>The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

>Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

>Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

>There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

>If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

>Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

>Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

>There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

>Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

>Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.