The Most Shocking Revelation in the New Star Wars Trailer

Star Wars fans who put up with two quarters of Eli Manning playing less than stellar football Monday evening were awarded with two minutes and thirty-five seconds of new footage from The Force Awakens, due out Dec. 18.

The latest trailer for the hotly anticipated movie served mostly to confirm plot details Star Wars fans have speculated about based on previous footage and other information.

The film looks like it’ll be centered around characters Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega). Rey looks to be some kind of scavenger or mechanic living on the desert world of Jakku. She may be Force-sensitive, and thus capable of becoming a Jedi.

Finn, meanwhile, appears to be a born-and-bred First Order pilot (the First Order most likely being an Imperial-loyalist faction left after the events of Return of the Jedi). He may or may not be a Jedi too — we see him wield a lightsaber, but that alone makes one not a Jedi, hmm?

And our primary Big Bad, Kylo Ren, is some kind of Darth Vader cultist obsessed with finishing what Vader started. Evil!

The most interesting detail Monday’s new trailer revealed is that the events of the original trilogy — Episodes IV, V and VI — have become mythologized in the Star Wars universe. “There were stories about what happened,” says Rey in a voiceover. “It’s true. All of it. The Dark Side. The Jedi. They’re real,” responds Han Solo (Harrison Ford).

That’s huge. It means all is certainly not hunky-dory in the Galaxy years after the second Death Star was destroyed. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) didn’t go on to rebuild the Jedi Academy and train a new generation of Soldiers of Peace. Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing — sure, Rey doesn’t know about the Jedi, but she apparently doesn’t know about the Sith, either.

Oh, and speaking of Luke, there’s still no sign of him. What’s up with that?

So what could’ve happened after the second Death Star went kablammo? Aftermath, a new in-canon novel, details Rebel Alliance leaders’ efforts to rebuild a non-militarized galactic government, all while Imperial loyalists regroup on the outskirts. It suggests there are pockets of peace and prosperity along with planet-slums run by warlords. Some areas of the galaxy may be subject to Imperial-controlled information blackouts — perhaps explaining why the story of the Jedi and the Sith have become mythologized by the time of The Force Awakens.

That sets up some very interesting plot possibilities. We’ll just have to wait until Dec. 18 to find out what’s happening in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.