As you may expect, spoilers follow for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
A lot of cool things happen in The Last Jedi, and for reasons of varying validity, some people are mad at them. Specifically, near the end of the film, Luke Skywalker appears on the salt planet of Crait in order to help the remains of the Resistance fight the First Order, miraculously survives an all-out attack from all their weaponry, duels with Kylo Ren, and gets stabbed in the heart with a lightsaber. He’s dead!, you have every reason to assume, but then … he’s not? Turns out Luke was actually projecting a version of himself all the way from Ahch-To. Then, he melts away into nothingness. For some viewers, Luke’s powers seemed implausibly powerful, like they’d been invented out of nowhere for the sake of a plot by a madman director who was ruining the franchise and didn’t care about the Star Wars canon. Rian Johnson, that madman director, has decided to quietly point out on Twitter that there’s totally a basis for that twist within the Star Wars universe.
For anyone wondering, The Jedi Path is an annotated Jedi training manual that was published in 2011. It’s not technically canon, as everything that was part of the Expanded Universe was wiped away in 2014 in advance of the release of The Force Awakens, but it’s definitely precedent. Also, in case you thought you were going to catch Johnson on Leia’s miraculous use of the Force to survive in space, Johnson has another explanation coming for you.
To be fair, “she’s a badass muthafucka” is not technically a thorough explanation, but to be doubly fair, she is.
