ST Adam Driver (Kylo Ren) in Episode IX

I know that some people are rooting for Kylo to be fully evil and remain evil in Ep. 9, but what I don't get is if the plan was always to make Kylo super evil why didn't they make him purely evil from the very beginning of TFA? Why bother telling us he's conflicted in two thirds of the ST? Telling us he's conflicted practically begs us to speculate that he could be turned. Heck Han did try to turn him in TFA and Rey too in TLJ. What would be the point of all of that only to say, "Nope! Our plan is to make him evil and keep him evil"?

It seems to me that they are telling a redemption story. They purposely showed Kylo as conflicted to plant the idea that he could be redeemed and then they purposely had Kylo turn down two opportunities to be redeemed to try to convince the audience that he's never going to be redeemed all so they can give him a redemptive moment in the last movie of the ST.

Do people that want Kylo to be pure evil in Ep. 9 have a problem with Luke's behavior in the hut in TLJ? If Luke believed that Ben was too far gone and there was no way to stop him from becoming pure evil and Ep. 9 shows Kylo to be pure evil all the way through the film will people in the audience think, "Damn! Luke was right after all! I was wrong to be mad at Luke for considering killing his nephew in his sleep! Now that I see Kylo is as evil as Luke believed him to be in the hut Luke totally should've killed Kylo when he had the chance!"

ETA: If Kylo remains pure evil then the the ST is implying that Luke basically told Rey, "see I told you so. You were wrong. I was right. Kylo is pure evil. He can't be redeemed". While Luke was telling Rey that before she left to try to turn Kylo Luke tells Leia that "nobody is ever really gone". By the end of TLJ Luke believes that Kylo isn't really gone, i.e. that he can still come back to the light side. If that's the case it wouldn't make sense for Kylo to be pure evil for the rest of the ST. That would mean Luke believed Ben Solo could be trained as a Jedi, then he changed his mind and thought Ben Solo was too far gone and couldn't be redeemed, then Luke changed his mind again and in effect said that Kylo can be redeemed...and then Ep. 9 comes out and the movie tells us that Luke was wrong again and that Kylo can't be redeemed? What?

 

No. The problems are:
- Murdering Han
- Mentally obviously instable
- Watching the FO attacking Leia more than once without showing any kind of emotion
- Killing the village guys
- After Snoke is dead telling Rey to let the past die (incl. his own mother).

 

The Leia thing is a bit incorrect. He was about to use the Force to save her and when he said to take no prisoners, his reaction showed it all. Leia was likely the key to his return in IX.

 

All of the OT3, and Rey, have sacrificed in some way and made a choice on some level related to not killing Ben Solo. The only way to honor those choices is for him to come back and pay that off by becoming atoner for the rest of his life. The smart thing that Johnson did to help on that front is remove Snoke from the picture and give Ben Solo a complication that could make his heart grow (Rey). With Snoke out of the picture I believe a coup d'état with a returning Knights of Ren faction is the most logical outcome here. They will return. We will learn more about the Temple night from their perspective. We will meet them and Ben Solo will try to make them into his new guard. We will learn that one of them sees himself as more of an alpha within the group and wants to challenge Ben Solo and who's even further gone than Ben Solo is. Hux will work with that person to overthrow Ben Solo and the new villain and Hux and the remaining Knights of Ren will become the new threats of IX. I also think they will write it where this new group is responsible for Leia's death on-screen. Perhaps it's implied that she's recovering in a bacta chamber (body double from far away) and these people know this and destroy and Ben Solo sees it. From that point on he becomes an uneasy ally of the Resistance advising them on FO weaknesses and tactics and getting his hands dirty now and then to help them in a continuation of the Praetorian Guard dynamic where we see he and Rey kick butt together again.

You don't buy a soap opera in space to kill off all of the bloodlines everyone knows. You might add to the known bloodlines with new ones but you don't kill all of the big ones off entirely. I also don't think you kill a villain in transition that's only in his early 30s and who might only have been embracing the Dark Side for 7 years of his life when he might be able to atone for the rest of it.

They've already set up the difference between Ben Solo and Kylo Ren. Ben Solo took his glove off to reach out and confort Rey and opened up his heart to her and told her she wasn't alone. Kylo Ren kept the glove on when he made his offer again and was mean-spirited and angry again. Rey knows the difference and is only sympathetic to the good she knows that's within him still and the good she personally has seen seen that the Dark Side has corrupted.

 

conflict is interesting and
speculation keep people interested. besides I don’t think this character had an end game in it’s conception

Luke was right, as were Holdo and Rose. the theme was failure for our heroes. Rey can’t redeem kylo that doesn’t mean he’s too far gone.

 

The hole atonning thing does not sound convincing to me. It looks more like an excuse for him to remain alive. We fans tend to refuse to accept a character dying. It is the same as with Luke disappearing into the twin sunset thing.

 

But then why would Luke tell Leia that she hadn't lost her son forever?

 

I really think you're on to something here, Mustache. Belief that Ben can come home really does tie into Han and Leia's faith in Luke and his faith in himself. In Luke's conversation with Leia and his subsequent actions on the battlefield, he is righting the ship, so to speak. He has returned to engage because nothing--Leia's cause, the Resistance and his nephew are things that he is not giving up on. He went into exile because he thought everything was lost. He is giving hope to all three by returning (albeit metaphysically) at the end.

 

I'd also add that if Ben wasn't going to be redeemed at some point then why has Luke kill him off by now? I know that's harsh but now that the galaxy has seen how Kylo Ren has been involved in the murder of countless people it seems like that would be enough for the audience to accept Luke killing his nephew. The writers just needed to spin it a little bit. They could've hammered home that Ben Solo died years ago and only Kylo Ren remains. Kylo remaining alive all these years implies that a redemption story might still happen.

To piggyback off of another posters comment from the other day, when Kylo and Rey teamed up in the throne room there seemed to be a giddy excitement in the theater I was in in. What's more the audience seemed to be rooting for Kylo to take Rey's offer to join her side. This is all despite the fact that we'd seen Kylo do a lot of horrible things. All this is to say I think audiences would be willing to accept a Kylo redemption story.

 

The point of Kylo is that he is RELENTLESSLY pursuing to fullfil the destiny of his grandfather: Galactic domination. It's beyond good and evil at this point. Kylo has to be stopped (killed, if necessary) not because he may be "evil" (abstract concept) but because he represents the WORST a Force-user has to offer: not justice or peace, but lack of freedom in the name of order, sanctioned by the rule of the strongest

I'll be MAD if Kylo turns "good" in IX. It would kill his character. And TLJ, despite all its many gross faults, correctly established that love/sex (Rey) was not tempting enough to turn him to the "light". Kylo has to die, and Rey must kill him

 

I mean...I kinda agree in some areas, but I still would want an evil Ren to be a well-written evil. Not super mustache twirling or "grrr im a bad guy" Palpatine type evil. If he's still evil by the time IX rolls around, make him the type of villain that's paranoid, ruthless, unstable still, etc. It could be a real-world reference to Stalin (or pick one from Russia, America or NK).

As a sidenote, please never post this on any star wars reddit lol. I don't want anything bad to happen to you for saying this.

 

On that note the way I see it Kylo is in pain and he's trying to soothe that pain with the dark side and doing evil things like taking over the galaxy. Ruling over the galaxy is probably just form of distraction for Kylo, a way to bury his pain. I don't think he has an ideology that he's trying to impose upon the galaxy.

More over I think he's constantly trying to convince himself that he's the monster he says he is and being the evil ruler of the galaxy would help with that. However if he can admit that to himself that might in part bring him back to the light side. I think we should be prepared for a redemption story in Ep. 9.

ETA: Evil dudes are a dime a dozen in the Star Wars universe. Kylo staying evil would mean not a lot more than the universe having one more evil dude. Vader was evil for decades. We've already had the evil Skywalker story. Redeeming him and letting him live would be more unique. Killing him would end the possibility of new interesting stories for the character.

 

I mean...technically redeeming him again would be a little repetitive too. Keeping an evil yet interesting character evil, especially when everyone's expecting redemption would be pretty different too. Unfortunately there's only one movie left and he's only become more of a villain. So there isn't much time to give him a convincing redemption and have him live where he's accepted by the heroes willy-nilly. It'd be different if it was a multi season show where we see it slowly happen and stuff. But I feel like him suddenly turning good and having the Resistance and heroes forgive him instantly would be a cop-out. Only opening up more stories about his eternal man-pain and how he got away with everything lol.

 

Agreed. That is how Star Wars does storytelling (at least that's how they did in the past)-with lots of hinting and foreshadowing. The way these saga films are told, plot details like this have always been anything but subtle.

What I predict is that the "twist" (though it doesn't seem much of a twist if we're all predicting it LOL) we're going to see in Episode IX is Rey or various members of the resistance in some state of urgent peril, and we will see a conflicted-across-three-films Kylo Ren finally make a choice to ride in and save her or them all. And I also predict he will die, whether right away in the process, or later on after accomplishing whatever endeavor they're in the middle of.

I know it strongly reflects the events of ROTJ, but the ST has already had so many other things that resemble OT events or imagery, so it's not so farfetched of an idea. And to me a galaxy saving self-sacrifice and subsequent death pulls on the heartstrings much more strongly than just saying "okay I'm good again, sorry about killing all those Jedi and my dad and stuff" or him staying evil and just being killed, like any other textbook villain.

I know these may not come true-but we all make "predictions," don't we??

 

Yeah while I'm hoping Kylo is redeemed and lives my gut tells me he'll sacrifice himself. That said they could make it look like he sacrificed himself but then reveal or strongly imply that he's still alive, though everybody thinks he's dead except for maybe Rey.

ETA: @RandomGreyJ if Kylo is redeemed I don't think the heroes will welcome him with open arms. If he interacts with the Resistance at all I think they'll view him as a means to an ends, to defeat the FO. That said it wouldn't surprise me if Kylo pulls a Vader and does one good deed that only Rey witnesses. Anyway you cut it I don't think they'll have Kylo accepted by the Resistance as their new best bud.

 

There was a conversation about this in another thread a while back about Darth Vader, and how the galaxy would've treated him if he lived. I say here what I said there: It may be great that he turned back to good, but that does not erase his murderous deeds over the last x-amount of years. He would still need to answer for his crimes, and beyond that-even if he did get some type of "pardon" from the Republic, he would've basically been forever shunned by the beings of the galaxy in general. Nothing he could do afterwords could change the power of public opinion. Therefore as I said with Anakin, Ben would never really be able to reintegrate and live a normal, peaceful life of contentment after that-like nothing happened. He'd have to retreat to some sparsely populated backwater planet on the outer rim, where people don't know who he is or something...

 

Indeed. I agree which is why I think it's best if a redeemed Ben Solo either is thought dead at the end if he's alive or he somehow he slips out before he can be brought to trial. If this were the real world then yes I'd want to see even a redeemed Ben Solo thrown in jail for the rest of his life, but as an audience member watching a popcorn flick I don't want to see an action/adventure movie ground to a halt by a courtroom scene in the last few minutes of an epic saga. What kind of prison could hold a super powerful Force user anyway? I feel like a scene showing Kylo being thrown behind bars would leave the audience thinking, "wait a minute! Can't he use his powers to free himself?"

Nah, a redeemed Ben living a solitary life, keeping a low profile seems the way to go, perhaps on Ahch-To or Tatooine.

 

I fail to see why and how would Kylo be redeemed other than Rey doing a Nomi Sunrider and cutting him from the Force (a slighty over-the-top idea from the Knights of the Old Republic '90s comics).

He counciously embraced darkness in Luke's Academy and embraced Snoke's teachings from a distance with his promises of turning him into the New Vader, and his guilt made him imagine Luke willing to punish (kill) him; he killed Luke's students and turned the rest to the DS; he abandoned his parents and the Rebellion's legacy to embrace the unfulfilled DS destiny of his infamous grandfather; he learned DS techniques to rape the mind of his prisoners; he killed his own father to prove a point; he backstabbed his DS mentor; he would have killed his old Jedi Master and uncle if not for a Force trick; he would have seized and killed Rey (and probably his mother) in Crait as punishment for her rejection had she not escaped...

It doesn't get more selfish and relentlessly egotistical as that. Why and how would he be redeemed seems pointless. If he still feels guilt at this point, I'd call it just a blatant case of bad writing; and, even worse, if he appeared in subsequent SW films as a redeemed good guy it would only made his DS character of the ST incredibly preposterous in retrospect. Vader's chance of redemption was intriguing (at least since ROTJ and the prequels came out) because he used to be one of us; we could forgive him because of his original life as one of us (sympathetic child slave; heroic, if maverick, Jedi Knight and loving, if paranoid, husband), and the possibility of him coming back to us made the character intriguing and the redemption arc cathartic.
On the other hand Kylo is too loathsome-unsympathetic to "come back to us"; his original life as Ben Solo Skywalker is just an unremarkable case of privilege, wealth and teen issues finally gone horribly wrong; his deeds as Kylo Ren are too selfish/dark to be forgiven, his power-ambition too dangerous, his reasons to "come back to us" non-existent...

He has to die

 

Vader personally killed countless people. He was culpable for the deaths of billions. He was basically responsible for the death of the woman he loved and he chopped off his sons hand...and he was redeemed. The same can happen to Kylo.

 

If you want to avoid more OT theft, Kylo should keep sort of waffling but still always choose the dark side. That’s an inverse of Vader, and it’s very in character anyway.

I disagree with the notion that Kylo being redeemed and joining the good guys alive and well would be some kind of overwhelmingly positively received story. People liked the throne room scene, yes. RJ is a good director. I personally didn’t like it because I could not get over what a RotJ ripoff it was, but hey, that’s a good scene to rip off. Part of that is, like RotJ, RJ didn’t have to show the consequences to Kylo reuniting with the good guys. They would look absolutely pathetic if they welcomed him with open arms. People talk about Kylo being involved with a new Jedi Order, like that’s a thing that could happen. Are people just going to not notice that you’ve put a school shooter in charge of the school? Some fans might be cool with it, but yeah, people would notice.

 

Read my last part: Vader was one of us before actually becoming Vader and his life as Anakin was heroic-remarkable enough, plus he was basically manipulated by his Sith Master all along. He didn't kill billions, the Empire-Emperor did. Obi-Wan Kenobi was just as responsible for Padmé's death as Anakin was.
Ben Solo never was one of us. He never was a hero or fought for us in a conflict. His life as Ben Solo was unremarkable before becoming Kylo Ren.

 

Ben was ostensibly a good kid until something in his past coupled with Snoke’s manipulation changed that, at least I think there’s room for Ep.9 to reveal that.

Vader sat back and let his buddies kill billions and did nothing to stop them. That’s pretty evil.

 

Like Kylo stopped Hux from using SKB to do the same?

 

I think we've been led to believe, so far, that Kylo always had quite a bit of darkness within him. I'm guessing that finding out Vader was his grandfather really cemented (at least in his mind) a few things for him.