'The Last Jedi': Even a Sith Lord in Training Loves His Mom

Warning! Potential spoilers for The Last Jedi ahead.

Can we talk about that new trailer for #TheLastJedi that just dropped Oct. 9?

Now that I've found my heartbeat again, I can finally sit back and really take a look at what's going on with the new Star Wars heroes audiences were introduced to in The Force Awakens. Rey, a personal favorite, appears to be wooed by new bad guy Kylo Ren, who's sporting what appears to be a high-tech healing agent or something over the scar that she gave him at the end of The Force Awakens. Jedi master #LukeSkywalker appears to be having a crisis of sorts that hearkens back to the emotional upheaval he went through in Empire Strikes Back from the original series of Star Wars films, and who can really blame him, given what Rey is likely asking him to do? Between my belief that she's asking him for Jedi training in order to understand her new powers and my belief that she's trying to commission him to take on his nephew in much the same way he battled his father Darth Vader, aka Anakin Skywalker, I'm not quite sure what to think, but either way, Luke is likely in for a hell of a ride.

The scene I keep revisiting in my head, though, is that all-too-brief scene of Kylo Ren actually joining the battle — something his grandfather very rarely did (for instance, we only see Darth Vader in his own TIE fighter in Star Wars: A New Hope) — and faced with the decision of gunning down his own mother, General (once Princess) Leia Organa. It's possible I keep looking at that scene in particular because of my own experiences as a mother, or because like so many other #CarrieFisher fans, I am eager to discover how those at Disney and Lucasfilm deal with her real-life death on screen.

It's possible, though, that part of my intrigue about those brief moments which appear to highlight some sort of inner conflict, that Kylo Ren is dealing with lies in a theme introduced by the series back in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and further highlighted by the events of Revenge Of The Sith. Where the original Star Wars trilogy that ran from 1977 to 1983 focused on the relationship between fathers or father figures and sons, both The Phantom Menace and Attack Of The Clones explored the relationship that sons and mothers share.

Look at the closeness that a young Ani and Shmi Skywalker shared in The Phantom Menace. She, like presumably all mothers, wanted the best for her boy, and she honestly believed that sending him off to be with the Jedi Knights was far better for him than a lifetime of slavery. While one could argue that being the galaxy's biggest dictator is definitely a step up from slavery, that's a discussion for another time.

By the time Attack of the Clones ended, Shmi Skywalker was dying, a victim of having been kidnapped by Tusken Raiders, and most of that movie deals with the struggles an older Anakin deals with in trying to control his feelings about the pain his mother appears to be in. In spite of not having seen his mother for years, Anakin still seems to have a significant connection to her and mourns her death as violently as he would have if they'd spent years at each other's side. It's clear that Anakin and Shmi were as close as they'd been during his formative years on Tatooine.

In the Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer, it appears as though Kylo Ren is readying to gun down the ship that he knows his mother, General Leia, is on. Now, at this early stage of this particular series of Star Wars films, we know that this Sith Lord in training appears to have had turmoil in his ultimate decision to kill his father, Han Solo, but he very definitely seems to be hesitating to kill his mother, and with good reason.

It doesn't help that General Leia appears to be staring out the window, directing her thoughts to where she feels her son's TIE fighter might be and silently imploring him to stand down. Fans have long suspected that Leia also has some degree of Force energy; as a member of the Skywalker family, how can she not? Certainly, near the tail end of Empire Strikes Back, it appears as though she "hears" Luke's pleas for help — something she might not have otherwise been able to do if she didn't have some degree of the Force — and scenes in The Force Awakens suggest that she very definitely felt it when Han Solo was cut down and murdered.

However, what if it wasn't the loss of her longtime love she felt, but the pain her own son felt at having done as he did? It very much seemed during that scene on the bridge over the chasm in The Force Awakens that Kylo Ren was every inch the tortured soul in the moments before he killed his father, so given the Force runs strong in the Skywalker family, doesn't it make sense that perhaps Leia floundered briefly in The Force Awakens because of what her son Kylo Ren was feeling and not because of Han Solo's brutal murder?

Could the thought of murdering his mother be what's causing the seeming hesitation on Kylo Ren's part in the new trailer for The Last Jedi?

I'm certain that director Rian Johnson had to consider where he was going very carefully in the immediate aftermath of Carrie Fisher's death December 27, 2016, but I'm not sure that fans will respond positively to the thought that the character of General Leia was killed at her own son's hand. While it would be interesting if the story saw Kylo Ren struggling with the prospects of having killed his mother as well has his father, having one of the most beloved characters in Star Wars history be murdered by her own son might not be the way to bring General Leia's story to its end.

We won't know the answers til December 15, which of course can't come soon enough.