Tuesday, March 15, 2016

What ever Rey is, she is.



With Leia Organa having turned to the dark side eliminating or at least mollifying the primary problem with the Soloist position, perhaps we should reconsider the prose of this position more carefully...

Well she got her daddy's ship and she cruised through the S-S.D. now,
She forgot all about the rebel base like she told ol BB now,
And with the belly-gun blasting goes cruising just as fast as she can now
And she'll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the Falcon away...

Well the girls cant stand her cuz she fights, looks and flies like an ace now,
She flies like an ace now, she flies like an ace
She makes the final Death Star asault look like a tatooien po-d race now,
She flies like an ace now, she flies like an ace
A lot of Ties try to catch but she leads them on a
(I can not believe I am saying this) wild bantha chase now,
And she'll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the Falcon away...

Ok, next to light-sabers and the Force it self,  the Millenium Falcon is probably the most significant icon of Star Wars, so the fact that Rey is the first and last person to sit in the pilot seat should not be taken lightly.  But does that really connect her to Han Solo? Remember he had not flown the Falcon meaningfully in over a movie. 
In fact a closer look reveals there may be connections to Luke within the Falcon sequence itself.  What is the first thing Rey does once they are on board the Falcon? I believe its sending Finn down to the belly gun. Now why would she do this? If you can only man one gunner position you would want it to be the dorsal gun, that way you can force enemy ships into your dome of fire by flying low. The only way you can do this with the belly gun is if you fly inverted, in which case you cant see where you are going. So why does she send him down there? Perhaps it was in her genes?
 Lets go back to ANH, picking up the action right after Han says "we're not out of this yet." Notice which gun Luke goes to (pop in the DVD if you must), I do believe it is the belly gun.  Ok, so she sent Finn to Luke's gunner position, that's still pretty insignificant compared to actually flying the Falcon, right? I mean Luke never sat in either of the pilot seats; Han did, Chewy did, Leah did, Lando did even gill-face did but Luke never did. 
But wait, what is the rather impertinent question Finn asks her just before they take off? Is it not "have you ever flown this ship before?" and Rey's answer is, no. Just as Luke had never flown that ship before....
What What what, time out, what is going on here? Why are we combing through these piles of minutia looking for clues to Rey's parentage? Do we really think the writers and director put that level of detail and complexity, that 99% of the movie going public would not care about, just so fanboys on their umpteenth viewing can go "Cool, did you see that? Did You See That?!?" Probably not. But even if they did, now is not the time for that. Now is the time for Rey the becoming.*
That's right, we have 18 mouths to think of Rey as whatever we want. If you think the Falcon sequence is cooler if she is Han's daughter, then think of her that way during that sequence. If thinking of her as Obi Won's granddaughter enhances your enjoyment of the vision, then think of her as such while watching it. And if you think it would be utterly stupid for her not to be Luke's daughter after the "sword in the stone" scene, then let us enjoy that possibility until they ruin the franchise by doing something else.
But my point is, now is the time for enjoying Rey's potentiality...we shall have to deal with her actuality soon enough.


* Yes, she is pretty, but that is not what I am getting at here.