Here’s How Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Brought Back This Iconic Spaceship

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is currently in theaters, and it’s arguably raising more questions than it answers about the galaxy far, far away. The film features quite a few surprising returns, including a vehicle that played a pivotal role in the saga’s first chapter, Star Wars: A New Hope. While eagle-eyed fans began to wonder exactly how the ship came back, the recently released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary sheds a bit more light. Spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker below! Only look if you want to know!

The visual dictionary provides a bit more context for the return of the Tantive IV, the Corellian ship that Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) was on when she got captured on Tattooine. According to the lore, Leia retrieved the ship from “a sympathetic former Imperial senator” who resided in the Yama system. Apparently, Leia just recently got the vessel back recently, but it is unclear when that happened.

While the return of the Tantive IV plays a relatively small role in The Rise of Skywalker, it provides a sort of visual allusion to where the saga has gone throughout all of these years.

“Our movie was not just following what we had started [with The Force Awakens], it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else [with Star Wars: The Last Jedi]. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies,” director and co-writer J.J. Abrams shared this past April. “While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run, was an enormous challenge.”

“However, to answer your question—truly, finally—now that I’m back, the difference is I feel like we might’ve done it,” Abrams admitted. “Like, I actually feel like this crazy challenge that could have been a wildly uncomfortable contortion of ideas, and a kind of shoving-in of answers and Band-Aids and bridges and things that would have felt messy. Strangely, we were sort of relentless and almost unbearably disciplined about the story and forcing ourselves to question and answer some fundamental things that at the beginning, I absolutely had no clue how we would begin to address.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is in theaters now.