Published
Episode 3 of a Star Wars podcast that ran on this domain spent its best segment on the question that owned 2015: is Rey Luke’s daughter? The trilogy has long since answered, twice, differently, which makes this page the right place for the format theories deserve once canon closes: a scorecard. Every major 2015 theory, graded against what the films did.
The answer, in two stages
The Last Jedi (2017) delivered the bravest possible no: Rey’s parents were “filthy junk traders” who sold her for drinking money, nobody, by design, in a saga built on bloodlines. Two years later The Rise of Skywalker revised the ruling: her father was a cloned, Force-null “son” of Palpatine in hiding, making Rey the Emperor’s granddaughter, and the “nobody” answer technically true of her parents’ chosen anonymity. The saga’s last line then split the difference — “Rey Skywalker,” a name taken, not inherited. Scored as drama: 2017’s answer remains the consensus braver one; 2019’s remains canon. This page reports both and lets the argument stand, which is what a scorecard owes its readers.
The theories, graded
Luke’s daughter, the 2015 favorite, built on the lightsaber calling to her and the Skywalker piloting genes. Wrong, and instructively: the films used the audience’s certainty as misdirection twice. Grade: F, with sympathy. Obi-Wan’s granddaughter, the connoisseur’s pick (the accents! the mind trick!). Wrong, but the Kenobi series’ Rey-adjacent warmth reads as a nod. Grade: C-minus. A Palpatine, genuinely proposed in 2015, genuinely fringe. Right, for reasons no theorist could have foreseen (the clone-father mechanism was invented later). Grade: A, asterisked. Nobody at all, the anti-theory, argued mostly by people tired of bloodlines. Right for two years, then half-right forever. Grade: B-plus and the moral high ground. The Snoke theories the folded-in details post tracked (Plagueis, ancient evil, Vader remnant) all scored zero against “Palpatine’s vat-grown proxy,” an answer engineered after the theorizing ended.
The rumor in the headline, resolved
One of 2015’s louder casting rumors paired Michael B. Jordan with a Boba Fett spin-off. Both halves evaporated, the spin-off lost its director within months and never recovered (a later Mangold version also vanished), and Fett returned years later through The Mandalorian, played by Temuera Morrison in continuity with his Jango casting — the Attack of the Clones page covers that lineage. Jordan’s own 2015, meanwhile, went to Creed — the showdown this site settled in his favor. The unmade Fett film belongs on the tracker’s shelf of projects that were reported, believed and never announced dead.
Why theory scorecards deserve pages
Fan theories are the one genre of film writing guaranteed to be settled, and almost nobody goes back to grade them; the internet’s boldest predictions just compost. This site keeps its ledgers precisely for what happens after the answer arrives; scoring the Rey argument is the same discipline the statuses page applies to unmade films, pointed at mythology instead. Final standing: the favorite was wrong, the fringe was right, and the saga’s actual answer (you pick your name) was better than the question.