Screenwriter Chris Terrio answers a burning question raised by Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which returned to a familiar planet some have interpreted to be the new home for Rey (Daisy Ridley). Spoilers. Skywalker ends with Rey journeying to Tatooine for the first time to lay to rest lightsabers belonging to Skywalker twins Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (Carrie Fisher), to the tune of a track titled “A New Home.” In its closing shot, Rey and droid BB-8 look out towards setting twin suns, but the scene was never intended to be read as Rey settling down on another desert planet after escaping Jakku.
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“I can say with confidence that neither the screenplay nor the film suggest that Rey is going to live alone on Tatooine,” Terrio told The Hollywood Reporter. “The track names on the soundtrack were at the discretion of the master himself, John Williams. I can’t presume to say what John meant when he titled the piece ‘A New Home,’ but I can say that Rey’s arc over three films has to do with her finding the belonging she seeks with the new family she’s found inside the Resistance. The very last thing Rey would do after all that is to go and live alone in a desert.”
The intention, Terrio explains, was Rey making “a pilgrimage in honor of her two Skywalker masters.”
“Leia’s childhood home, Alderaan, no longer exists, but Luke’s childhood home, Tatooine, does. Rey brings the sabers there to honor the Skywalker twins by laying them to rest — together, finally — where it all began,” he said. “The farthest planet from the bright center of the universe, but a beautiful and peaceful place to bury two sacred objects.”
Rey feels more at home on Ajan Kloss, the green-covered jungle planet acting as the base of the freedom-fighting Resistance, and it’s there Rey pauses in awe at its foliage — a direct call back to The Force Awakens.
“The stage direction in the screenplay for that Rey moment in TROS is ‘Rey stares at the jungle, as though trying to memorize its green color,’” Terrio said. “It’s a callback to TFA, but it’s also more than that, because Ajan Kloss is also the only real home she’s ever known in her adult life — a place where she’s loved. She doesn’t want to leave because she knows nothing will ever be the same.”
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is now in theaters.
