Late last week, we covered a recent Star Wars leak about the alleged setting for Disney’s next Star Wars film series, the High Republic. But it seems leakers aren’t quite done with the Skywalker Saga yet either, as YouTube, Reddit, and a number of trusted outlets such as AVClub have now come together to release and verify what was supposedly Colin Treverrow and Derek Connoly’s first script for Episode IX before they were taken off the project. Originally coming to us from filmmaker Robert Meyer Burnett’s YouTube channel and later posted on the r/starwarsleaks subreddit, the newly revealed script is titled Star Wars: Duel of the Fates, after the iconic score John Willaims wrote for key lightsaber duels in the prequel trilogy, and tells a drastically different story from what we ended up getting in The Rise of Skywalker.
Supposedly written in December 2016, about a week before Carrie Fisher’s unfortunate passing, Trevorrow’s script features many key differences from The Rise of Skywalker, such as keeping Emperor Palpatine dead and rejecting the idea of Kylo Ren redeeming himself. Instead, it opts for a more direct follow-up to The Last Jedi, where Rey is still descended from nobody in particular, Kylo Ren is the main villain, and Rose Tico is still a major character. This time around, the plot instead focuses on a galaxy taken over by the First Order, which has cut off interplanetary communication to prevent rebellion, as well as Kylo Ren’s continued fall to the dark side. Let’s walk through its basic plot beats.
Continuing with the split story structure of The Last Jedi, the film opens with Rose, Finn, C-3PO, and R2-D2 spearheading an assault against the now promoted Chancellor Hux on Coruscant to activate an old Jedi beacon that would re-establish galactic communications for the Resistance. Meanwhile, Poe, Rey, and Chewbacca instead go on a distant journey to find a more Force-centric solution to the Galaxy’s problems. Kylo Ren, on the other hand, is busy tracking down Palpatine’s old master, “Lovecraftian” monster Tor Valum, to finish his training in the dark side, after stealing a Sith holocron Palpatine left behind for Darth Vader pinpointing Valum’s location in case he died and Vader needed a new way to train a turned Luke in the dark side.
Along the way, characters argue over whether Kylo Ren can be redeemed, with Rey believing in him and Finn and Leia being more skeptical (Here, we get a particularly cute line where Rey tells Finn that he’s the one who convinced her of the power of redemption in the first place). Luke, seemingly on Rey’s side, also takes advantage of his Force ghost powers to haunt Ren throughout the film, trying to turn him back to the light. In case you’re thinking the whole film is just talking heads and philosophy, though, don’t worry. While fan favorites like Babu Frik are absent in this draft, we instead get Finn and Rose hijacking a Star Destroyer, Chewbacca flying an X-Wing, a droid modeled after Darth Maul, and Rey wielding a new hybrid weapon constructed from her Force Awakens staff and the shattered remnants of Luke/Anakin’s lightsaber after it was destroyed in The Last Jedi (how exactly did she put that thing back together in Rise of Skywalker, anyway?).
After a film’s worth of adventure, the story would conclude on Mortis, a planet from the Clone Wars cartoon that once served as home to a number of beings that can only be described as Force Gods. Here, Rey would duel Ren as the ghosts of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Luke appear to try to turn him back to the light, before ultimately failing and deciding that he must be defeated for the good of the galaxy. If you’re wondering where Anakin is, it seems Ren would have dropped his Vader-worship by this point in the film, throwing his helmet over a cliff and claiming the old Sith Lord betrayed the dark side by letting love weaken him in the end. On the less mystical side of things, Lando Calrissian would meanwhile be busy uniting the Galaxy’s smugglers to form a navy to take down the First Order fleet.
There’s a lot to take in with this story, and to be fair, some of it does sound like fan fiction. In particular, bringing Mortis into the films and involving a Darth Maul doppelganger droid may have been a touch too lore-obsessed for mainstream audiences. But other touches, like maintaining Rey’s parentage, following Kylo Ren’s character arc from sidekick to main villain, and even Rey’s makeshift saber staff seem to give the film a more conclusive feel than The Rise of Skywalker’s more reboot-centric tone. It’s not the film we got, and it’s tough to know if it would have worked out on screen- movies are more than their scripts and Treverrow is still the director behind the critically maligned The Book of Henry– but, like Rey, I suppose it’s up to you to decide if he deserves redemption.
Still, neither Colin Trevorrow nor Lucasfilm has as of yet confirmed the script’s veracity, so as enticing as some of its plot points may be, remember to take it with a big heaping Crait-sized grain of salt. That said, aside from YouTube and Reddit, both AVClub and Slashfilm claim to have independently verified the script as legit, and for what it’s worth, are responding positively to its story.
Regardless, even if the script turns out to be a hoax, this recent explosion of interest in alternate takes on Episode IX does point to a larger dissatisfaction with what we actually ended up getting, something Disney will have to keep in mind as it decides where to take its flagship sci-fi series next.
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