As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve loved Star Wars. When I grew up, I started thinking harder about what Star Wars actually is trying to say. Hint: it’s not much besides Nazis are bad and the power of friendship and Love is Good. Which is fine! The two sides of the Force, the light and the dark, have been battling it out since 1977 and as of 2017, it seems like there’s no end in sight. Just a long, tedious war between insurgent fascists, and a coalition of begrudgingly allied aliens and humans (though the Resistance seems considerably more tight-knit). Whether it’s the old Legends canon or the new and shiny Disney-approved timeline, the “good guys” in the form of the Jedi, the Republic, and free systems have been trying to find a way to keep the galaxy at peace once and for all, sometimes plunging it into war yet again in the process. Granted, the series is a cash cow named “Star WARS”, as in, “as many of these as we can make”, but it looks like the now wizened Master Luke defying this when he says to Rey in the trailer, “[the Force] it’s so much bigger!”

This isn’t a theory article or another Star Wars YouTuber analysis trying to guess what Director Rian Johnson and co. have in store for audiences come Christmas time. Sorry if I sounded like I was misleading you with that headline, but I’d like to project my own Marxist education onto Luke Skywalker for a moment, who looks like he’s been through some sh** since the end of “Return of the Jedi”. Really, these are just a few of my thoughts on the implications of that BOMBSHELL of a statement (judging by most people’s reactions, I personally thought this was the most logical direction for Star Wars to go, but more on that in a moment) and what this tells us about Luke, the Resistance, and the broader philosophy of Star Wars.

There is more that can be accomplished with the Force. There is more than the Jedi were Good and the Sith were evil, although those things are still true at the time of “Last Jedi”. There has to be more, or the First Order will consume everything this time for real. We can speculate about the idea of including “Gray” Jedi (an EU term for those Force users who used both dark and light techniques, like Kyle Katarn, Qui Gon Jinn, and Corran Horn) in the new official canon, but I think Rian Johnson included this line specifically because it signals just how huge the meta-text of “STAR WARS” is going to become. “Rogue One” showed us that audiences have long been ready for a “non-traditional” Star Wars narrative, which should not have been surprising or seemed as risky as it did at the time. Now with the Anthology films and the popular acclaim of the new trio of heroes from “The Force Awakens”, there is a clear dialectic at play in and out of the galaxy far far away. I think Luke, through his investigation at the first Jedi Temple on Achh-To, has found something that he believes means that some of what the Jedi taught was either a lie or makes them obsolete.

Maybe he came to the same conclusion a lot of us did - Anakin Skywalker and Ben Solo became Darth Vader and Kylo Ren not solely because of their own innate evil, but because of the failures of the teachings of their Masters and the fundamental disconnect in the Code between “attachment is bad” and “compassion for all living things is good”. Nobody but people who played the now-ancient “Knights of the Old Republic” games on Xbox and PC might realize, but this interrogation of how the Force actually works and who is responsible for fallen Jedi comes straight out of discussions of that ever magnanimous figure, Revan, and the Jedi Civil War thousands of years before the original movies ever came out. I’m not saying Disney is stealing Obsidian’s dialogue trees from KOTOR II, but I am suggesting that Johnson was aware of the games when he was writing the screenplay.

The only thing I can say for certain with regards to Episode VIII is that Rey will be a non-traditional Force-user, and that Luke’s return signals a paradigm shift in the fabric of Star Wars. The Jedi have failed multiple Skywalkers on their tally now, and caused multiple Nazi factions to rise to power because of it. If the Jedi are nothing but catalysts for new empires, then they do indeed need “to end.”