Two years ago, a friend of mine got an awesome opportunity to attend a private screening of The Last Jedi, but was unfortunately not familiar with the Star Wars saga. She turned to me for help, and I attempted to summarize an entire space opera in a few paragraphs. After a bit of polishing, I posted the results here, and I guess people liked it–it remains one of my most widely read blog posts ever.
A Quick Note on Order of Watching
For the uninitiated that might be subjected to some fanspeak en route to and from the movie, a quick clarification: Episode 4 does not refer to the fourth movie that was made. When a fan talks about Episode 4, they’re talking about the first movie that was made: A New Hope.
You might already be aware that the first set of movies made in the late 70s-early 80s are actually the middle chunk of the narrative. The second set of movies, made in the late 90s-early 2000s, tell the beginning of the story, and are collectively referred to as the ‘prequels’. Fans therefore have an ongoing debate about how to introduce a new person to the saga: do you start at the beginning of the story, or show them in the order they’re made?
All three sets of Star Wars movies have very different feels, and some fans believe it’s important to begin with the original set of movies (Episodes 4, 5, and 6) to set the tone; plus, watching the prequels first spoil a couple of things that were intended to be big reveals in Episodes 5 and 6.
If you’re here, though, you either don’t have the time or inclination to binge-watch eight movies, or you already know all this and are just reading out of a sense of morbid curiosity. It’s way easier on the storyteller to just tell everything in narrative order, so that’s what I’m doing here.
(Also, there’s some pretty awesome additional pieces of the story out there–additional movies Rogue One and Solo, and series like The Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, and The Mandalorian. I’m skipping those here, and focusing on the stuff I think will be important for Episode 9.)
What You Need to Know, Generally:
The Force is space magic.
The Jedi are space wizards.
The Sith are evil space wizards.
The Rebellion, which eventually becomes the Resistance, are the good guys.
The Empire, which morphs into the First Order, are the bad guys.
The Prequels
Trying to write a play-by-play synopsis of the Prequels will give me as much of a headache as it will give you to read it, so here’s the boiled down version: the Prequels are about a corrupt, power-hungry politician who:
- Orchestrated a completely unnecessary trade war to bolster his standing
- Manufactured a crisis as an excuse to be handed even more power
- Convinced people the good guys were actually the bad guys
- Manipulated otherwise blameless people into making very bad decisions
- Manipulated power-hungry people into becoming unquestioning lackeys who carried out his every command, no matter how obviously bad and insane those commands are
- Manipulated an angry, disaffected young man with a sense of entitlement into becoming a mass murderer AS WELL AS an unquestioning lackey who carried out his every insane, obviously bad command
- Sowed division and leveraged fear to destroy the Republic and grant himself absolute, unchecked power
Any way, Palpatine gets himself declared Emperor and the former Republic becomes his brand new Empire.
And it turns out that Palpatine is also a Sith (evil space wizard), which, since everybody thought they were extinct, flew under the radar for longer than it should have. But that meant that a delightful bonus achievement of his rise to power was conducting the genocide and near-total extinction of the good space wizards (the Jedi).
And that angsty young man Palpatine manipulated into participating in said genocide? His name is Anakin Skywalker, formerly of the Jedi. One of the last surviving Jedi, a guy named Obi-Wan Kenobi, catches up to him after the massacre and manages to kick his butt while playing a game of Extreme The Floor Is Lava. Palpatine rescues the limbless, extra crispy Anakin and somehow, miraculously, manages to restore his rapidly fading life… Meanwhile, elsewhere, Anakin’s wife is simultaneously, mysteriously dying of no cause that anyone can discern…
But not before she gives birth to their twins.
Palpatine puts Anakin in a badass cyborg suit and calls him Darth Vader.
Also, Darth Maul was in there somewhere. He’s the guy with the horns all around his red and black head. He doesn’t say much, and he’s mostly renowned for looking cool and dying spectacularly. Just thought I’d mention it.
The Original Trilogy
Orphaned farm boy Luke Skywalker (name sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) is bored out of his skull on a desert planet farming moisture, whatever that entails. Princess Leia (you’ve probably seen pictures, she’s got the super cool hair buns) is a secret agent for the Rebellion against the Empire, which has been in power for nearly two decades at this point. Leia steals plans for a moon-sized mass murder device called the Death Star, and hides them in a droid (space robot) that she jettisons over Luke’s planet before the Empire captures her and takes her to said Death Star.
The droid winds up in Luke’s possession, and it’s under strict instructions to find and get help from Obi Wan Kenobi–the space wizard that chopped apart angsty Anakin Skywalker-turned-bad-guy-Darth-Vader back up a few paragraphs ago. It turns out Obi Wan is still alive and in hiding in Luke’s planet, so the space robot drags Luke along to find him. Obi Wan tells Luke that his Dad was a space wizard too (without going into much detail because, ya know, it ended rather badly) and gives Luke his dad’s old lightsaber (laser sword). Then he drags Luke along on his mission to get the plans for the moon-sized mass murder machine (the Death Star) to Leia’s (Princess Cool Hair) home planet. They hire a smuggler named Han Solo (sarcastic Harrison Ford) to take them there.
Before they can arrive, the Empire uses the Death Star (giant mass murder ball) to blow the planet up.
Their ship gets sucked into the Death Star, and they figure, while they’re there, they might as well all rescue the princess. Space Wizard Obi Wan sacrifices himself to Darth Vader’s lightsaber (laser sword) to let the rest of the group escape, and they bring the Death Star plans to the Rebellion’s secret base, with the Empire’s giant murder ball in hot pursuit. The rebels figure out that there’s a weakness in the Death Star plans they can exploit. Farmboy Luke jumps in a space ship and, with a little help from the space magic that he apparently inherited from his father (reminder: that’s Darth Vader), blows up the Death Star before it can blow up the rebels.
… But the fight isn’t over. A couple years later, all your favorite rebels have been cornered on an icy planet by the Empire, where the sexual tension between Princess Leia of the Cool Hair and loveable rapscallion Han Solo (still played by sarcastic Harrison Ford) is painfully obvious. Luke sees of vision of now-dead space wizard Obi Wan telling him to go find a new space wizarding teacher.
The Empire attacks, causing the Rebels to scatter into the galaxy. Han-rrison Ford takes Leia to safety aboard his ship, the Millennium Falcon, which gets badly damaged in the escape. Luke follows Obi Wan’s instructions and discovers that his new Force (space magic) coach is a diminutive, shriveled green alien named Yoda, who considers normal sentence speaking order more of a guideline then a rule.
Smuggler Han decides to hit up an old friend for desperately needed ship repairs, and en route to his friend’s planet, he and Princess Leia officially become an item. On arrival, his buddy, Lando, immediately proves himself a bad friend by hitting on Han’s new girlfriend, and really, Han should have taken that as a sign and peaced out, because Lando caved to extortion from the Empire and sold them out to Darth Vader (reminder: that’s the formerly angsty, now evil mass-murdering space wizard that they tangled with on the Death Star).
Vader turns Han into statuary and sells him to a galactic crime lord as a wall decoration.
Meanwhile, farmboy-turned-Force user Luke has been whining his way through space magic lessons, and despite the fact that his shriveled green teacher Yoda would probably only give him about a C+ to this point, senses that his friends are in trouble and decides that he is totally ready to leave his training and take on Big Bad Vader.
Spoiler alert: he is not ready.
A lightsaber (laser sword) fight ensues.
While Vader slices and dices Luke, terrible friend Lando feels some remorse and helps Princess Cool Hair Leia back onto Han’s ship to escape. Vader reveals that he’s ACTUALLY LUKE’S DAD! (Remember that, from way a bunch of paragraphs back up there?) and Luke’s response is to throw himself off the planet. Somehow–could it be the Force?–Leia senses exactly where to find Luke (literally dangling off the planet) and rescues 90% of him (no word on where that one hand wound up).
Some time later, Space-Wizard-in-Training Luke, Princess Leia of the Still Cool Hair, and Slowly-Redeeming-Himself friend Lando rescue petrified Han ‘Harrison Ford’ Solo from the space gangsters. Luke goes back to tiny green space wizard Yoda to complete his training. Remember how angsty space wizard Anakin Skywalker/future Darth Vader actually had two kids with his mysteriously dead wife? Well, Yoda helps Luke figure out that Leia is the other one–she’s his twin sister.
The rest of the gang finds out that the Empire has built a second, even more terrifying Death Star (Murder Ball) that is being protected by a force field projected from a nearby moon. The Rebel friends go down to the moon to deactivate the force field, while Luke goes to confront Dad Vader.
While the rebels accomplish their mission with the help of the cute, furry natives, Vader takes Luke to see the Emperor (remember that guy?) When the Emperor realizes that Luke is not going to be as easy to manipulate to evil as his dad was, he starts shooting Luke with lightning from his fingertips.
Vader decides to be a good dad for the first and last time in his life, and picks the Emperor up and throws him off a seven-million story balcony, sacrificing himself in the process.
Luke escapes just before the rebels blow up the second Murder Ball.
Also, Boba Fett was in there somewhere. He’s the guy with the cool green space armor. He doesn’t say much, and he’s mostly renowned for looking cool and dying spectacularly. Just thought I’d mention it.
Also also–and this is important–Han shot first.
Episodes 7 and 8
It’s been a couple decades, so here’s your galactic version of Where Are They Now:
The Empire is under new management and is now called the First Order.
There’s a new Republic. It’s funneling money to a Resistance group that is trying to thwart the First Order.
Princess Leia, still of the Cool Hair, is now General Leia of the Resistance. She and Han Harrison Ford Solo had a kid together, and then Han split.
Official Space Wizard Luke tried to start a space wizard training school, and Leia sent her son Ben there for training. This quickly went south, we eventually learn, when Luke sensed evil in his nephew one day and panic-drew his lightsaber (laser sword) on his own relative. Ben lost his mind, went scorched-earth on the whole place, embraced the evil, became part of the First Order (bad guys), and renamed himself Kylo Ren.
Luke runs away and cuts off all contact with everybody.
Now that we’re all caught up, we start with an orphan in the desert and a stranded droid (space robot). Sound familiar?
This particular space robot is called BB8, and he belongs to hotshot Resistance pilot Poe, who got himself captured, stranding BB8 on a desert planet. This is bad, because BB8 is carrying a piece of a map that will show everyone where Luke disappeared to. He gets kind of adopted by an orphaned scavenger girl named Rey.
Hotshot pilot Poe has ridiculously good luck, because a First Order grunt named Finn is having second thoughts about his job as a glorified meat shield for the bad guys. He helps Poe escape, but when they crash land on orphan girl Rey’s planet, Poe can’t be found in the wreckage. Finn also winds up getting taken under orphan girl Rey’s wing, because she mistakes him for a member of the Resistance. A First Order ambush forces them to grab the nearest space ship and escape the planet, and it just happens to be Han’s ship, the Millennium Falcon. Moments after they take off, Han shows up to reclaim his ship.
Han (a much older, grumpier Harrison Ford) begrudgingly decides to drop them off at the nearest Resistance base, after a pit stop at a cantina, which proves to be a bad choice. Kylo Ren (Han and Leia’s emo evil space wizard kid) shows up and kidnaps desert orphan Rey, believing she can lead him to his uncle Luke.
The Resistance (reminder: good guys) show up and chase off the First Order (bad guys) and take defecting bad guy Finn into their fold. They have bad news: the First Order has developed and even bigger, badder Murder Ball called Starkiller Base, and they’re using it to eat stars and blow up planets. Someone’s gotta go infiltrate it so that the Resistance can destroy it. Ex-bad-guy Finn volunteers, because that happens to be where orphan girl Rey was taken, and he was super into her. General Princess Awesome Hair Leia voluntells her ex Han to go as well, and talk some sense into their son.
Much to evil space wizard Kylo Ren’s chagrin, Rey discovers that she has some Forciness of her own, and manages to tap into some space magic and escape his grasp.
Han’s father-son-talk with his evil space wizard son does not go well: Kylo Ren puts a lightsaber through his torso and Han falls down a very large pit to his doom. It literally can’t go much worse than that.
Rey uses her new Force powers (space magic) to fend Kylo Ren off, and she and Finn manage to escape the giant Starkiller Base Murder Ball before the Resistance explodes it.
Now that that’s taken care of, it’s orphan space wizard Rey’s job to take the map and go find Luke, hoping he’ll teach her more about the Force. Luke is NOT having it. His disastrous experience trying to train his nephew (who, reminder, went batshit crazy and became bad guy Kylo Ren) left Luke with some pretty negative feelings about space magic. Luke eventually begrudgingly agrees to teach her a few things, which is probably for the best, because Rey and Kylo Ren apparently have some kind of psychic connection that’s freaking both of them out.
Meanwhile, the Resistance is involved in a big space battle, and hotshot pilot Poe reminds us that there’s a fine line between hotshot and idiot. He manages to take down a huge First Order ship at the expense of half of the Resistance’s fleet. Former First Order soldier Finn, now a part of the Resistance is, again, having second thoughts, and, again, tries to run away from his problems, but is prevented from fleeing by Resistance mechanic Rose, who’s hanging around the escape hatches grieving the loss of her sister in the recent space battle. The First Order is in hot pursuit of what remains of the Resistance fleet, and Kylo Ren clearly has at least a little bit of humanity left, because he chokes up when he gets the chance to open fire on his own mom, General Princess Leia.
Unfortunately, one of his comrades fires on the bridge of the Resistance flagship, killing most of the Resistance higher-ups. Princess General Leia is also on the Bridge, but uses the Force to (barely) save herself. With Leia barely clinging to life and all the other bigwigs dead, the very purple Admiral Holdo takes control of the fleeing Resistance fleet.
Hotshot idiot pilot Poe clearly still thinks he knows best, and is less than thrilled with Holdo’s leadership. He convinces First Order defector Finn and mechanic Rose to undertake an unauthorized mission to find someone to disable the tracking device that’s allowing the First Order to follow the Resistance’s every move. Finn and Rose head to a terrible casino planet looking for a hacker who can handle the job. After causing some mayhem, they find a super creepy one who claims he can handle it, and infiltrate the leader of the First Order’s ship, only to be immediately arrested.
New-space-wizard-in-training Rey, meanwhile, has decided that she is totally ready to leave her training and go try to save poor Kylo Ren’s emotionally tortured soul. He’s not evil, she’s sure; just misunderstood. She also departs for the leader of the First Order’s ship, and upon arrival, is also immediately arrested.
Idiot hotshot Poe is over here leading a mutiny against Leia’s chosen replacement, Admiral Holdo, on the besieged Resistance flagship. Unfortunately for him, Princess General Space Wizard Leia recovers and is pissed at him for screwing things up. It turns out that Holdo’s plan–to evacuate the personnel to an old Resistance base on smaller ships, knowing that the First Order is only tracking (and firing on) the flagship–is a solid one that Leia endorsed, and Poe is ruining it. Leia is so space-mom angry at Poe that she gives him a walloping hard enough to knock him unconscious, allowing the plan to proceed. The crew begin to evacuate, and Admiral Holdo remains on the flagship alone.
Unfortunately, the creepy hacker that Rose and Finn took with them on their unauthorized away mission trades the Resistance’s plan for his freedom. The evacuating Resistance ships suffer heavy casualties (which totally wouldn’t have happened if stupid Poe hadn’t sent Finn and Rose on that completely unnecessary mission in the first place!), and Admiral Holdo, alone piloting the flagship, decides to sacrifice herself for them by turning it around and ramming it through the First Order leader’s ship at light speed. The First Order flagship is fatally damaged. Finn and Rose, though, manage to escape and join back up with the Resistance.
Evil space wizard Kylo Ren had taken good space wizard Rey to see his leader, but when ordered to kill her, he kills the leader instead. Instead of turning back to the good side, he invites Rey to join him on the evil side. Rey refuses and flees the ship as Kylo Ren declares himself the new leader of the First Order–and his first order is to destroy the Resistance.
A giant First Order force converges on the small, battered old Resistance base, and things are looking bad…but after receiving a strong kick in the butt from the ghost of his shriveled green mentor, Yoda, badass space wizard Luke is suddenly there, staring down the entire First Order force alone. His nephew Kylo Ren promptly loses his mind, and orders all guns fired at Luke. After emptying their clips (or whatever laser blasters have) into the spot where Luke is standing, when the dust clears…Luke is still there, just shrugging it off.
A lightsaber battle ensues.
Rey and Leia use the distraction to load the meager remains of the Resistance onto Han’s old ship, the Millennium Falcon, and escape into space. After several epic feats of Forciness, it becomes clear to Kylo that his Uncle Luke isn’t actually there–what he’s seeing, and fighting, is just a psychic projection that Luke is creating via space magic.
In reality sitting alone in his hermit camp where Rey first found him, Luke, his powers now exhausted, dies peacefully and fades away. His sister Leia and trainee Rey sense his death, and as what’s left of the Resistance flees into space, Leia promises Rey that they’re not done fighting.
Also, Captain Phasma was in there somewhere. She’s the shiny silver stormtrooper. She doesn’t say much, and she’s mostly renowned for looking cool and dying spectacularly. Just thought I’d mention it.
*****
And that brings us to this moment. Tonight marks the end of 40+ years and countless planets’ worth of epic storytelling. Tonight is the night that many nerds have been waiting for for most of their lives.
So if you had to read this because you’re accompanying someone, possibly against your will, to a movie premiere this evening, please remember: be kind to your nerd tonight. They’re going to be going through some emotional times. Be the support they need. Let them know that even if the arc of this tale is drawing to a close, the Force is with them–always.
Laura Writes 
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