This month’s Star Wars writing prompt from the site Anakin and His Angel is, “After you’ve seen The Last Jedi with your favorite people once, twice, maybe even five times and enjoyed celebrating the most wonderful time of the year, we all want to know what your one favorite scene from the film was. Was it a scene that shocked you? That you hoped for? How did it resonate with you? What made it different from the rest of the film?”

I was so incredibly anxious to have Luke and Leia reunite in The Last Jedi, knowing that with Carrie Fisher’s death, this would be the only movie for it to happen. While I had really adored The Force Awakens, only having a brief wordless sighting of Luke meant that this movie better deliver.

The Skywalker twins have been my favorites since I was a child.  I viewed them as heroes,  plus I loved the public personas of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. Neither became a mega-star like Harrison Ford, but to me they were so much more than that, they were REAL.

Image result for luke and leia the last jedi reunion

*Spoiler Alert*

Luke’s reluctance to leave his self-imposed exile on Ahch-To concerned me, and I didn’t understand his reasoning to stay put. I felt he was letting his family and the Rebels down, betraying the Jedi’s and taking the coward’s way out (but my feelings on that will come soon on a future post). I needed him to reunite with his sister and bring some order into the chaos of the struggling rebellion.

So when he showed up in the cave on the planet Crait where the Rebels were making a last stand, I was heartened. While Luke and Leia’s conversation was much much too brief, the scene was the one that touched me the most, in a movie that overall angered me (again, a conversation for another post). Luke handed Han’s dice to Leia, which I thought was a sweet way to connect the original three heroes. Within minutes they parted and Luke went out to battle his nephew Kylo. When we find out that all of Luke’s interactions were just an astral projection, I felt cheated. I was beyond angry! It took me a second watching of the movie, and some time to cool off, to realize that Leia would have known that Luke was just a projection. So while even if their physical bodies didn’t meet, their minds and souls did. Perhaps the next movie would have given us a better and more complete resolution had Carrie Fisher not died, but we will have to live with this reunion.

As such, my favorite scene was quite bittersweet. The Skywalker twins did not get the ending I felt they deserved, but I will try to believe that their reunion was filled with enough love and acceptence for the two siblings to feel complete.

-Nancy