‘Star Wars’: The 1 Big Inconsistency Between ‘The Force Awakens’ and ‘The Last Jedi

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If J.J. Abrams set up a clear path for the Star Wars series to follow with The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson takes a sharp left turn in The Last Jedi. For the most part, this is a good thing, as Johnson keeps the audience on their toes and introduces some twists that are shocking but right.

In other ways, though, Johnson seems to recklessly disregard plot points from The Force Awakens. He has said that Abrams and Lucasfilm never told him the solution to some of the mysteries established in the last film, and he was allowed to come up with whatever he wanted to happen next. As a result, there are now some apparent inconsistencies between the two movies. Some are very minor, but there’s one huge inconsistency that Episode IX absolutely must explain. We’ll get into that one on page four.

Here are some of the ways The Last Jedi doesn’t quite line up with The Force Awakens — at least until the series can come up with an explanation. Warning: Major spoilers for The Last Jedi lie ahead.

What’s the deal with the Knights of Ren vision?

In The Force Awakens, Rey touches Luke’s old lightsaber and receives a series of visions. One of those is a massacre carried out by Kylo Ren and the Knights of Ren. The assumption at the time was this was Kylo’s betrayal of Luke and the destruction of the Jedi Temple.

But that can’t be the case. In the flashback to that betrayal in The Last Jedi, it’s not raining, and Kylo doesn’t have the mask yet. So what the heck is this scene? Some fans have theorized it could be a flash forward. But that can’t be true because Kylo destroys his mask in The Last Jedi and he’s wearing it in this vision.

Besides, who exactly are the Knights of Ren, and where are they in The Last Jedi? This seems to be a crucial plot point that Abrams set up but that Johnson wasn’t interested in. Luke does say in The Last Jedi that Ben left with some of his students. But it’s not confirmed whether these are the Knights of Ren.

Hopefully, Abrams will make some sense of the Knights of Ren — and this vision scene — in Episode IX, considering he’s the one who came up with the characters in the first place.


Maz asking Han Solo, “Who’s the girl?”

Making Rey a random young woman whose parents are unimportant was a wise decision. The Last Jedi tosses aside the question of Rey’s parentage as if we should never have been asking it. But was that always the plan? Looking back at The Force Awakens, there are definitely some moments where the film seems to call on us to speculate about Rey’s background, and so it’s easy to understand why some were disappointed in The Last Jedi‘s solution.

For example, there’s the scene at Maz’s Castle where Maz asks Han Solo, “Who’s the girl?” The movie then cuts away and does not reveal Han’s answer. Abrams is clearly being intentionally cryptic here, potentially suggesting that Han knows more about Rey than he’s letting on. If not, at the very least, the edit suggests that Abrams is calling on us to ask who the girl is. It doesn’t seem like the sort of scene you’d put in the film if Rey’s identity and background are completely unimportant.

Based on The Last Jedi, though, Han presumably just told Maz that he has no idea who she is. Ultimately, because of little scenes like these, we get the sense that Abrams was into the idea of building up the mystery of Rey’s background, but Johnson wasn’t into it, resulting in a bit of inconsistency in how the movies present this information. Johnson himself told Slashfilm that Abrams did not tell him what he had in mind for Rey’s parents. Some more collaboration between directors might have resulted in two films that feel less disparate.


The ending of The Force Awakens happens differently in The Last Jedi

This one is more of a minor inconsistency, but it’s still a little annoying. The Force Awakens ends with Rey walking up to Luke on Ahch-To, holding the lightsaber out to him from a distance. About 30 seconds of silence pass, and then the film ends.

In The Last Jedi, we see that same scene a second time, but it’s completely different. Now, Rey walks right up to Luke and hands him the lightsaber. So the whole idea of her standing and holding it out — the iconic image that concluded the last film and that audiences were left with for two years — just doesn’t take place anymore. In addition, the scene also looks nothing like it did before. In The Force Awakens, Ahch-To has a cool, blue tone to it, while the new scene is warm and more orange.

To be fair to Johnson, though, Abrams put him in a difficult spot. Abrams probably legitimately did not know how the encounter with Luke would end and just thought it would be an effective cliffhanger. This forced Johnson to desperately try to figure out what happens after a 30-second awkward silence.

That’s pretty nitpicky, but this next one is actually is much

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