Big Questions We Still Have After Watching Rogue One

Rogue One is here, and Star Wars fans across the world are more excited than a wookiee on Life Day. But while Rogue One answers some of the key questions left by Episode IV: A New Hope way back in 1977, it also left several dangling plot threads of its own. Hopefully, we won't have to wait four decades to learn the secrets behind the biggest unanswered questions in Rogue One ...

At the beginning of the movie, Jyn's doomed mom tells her to put her faith in the Force. She even gives her daughter a crystal necklace, which Jyn later says a little Force-prayer to. Given that her dad is apparently some kind of expert in the manipulation of the kyber crystals that Jedi use for their lightsabers, and the fact that her parents dress like Jedi while they're off being playing the role of super-humble anonymous farmers, it seems as though Jyn has some kind of connection to the Force. Just what the significance of any of that is, however, goes completely unanswered in the film.

So just what was Jyn's connection to the Force? Can we expect to see her appear as a Force Ghost sometime in the future? Will her crystal necklace heirloom play some role in future events? Was that necklace actually the crystal from her mother's lightsaber or something? Or was all of that just some kind of pointless red herring to confuse fans? We're hoping this sprawling saga rewards us with some kind of answer eventually.

Rogue One saw the dramatic return of a long lost Star Wars character, Grand Moff Tarkin. That was a bit of a surprise, considering the actor who played Tarkin, Peter Cushing, died over two decades ago. It was an absolutely amazing show of CGI wizardry, where they took a living actor [in this case, Guy Henry (Pius Thicknesse from Harry Potter), had him play the role, and then CGI'd Cushing's body around him in post-production.

The use of this CGI, which very possibly also allowed the filmmakers to build a young Carrie Fisher around another actress for a Princess Leia cameo (though the actress, Ingvild Deila, also might have actually played Leia, no CGI required), opens up a whole Pandora's Box of possibilities for future film instalments. Namely, which other dead actors might they bring back? The obvious one would be Alec Guinness, whose Force Ghost version of Obi Wan Kenobi would be an interesting addition to the journey of Rey and Luke in Episode VIII.

Like most Star Wars films, there's not a lot of obvious romance in Rogue One. But there are some subtle clues that Baze and Chirrut (the long-haired assassin and his blind monk bestie) might just be the first same-sex couple in Star Wars canon. Then again, maybe not — fans have been shipping Poe and Finn from the moment Force Awakens came out, with no official word either way from the studio.

The bromance between Baze and Chirrut isn't any more or less obviously romantic in nature, but we can already hear the fanfic being written. Despite them also being very dead now, maybe Disney and LucasFilm will fill in their backstory, so this won't be an open question for long.

The whole plot kicks off because the Empire desperately needs Galen to finish the Death Star. But why? They already have the plans for the Death Star at the end of Episode III. Presumably, Galen is needed for his expertise in manipulating kyber crystals, but even he points out — in the film itself — that they eventually would have realized they could finish the Death Star without him.

So, was there any actual point to his involvement beyond "gotta get the movie rolling somehow?" Were they just having a really bad case of architect's block and needed his genius for inspiration? Given that the entire film — and therefore, the plot of A New Hope and basically the entire Original Trilogy — revolves around the Empire using Galen, finding out why they need him would be really handy.

Chirrut is described in the film as one of the (apparently Force-sensitive) monks who guarded the Jedi Temple. So, what happened to the rest of them? Sure, a lot of them presumably died when the Temple was destroyed, and more of them were likely killed when the city was blown up. But it seems doubtful that Chirrut would be the only one of them to survive. Surely some of the other monks were out of the city when it blew up — maybe they off-planet looking for jobs, or trying to find some Jedi, or whatever. If so, what happened to them? Why have we never seen any other monks from Chirrut's order in any of the films that take place chronologically after Rogue One? For now (but hopefully, not for long), your guess is as good as ours.

Going into Rogue One, there was heavy fan speculation that the film would finally reveal who sired Rey (pictured above, on the right), with the smart money being on heroine Jyn Erso and some unnamed baby daddy, possibly even Luke Skywalker. That's clearly not the case, since Luke didn't even make an appearance (plus, he was just some farmboy at the time, in a planet Jyn never visited, so the possibility of a meet-cut was very much an impossibility.)

Plus, given that Jyn died in a giant fireball without so much as kissing anyone, we can toss the idea of her mothering anybody – much less Rey — onto the scrap heap of rejected fan theories. That means that for now, the mystery behind Rey's parents is still exactly that: a mystery.