***Spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Episode VIII follow.
Now that Rogue One has taken its rightful place in Star Wars history, Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII is poised to take over our galactic thoughts and dreams. With heavy hearts, we can’t help but simultaneously look forward to, and tear up over what will be Carrie Fisher’s last appearance as General Leia, wondering what the distant future holds for the character.
Among our questions about the next installment are where and when the story will pick up; when last we left Daisy Ridley’s Rey, she’d followed R2-D2’s map to find an epically bearded Luke, returning his father’s lightsaber to (perhaps, her own father) Skywalker. Speaking with USA Today, Johnson quickly revealed that as with Rogue One — ***Minor Spoiler*** — the time passed between films is next to nothing.
Episode VIII continues where The Force Awakens left off with the journey of Jedi-in-training Rey … The new film from the start will explore the relationship between Luke and Rey, who shows up on his remote intergalactic island with his old lightsaber ‘both not knowing what’s going to happen and also having a lot of expectations in her head about how this is going to go. It very much feels like what we all go through in adolescence, the dawning of this new chapter of our lives.'”
Like I mentioned, many of us believe the connection between Rey and Luke is a familial one; Johnson added that exploring those ties is “a huge part of especially Rey’s character, something that was a really powerful part of her setup and something I really wanted to dig into with this.”
Continuing Finn’s (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron’s (Oscar Isaac) stories is also a given:
I wanted to know more about each of them, and that doesn’t just mean information or backstory. Figure out what’s the most difficult thing each of them could be challenged with now — let’s throw that at them and dig into what really makes them tick by seeing how they handle that.”
