So, last night, I decided to watch The Force Awakens again, for the third or fourth time, because I had completely missed seeing Jessica Henwick as an X-wing pilot those previous two or three times. The flight helmet covers the top half of her head, so you have to have sharp eyes to realize it’s her in those scenes.

Anyway, I had a thought about how Rey suddenly develops her control of the Force. I’m not a denizen of fan sites, so maybe my hypothesis has been floated before, but I suggest Kylo Ren’s deep-mind probe unleashed Rey’s latent skills. She telepathically “stole” some of his mastery. Had he not tried so hard to pull the map information from her brain (and had she not resisted so strongly), Rey would not have developed her hypnotic and TK powers so rapidly. I had read a critique of Rey as a “Mary Sue” character a few days before. How does a impoverished scavenger from a remote planet, with no apparent piloting experience, manage to steal the Millennium Falcon and fly it (albeit poorly), much less repair it? How does she manage to master Jedi mind control so quickly, when during the first part of the film she seems not especially gifted? For the first question, maybe she’s just amazingly mechanically gifted. Or just very lucky. For the second, it’s Kylo’s “inoculation” of his own Jedi skills into her mind.

On the other hand, for a civilization so remarkably advanced, why does no one in the Star Wars universe ever encrypt sensitive files? Everything mission-critical (maps, plans, locations of secret bases) is in clear-text on what amounts to be USB drives and corporate computer networks.

[Edited to correct the film title — I watched Star Wars VII.]