The hubbub surrounding Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has largely come and gone, and whether you loved it, liked it, or was pretty meh about it (like me), there’s no arguing it marks the end of the 42-years-in-the-making Skywalker Saga. And with that conclusion comes a whole new list of questions about the ins and out behind the mythology of A Galaxy Far, Far Away.
Fortunately, we’ve got the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – The Visual Dictionary hardcover coffee table book by Lucasfilm Story Group member Pablo Hidalgo to pore through, soaking up each little detail we may have missed in the movie– and many of which will only ever exist in the long-running franchise’s ancillary materials.
And while Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – The Visual Dictionary is absolutely chock full of information from cover to cover, we thought it’d be helpful to break down some of the juiciest info we garnered from this handy guide, arranged by category. Enjoy and May the Force Be with You!
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge
- The events of the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge attraction Rise of the Resistance are noted in-canon here, with Kylo Ren having transferred his command to a new Star Destroyer after the battle over Batuu.
- The book also mentions the temporary loan of the Millennium Falcon to Weequay pirate Hondo Ohnaka for the events of the Smugglers Run attraction at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. It even notes the ship’s cockpit having been recently refitted back to having the traditional number of seats.
- Astoundingly, this book even bends over backwards to explain the wrong colors of Poe Dameron’s X-Wing in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. It seems the pilot sometimes recolors his new ship as a tribute to the previous one.
Rey
- While living on Jakku, Rey trained to be a pilot in reactivated Imperial flight simulators.
- Prior to departing the planet with Finn, Rey had never personally piloted a craft into outer space.
- Rey’s possessions, including her speeder and AT-AT home, were claimed by scavengers after she left.
- Kylo Ren’s revelation to Rey about her parents in The Last Jedi was based on her own fears.
- Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber acts as a vergence in the Force, giving Rey insight into past events.
- Rey used information in the Jedi texts she took from the library on Ahch-To to repair the broken Skywalker lightsaber and its shattered kyber crystal.
- The repurposed A-Wing pilot helmet Rey uses in her training is the same one used by Leia in flashback.
Kylo Ren
- Ben Solo was born on the planet Chandrila, home of Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma.
- Ben Solo trained under Luke for 13 years before turning to the Dark Side to become Kylo Ren.
- This book says Ben set fire to Luke’s Jedi temple, but in The Rise of Kylo Ren comic book, we see that he did not. It is likely that Pablo Hidalgo wrote this guide to the movie before the comic was finished.
- The Sith trials of ascendency require the sacrifice of a loved one, hence Ren’s murder of his father Han Solo.
- The kyber crystal in Kylo Ren’s lightsaber was cracked, giving its blade its unusually ragged glow. The smaller blades of its crossguard were also designed to vent the crystal’s excess power.
- The character who mends Kylo Ren’s helmet is a Sith alchemist named Albrekh.
Other Characters
- In addition to reprising his role as Wicket W. Warrick the Ewok, actor Warwick Davis also played a new character named Wizzich Mozzer, a Cyclorrian working for the Resistance.
- Emperor Palpatine had been hunting for immortality since the end of the Clone Wars.
- Leia trained with her brother Luke Skywalker on the jungle planet Ajan Kloss for about a year to become a Jedi before abandoning that path. This planet later housed the Resistance base seen in The Rise of Skywalker.
- Luke’s Force-projection strategy in The Last Jedi is called the Fallanassi technique of Similfuturus, a reference to a religious order from the non-canonical Star Wars Legends timeline.
- Luke Skywalker was 53 years old at the time of his death, more than a decade younger than actor Mark Hamill.
- The Jedi texts (including The Rammahgon, The Aionomica and Chronicles of Brus-bu) were collected by Luke during his travels across the galaxy. Rey had R2-D2 scan the books in his memory core for safekeeping.
- Dominic Monaghan’s character Beaumont Kin is a historian who helps Rey decipher the texts.
- The Knights of Ren are named Vicrul, Cardo, Ushar, Trudgen, Kuruk, and Ap’lek. They are Force-sensitive to a stunted degree, and their command was gifted to Kylo Ren after he proved his worth to Snoke.
- Ap’lek wields a Mandalorian beskar ax, while Trudgen’s mask is crafted from a death trooper helmet.
- Leia’s ability to remember her real mother (though she died in childbirth) is explained away as part of her latent Force sensitivities.
- Lando Calrissian was voluntarily exiled on the planet Pasaana for years before Rey and company’s arrival there, under the pseudonym “The Hermit.” His personal yacht the Lady Luck remained hidden nearby.
- Sometime after Return of the Jedi (and the novel Star Wars: Last Shot), Lando had a daughter who was abducted by the First Order. This happened six years before he accompanied Luke to Pasaana.
- The head of Lando’s cane is sculpted to resemble the structure of Bespin’s Cloud City.
- Lando never finished the Calrissian Chronicles memoir he was seen recording in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
- One cyborg character named Rothgar Deng seen featured in one shot in the cantina on Kijimi is heavily implied to be the bounty hunter formerly known as Dengar.
Vehicles
- Those pointy-winged TIE Fighters from Palpatine’s army are called TIE Daggers.
- The ship flown by Rey’s parents that left her on Jakku was called the Bestoon Legacy.
- The Corellian corvette on Ajan Kloss is actually the Tantive IV, the first ship ever seen in a Star Wars movie.
- Kylo Ren’s TIE Fighter in this film is a modified version of a craft known as the TIE Whisper.
- The Knights of Ren’s smoke-spewing ship is called the Night Buzzard, a former prison transport.
- A newly designed Resistance cra called the Jungle X-Hopper is called a “mini-rig” by its in-universe creator Rose Tico. This is a reference to a series of smaller vehicles made for Kenner’s Star Wars toy line in the 80s.
Locations
- The planet Ilum, as depicted in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the Ahsoka novel, the Jedi – Fallen Order video game and other media, was the one transformed into Starkiller Base by the First Order.
- Snoke’s home planet is listed as Exegol, which makes sense as we saw Palpatine had crafted him there.
- The micro-star that now burns at the former location of Starkiller Base has been nicknamed the Solo.
- Shipyards on Exegol had been producing the vast Sith fleet for decades prior to the beginning of Episode IX.
- The planet Kijimi was once home to mountaintop monasteries, now populated by outlaws and pirates.
- The first planet seen in The Rise of Skywalker is actually the lava world of Mustafar, where Anakin fought Obi-Wan Kenobi. Kylo Ren finds the Sith wayfinder in the ruins of Darth Vader’s castle.
- Mustafar was originally a garden planet, but Corvax’s pursuit of immortality altered its orbital path.
- The frozen iceberg-like location the Falcon visits at the beginning of the film is called the Sinta Glacier Colony.
- Poe’s hyperspace-skipping trick takes the Falcon through the Megafauna Chasm of the Typhonic Nebula, the Mirror-Spires of Ivexia, and the Crystal Chaos of Cardovyte.
Jedi / Sith History
- The World Between Worlds (as seen in Star Wars Rebels) is described in one of the Jedi texts, as is the ethereal realm known as Mortis (as seen in Star Wars: The Clone Wars).
- Jedi Master Odan-Urr is said to have once updated the texts. This is another reference to Legends canon, specifically from the pages of the Dark Horse comic book Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi.
- The beings slaughtered by Kylo Ren at the beginning of the film are Vader cultists called the Alzamec of Winsit, who seek the tears of Lady Corvax– a character introduced in the VR series Vader Immortal.
- The construction of the Sith wayfinders was reverse-engineered from the inner workings of Purrgil– the naturally hyperspace-traveling whale-like creatures first introduced in Star Wars Rebels.
- It is implied that Ochi of Bestoon created the mysterious dagger and inscribed it with runic Sith symbols himself, to act as a means of pinpointing the hidden wayfinder’s location within the crashed Death Star.
- One legion of Sith Troopers is named the Revan Legion, after Darth Revan– the villain of the fan-favorite Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic video games. Other legions have similarly esoteric references as names.
The Resistance
- The Resistance dyed New Republic flight suits to match the colors of the Rebel Alliance.
- The Resistance used T-70 X-Wing Fighters, a step back from the T-85s used by the New Republic.
- The rebuilding of the Resistance was assisted by rumors of Luke reemerging among its ranks.
The First Order
- The firing of Starkiller Base was designed to be seen across the galaxy via spacetime-bending physics.
- As it expanded, the First Order would use newly annexed worlds as sources for additional recruits.
While this is obviously already a tremendous amount of information to digest, the actual book itself is far more densely packed with details, illustrations, cross-sections of ships, character bios, behind-the-scenes information and much, much more. The above list really only represents a very small fraction of the voluminous Star Wars data available by picking up this book (available on Amazon for only $15), which I found to be absolutely worth reading and ironically quite a bit more entertaining than the movie itself.
Pablo Hidalgo undeniably knows his stuff, and has admirably bent over backward here to make countless hours and pages of lore work together as a unified whole. It’s good to know the Lucasfilm Story Group is still capable of making sense of this giant, ever-expanding, often messy tapestry we call Star Wars.