About that Final The Last Jedi Scene

!! There are spoilers here, like immediately in the next paragraph, so don’t scroll down if you haven’t seen the film yet. !!

One of the criticisms I’ve seen repeated about The Last Jedi is that Luke’s departure from the series doesn’t receive the gravity it deserves given his legacy (both in canon and out). While all reactions to the movie are valid (our unique reactions to stories are what make stories worth telling, after all), I want to give voice to why I was satisfied by the conclusion of Luke’s arc.

First, let’s repaint the picture: the meager remains of The Resistance has barricaded itself in a defunct Rebel Alliance base while The First Order bears down on them in a fleet of impressive weapon-tech. The Resistance is woefully outnumbered, colossally outgunned, and their distress signal to allies has gone unanswered. Even General Leia Organa, who has seen rebellions rise and fall her whole life, has succumbed to despair. The spark that ignites the rebellion has gone out, she says, right before Luke Skywalker emerges hooded and cloaked onto the scene. He promptly steps out into the middle of Craite’s arid blight, where the disturbed crimson sand looks like a lake of spilled blood, and faces down a legion of Kylo Ren’s troops and technology.

What follows is Luke inexplicably (or so it seemed) surviving a company of mass weaponry trained and fired on him, and then a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren, during which it seemed like Luke’s farewell might be in the flavor of Obi Wan Kenobi’s strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Ultimately, satisfied that he has distracted Ren long enough to allow Leia’s Resistance to escape, Luke reveals that his physical form isn’t actually present, that Ren has been fighting some sort of incorporeal Force-projection of Luke, and he dissipates from the scene.

Now I get into why I loved it.

Back on Tatooine in A New Hope we were gifted with what would become an iconic shot at a young Luke Skywalker gazing up at the two suns of Tatooine, pondering the galaxy and what stories it held, what role he might play in them, and what it would be to be a starfighter pilot instead of a moisture farmer. This is the first time we hear John Williams’ leitmotif for the Force.

In the time since, Luke has become the starfighter, discovered the dual-edge power of the Force, refined his wielding of the Force, attempted to train a new generation of Jedi, accidentally catalyzed the turning of the Dark Side’s most promising young disciple, and closed himself off to the Force so as to not bring any more missteps upon the galaxy. Like the Force, Luke Skywalker’s footprint upon his world is vast, and not all good.

So when Luke projects himself onto Crait to face down Kylo Ren, he does so using a strength and facility with the Force that we had never conceived of. It is not an act of brazen intrepidity, which we saw then in young Luke and we see now in Poe Dameron, but a measured act of selflessness, his true Obi-Wan moment, for his self-sacrifice here, to defy what his own reasoning has concluded about the future of the Jedi, is what ensures that the downtrodden stablehands of the galaxy, the sons and daughters of junktrader drunks on backwater Jakkus, the FN-2187s who find morality when confronted with depravity, have somewhere else to go.

In a story about the power of the ordinary burgeoning in the shadow of legacy, and about the death of old making space for the new, Luke Skywalker’s final act was making sure that when that next moisture farmer from Tatooine stares up to ponder the unfathomable stars, it is not in vain, and that the latest merry band of righteous insurgents will be there to sweep up the galaxy’s new generation of noble-hearted dreamers.

In his final moment on screen, Luke looks to the sky, where again there are two suns, and again the Force’s leitmotif sounds out, and he knows the types of stories the galaxy holds, and he has done his part that they will remain varied and balanced and the boundless cycle of light and dark will carry on.

So yeah, that’s why I liked it.