This Tiny Detail In ‘The Last Jedi’ Might Be Majorly Setting Up Episode 9

Most of the big reveals in Star Wars: The Last Jedi are pretty obvious while you watch the movie, but there's one smaller moment that stuck out to me that might be setting up a major part of the upcoming Episode 9. Of course, it's still way too early to know anything about what the trilogy-capping next Star Wars movie is going to be about, but there's a subtle line in the middle of The Last Jedi that could be hinting at a bunch of new characters entering the fray. Basically, it comes down to the question: Where are Luke Skywalker's other Jedi students after The Last Jedi? We know he trained a group of Padawans along with Kylo Ren, so where are they, and could they have a part in the next movie? Spoiler alert: This post is going to reveal some details from The Last Jedi, so don't read on if you haven't seen it yet.

So, about halfway through The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker tells Rey about what happened between him and Kylo Ren back in the day that led to his self-imposed exile ever since. The Jedi says that he recruited Kylo (then known as Ben Solo) along with about a dozen other Padawans to train them in the ways of the Jedi, only to watch it all fall apart after noticing a growing darkness inside Kylo. Luke says that Kylo destroyed the Jedi temple and slaughtered some of his fellow students, but took a few of them with him when he left the remote island planet.

So, that means there are still a few other people out there that have trained under Luke and were on their way to becoming Jedi, which is a pretty big deal! I mean, as the name of the movie makes explicitly clear, there is only one Jedi left in the galaxy (and at the end of the movie, that is Rey), so this possibility of other Jedi-trained, Force-sensitive Padawans wandering around somewhere could be a major game-changer moving forward.

There are a couple of issues with this, though. If Kylo Ren selected only a few of his fellow pupils to bring with him when he abandoned Luke for the dark side, then it's most likely that he or Snoke changed them over to the dark side as well. The other issue is that we later found out Luke's initial recounting of Kylo's evacuation to Rey was not the whole truth. After she confronts him with more details, Luke admits that he drew his lightsaber and had a moment where he considered killing Kylo in his sleep, and when Kylo woke up to see this, he fought back and left the island. There's no mention of the other students in the new version of the story, and the update that Kylo was actually defending himself rather than simply going on a rampage may also alter the tidbit about slaughtering his fellow Padawans. But since there's no new info about the students, it's safest to assume Luke was telling the truth about Kylo taking a small group of them with him when he left.

Another pretty important moment that could go hand-in-hand with this is the very last scene of the movie, which shows a small boy using the Force to pick up a broom. Earlier in the movie, we found out that Rey doesn't have a family connection to the Jedi, and these two revelations (the boy and Rey's parentage) seem to be clear signs that the saga may focus more on outsiders and unexpected people learning to wield the power of the Force rather than just the Jedi. Maybe Rey will even become a teacher, and reunite Luke Skywalker's old class of Padawans?