IDS Film Hub · Episode IX · 2019
The Rise of Skywalker
One screen story, connected to the larger Imperial Dark Sector archive through anthropology, characters, institutions, places, events, and lore.
Story record
Movie summary
2019 · Episode IX
The Rise of Skywalker begins with the galaxy receiving a broadcast announcing the return of Emperor Palpatine. Kylo Ren, now Supreme Leader of the First Order, obtains a Sith wayfinder and travels to the hidden world of Exegol to investigate. There he finds Palpatine physically alive but sustained by machinery and followers associated with the Sith Eternal. Palpatine reveals an enormous fleet of Xyston-class Star Destroyers, each equipped with planet-destroying weapons, and offers Kylo control of the fleet if he kills Rey. He also tells Kylo that Snoke was one of the instruments through which he manipulated events. The discovery reframes the First Order as part of a longer political and religious project rather than the final form of Imperial succession. Palpatine has preserved personnel, technology, ritual, and military capacity outside normal galactic institutions while waiting for a moment to return openly.
The Resistance remains small and mobile after the events on Crait. Rey trains under Leia Organa, studying Jedi texts and trying to deepen her control of the Force. She is frustrated by anger and visions she does not understand. Poe and Finn return from an intelligence mission with information from a First Order spy confirming Palpatine's plans. The Resistance learns that Exegol can be reached only through dangerous space navigational routes and that another Sith wayfinder may exist. Rey decides to search for it using notes left by Luke Skywalker. Chewbacca, Finn, Poe, C-3PO, and BB-8 accompany her aboard the Millennium Falcon. The mission is both practical and historical: they must follow traces left by older conflicts because the enemy they face has survived through hidden continuity with those same histories.
On the desert world Pasaana, the group encounters a festival celebrated by local residents and later meets Lando Calrissian, who once searched for Sith clues with Luke. Lando directs them toward the remains of an assassin named Ochi of Bestoon. First Order forces arrive after Kylo uses his continuing Force connection with Rey to determine her location. The group escapes into tunnels and finds Ochi's dagger, an artifact engraved with Sith language that C-3PO can read but is forbidden by programming from translating. Chewbacca is captured while retrieving the dagger. Rey and Kylo struggle over a transport ship through the Force. Rey, overwhelmed by anger, releases Force lightning and believes she has destroyed the transport with Chewbacca aboard. The event intensifies her fear that her power and ancestry may be connected to the dark side.
The group travels to Kijimi, where Poe's former associate Zorii Bliss helps them reach droidsmith Babu Frik. Because C-3PO's programming blocks translation of the Sith inscription, he agrees to a memory wipe that will allow Babu Frik to bypass the restriction. The translated message points toward the moon Kef Bir and the wreckage of the second Death Star. The heroes learn that Chewbacca survived because he was aboard a different transport and board Kylo's Star Destroyer to rescue him. Rey discovers records identifying herself as Palpatine's granddaughter. Her parents were hiding her from the Emperor's agents, and Ochi was sent to find her. The revelation changes the meaning of her childhood abandonment but does not fully answer who she wants to become. Before escaping, Finn and Poe learn that General Hux is the First Order spy. Hux helps them because he wants Kylo to fail, not because he has joined the Resistance.
On Kef Bir, the group meets Jannah and a community of former First Order stormtroopers who mutinied rather than kill civilians. Their experience confirms that Finn's refusal was not unique and suggests that conditioning can fail collectively when individuals recognize a moral boundary. Rey uses the Sith dagger as a guide to locate the wayfinder in the Death Star ruins. Kylo destroys the artifact and confronts her. During their duel Leia reaches out to her son through the Force, distracting Kylo at the moment Rey stabs him with his own weapon. Leia dies from the effort. Rey senses her death and heals Kylo's wound using the Force. She then takes his fighter and leaves for Ahch-To, intending to isolate herself as Luke once did because she fears becoming like Palpatine.
On Ahch-To, Luke appears as a Force spirit and challenges Rey's decision. He tells her that Leia knew about her Palpatine ancestry and still chose to train her. He argues that hiding from fear would repeat his own mistake. Luke raises his old X-wing from the sea and gives Rey Leia's lightsaber. Rey also finds a wayfinder in Kylo's fighter and travels toward Exegol. Kylo, meanwhile, experiences a memory of Han Solo. The conversation mirrors their confrontation on Starkiller Base, but this time Ben throws away his red lightsaber and rejects the identity of Kylo Ren. Leia's final act and Rey's choice to heal him create the conditions for his return, though neither action erases the harm he committed. Ben decides to follow Rey to Exegol rather than continue leading the First Order.
Palpatine announces that the Final Order fleet will launch and threaten the galaxy. The Resistance learns Rey's route from signals she transmits through Luke's X-wing. Poe assumes command after Leia's death and initially doubts his ability to replace her. Lando leaves to call for help across the galaxy, while Resistance pilots and ground teams launch a desperate assault on Exegol. Finn and Jannah lead an attack on the navigation system the Sith fleet needs to escape the planet's turbulent atmosphere. The Resistance force is badly outnumbered until Lando returns with a vast civilian fleet composed of independent ships from many systems. The arrival transforms the battle from an operation by one military organization into a broad coalition of people responding to a common threat without waiting for a single central government to mobilize them.
Rey confronts Palpatine inside the Sith citadel. He initially wants her to kill him in anger so that the Sith legacy can pass into her. When Ben arrives and joins Rey, Palpatine discovers the power of their Force dyad and drains energy from both of them, restoring his own body. He throws Ben into a chasm and attacks the Resistance fleet with Force lightning. Rey hears the voices of Jedi from earlier generations encouraging her to rise. Using Luke and Leia's lightsabers, she reflects Palpatine's lightning back at him until he is destroyed. The effort kills Rey. Ben climbs from the chasm, transfers his life energy to her, and revives her. They share a brief kiss before Ben dies and becomes one with the Force. Leia's body disappears at the same time, connecting mother and son at the conclusion of their family story.
Across the galaxy, uprisings destroy First Order and Final Order ships, including a Star Destroyer above Endor. The Resistance celebrates, but the victory has come after the New Republic's earlier collapse and does not immediately establish what government will replace the old order. Rey later travels to the abandoned Lars homestead on Tatooine. She buries Luke and Leia's lightsabers in the desert and reveals a new yellow-bladed lightsaber of her own. When a local resident asks her name, Rey sees the spirits of Luke and Leia and identifies herself as Rey Skywalker. The decision does not change her biological descent from Palpatine. Instead, it declares which family history and moral tradition she chooses to carry forward.
The Rise of Skywalker closes the sequel trilogy by tying political conflict to questions of institutional survival and chosen identity. Palpatine's return depends on a hidden organization capable of preserving Sith ritual, military industry, cloning-related science, and loyal personnel beyond the visible state. The Resistance survives because it maintains networks after the destruction of the New Republic and ultimately turns those networks into mass mobilization. Finn's history as a stormtrooper connects him to others who also rejected conditioning. Poe grows from an impulsive pilot into a leader who must ask others to participate rather than assume command alone can create victory. Rey refuses both the identity Palpatine assigns her and the isolation she once used for protection. The final defeat of the Sith is therefore paired with a broader claim that inheritance matters, but it does not dictate the social relationships, institutions, or names through which people choose to live.
IDS anthropology
Anthropological analysis
The full IDS long-form analysis is included directly on this film page.
01 · Central reading
What an anthropology lens changes
The Rise of Skywalker is preoccupied with inheritance. Rey confronts a biological connection she did not choose, Palpatine attempts to reproduce Sith power through lineage and ritual, and the Resistance survives by creating a coalition larger than its formal organization.
This review does not score the film. It asks what kinds of social relations the story makes visible: who has authority, how institutions reproduce themselves, what counts as family, how belief is organized, who performs necessary labor, how violence is justified, and how people attach meaning to places and objects. The aim is to connect character decisions to the systems around them without pretending that one interpretive framework exhausts what the film can mean.
02 · Anthropology lens
Genealogy and social identity
Rey's connection to Palpatine raises a classic anthropological distinction between descent and identity. Biological ancestry creates a relationship, but it does not determine social belonging or moral action. Rey's final choice of the Skywalker name is an explicit claim that kinship can be constructed through affiliation, memory, and chosen inheritance.
The Rise of Skywalker treats identity as something produced through recognition, memory, classification, and material signs rather than as a fixed inner essence. Names, uniforms, ancestry, scars, masks, reputations, occupations, and institutional records all tell other people how a person is supposed to be understood. Those labels can provide belonging and authority, but they can also restrict movement or preserve a version of the past that a character no longer accepts. This is why memory becomes political. Communities decide which stories to repeat, which failures to hide, and which figures become models for later generations. The film's characters inherit those stories unevenly, and their attempts to accept, reject, or reinterpret them become part of the larger struggle over social identity.
03 · Anthropology lens
Sith Eternal as ritual community
Exegol presents the Sith as more than two individuals. Cultists, architecture, hidden fleets, cloning infrastructure, and ritual language support Palpatine's return. The setting expands Sith continuity into a community organized around secrecy, preservation, and ceremonial transfer of power.
The religious dimension of The Rise of Skywalker is most revealing when belief is treated as organized practice rather than vague spirituality. Knowledge has teachers, texts, rituals, sacred places, rules of transmission, and institutions that decide who may interpret or inherit it. Religious authority can therefore conflict with family obligation, military necessity, political leadership, or personal experience. The film also shows that traditions survive unevenly: some practices remain institutionalized, others are carried by isolated practitioners, objects, memories, or stories after the original organization has weakened. This makes belief part of social history. It shapes how characters understand death, duty, legitimate power, the body, and the future, while disagreements inside the same tradition reveal that religion is never a single automatic response.
04 · Anthropology lens
Relics, archaeology, and authority
Wayfinders, the dagger, ruins, old ships, masks, and inherited lightsabers drive the plot. The characters navigate the present through material traces of the past. Objects do not merely contain clues. They authorize routes, identities, memories, and claims about what earlier generations intended.
What makes this especially important in The Rise of Skywalker is that authority is never only a matter of who gives an order. Power has to move through institutions, recognized offices, information systems, material resources, and relationships that persuade or compel other people to act. The film repeatedly distinguishes formal legitimacy from practical capacity: a government may possess law without control, a commander may possess rank without autonomy, and a resistance movement may lack legal recognition while still exercising real political coordination. Reading the sequence this way shifts attention from individual intention to institutional conditions. It asks who can convert a decision into action, who can challenge that decision, which groups are excluded from the process, and what happens when public rules and lived experience stop matching one another.
05 · Anthropology lens
Coalition instead of centralized command
The final battle depends on civilian and military forces arriving from across the galaxy. Lando's appeal produces a coalition that the Resistance alone could not field. Political capacity emerges through networks and shared opposition rather than through a restored central state.
What makes this especially important in The Rise of Skywalker is that authority is never only a matter of who gives an order. Power has to move through institutions, recognized offices, information systems, material resources, and relationships that persuade or compel other people to act. The film repeatedly distinguishes formal legitimacy from practical capacity: a government may possess law without control, a commander may possess rank without autonomy, and a resistance movement may lack legal recognition while still exercising real political coordination. Reading the sequence this way shifts attention from individual intention to institutional conditions. It asks who can convert a decision into action, who can challenge that decision, which groups are excluded from the process, and what happens when public rules and lived experience stop matching one another.
06 · Anthropology lens
Names and belonging
Names repeatedly matter in the sequel trilogy. Finn chooses a name after leaving the First Order. Ben Solo rejects and then returns to his family identity. Rey is asked who she is and finally answers with an adopted surname. Naming functions as social recognition, not just personal labeling.
In The Rise of Skywalker, this relationship matters because kinship and belonging create obligations that formal institutions cannot fully control. Family, mentorship, adoption, friendship, descent, and chosen partnership each establish different claims about care, loyalty, inheritance, and responsibility. Those claims become politically significant when they collide with military orders, religious discipline, class position, state violence, or expectations about succession. The anthropology lens therefore treats relationships as social structures rather than private emotion alone. A person may belong to several communities at once, and those communities can demand incompatible actions. The resulting conflicts help explain why characters sometimes resist the roles assigned to them and why a change in relationship can reorganize identity more deeply than a change in title.
07 · Anthropology lens
Death, ancestors, and continuity
Rey hears past Jedi voices, while Palpatine claims the accumulated power of the Sith. Both sides construct continuity through relationships with the dead. The film therefore treats ancestry in more than biological terms. Communities are also built through remembered teachers, ritual predecessors, and inherited narratives.
The religious dimension of The Rise of Skywalker is most revealing when belief is treated as organized practice rather than vague spirituality. Knowledge has teachers, texts, rituals, sacred places, rules of transmission, and institutions that decide who may interpret or inherit it. Religious authority can therefore conflict with family obligation, military necessity, political leadership, or personal experience. The film also shows that traditions survive unevenly: some practices remain institutionalized, others are carried by isolated practitioners, objects, memories, or stories after the original organization has weakened. This makes belief part of social history. It shapes how characters understand death, duty, legitimate power, the body, and the future, while disagreements inside the same tradition reveal that religion is never a single automatic response.
08 · Synthesis
What the film reveals when the lenses are connected
Taken together, the major lenses in this review — Genealogy and social identity, Sith Eternal as ritual community, Relics, archaeology, and authority, Coalition instead of centralized command, Names and belonging, and Death, ancestors, and continuity — show why The Rise of Skywalker works as more than a sequence of plot events. The Rise of Skywalker is preoccupied with inheritance. Rey confronts a biological connection she did not choose, Palpatine attempts to reproduce Sith power through lineage and ritual, and the Resistance survives by creating a coalition larger than its formal organization. The recurring pattern is that large historical changes become real through ordinary social mechanisms. Institutions classify people, families create competing obligations, religious traditions authorize some forms of knowledge, labor and technology make political projects possible, and places shape who can move or act safely. The film also leaves tensions unresolved, which is analytically useful. Social systems rarely change all at once, and a victory, revelation, or regime shift does not erase the institutions and memories that came before it. For IDS, the value of the film lies in following those continuities and contradictions instead of reducing the story to a single political message.
09 · Method
How IDS is reading this film
The analysis treats Star Wars as a fictional social world rather than evidence about any real population. Anthropological concepts are used as questions, not as claims that fictional societies map directly onto real cultures. The review distinguishes events shown or established by the story from IDS interpretation about institutions, kinship, belief, political economy, identity, material culture, and historical change. That distinction matters because interpretation should make the source material more legible without quietly turning analysis into additional canon.
People in this story
Character list
Open existing IDS dossiers or search the archive for additional coverage.