Who Is The Little Boy At The End Of The Last Jedi?

Audiences may (or may not) be torn on The Last Jedi, but the very last scene of the film garnered a reaction from almost everyone in the audience. 

"Did you see that?" 

"Did that really happen?" 

Yes and yes. That little boy used the Force to guide a broom into his hand before pausing from his work to stare into space, daydreaming about the Resistance. Who is that little boy and what exactly did that mean? And more importantly, what does the scene mean for the future of Star Wars?  Let's break down what could potentially be the most important scene in The Last Jedi—and be forewarned, there are spoilers ahead.

To provide a little refresher, one of The Last Jedi's plots sees Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) traveling to the planet Cantonica to find a hacker in the city of Canto Bright. The casino city—more Monaco than Las Vegas—is the ultimate hangout for the wealthy; as director Rian Johnson described it, it's "a playground, basically, for rich a–holes." 

But that doesn't tell the whole story. As Rose points out, drawing on her own painful past, the people working in Canto Bright are slaves.  It's during this sequence that we first encounter the boy in one of the stables as Finn and Rose escape—he's among the child slaves that clean and sleep in the stables while caring for the Fathier, the space ponies who end up serving as Finn and Rose's way out.

The Star Wars Visual Dictionary tells us that the boy is named Temiri Blagg, and according to IMDb, first-timer Temirlan Blaev portrays the boy. Clearly, Blagg is at the least Force sensitive, and that's nothing to scoff at in the Star Wars universe. In fact, over the course of the current trilogy, he's one of only a handful of people we've seen use the Force—a list that includes heavy hitters like Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, Kylo Ren, Supreme Master Snoke, Yoda, and Rey. In other words, he's probably a big deal.

Aside from offering up some of the coolest space battles and most exciting action sequences in the franchise, The Last Jedi put a lot of effort into shaking up the Star Wars mythology—which is another way of saying that a lot of what we thought we knew about the saga just went out like trash from a Star Destroyer.  

Rey, the powerful Force-sensitive hero of the new trilogy, turns out not to be the secret offspring of one of the story's heavy hitters. In fact, her parents were nobodies—and that wasn't by accident. Writer-director Rian Johnson called it the "Stand on your own two feet and define yourself" moment—in the new Star Wars universe, you don't have to be a Skywalker or a Kenobi or whatever cockamamie theory the internet concocted to be important. Along those lines, Temiri Blagg isn't related to anyone you've heard of; his parents abandoned him, just as Rey's parents left her. As the Skywalker saga comes to a close, we're learning that anyone can be force sensitive, from a daughter of drunkards to a slave boy who sweeps up Fathier scat.

Kylo Ren spelled out the new plan for the movies going forward—no more Jedi, no more Sith. It's a clean slate, as he demonstrated when he smashed his helmet—going from worshiping his grandfather Darth Vader do doing away with the "old gods." Temiri Blagg is Force sensitive, and he might do something with it, but he won't be a Jedi, because the order as it existed is gone. Rey isn't one, at least as it's been traditionally defined, so as far as we know there aren't any Jedi to teach him. And yes, the Jedi sacred books survived—stowed away by Rey on the Millennium Falcon—but studying from a book is very different from the master/padawan dynamic built up over generations of Jedi. As Luke vowed before becoming one with the Force in the final act, he won't be the last Jedi—but what it means to be one, and who gets to carry that mantle going forward, is wide open.

So how important is Temiri Blagg? By representing part of the unraveling of everything we knew about Star Wars—much to the chagrin of some fans—he also represents the future of the franchise, and everything the future can hold: hope. Blagg is a new new hope for the Resistance, and the saga overall; you don't need to be a "name" character to wield the Force.  It likely wasn't a coincidence that The Last Jedi ended with Blagg staring off into a star cluster, uncertain of his future, just as Luke did at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. You could make the case that Blagg is the new Luke—without the pedigree.  

There are so, so many planets in Star Wars canon. Cantonica is a planet Rian Johnson and the rest of the team whipped up—no one had even heard of it until the name leaked from a Last Jedi toy display. The odds of Temiri Blagg being the only other Force-sensitive character besides Rey in that galaxy far, far away is pretty slim, and that also plays into the new Star Wars canon. Blagg won't be the only one—there will be others. Maybe he never makes it off Cantonica? Maybe he doesn't pop up in Episode IX? Both of those scenarios would fit into what Star Wars is now: a brand new series, where anyone can use the Force, and the Sith and Jedi as we knew them are no more.