My Star Wars Theory

Or, a missed opportunity? What got me thinking about this was that fish we see Luke carrying in The Last Jedi, that he evidently speared with that super-long spear. That fish that, for a planet that kicks up Thala-sirens (those Suessian things he milks) and frog nuns that look straight out of a live-action Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band—

—is a pretty normal fish:

And by ‘normal’ I mean ‘in keeping with the Earth-fish I know,’ yeah. But? This could of course be convergent evolution, I know: this design for fishkind is the design many water-breathers plateau at because it’s a good design.

But what if convergent evolution isn’t the culprit here? What if . . . what if when Luke Force-projects a hologram of himself*, the energy-snapback of him coming back to his lotus’d out body from all the way across the void releases an accidental “blast” of power across Ahch-To (that planet he’s on, that gives me no good anagrams) that sadly wipes out all the frog nuns and Thala-sirens and even the cute and tasty Porg. His coming back to himself is an extinction event.

Except of course no extinction event wipes everything out. First, the fish keep on keeping on. But more important, on another island on the opposite side of the planet, some little mammals had happened to be hanging in a burrow, under a tree, something like that.

And now, without any competition, they can rise, they can evolve over the millennia, they can take to the trees, get prehensile hands for better climbing, color vision for finding ripe fruit, they can start tightroping on two feet down long branches, they can can leave the trees for the savanna, start scavenging, have to get some language to coordinate hunts, master fire, invent steam combustion, until . . . until “a long time ago” catches up to us, now, making up space opera stories about the event that spawned us. And, yeah, Star Wars is supposed to have happened in a “galaxy far, far away,” but, I mean: Ahch-To is way out in the “unknown regions,” isn’t it? Who’s to say Earth isn’t in that unknown region?

However, of course none of this edges even close to an explanation for why the four-instead-of-three periods in an ellipses thing**, which has been my main and only real question with all the Star Wars stuff, across these many years:

Guess Anakin knows now, but since Disney cut his ghostly presence from The Rise of Skywalker, he probably won’t be telling us anytime soon . . .

* which Snoke has been doing all along, yes? so what’s the big deal.

** the Flash Gordon answer is as good as any, I suppose.