‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Reveals How Kylo Ren Turned to the Dark Side

Star Wars: The Last Jedi gave fans plenty to take in – including exactly how one character initially made their way to the Dark Side.

Major spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi below!

After he terrorized the galaxy (and broke the hearts of Han Solo fans everywhere) in The Force Awakens, audiences got a better idea of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren’s (Adam Driver) backstory. As it turns out, it ties pretty closely to one of The Force Awakens‘ darkest moments – of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and R2-D2 standing in front of a burning Jedi temple.

Throughout The Last Jedi, fans were confronted with three different re-tellings of how that fire began. All shared a bit of connective tissue – Luke felt threatened by Kylo, prompting him to face off against him, before Kylo attacked back. He crushed Luke under a hut, set the temple (and the as-yet-unnamed island it resides on) on fire, and escaped away with the Knights of Ren.

Finally, the third version of the story seemed to tell the truth. Luke went to Kylo’s hut in the middle of the night, and searched inside his mind. What he found was that Kylo had already been groomed by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), and that his future involved an unbelievable amount of death and destruction.

Luke prepared to kill young Ben Solo in his sleep, but quickly hesitated. But before he could turn his green lightsaber off, Ben woke up, shocked by what he saw. He then attacked the temple and Luke, officially cementing his turn to the Dark Side.

This plot point has been oft-debated by fans in the days since The Last Jedi‘s release, with people uncertain about what it means for both Luke and Kylo as characters. And according to director Rian Johnson, that’s exactly the intention.

“There’s a big part of the story yet to be written and not by me,” Johnson said in an interview last month. “But I don’t think it’s very interesting if the whole story is just ‘Will Kylo get his comeuppance?’ He’s a more complicated character than that and I think he deserves a more complicated story than that. I don’t see the point of trying to get behind his mask and learn more about him if all we’re going to learn is ‘Yeah, he’s just an evil bad guy that needs to be killed.’”

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is in theaters now.