WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in theaters now.

The Rise of Skywalker has the unenviable job of not only concluding one of the biggest trilogy of blockbusters of the last several years, but also a (now) nine movie saga that has dominated cinema for the last four decades. How well J.J Abrams' film manages to do either of these things is currently the subject of laser sword-hot online discourse.

Those as exhausted by this debate as a 250-year old Wookie limping after an aging Han Solo can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that, for the purposes of this article, we're going to try and put subjectivity aside to answer one simple question: is the Force balanced by the end of the Skywalker saga?

That last part was a lie -- there's no such thing as simplicity when it comes to Star Wars, but loving the world's greatest space saga means also loving the world's silliest and messiest space saga, one where the pieces of the plot are left strewn about the place for fans to piece together like the second Death Star. In this case, figuring out the answer to what is supposedly the crux of the entire film series means grappling with a question that was retrofitted in three movies into the franchise's existence and then kind of forgotten about by the time the next three came along. In other words, any notion of balancing the Force, an idea George Lucas introduced with the prequel trilogy, is something we as viewers, have to insert into the original trilogy -- made before he came up with the idea -- and the sequel trilogy -- made after he exited the world of Star Wars.

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Why do have to do this? Because even though they were made out of order, the prequel series is still the chronological start of the saga, and the question of an imbalanced Force that needed correcting was fundamental to its hero-turned-villain-turned-hero-again's journey, the universe he occupied and, by extension, his continuing family line through the original and sequel series.

Anakin Skywalker was conceived "immaculately" by his mother Shmi Skywalker and born into a life of indentured servitude on Tatooine. Just before he hit his teenage years, Shmi was told by visiting Jedi Master, Qui-Gon Jin, who performed a blood test on him, that her son of mysterious origin had an astronomically high Midi-Chlorian count; highly intelligent, cellular lifeforms that, if high enough in number within a host body, can enable that host to not only sense the Force but also use it.

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Qui-Gon's working theory was that the Force itself produced Anakin, fulfilling an old Jedi prophecy that a fatherless child would be born to bring balance to the Force. He had a tough time convincing the Jedi Council of this, however, who -- at the pinnacle of their singular powers in the peaceful (though still slave-riddled) Galactic Republic -- didn't believe that the Force was out of balance. This was because they believed their rivals, the Sith, had long been wiped out, ensuring the galaxy's stability. Rather, after assessing the boy, the Council came to the conclusion that Anakin had the temperament and latent Force-using potential of someone who could become the Jedi's greatest enemy, rather than their greatest savior.

Despite their misgivings, Qui-Gon, who was quietly critical of the Jedi's rigid rule, followed his own instincts and took the kid on as a Padawan learner. Qui-Gon was, unfortunately, right: the evidence of the imbalance in the Force ended up being his undoing when a Sith apprentice, Darth Maul, materialized and killed him, leaving Qui-Gon's older student, Obi-Wan Kenobi, to complete Anakin's training and Darth Maul's own master, Senator Sheev Palpatine, without a second-in-command, which the long-standing Sith "Rule of Two" didn't allow for. This meant he was in the market for a new subordinate. Anakin, overflowing with Midi-Chlorian-rich blood and barely concealed emotional turmoil following both his mother and his father figure's deaths, was an easy and obvious target. (Theories about whether or not Palpatine himself nudged the Midi-Chlorians into creating Anakin have recently been put to rest by LucasFilm.)

Palpatine did what the Dark Side of the Force does best and lured Anakin under his wing by promising to give him what he wanted but not what he needed -- a promise (a lie) that the only person left in his life that he loved, his wife Padmé, could be protected from death. His conversion from the light to dark led to the destruction of the Republic and the eradication of the Jedi through Emperor Palpatine's Order 66 and the Jedi Purge -- save for the likes of Master Yoda, Obi-Wan and others, who retreated to the far reaches of the galaxy.

This brings us to the original trilogy and Anakin, now going by Darth Vader, and Padmé's children: Luke and Leia. According to the prophecy, the Force would have been massively imbalanced at this point with the double Sith whammy of Darth Sidious (Palpatine) and Vader ruling unopposed by their Light side counterparts. "Old Ben" Kenobi and Yoda saw an opportunity to address this when Luke and Leia grew to adulthood, training Vader's son to become a Jedi Master -- with Leia, apparently, relegated to a back-up position. Luke's strength with the Force and Anakin's lingering shred of a soul led to him eventually laying down his life to save his son from the Emperor and, in turn, the galaxy. With the Sith finally gone, the Jedi -- both living and ghost alike -- would consider the Force to be fully balanced again by the end of Return of the Jedi.

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Unfortunately, The Rise of Skywalker throws us a curveball ("THE DEAD SPEAK!") with the revelation that this wasn't the actual end of the Sith: not only does Palpatine return, but he brings an entire, planet-destroying Sith Fleet with him, and the even more upsetting news that he got busy at some point in the past and had a son, who then had a daughter -- Rey, the heroine of the sequel trilogy. Alongside Rey's growth in Light side power over the course of the new series, her Dark side equivalent already had quite a headstart on her. By this point, Ben Solo, the grandchild of Anakin, had already fallen to the darkness thanks to the machinations of Supreme Leader of the First Order, Snoke -- who was secretly an avatar of Palpatine -- and taken on the mantle Kylo Ren.

This then leaves us, finally, with two possible Chosen Ones in the final chapter of the Skywalker saga. An exchange between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul in Star Wars Rebels revealed, interestingly, that the man who kept Luke out of reach of the Empire's black-gloved reach for years, came to believe that he, not his father, was the real Chosen One. Taking this and Vader's futile sacrifice into account, we can speculate that the Jedi prophecy could extend not just to one Midi-Chlorian-created individual, but their entire bloodline. Every Skywalker is purpose-built, therefore, to balance the Force because they're genetically pre-dispositioned to. This is demonstrated by Ben Solo echoing his grandfather, his uncle and his mother's self-sacrificial acts at the end of The Rise of Skywalker.

The only snag is that Ben isn't the one to actually kill the Emperor and destroy the Sith dynasty -- the woman whose life he restores is. Does this mean a Palpatine, not a Skywalker, was always meant to be the real Chosen One? To believe this, we have to also believe that the Jedi's prophecy was wrong, which, luckily, The Last Jedi gives us permission to do. Old Man Luke may have had a change of heart by the end of Episode VIII but his un-minced words about the religion's arrogance rang true for a lot of Star Wars fans who'd long seen the cracks in the Jedi's heroic armor.

In The Last Jedi, the island of Ahch-To is shown to us -- and Rey -- by the reclusive Luke as a place where light and dark coexist in delicate and dramatic harmony with one other because, in essence, "light" and "dark" are the amoral forces of "life" and "death." For the purposes of this discussion, it's the most important location in the entire film series as it's the first clear-cut representation of what bringing balance to the Force actually looks like and means from an unbiased perspective. Despite being the site of an ancient Jedi Temple, it's become a place devoid of Jedi or Sith ownership; two opposing ideologies that have always been hellbent on the total suppression of the other, which doesn't fit the dictionary definition of a balance, at all.

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What The Last Jedi started to do was radically shift our entire viewpoint on what balancing the Force actually meant: the end of both the Sith and the Jedi, thus breaking a cycle of one-up-manship that kept periodically tearing the galaxy apart. Rey, a Palpatine heir trained by the Skywalkers, has the unique potential within her to be a living embodiment of this balance. This also fits with the story of the Father, the Son and the Daughter -- god-like beings who originate from the source of the Force itself and represent the dark, light and in-between that keeps the latter two in check. (The Father once sought to pass on his parental balancing duties onto Anakin during The Clone Wars, but Anakin refused.)

If it wasn't for the very last line of The Rise of Skywalker, in which Rey claims the Skywalker name for herself, we could definitively say that she, by verbally rejecting both the Jedi and Sith's most prominent families (and the Daughter and Son's roles, respectively) to take on the Father's important, nameless role in the trinity, could be the first true-neutral conduit for the Force in the galaxy, therefore being a perfect-- and progressive -- figure of balance. As it stands, the choice she makes at the end appears to leave us back at square one: with a dominant Light side-affiliated Skywalker that, as history dictates, can only necessitate the rise of a Dark side equal. It's a sweet gesture, but not the selfless, anti-eulogizing one needed.

So, is the Force balanced by the end of Skywalker saga? Unfortunately, finding a definitive answer requires seeing things from a certain point of view -- one you'll have to pick for yourself.

Directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stars Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, Billie Lourd, Keri Russell, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher, with Naomi Ackie and Richard E. Grant. The film is in theaters now.

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