Luke Skywalker's Shuttle Wasn't In the 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Rey Scene
According to tweets by Lucasfilm Story Group exec Pablo Hidalgo, fans suffered from a bad case of wishful thinking.
As Star Wars fans are wont to do when little snippets of information leak in the dark recesses of the internet, they began to speculate on a theory yesterday that, if true, could have complicated the incessant debate surrounding Rey’s parentage.
As we reported yesterday, an image found its way to the r/StarWarsLeaks subreddit that was taken from a 1984 Star Wars comic showing a very familiar looking ship that ended up being Luke Skywalker’s shuttle. Because Star Wars is all about family ties — and because Star Wars fans are simultaneously the most passionate and voracious fans on the planet —some genius redditor put two and two together. He posited that it was the spacecraft seen during Rey’s Force fever dream that left her stranded on Jakku in The Force Awakens.
The theory suggested that Rey is related to Luke somehow because the spaceship seen in the movie just happened to be the same vaguely similar horseshoe-shaped craft seen in a comic book three decades ago. Game-set-match, Episode VIII writer/director Rian Johnson and everyone at Lucasfilm.
Is this Luke's ship? No, no it isn't.
Alas, the theory was only that. Pablo Hidalgo, chief executive of the Lucasfilm Story Group (or, basically the keepers of all official Star Wars lore) tweeted yesterday to graciously tell fans to slow their roll. Apparently, the ship that appears in The Force Awakens was an original design thought up by the art department, and can even be seen in the book The Art of The Force Awakens, released around the same time as the movie.
According to Hidalgo, the ship design wasn’t lifted from the comics and repurposed for the new movie. Instead, the ship was simply cut from the scene it was originally in and plugged in to be the one saying bye-bye to little Rey.
This informative but still cryptic bit if information still vexed fans, who thought maybe it still referred to the ship still showing up in another scene with Luke somehow. Hidalgo’s response: wrong again.
The ship in question was supposed to be used in place of the scene early on in The Force Awakens where Rey is scrubbing the scavenged star destroyer parts, sees the old lady doing the same, and drifts off to contemplate how much time she might be stuck on Jakku.
A look into the future for Rey.
Instead, Rey was to have seen a family boarding the ship and flying away. A similar image in the final film is seen when Rey returns to her hollowed out AT-AT bungalow and watches a ship fly away from Jakku.
The family boarding this ship was cut from the final film.
The moral of the story here is, don’t believe anything on the internet about Star Wars until Pablo Hidalgo has anything to say about it
