New Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer provokes fan theories with its final shot

The official Star Wars Twitter account shared one final short trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi yesterday, commemorating “VIII days” until the movie’s premiere. It’s only 30 seconds long, and it’s in that infuriating social video aspect ratio, but the new teaser does include some perplexing new material.

While the new spot uses a fair bit of footage we’ve seen in previous trailers, there are a handful of new shots—one of them quite provocative for the types of fans who revel in speculation and theories. So if you want to go into each shot fresh, watch before reading. And if you want to go into the movie totally fresh, don’t watch the trailer at all.

Trailer details

In this trailer, we get several more shots of Poe Dameron in action behind the throttle of his X-Wing—they comprise the majority of what’s new here. But we also get a glimpse at a stormtrooper preparing what looks like an energy axe, for lack of a better term.

But the most striking shot is the last one—in it, Rey takes and wields what looks like Kylo Ren’s red lightsaber during some kind of altercation in Snoke’s red throne room. There are a lot of reasons this could happen, some significant and some not. It could be that Kyle Ren was incapacitated, so she grabbed his weapon in a time of crisis. It could be that they team up, and he gives her his weapon so she can fight Snoke.

The other explanation is that Rey has in fact turned to the dark side—maybe the Snoke throne room scene involves a shocking switcheroo in which Kylo Ren sees the light and Rey goes dark as they swap lightsabers in a confrontation. But most of the trailers to date have teased that Rey might turn to the dark side, and they’ve done it with such volume and consistency that leads me to believe that’s not going to happen; they wouldn’t spoil something that big in the trailers, right? Besides, the Leia going dark fan theory is a lot more fun.