a fancy new golden lightsaber, and while there's nothing to indicate it is better than any other lightsaber, it is worth noting that with the deaths of Ben Solo and Emperor Palpatine, she is now almost certainly the most powerful force user in the galaxy by a massive margin, so it's more that her standard mode is now a super mode due to lack of competition.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Once the Resistance finally has a course to reach Exegol, Lando and Chewbacca are sent to the Core Systems to rally a new fleet to stop Palpatine's Final Order. The Galaxy Far Far Away responds with zeal, sending the biggest fleet depicted in Star Wars canon to Exegol to defeat the resurrected Emperor.
  Admiral: Where did they come from? The Resistance never had a navy this size!
  Subordinate: It's not a navy, sir, it's just... people.
• Grand Finale: The movie is the finale to the complete Skywalker Saga that's constituted by all three main Star Wars trilogies.
• Grand Theft Me: The Reveal shows that Palpatine is a secret practitioner of this trope throughout all nine films, using a secret Sith ability that allows him to forcibly possess anyone who murders him. The catch is that he has to be killed in an act of anger or hatred, opening his new host up to the Dark Side as a result.
• Group Hug: Rey, Finn, and Poe share a three-way hug after reuniting on the Resistance base at the end of the movie.
• Hand Wave:
  • Strictly speaking, killing Palpatine and wrecking his fleet of planet killers shouldn't have any effect at all on the rest of the First Order, who had conquered most of the galaxy entirely with their own resources in The Last Jedi. It does mean that they don't get a (very major) power boost, but even without that, they were portrayed as being anything but pushovers before. However, the ending wraps it up with a throwaway line that people are now rising up against the First Order, we get a montage of a couple of their starships crashing. At the very least, with Hux, Pryde, Palpatine, and Kylo Ren out of the way, they are leaderless.
  • Palpatine's resurrection. Again, one throwaway line about something-something cloning and Sith magic, and a villain who used to be Deader than Dead (as in thrown into a reactor and vaporized, and then literally nuked by an exploding Death Star on top of that) is back.
• Happy Ending Override: Return of the Jedi gets hit with this further than it already did with The Force Awakens. Palpatine returned from a state of death thanks to his contingency plan, which he'd been preparing for decades; even if he is effectively a living corpse hooked up to life support, the fleet he's built is explicitly stated to be the largest in the history of the galaxy, and that's before considering the fact that every single ship has a Death Star laser. He's also been behind the First Order via a Puppet King, Snoke, in the interim, and The Visual Dictionary to the film reveals that Palpatine had influence over many of the galaxy's industrial corporations via Sith Eternal cells. Furthermore, per the same book, Snoke's own defeats in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were All According to Plan to prepare Kylo Ren for his role. The thing that keeps this from being a Shoot the Shaggy Dog situation is that Palpatine's grand return only lasts for less than a day before the entire galaxy, inspired by the prior and present heroism of the leaders of the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance, shows up to his front door and destroys the Final Order, just as he experiences a Final Death, taking the Sith Eternal with him, and uprisings around the galaxy cause the start of the collapse of the First Order.
• Hates Being Touched: The newly-reactivated D-0 recoils when Rey reaches out to him. It's implied his previous owner, Ochi, abused him.
• Healing Hands: During the timeskip, Rey has learned to heal wounds using the Force by giving up some of her life force to do so. She mends the large wound on a Vexis snake while on Pasaana and later heals the stab wound and scar on Kylo Ren. A reformed Ben Solo uses Force healing to resurrect Rey at the cost of his life. It was mentioned in old EU that force healing was a relatively common ability, back in the order's days. Palpatine also mentioned, in Episode III, the greater-scope version of this sort of powers: Darth Plagueis, who could "create life" and "defeat death" — which corresponds both to Rey and Kylo's abilities, and Palpatine's own "unnatural" resurrection.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: The moment Lando arrives at the head of a massive volunteer fleet to turn the tides against the Final Order, Poe and Finn, who were starting to get overwhelmed on their respective fronts, appropriately express their amazement:
  Poe: Look at this. Look at this!
  Finn: Lando, you did it! YOU DID IT!
• The Hero Dies: Leia, one of the main heroes of the Star Wars franchise, becomes one with the Force after she successfully reaches out to Kylo Ren.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Poe is overcome with despair when it seems the battle over Exegol is lost. He gets on the comm to apologize for having led them into the disaster, just in time for The Cavalry to arrive.
  • Rey travels to Ahch-To in Ren's TIE fighter to go into exile after running Ren through with a lightsaber, realizing how close she was to the Dark Side. Luke talks her out of it.
  • Chewie collapses in grief and lets out a Wookiee wail of anguish when he learns that Leia has died.
• Heroic RRoD:
  • Leia uses the Force to telepathically reach out to Kylo Ren while he's fighting with Rey, draining her life energy as a result.
  • At the end of the film, Rey uses her lightsabers to deflect Palpatine's Force Lightning blast back at him, but at the cost of her own life.
  • Then Ben Solo spends his life force to revive Rey, costing him all of his.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Palpatine, the Big Bad of the original and prequel trilogies, returns in this movie, and is given the entire First Order by General Pryde to add to his forces. Furthermore, he claims to have been behind Kylo's fall to the dark side the entire time.
• His Name Is...: Just before his memory is wiped, Threepio starts to say that he has another idea, right before Babu Frik shuts him down.
• History Repeats: Much like when Vader killed Palpatine the first time, Rey ended up fatally wounded by the Emperor's force lightning in the process of killing him. Played straight, then promptly averted as Ben fully redeems himself by reviving her at the cost of his own life.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • As Kylo Ren is about to deliver the killing blow to Rey with his red lightsaber, he suddenly senses his mother dying, who then calls for him ("Ben.") and sees her expire on a bed. He drops his lightsaber, allowing Rey to use his own lightsaber against him.
  • Rey reflects Palpatine's own lightning back at him. This vaporizes him without letting him possess her as he planned.
• Howl of Sorrow: Chewie lets out a roar of pure anguish and falls to his knees when he's told that Leia has died.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • By this point in the saga, Darth Sidious's excessive usage of The Dark Side has turned him into an unholy monstrosity in the form of a man. Not only has he conquered death and returned as a rotting corpse while having an entire legion of devout followers who see him as a God of Evil, he also displays the full scope of his power at its most terrifying and also claims himself to have all of the dead Sith lords of the past dwelling within him.
  • Dark Rey, seen in Rey's vision, deserves a mention as well. She looks just like the Rey we all know and love but has been consumed by The Dark Side, has a mouthful of Scary Teeth, and moves around in a rather unnatural manner. Plus, considering she's the possible result of Rey getting possessed by Palpatine, who already has all of the other Sith with him, you get the idea.
• Hyperspeed Ambush: The Resistance fleet jumping to Exegol and attacking the Sith Star Destroyers. Then exaggerated when the entire friggin' galaxy shows up to join the Resistance.
• Hyperspeed Escape: The Millennium Falcon escapes from First Order TIE Fighters by pulling a series of brief jumps, which Poe calls "Hyperspace skipping". It works, but the Falcon is on fire when she returns to the Resistance base.
• Hypocritical Humor: On Ahch-To, Rey tries to throw Anakin's lightsaber into a bonfire. Luke's ghost appears and tells her a Jedi's weapon deserves more respect—after he tried the same when she found him in The Last Jedi.

Tropes I to N

• I Am the Noun: Palpatine claims to be all the Sith. Rey responds that she is all the Jedi. Given their ability to call upon the memories (and, apparently, power) of past Sith and Jedi respectively, it isn't entirely hyperbolic.
  Palpatine: You are nothing! A scavenger girl is no match for the power in me! I am all the Sith!
  Rey: And I... am all the Jedi.
• Idiot Ball:
  • It's never clarified why Sidious kept the fleet mustered in Exegol when he could've just used any random planet in the Unknown Regions (they were literally buried when Kylo Ren arrived, clearly they're not dependent on any maintenance infrastructure there... not that we see any of that either). Thanks to the odd climate, Exegol disables his Star Destroyers' shields, so you'd think he'd never want to take the risk of having an enemy engage them there, especially once he publicly announces his return. Instead, he keeps his whole fleet in the one place in the entire galaxy where it's vulnerable to being lasered-to-death by a swarm of starfighters.
  • The symbolic act notwithstanding, Kylo throwing away his lightsaber for no other reason than because it's red would have gotten him killed on Exogol if it wasn't for Rey giving him hers.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: On a grand scale; not only would killing a Sith out of hatred cause a fall to the Dark Side, as it nearly happened to Luke, but Rey—who finds herself in an identical situation of killing Palpatine—is explicitly told that, if she kills Palpatine, driven by fear and rage, she will be possessed by his spirit and possibly countless Sith and Dark Jedi—cementing his resurrection. However this ends up blowing back in Palpatine's face (literally) because it allows Rey to realize what killing Palpatine means for both of them and she manages to stay her hand until she can summon the power of the light side to drive back Palpatine's own attack towards her (meaning she did not strike him down in anger) and use it against him to finally end him once and for all.
• Immortal Ruler: Palpatine is revealed to be Back from the Dead, being behind both Supreme Leader Snoke and the rise of the First Order. He intends to take over Rey's body to extend his lifespan even further, as she's his granddaughter. In addition, he claims to contain "all of the Sith", implying that the Sith masters have been doing this since the Rule of Two was established.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Stormtroopers still have the darnedest time being able to shoot anything. Finn, Jannah, and the other former Stormtroopers, on the other hand, are all crack shots with Jannah being effective using a bow and arrow.
• Internal Reveal: While the audience and the main characters have known for decades, this film sees the fact that Palpatine is a Sith Lord become public knowledge for everyone in the galaxy.
• In the Hood:
  • Aboard the remains of the Death Star, Rey sees a vision of herself having embraced the dark side as a Sith Lord, complete with a black hood. Later, frightened of what she could become, Rey goes to Ahch-To and dons the light cloak of the Jedi, intending to stay there for the rest of her life.
  • While on Kijimi our heroes adopt this as a Paper-Thin Disguise (though it is rather cold, so maybe they wanted to keep their heads warm too).
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: With a massive fleet to crew, the First Order is increasing "recruitment" by abducting even more children. After arriving on Kijimi they took every child on the planet. And as seen in the movie most of those children grow up not even remembering where they came from, who their parents are, or even their actual names.
• Irony:
  • When C-3PO is unable to translate Sith writings (due to his programming forbidding it), both he and Poe note the irony of him being unable to talk the one time he needs to.
  • There is something funny in the fact that the Skywalker family lightsaber (along with Leia's lightsaber) will now end up being buried on Tatooine which Anakin and Luke wished to leave in their youth, and at the Lars Homestead, whose owner Owen (Anakin's step-brother and Luke's uncle) was not fond of Jedi.
• It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans: The heroes arrive on a planet during a festival that happens every forty-two years.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: The First Order officers disdainfully refer to Chewbacca as "it," hinting at their Fantastic Racism.
• I Work Alone: The movie's attempts to establish Rey, Finn, and Poe as a Token Trio are undercut by Rey continually running away from her friends to chase after Kylo by herself.
• Jedi Mind Trick: The first two Stormtroopers Rey, Poe, and Finn encounter while sneaking around on a First Order ship are targets of a mind trick from Rey, who convinces them that they don't mind seeing the intruders and are in fact relieved to see them.
• Keystone Army: During the final battle, destroying the lead Star Destroyer with the navigation beacon on it prevents the rest of the Star Destroyers from leaving the planet's atmosphere.
• Knew It All Along: Poe unconvincingly declares "I knew it!" when Hux announces he was the mole in the First Order. Finn shoots back, "No you didn't!"
• Lampshade Hanging: Poe's comments on observing flying Stormtroopers and each Star Destroyer possessing a planet-destroying weapon.
• Last Kiss: Kylo and Rey share their first, and last, kiss before Kylo passes after giving his remaining life force to save Rey.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The festival on Pasaana is said to occur every 42 years, the same amount of the time between the release of this movie and A New Hope in 1977.
• Leitmotif:
  • The piece entitled "The Rise of Skywalker" on the soundtrack album is a new Leitmotif representing The Power of Friendship. It carries the same connotations of innocence that John Williams used in previous tracks such as "Anakin's Theme" and "Harry's Wondrous World", and it may also be Williams' way of saying farewell to the Star Wars franchise.
  • During the victory celebration at the Resistance base, the score includes not only "The Rise of Skywalker" but also Yoda's theme from The Empire Strikes Back and Luke and Leia's theme from Return of the Jedi, implying that their Force ghosts are present in spirit.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Rey is introduced floating in lotus position several feet above the jungle floor, with a double ring of rocks orbiting around her, as she attempts to commune with the spirits of past Jedi.
• Lighter and Softer: This film feels closer to the tone of The Force Awakens, there's much less infighting amongst the heroes.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Once Rey kills Palpatine by redirecting his Force Lightning back at him, the surrounding temple begins crumbling, killing the hundreds of Sith cultists in the room.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: For the majority of the film, Rey, Poe, Finn, and Chewie are the only characters who are doing anything proactive about Palpatine's return, collecting intel from a spy and attempting to find Exegol before the Sith Fleet launches. The rest of the Resistance sit around at their base until Poe rallies them to attack Exegol in the third act. Supporting character Lando is also busy whipping up a civilian fleet, though this all happens offscreen.
• Make It Look Like a Struggle: Hux tells Finn to shoot him in the arm so he can claim he was coerced into helping (Finn shoots him in the leg instead). Despite this, it doesn't work; when Hux reports back to Pryde, Pryde instantly shoots him dead and then informs Ren that the spy has been found.
• Make Way for the New Villains: Hux is supplanted by General Pryde, a severe and pragmatic Imperial loyalist with none of Hux's weakness for dramatic gestures, with the changeover being cemented when Pryde realizes Hux is the spy and casually shoots him dead.
• The Man Behind the Man: Palpatine created Snoke and was apparently behind all of his actions as head of the First Order.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • Ben's conversation with the memory of his father contains several echoes of his last conversation with his father in The Force Awakens, including a reprise of "I know what I need to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it." The end, where he starts to tell Han he loves him, and Han says "I know", echoes the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Leia first admits she loves Han.
  • Luke's line "A thousand generations live in you now" serves as an echo of Obi-Wan's own line to him back in A New Hope "For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice".
  • A short one: Palpatine echoes his own lines from Episode three, regarding the "unnatural" ways in which he escaped actual death, just as he said Darth Plagueis had done before. This ability was regarded as a myth; it seems he was powerful enough to unveil the secret.
• Meaningful Name: Hux is a very ironic name for a man who managed to con the entire First Order: he's a Huxter.
• Meaningful Rename: Even after learning that she is a Palpatine by birth, after standing for the Jedi in the final confrontation with the Dark Side as she faces her grandfather, Rey proclaims that her name is Rey Skywalker, choosing the family that defended the Light over the family that sought to rule the Dark.
• Metaphorically True: It wasn't actually true that Rey's parents were nobodies, as was said in The Last Jedi. Or rather, it may have been technically true that they were—but her grandfather was the Emperor.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Everyone is sad about Leia dying (which is natural enough, of course), but literally no one seems to care much about the destruction of the whole planet Kijimi and its population (not even Zorii, who came from there, or Poe who'd at least lived on it for some time).
• The Mole: A spy in the First Order informs the Resistance of Palpatine's return and the Final Order fleet. It's General Hux, who, while he has no love for the Resistance, can no longer stand Kylo Ren and is willing to do whatever it takes to get rid of him.
  Hux: I don't care if you win. I just need Kylo Ren to lose.
• Mook–Face Turn: Our heroes meet an entire platoon of former Stormtroopers who went AWOL when they refused to kill civilians. They later join the Resistance.
• Mordor: The planet Exegol seems to have a permanent planet-wide thunderstorm going on.
• More Diverse Sequel: This movie is by far the most racially diverse in the franchise, with the addition of Jannah on the heroic side (as well as the Black Finn, the Latino Poe and various others carried over from earlier films in the Disney Trilogy) and a more multi-racial First-Order/Final-Order villain faction with some black, female, black female, and otherwise officers and soldiers who are people of color, and there are now numerous female stormtroopers, though it's left unknown what races most stormtroopers were. By contrast, in the original trilogy, Lando was the only character of color with a major speaking part, and the antagonistic Empire was patterned on British Nazis (thus all white that we saw).
• Mundane Utility: In the caves of Pasaana, Rey demonstrates another use for the glowing plasma weapon that is a lightsaber: a torch.
• Mutual Kill: Rey manages to successfully kill Palpatine by deflecting his own lightning back at him, but the act winds up killing her. Kylo Ren then uses the Force to restore her to life, at the cost of his own.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Twice with Rey:
  • She lets out a horrified scream after destroying a First Order transport craft with lightning, thinking she killed Chewie inside it, and goes into a Heroic BSoD after.
  • She instantly regrets stabbing Kylo Ren with his lightsaber in a rage, having mortally wounded someone who's empathized with her. And it's implied, because Leia was reaching out into the Force to connect with Ben in one last attempt to save him, this resulted in Leia's death as well (though Maz had already said doing so would kill Leia either way).
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling:
  • Both Kylo and Rey feel it when Leia dies.
  • Finn, although not confirmed to be Force-sensitive, somehow senses that the fleet control signal to the Final Order's fleet has been transferred to one of the ships. He also senses Rey's (temporary) death. He brushes this off as "A feeling".
• Mythology Gag:
  • The heroes happen across the Aki-Aki Festival of the Ancestors, held once every 42 years. The Rise of Skywalker was released 42 years after the original A New Hope.
  • The plot about Palpatine returning by possessing a clone body and building a fleet of superweapons, all while attempting to make a Jedi his new apprentice/possess them also heavily echoes Dark Empire, a comic series in Star Wars Legends where he did exactly that.
  • Kylo Ren/Ben Solo having visions of a grand Throne, with the universe either at peace or turmoil under the rule of a Solo, calls to mind Darth Caedus/Jacen Solo — the old Expanded Universe's son of Han and Leia — having visions of his daughter on a grand throne both in a time of peace and under the reign of a Sith.
  • Kylo/Ben turning back to the light after a long fall in a search for everlasting galaxy-wide peace that left Luke embittered and the Jedi nearly eradicated completes the arc of a Solo's son being redeemed — Jacen, again, underwent something similar, complete with attempting to convince a female rival/comrade to join the Dark Side, avoiding a fight (and becoming mortally wounded as a result), and said rival/comrade nearly falling to the Dark Side twice.
  • Palpatine having a son who was against him, plus a grandchild who isn't aware of their heritage, had previously been in a series of Star Wars Legends books from the '90s.
  • In a Freeze-Frame Bonus, the display showing Luke's X-Wing identifies it as "AA-589," the serial number it was given in The Thrawn Trilogy.
  • Leia's death shortly before the final assault on the First Order mirrors the passing of Admiral Ackbar shortly before the final assault on the Yuuzhan Vong in the New Jedi Order books.
  • Palpatine utilizing the combined power of all the Sith is remarkably similar to Jerec's plan with the Valley Of The Jedi in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Rey making use of the combined power of the Jedi echoes Kyle Katarn's use of the same source to regain his Force powers in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.
  • In the Legends continuity, Darth Vader's personal abode, Bast Castle (not to be confused with Fortress Vader), was described as looking like it was made out of black onyx stone. Kylo Ren keeps his grandfather's melted mask on a pedestal which looks like black onyx.
  • Chewbacca became the only one of the original heroes from all three original trilogy films to actually die over the course of the Legends Expanded Universe (specifically in New Jedi Order). While audiences already knew Leia would die in this film, it was a surprise that Chewie gets killed, but he actually wasn't. So the sequel trilogy did the complete opposite of the Expanded Universe, with Han, Luke, and Leia passing away during wartime, while Chewie outlived them.
  • When Stormtroopers are searching for the heroes on Kijimi, the dialogue matches the scene in Episode IV where R2-D2 and C-3PO hide from troops in Mos Eisley.
  • Palpatine refers to his resurrection as "the return of the sith" - Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi was originally called "Revenge of the Jedi" before being changed, the title instead being used for Episode III. Here, Palpatine brings things full circle (Revenge/Jedi, Return/Jedi, Revenge/Sith, Return/Sith)
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Once more, the Empire/First Order's Nazi inspirations are hammered home with Palpatine's "Final Order" — a total genocide of anyone who opposes him.
• Never Tell Me the Odds!: Lampshaded when C3PO is understandably reluctant to risk having his memory permanently wiped, only for Rey to point out, "You know the odds better than any of us."
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailers strongly push the implication that Tonight, Someone Dies, specifically, C-3PO. In reality, his memories and personality are erased, but the latter is restored almost immediately, and the former are also restored (with the exception of only the last few days) prior to the climax.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • In The Last Jedi, the Resistance called for aid and nobody came, because the First Order only targeted the Resistance and those who were never part of the Resistance to begin with were unwilling to take part in the war because they believe it's already a Hopeless War. This time, the Sith/Final Order threatens to destroy all free worlds if they do not submit, and how do people in the galaxy react? They come to the Resistance's aid because they realize now that they too are in the line of fire.
  • As a double-whammy, Palpatine revealing why he needs Rey to kill him in fury ends up undermining any chance she has of actually going through with it. The true irony here is that when he unleashes his power against the Big Damn Heroes just above his head, she could have struck him down as an act of courage to immediately and directly save her friends (an option that wasn't available to Luke) and thereby got away with it.
• Nightmare Face:
  • As Dark Rey hisses and lunges at Rey, she briefly takes on a fanged, demonic look all too reminiscent of Bilbo Baggins's own split-second transformation.
  • Palpatine's heavily scarred, decayed and undead-looking visage with milky white eyes before he rejuvenates himself isn't an exactly a pretty sight.
• No Endor Holocaust:
  • Played straight here in the trope's originating franchise (and back to the Trope Namer at that). We see two Ewoks celebrating the final victory over the Final Order at the end. A First Order Star Destroyer has been destroyed by a "Holdo Maneuver" right over the forest moon of Endor, and everything seems just fine there, despite the apocalyptic destruction and spread damage such a maneuver caused in the previous film.
  • We also finally get an explanation for why there was No Endor Holocaust — the remains of the Death Star II scattered across Endor's moons, the biggest chunk of it landed on a different moon than the one featured in Return of the Jedi. Don't think about the logistics of it too hard.
• No Romantic Resolution: None of the romances teased throughout the trilogy result in a definitive resolution.
  • After expressing attraction to Rey in the first film, Finn tries to make some sort of dying declaration to her, but gets cut off and refuses to elaborate after the fact. He and Rey remain platonic friends in the end. His budding romance with Rose, introduced in the second film, isn't even addressed in this one. He has a few entirely platonic conversations with her, none of them about their relationship. A possible romance with Jannah is introduced in this film, but has no resolution. By the end of the film, they've shared no romantic moments, and Jannah ends the film talking to Lando about finding out her origins.
  • Rey always treats Finn entirely as a platonic friend and remains oblivious to the fact that he ever had interest in her. The trilogy-long teasing of a romance with Kylo Ren ends with his death immediately after their Big Damn Kiss, so they never have a chance to actually decide whether they're together.
  • Poe finally gets a romantic interest in the form of his old comrade Zorri Bliss, with whom he shares Belligerent Sexual Tension. In the end of the film, he nonverbally propositions her, and she shoots him down. It's ultimately unclear whether she has no interest at all or is still stringing along their BST.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Hux became The Mole not because he wants the Resistance to win, but because he wants Kylo Ren to lose.
• Novelization: Rae Carson wrote an "Expanded Edition" that was released in March 2020.

Tropes O to S

• Obscured Special Effects: The movie tries to avoid showing spacecraft landing or people getting out of them as much as possible. When the Millennium Falcon lands on fire at the Resistance base and belly-flops on Kef Bir with no landing gear, and when Rey gets out of Luke's X-Wing or Ben gets out of his TIE fighter, these all take place offscreen.
• Offhand Backhand: Kylo Ren guns down a Sith Trooper and doesn’t bother to look. More justified here than many examples in other franchises, since he has overtly supernatural powers of precognition and clairvoyance.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • On Pasaana, Finn and Poe have an "oh, crap" reaction upon seeing the Stormtroopers tailing them launch from their speeders and fly after them.
  • The Knights of Ren all take a step backward when Ben pulls his hand from behind his back and reveals he's holding a lightsaber.
  • The entire galaxy got one when Palpatine came back.
• Once per Episode:
  • After showing off two different applications of the hyperspace jump in The Force Awakens and Solo, the Millennium Falcon gets to showcase another hyperspace jump technique, although this time it's forcefully done by Poe and Chewbacca is furious by the end of it.
  • Lando finally gets his turn to say "I have a bad feeling about this" as the First Order attacks them on Pasaana.
  • Rey has yet another Force Vision.
  • Poe's ride is blown up. Least this time it's not his X-Wing.
  • Again, the Millennium Falcon is the lead of the Cavalry
  • New Force powers introduced: Force drain (by Palpatine on Rey and Ben), and Force Heal as first performed by Rey (Zigzagged depending on if you watched The Mandalorian prior to watching the movie)
• One-Man Army: When Lando's citizen fleet arrives, the tide turns against the Final Order... until the restored Emperor decides to personally intervene. When he does, Sidious zaps the enemy fleet with Force lightning, incapacitating thousands of starships.
• Our Liches Are Different: Palpatine is revealed to be a Sith variant of this trope. Not only that, but the previous Sith who also discovered this secret to immortality live on within Palpatine's soul.
• Palette Swap: Lando's clothes mostly resemble his outfit from The Empire Strikes Back, in the colors of his outfit from Solo.
• Parallel Conflict Sequence: The Resistance and the Sith fleet fight a Big Badass Battle Sequence while Rey and Kylo/Ben face Palpatine and his minions.
• Parasitic Immortality: Palpatine wants to do this by possessing Rey, who turns out to be his granddaughter. Whether he would have been taking over her body or if he would just be living inside her is left unknown.
• Passing the Torch: Luke and Leia finally hand off to the new generation. Leia trained Rey in the Force and Luke gives Rey her lightsaber and his X-Wing. Lando shows up, too, giving Poe the advice he needs to hear to be able to reach out to Finn and share the burden of leadership, then to the galaxy and ask for help.
• People Jars: When Kylo Ren explores Snoke's hideout on Exegol, he passes several tanks holding clones of Snoke.
• Personal Hate Before Common Goals: Hux has this attitude towards Kylo Ren. Even though he is fanatically loyal to the First Order and its cause, he is willing to be a spy for the resistance, only because he hates Kylo Ren and wants to see him fail as leader. Even if that failure could completely jeopardize the war effort, or end up provoking the destruction of the First Order as a whole.
• Pietà Plagiarism: After Rey dies in her fight with Palpatine, Ben picks up Rey's dead body and holds her. Ben is upright and kneeling on the floor, while Rey is lying horizontal, with her upper body cradled in Ben's arms. This mirrors Messianic imagery, with Rey being the crucified hero who soon rises from the dead.
• Planet Destroyer: The Final Order is a fleet of Star Destroyers that are each equipped with a planet-busting super laser, although this one appears to have to carve the planet apart in a prolonged discharge rather than destroying it in a single hit.
• Quicksand Sucks: A variation with the pit on Pasaana, as while it swallows up everyone who stumbles into it, it doesn't suffocate them to death, instead dropping them into a cavern from which escape is impossible except by way of a Secret Test of Character.
• Race Against the Clock: The Resistance has a limited amount of time to locate Exegol and eliminate Palpatine's new fleet of Star Destroyers before they are free to leave the planet and threaten the entire galaxy with their planet-destroying lasers.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • Luke's old X-Wing was left underwater at Ahch-To for who knows how long. Aside from having seaweed and a lot of water inside of the craft, the fighter is still capable of flying. The same with the Imperial Tie Fighter that Ben pilots.
  • The hulk of Death Star II debris, apart from being broken up in chunks, is in fairly good shape despite having been blown up several decades earlier and crashed on a different moon than the one it was originally orbiting. There are walkable corridors, TIE hangars (presumably, going by the above point), scores of Stormtrooper helmets lying around in excellent condition, and the Emperor's throne is even still in its original position despite his Tower being flung off the DS and crashing next to the dish. Even the secret chamber doors have enough power to open and close.
  • Ochi's ship, despite being derelict in a desert planet for over fifteen years, in a highly visible place near a populated outpost, takes only a few kicks and spittle to start up and become spaceworthy again.
• Raised Hand of Survival: After Rey kills Sidious and collapses, the camera moves to the edge of the pit where Ben was thrown and lingers on the edge. His hand shoots up, grabbing it, and he climbs out.
• Ramming Always Works: Zig-Zagged. Finn dismisses the Holdo Maneuver as a Taking You with Me solution to deal with the Final Order, since it has a Million to One Chance of working and there aren't enough Resistance ships to destroy the fleet with. However, we later see that someone actually did pull it off above Endor after the final battle over Exegol.
• Rank Up: Upon Leia's death, Poe is promoted to general. Deciding that leading the Resistance is too much for him alone, he grants Finn the rank of general as well.
• The Real Heroes: In the Final Battle, "It's not a navy, sir, it's just... people."
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: C-3PO's eyes turn red when he translates and reports the Sith language-writing on the dagger.
• Red Herring: There are a couple of shots where it looks like Pryde might be the First Order traitor, but it's Hux.
• Reforged Blade: The blue lightsaber that was used by Anakin, Luke and then Rey before being wrecked in The Last Jedi reappears in Rise repaired and being used by Rey once more.
• Refuge in Audacity: Finn stages a ground assault with soldiers mounted on not-horses... on a Star Destroyer.
  General Pryde: Jam their speeders!
  Ensign: We can't, sir.
  Pryde: Why not?!
  Ensign: They're not using speeders.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: Rey is revealed to be the paternal granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine. However, the The Rise of Skywalker: Expanded Edition states that Palpatine's "son" is actually a clone, so while there's still shared DNA between them, Rey technically isn't his real granddaughter (genetically she could be considered his daughter). The movie doesn't mention this and specifically refers to Rey as being Palpatine's "granddaughter" including by Palpatine himself, so it's unclear which version is canon. ^note the novelization appears to be based on an earlier version of the film's script, like many novelizations, so not everything in it matches up with the finished film
• Relationship Upgrade: Of a non-romantic variety. Rey and Leia barely interacted in the previous movies, apart from sharing a moment of grief over Han's death before Rey flies off to Ahch-To and a little bit on Crait when Rey opens the back of the base. In between this film and the last, Leia has become Rey's mentor in the Force, training her much as Yoda trained Luke, but with more wuxia elements thrown in.
• The Resenter: Palpatine seems bitter over his original manner of dying. He chooses to cast Ben down a chasm specifically to spite the Skywalkers, seemingly killing their last descendant in the same way Anakin killed him (Ben however, managed to survive, and chose to sacrifice his life to save Rey's, thus rendering Palpatine's attempt to ensure that the Skywalker bloodline die in vain, null and void).
• Restraining Bolt: C-3PO is unable to translate vital information because his programming prevents him from doing so.
• Resurgent Empire: The Final Order is basically the Palpatine-ruled Galactic Empire restored rather than the military junta rogue organization that is the First Order, which is later incorporated into the former entity.
• Retcon:
  • Rey's parents were said to be nobodies who sold her for drinking money in The Last Jedi, but now her father was a Palpatine clone, making Palpatine himself her grandfather (kind of?). The change can be explained as Unreliable Narrator as she heard it from Kylo and the Dark Side Cave on Ahch-To.
  • In Return of the Jedi, Palpatine is thrown into a reactor core and vaporized, on board a space station that subsequently explodes. He is somehow still alive in this film.
• Robot Buddy: BB-8, C-3PO, and R2-D2 feature in this film, along with a new droid, D-0. BB-8 finds the inactive droid in Ochi's ship and revives him, and D-O accompanies BB-8 for the rest of the movie, becoming the robot buddy to a robot buddy.
• Rock Beats Laser:
  • During the final battle, Finn and Janna's group work around the control ship's jamming field that prevents speeders from working by riding their alien steeds.
  • In a more direct example, Janna takes down one of the jetpack Sith troopers with a simple arrow.
• Rule of Symbolism: Kylo Ren having his helmet repaired symbolizes him backsliding into being a Darth Vader expy, but at the same time, the visible cracks show his deep-seated doubts in the path he is taking.
• Rule of Three:
  • A feeling. (Not including the bad feeling) Rey has one Kijimi, Finn has two more later in the movie.
  • Played for humor when Poe, Rey, and Finn are reminded of formerly being a smuggler, a scavenger, and a stormtrooper, respectively.
• Sacrificial Planet: One of Palpatine's Star Destroyers inflicts an Earth-Shattering Kaboom on Kijimi, and promises to do the same to every planet that refuses to bow before him.
• Sand Worm: The Vexis snake, a huge serpentine burrower found under Pasaana. However, it doesn't attack, and leaves the heroes alone after Rey heals it.
• The Scapegoat: When discussing the acquisition of the Final Order with the other leaders of The First Order, General Pryde specifically claims the fleet of Super Star Destroyers will make up for the failure of Starkiller Base while eyeing General Hux, not so subtly dismissing the man and showing he's still the Butt-Monkey of the organization. Even ignoring how it was Captain Phasma who lowered the shields around Starkiller Base that allowed the Rebels to blow it up to save her own skin, their Supreme Leader Kylo Ren had a bigger role in screwing over Starkiller Base by kidnapping Rey and bringing her there while neglecting to retrieve BB8 and spending time settling his personal scores with Han, Finn, and Rey. Hux's worst crime was being unable to repel the assault while doing his actual job of defending the base. This is to provide Foreshadowing on Hux's reasons for betraying The First Order to screw over Kylo Ren.
• Schrödinger's Canon:
  • Transfer Essence/Essence Transfer/Force Drain/Dark Transfer (and a few other names besides) has been a prominent Force power in Legends continuity, despite a lack of Force healing abilities depicted onscreen (until now). Interestingly, the film shows two variations of it while strongly hinting at a third:
    • Rey (and later Ben) use the "Light Side" version, healing another being by investing it with their own Force energy.
    • Palpatine uses a "Dark Side" version, draining the life force from Rey and Ben (and, it's implied, their Force Bond) in order to fully restore himself from his Dark Lord on Life Support state.
    • Finally, it's implied Palpatine used a variation of the trick which was shown in Dark Empire, transferring his consciousness, essence, "soul" from his dying body to a new cloned body.
  • Palpatine telling Rey that if she strikes him down in anger, he'll be open to possess her body, using it to prolong his own life. Darth Bane learned the secret of immortality via Grand Theft Me after founding the Rule of Two, and attempted to use it on his apprentice when they fought for the future of the at-the-time new Sith. The novel leaves it a tad ambiguous on if Bane was successful at possessing Zannah, hinting that Palpatine's claim to be "all the Sith" is Not Hyperbole. (Note, however, that author Drew Karpyshyn clarified in his blog that he had intended Bane to have failed to possess Zannah: the ambiguity here resulted from mistakes on his part.)
  • Rey uses the Force to seize a small ship that's lifting off and stop it from flying away, which Vader did in the Vader Down comics story arc.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: J. J. Abrams strikes again. While debris from the Death Star II impacting other bodies in the Endor planetary system has been recorded since Legends,^note The No Endor Holocaust trope takes its name from Lucasfilm's retcon that most of the debris was jumped to hyperspace when the reactor blew, after commentators started theorizing that the aftereffects of the station's destruction should have sterilized the Ewoks' forest moon. the section shown in this film is wildly out of scale with the Death Star itself, and is also conveniently still recognizable despite the force of the blast. Even the Emperor's throne room is still walkable and still partially powered.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: When Rey suffers a Heroic BSoD after discovering her lineage, Luke's spirit reassures her that Leia knew all along, and still trained her.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Palpatine is killed by his own lightning that Rey reflects back at him with her lightsabers.
• Sequel Escalation: How do you top Starkiller base, which was itself an example of this trope? How about an entire fleet of star-destroyers with planet-killing weapons? It used to be that literally planet-destroying weapons were fairly rare in the setting; the Death Stars in the original films were basically just really big warships, so they weren't magical or gimmicky (by the standards of the galactic civilization), but they still required very substantial investments, and so there weren't very many of them. In this movie, planet-destroying firepower can be fitted into an ordinary warship that is millions of times smaller, and there are lots and lots of them in the Emperor's secret fleet.
• Series Continuity Error: Poe expresses surprise at seeing First Order troopers equipped with rocket packs, though Poe had already encountered First Order jet troopers in Star Wars: Poe Dameron. It can be Hand Waved in the sense that that only C-3PO and Finn are actually in disbelief, whereas Poe comparatively replies like he's Seen It All.
• Shed the Family Name: It turns out Rey was born a member of the Palpatine family. However, her father shed the name as he and his mother chose to be "no one", and Rey openly rejects the Emperor's legacy, including the name, after learning the truth. Instead, she takes up the name of the Skywalkers, giving it a continuation of sorts, now that the last members of the original family have died and their lineage been wiped out.
• Ship Sinking: Just about every ship is sunk by the end of the movie:
  • Rose and Finn's romance from the previous film goes totally unaddressed, with supplemental material stating that they decided they were Better as Friends.
  • Word of God confirmed prior to release that Poe×Finn wouldn't be happening, and Poe and Finn are given female Implied Love Interests in the form of Zorii and Jannah respectively.
  • Finn×Rey gets some Ship Tease with Finn appearing to attempt a Dying Declaration of Love, but Word of God later revealed that he was just trying to tell her that he was Force-sensitive.
  • Rey and Kylo share a kiss, but he dies immediately afterwards.
• Shock and Awe: Rey discovering that she can emit Force lighting foreshadows her origins. And of course Palpatine uses his lightning again at the climactic battle.
• Shout-Out:
  • Albrekh, the chimpanzee-like Sith alchemist who reforges Kylo Ren's broken helmet, is named after Alberich, the dwarf who created The Ring of the Nibelung. Some have also taken his appearance as an esoteric allusion to the Emperor's appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, which was created by superimposing a monkey's eyes over a woman in heavy makeup and prosthetics.
  • Kylo's new quarters, which are stark white and clean unlike his prior dark and moody ones, are a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • Dark Rey hissing and taking on a monstrous appearance with sharp teeth for a split second is likely a reference to Bilbo Baggins's own infamous Jump Scare from the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
  • The heroes take down the Final Order Star Destroyers by targeting their superlaser cannons, followed by a montage of First Order Star Destroyers being taken down across the galaxy, which is just like the ending of Independence Day.
  • The superlaser cannons being built underneath the Star Destroyers — instead of within the ships and with the muzzle protruding out from the bow (like Palpatine's Eclipse dreadnaughts in Dark Empire) — is like the positioning of the planet bombardment gun on the Comet Empire dreadnaught in Space Battleship Yamato.
  • Palpatine's death in the movie heavily evokes Toth melting away in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • The scene where John Williams appears has references to each of his Oscar-nominated scores. Among the objects are yellow barrels, a Hook, an electric iron, a bullwhip, E.T.'s spaceship, dogtags and a book representing The Book Thief.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Rey now has a completely white outfit to illustrate her taking the role of a champion of the light.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Zorii Bliss tells Poe that the forces of darkness are actually depending on people's fear and cynicism, but the forces of good and decent people greatly outnumber those of the dark. She is proven correct during the climax of the film.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: Beaumont Kin says, "We need to pull some Holdo Maneuvers" in reference to the scene in The Last Jedi when Admiral Holdo used the Raddus to ram the First Order flagship Supremacy while jumping to hyperspace, wrecking it and the accompanying fleet. The suggestion is brushed off as "one in a million". Though in spite of this line, the montage of the First Order's defeat at the end includes a shot of a Star Destroyer broken in nearly the same way as the Supremacy, implying that some crazy Resistance pilot did recreate the Holdo Maneuver successfully.
• Spanner in the Works: Hux, as The Mole, ruins Palpatine's plans by alerting the Resistance about Palpatine and the Sith fleet at Exegol, all to spite his boss.
• Spider-Sense: When the Sith fleet shuts down their nav tower, Finn senses which ship now has nav control using the Force.
• Spirit Advisor: Han Solo to Kylo Ren, although in this case it's his father's memory rather than an actual spirit.
• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Again, Palpatine tries to turn a Jedi to the Dark Side this way. This time, however, he claims that once Rey kills him, his spirit and the spirits of all the Sith before him will flow into her, crowning her the new Sith Empress and granting her control over the Final Order.
• Super-Power Meltdown: When Rey throws the Emperor's lightning back in his face, he explodes in an epic release of dark side energies, lightning, and a hurricane gale that destroys the Sith throne, arena, and all the attending cultists.
• Symbolic Weapon Discarding: The battle between Kylo Ren and Rey in the wreckage of the Death Star ends with both of them sensing Leia's death and Rey running Kylo through with his own lightsaber, then Force healing him before leaving. In a moment that comes full circle from The Force Awakens, Kylo has a crisis of conscience which appears as him being visited by Han Solo. They talk, "Han" appears to forgive Kylo for his past actions and tells him to come home, and Kylo hurls his lightsaber into the ocean, finally rejecting his past and becoming Ben Solo again.
  Kylo Ren: I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it.
  "Han": [touches Kylo's cheek] You do.
  Kylo Ren: [on the verge of tears] Dad...
  "Han": I know.

Tropes T to Z

• Talented, but Trained: In Talking to the Dead, we see Poe confess to Leia that he doesn't know how to do this... so he brings in Finn to be his co-commander of the Resistance forces. Poe is an expert in air combat and takes command of the navy and Finn is a life-long infantryman and takes over the ground forces.
• Talking to the Dead: Poe confesses his insecurities to the recently-deceased Leia.
  Poe: I gotta tell you, I don't really know... how to do this. What you did... I'm not ready.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: This is the first time we get a chance to see Rey and Poe interacting with each other, which mainly consists of them arguing a lot.
• That Man Is Dead: When Ben Solo is faced with an image of his father calling him by name, he claims Ben is dead. Han corrects him by saying Kylo Ren is dead.
• Theme Music Power-Up: The Big Damn Heroes moment when Lando arrives at Exegol with the Citizens' Fleet is accompanied by a rousing rendition of the Star Wars theme.
• This Cannot Be!: Aftab Ackbar says "It cannot be! The Emperor is dead!" in reaction to Poe announcing that somehow, Palpatine returned.
• Time Skip: The film picks up one year after the events of The Last Jedi, rather than being an Immediate Sequel as The Last Jedi was. As such, the Resistance has regained some forces (the comic book Star Wars: Allegiance explains how they did), Finn's hair has grown out more, Rey rebuilt Anakin's lightsaber after it was torn apart in the finale of the previous film, and so on.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot: Past films showed hyperspace travel ranges from hours to days if not longer. Here, most of the film takes place over sixteen hours with ships having to cross the galaxy in moments.
• Too Dumb to Live: In a classic Villain Ball moment, we have Palpatine shooting lightning at Rey, which she deflects with a lightsaber. Rather than trying something else (for example, telekinesis, which has worked well for both him and Vader in similar situations in previous movies), he doubles down on the lightning, and essentially vaporizes himself once Rey reflects his power back at him. He does at least succeed in taking Rey with him... temporarily.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Poe, with a dose of Took a Level in Jerkass. He's clearly having to deal with a lot of stress as one of the de facto leaders of the Resistance in a war that just got a lot more desperate for his side, and unfortunately he lets some of these frustrations out on his friends. By the end of the movie, however, his original optimism and kindness reemerges.
• Traitor Shot: Subverted: General Pryde gets one as he's looking at Kylo Ren, but he's not the spy (that would be General Hux). And while it turns out Pryde's loyalty is to the Emperor and not Kylo, by that point Kylo has gone rogue.
• Tron Lines: Kylo's reforged helmet is covered in glowing red lines where the cracks were repaired.
• Unexplained Recovery: It's never made clear exactly how Palpatine came back beyond a vague allusion to the Dark Side (doubling as a Call-Back to Revenge of the Sith). He does state that he outright died in Return of the Jedi, so he wasn't just hiding somewhere after Endor, but beyond that it's left vague. Beaumont Kin, a member of the Resistance, speculates that it's tied to the Emperor's history with cloning technology during the Clone Wars, along with other scientific knowledge and Sith abilities. The novelization is that he did die in Jedi and his appearance here is via the only functional cloned body that he was able to create, with his spirit possessing it.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: A downplayed example, but at the beginning when Palpatine broadcasts a message throughout the galaxy, people are surprised but not nearly as much as you would think. Even considering that a fair amount of people know about the Force by now, considering that, as far as we know, no Sith Lord has come Back from the Dead, it's still weird people aren't more shocked and/or even wondering if it's some kind of hoax. (Not a perfect analogy, but imagine some famous person who died decades ago came back from the dead suddenly, and most people's response was just "that's kind of weird", rather than "Holy shit!, is this some kind of miracle or something?") Of course, given what some have seen about the Force already (or at least heard) this may not be that surprising. The galaxy in general might regard this as a hoax, but we only see how main characters view it.
• The Unreveal: There are a couple of moments in the film where Finn notes that he has something to tell Rey yet he never got a chance to. In the end, we never find out: Word of God states that no, it wasn't a Love Confession, it was just telling her that he's Force-sensitive, which explains his vague "feelings" which turn out to be right on various things throughout the movie.
• Villain Opening Scene: The movie begins with Kylo Ren attacking a group of Alazmec, killing them, and taking the Sith wayfinder they were guarding. Afterwards he uses the wayfinder to reach Exegol and confronts Palpatine who tells him that he was the one who created Snoke, offers him the Final Order Star Destroyers, and tells Kylo that Rey isn't who she appears to be.
• Villainous Lineage: Kylo Ren tells Rey that as the descendants of Darth Vader and Darth Sidious respectively, the Dark Side is in their blood. Sidious also tells Rey that as his granddaughter, the throne of the Sith is her birthright.
• Visual Pun: In the second-last shot of the film, we see BB-8 against the horizon of Tatooine, where one of the two suns is rising behind the other, giving them exactly the same silhouette as BB-8.
• Voodoo Shark:
  • The lack of backstory for Snoke was a sticking point many people had about the last two films. Early on, this film explains that Snoke was in fact a creation of Palpatine, evidently artificially grown in a pod on Exegol. However, the film does not explain why Palpatine would want to create Snoke in the first place and use him as a proxy for his plans, potentially risking Snoke becoming a rival. The explanation also does not fit supplementary information about Snoke's history, which had indicated that he was older than Palpatine's Empire, barring the possibility that he simply had Fake Memories.
  • The revelation that Rey is the paternal granddaughter of Palpatine (thus inheriting her Force powers from him) and that her parents weren't abusive drunks, but loving parents who left her on Jakku to protect her. Besides not really matching up with The Last Jedi's reveal about Rey's heritage, it raises more questions such as when Palpatine had a son, why he had never been mentioned before, why Rey and Kylo were both under the impression her parents sold her for drinking money, and why Rey's parents thought abandoning her on Jakku was a good way to protect her, to name some. The novelization tries to clear things up a bit by revealing Rey's father was an "imperfect" clone of Palpatine, but this still leaves unanswered questions.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Palpatine's ships are each equipped with miniature Death Star cannons, making each one a Planet Destroyer in its own right.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The Final Order Star Destroyers can't activate their Deflector Shields when they're in Exegol's atmosphere, giving the Resistance a shot at destroying them.
• Weaponized Exhaust: The Falcon rises into view as Ren confronts Rey in the bay of his Finalizer. It turns and Poe fires the engines, sending everyone but the two force-wielders flying so Rey can get on board.
• We Can Rule Together: Kylo makes this offer to Rey a second time, saying that they can kill Palpatine.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: A planetary version in Kijimi, which is visited once by the heroes before being blown to smithereens by the Final Order.
• Wham Line: Later on in the film, Kylo Ren reveals Rey has her own grandfather: the Emperor himself.
  Ren: You don't just have power. You have his power. You're his granddaughter. You... are a Palpatine.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Rey uses Anakin's and Leia's blue lightsabers during the fight with Palpatine, and buries both of them at the Lars homestead at the end of the movie. As far as the film is concerned, what happened to Luke's green lightsaber is unclear. According to The Last Jedi Extended Novelization Alcida-Auka, matron of the native Caretakers, took Luke's green lightsaber and other possessions and stored them in the island's repository after his death.
• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • Although various details are changed (mostly to accommodate the new Disney-verse protagonists), the main outline of the plot, and even many of its individual elements, look eerily similar to the old Star Wars Legends continuity's legendary Dark Empire — which likewise featured The Reveal of a surviving Palpatine as The Man Behind the Man, hidden fleets, cloning, the Emperor as a Person of Mass Destruction, a planet-destroying gun mounted on a Star Destroyer, body theft, and much else that now reappears in The Rise of Skywalker. For the most important difference, there it was Luke and Leia together who defeated the Emperor, not his granddaughter.
  • The additional idea that Palpatine wishes to steal Rey's body so he can become Empress as her also closely mirrors Blackhole's scheme in Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, although he wanted to do it with Luke. The Rey/Palpatine throne room scene bears a particularly heavy resemblance to an equivalent one in that book, where Luke meets Blackhole on his Shadow Throne. It is also similar to the Emperor attempting to pass on his spirit to the then baby Anakin Solo, the events of which again occurred during Dark Empire.
• A Wizard Did It: The most explanation the film provides for the return of Sidious after his death is a vague allusion to "dark science", "cloning", and "secrets only the Sith knew".
• Wizard Duel: Rey's final battle with the revived Sidious arguably qualifies: he spams Force lightning at her, which she barely blocks with two crossed lightsabers, until the strength of past Jedi allows her to throw it back at him.
• The X of Y: The Rise of Skywalker.
• Xanatos Gambit: Palpatine claims at least three win conditions; Kylo kills him and takes his place, Rey does the same, or he drains them both and regenerates. Kylo's We Can Rule Together plan with Rey might count as a fourth, except he doesn't care for continuing Palpatine's legacy after that — just taking his fleet to rule on his own terms.
• You Are in Command Now: With Leia dead, Poe becomes General of the Resistance. He then promotes Finn to General; during the Final Battle, they command the fighter attack and ground forces, respectively.
• You Are Not Alone: A recurring theme.
  • An early example:
    Poe: I got to tell you, I don't really know how to do this, what you did. I'm not ready.
    Lando: Neither were we. Luke, Han, Leia, me. Who's ever ready?
    Poe: How did you do it? Defeat an empire with almost nothing?
    Lando: We had each other. That's how we won.
  • Later, when rallying the Resistance for their last stand:
    Poe: The First Order wins by making us think we're alone. We're not alone. Good people will fight if we lead them.
  • Finally, in the final confrontation with Palpatine, Rey suddenly is lent the strength of all the Jedi of the past, Kenobi, Skywalker and all, through the Force to help her finally destroy the Emperor once and for all.
    Mace Windu: You're not alone, Rey.
    Yoda: Alone, never have you been.
    Qui-Gon: Every Jedi who ever lived lives in you.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The moment he realizes he can simply pull a Life Drain on Rey and Ben, the Emperor ditches his original Body Surf plan, slurps up their Dyad energy to restore his body, and chucks both aside.
• You're Not My Father: Rey is really a member of the Palpatine family, and the granddaughter of the now undead Sith Emperor. While he tries to goad her to the Dark Side, she rejects both him and her family name, later accepting the Skywalker name as her own with the unspoken approval of Luke and Leia.

---

"I'm Rey... Rey Skywalker."

---