I wanted to wait a bit before writing on this, but it’s spoiler time if you haven’t seen the Last Jedi.
SPOILERS
SPOILER SPACE
Okay, so in the Last Jedi, we get the moment where we see the potential double turn, with Kylo seemingly going “good” only for us to find out that he hasn’t really gone good but has really gone sort of a different shade of evil.
In that moment, though, Star Wars hits us with the deepest message it has managed in all these years. In Kylo, we see someone who is deeply flawed (just as the other protagonists are), but unlike anyone else we’ve encountered — not Anakin, not Ben, not Luke, not Han, not even Leia though she’s come closest– Kylo has a very hyper-aware sense of self.
We find out in this film that Luke went to kill Ben Solo when he realized that Solo was connected to the dark side. It didn’t happen exactly as Kylo remembers (if we trust Luke’s recollection), but we see Luke making yet another mistake in that moment and paying dearly for it.
Kylo, however, didn’t do anything THAT outrageous, if we understand the world the way he does. Yes, he destroyed Luke’s temple and his trainees, but he did that because he believed Luke meant to kill him, and a child in fear for his life without the ability to control his connection to the Force is likely to do such things (Anakin knowingly slaughtered a whole collective of Jedi padiwans and we accept that he can be redeemed, so Kylo isn’t so far off). Kylo also learns in this moment not to trust the people he loves, as his mother and father left him in the hands of an uncle that would sooner kill him than help him to understand his powers.
Kylo himself invokes the moment where he killed his father, Han Solo, talking about his need to lose earthly connections (there’s a long standing cliche, with some psychology research behind it, about how a male doesn’t become his own “man” until his father is gone). We see, however, that he’s grown from that moment, as he hesitates to kill his mother (who we then see can’t be so easily dispatched anyway).
The moment when Kylo kills Snoke is emotionally laden, but I realized (as I am sure many did while watching) that it wasn’t the redemption of Ben Solo. Ben Solo is dead. And that’s sort of the whole key to why Kylo, in many ways, is the hero of this story. Rey– while she’s an amazing female hero and has a fascinating story– is looking for someone to show her what she needs to do. She’s driven by her desire to find out who she really is (a moment that hits like a ton of bricks in the film, right down to Kylo goading her to say it herself before telling us what we all sort of already knew). Rey looks to Han Solo, looks to Leia, looks to Luke, to Maz Katana, in a lesser degree to Poe Dameron.
Kylo Ren wants to look into himself. And we see the good and the bad of that. On the good side, he realizes that Snoke is not the answer to rule the universe. He extinguishes that threat (perhaps– perhaps not, if you read deeply into fan theories). But on the bad side, he’s not one of our rebel scum. Kylo understands something that no one else has really understood, and in a sense, I think we’ve seen that he IS the heir to Anakin and Luke in that he does want to bring balance to the Force. He just wants to bring that balance by destroying everything that used to exist.
We also see that Kylo, though he is trying to do what he believes is right, still carries his deepest scar: he is manipulated by Luke into allowing the tiny rebellion to escape. But even here, Kylo is a representation of how balance would work. He is cold and calculating, then he’s irrational and emotional.
I think that as fans, we’re Kylo Ren, too. We feel the deep emotional attachment to the Star Wars universe and to the stories and the traditions, but at the same time, we know that we need something new. We need to blow the old up and stop trying to make the stories work with aged Han, Leia and Luke, with the old Millennium Falcon. It’s time to see what happens when the past is dead.
Even if that hurts us.