re: #121 wheat-dogg

So, last night, I decided to watch The Return of the Jedi 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.

Annikan Skywalker was a slave on a remote desert planet and was naturally a good pilot - the only human who could compete in pod racing and was like 10. So latent force powers probably help with being a pilot - as Qin Jon pointed out, you tend to see things before they happen. And she did show herself to be pretty mechanically inclined at the beginning of The Force Awakens, I think.

As for the connection with Kylo Ren, that does seem to be the working theory I’ve seen on fan sites. But there are plenty of people pissed off about it because it’s the internet and we can’t have nice/fun things without someone pissing in the punch bowl.