Three Planets, Three Caves, Three Relics
In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey and her friends go to three planets during their mission to recover a Sith Wayfinder: the desert planet Pasaana, the mountainous planet Kijimi, and the watery planet Kef Bir. On each of these three planets, Rey enters a “cave”: the lair of the Vexis Snake on Pasaana, Kylo Ren’s chamber on the Star Destroyer hovering above Kijimi, and the hidden room in the ruins of the Second Death Star on Kef Bir. And in each of these three caves, Rey finds a Sith relic: a Sith dagger in the snake’s lair, Darth Vader’s helmet in Ren’s chamber, and the Wayfinder in the hidden room of the Death Star.
On each of these planets, Rey enters a space that contains a physical embodiment of evil and death. The dagger was used by the Sith hunter Ochi to kill her parents. Darth Vader killed countless people while wearing his skull-like helmet. And the Wayfinder was created to guide the Sith to the planet Exegol, where they would participate in occult rituals, presumably including human sacrifice (as when Palpatine asks Rey to strike him down later in the film). Each time Rey leaves one of these caves, however, she realizes that evil isn’t something that only exists outside of herself, safely externalized and contained in these relics. The Dark Side also lurks within her.
On all three planets, Rey is confronted by Kylo Ren after leaving the cave, prompting a series of disturbing revelations about herself. On Pasaana, Rey realizes there’s something evil inside her when Ren eggs her into using Force lightning. On Kijimi, Rey finds out where that evil comes from when Ren tells her the truth about her Sith ancestry. And on Kef Bir, Rey has a vision in the cave of what she would become if she succumbed to that evil. Then, when she leaves the cave, she is tempted to embrace the evil she saw in the vision when Ren destroys the Wayfinder, provoking her to anger and aggression, nearly causing Ren’s death.
Each time Rey is reeling from these revelations about her evil impulses, her friend Finn calls out to her to turn away from Ren, return to her friends, and get into their ship to leave the planet. On the first two planets, she accepts Finn’s call. On the third planet, she refuses it. Instead, she flees to the planet Ahch-to, fearing she must exile herself there to protect her friends from the evils she now knows she is capable of committing.
On each of these three planets, Rey gets closer to recovering the Sith Wayfinder. The dagger found in a hidden place on the first planet is decoded in a hidden place on the second planet, then used on the third planet to find the hidden place where the Wayfinder is kept. But with each planet, Rey also gets closer to discovering that the way to becoming a Sith isn’t so hard to find.
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Concepts: caves / death / friendship / good and evil / relics / Sith / temptation / visions
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