Does Star Wars: The Last Jedi Teaser Show Dark Side Luke Skywalker?

A new teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, “Awake,” leaves little doubt that a central plank of Lucasfilm/Disney’s marketing campaign is the ongoing insinuation that Luke Skywalker will make a turn to the Dark Side. Maybe this is just because I can’t bring myself to believe, narratively, that a 40-year hero’s journey ends with a complete collapse into evil, but I think we’re being misled. Something far more interesting is going on with Luke in The Last Jedi.

If you’re already onboard with the “Luke turns to the Dark Side” theory, which gained steam after a movie theater standee placed Luke with the Dark Side characters, then there’s plenty to support the assertion in this new teaser trailer. Beyond the simple aesthetic darkness of portraying Luke in a dark, Sith-like hood, two shots in the teaser trailer are edited to give the appearance of a standoff between Luke and Rey. “This is not going to go the way you think,” Luke says, as Rey looms over him and lifts her lightsaber to a striking position.

Though clearly from the same scene, there’s no way to know whether the two shots are actually related to each other (also, there’s always the possibility it’s Rey, not Luke, who turns to the Dark Side). It’s possible Disney is playing us just as effectively as they did with the marketing campaign for Iron Man 3, which focused on the mystery of The Mandarin to cover up the movie’s real bad guy, Aldrich Killian.

But it’s Supreme Leader Snoke’s line that might have the most to tell us about the actual Dark Side conflict in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “Darkness rises… and light to meet it,” Snoke says, stating explicitly the Manichean worldview that’s always defined morality in the Star Wars galaxy. Snoke isn’t expressing his desire that the Dark Side wins, but instead anticipates the binary conflict between Dark and Light. The arch-villain of The Last Jedi is deeply invested in this concept, so defeating him could mean subverting the conflict Snoke desires, rather than submitting to the binary and hoping Light comes out on top.

It doesn’t make sense for Luke to join the Dark Side, but it does make sense for him to sidestep the terms of the conflict entirely, denying the Dark Side the legitimacy and meaning afforded it by endless war with the Jedi. Like Daenerys’ promise to “break the wheel,” disrupting the cycle of endless conflict that has always defined Westeros in Game of Thrones, Luke could end the conflict forever by refusing to be Snoke’s antithesis.

We know Luke wants to bring the Jedi to an end. We know he’s been reading their oldest documents, stored in the tree at the center of the first Jedi Temple on Ahch-To. Luke, who believed evil was defeated with the death of Emperor Palpatine, has watched the same cycle return again. If we thought The Force Awakens felt like a remake, imagine how he felt. Rather than fall into the same role and repeat the cycle, maybe Luke opts for a third way, denying the moral starkness of the Jedi vs. Sith duality.

Sure, it’s just a guess, but it makes a lot more sense than “Luke Skywalker becomes a baddie.” We’ll all see just how right I am Dec. 14, when screenings for Star Wars: The Last Jedi begin.