A Few Thoughts on Kylo Ren (Star Wars)

(Kylo Ren-related spoilers ahead for all three films in the new trilogy, along with a quick season 4 spoiler for The Good Place.)

There are a lot of feelings about Kylo Ren out there on the wild Internets, some wildly positive, some overwhelmingly negative, and all kinds of stuff in between. My own feelings on the subject vary quite a bit, although I can say two things pretty definitively: 1) seeing Adam Driver in other films/shows admittedly increased my interest in Kylo Ren as a character, and 2) the Twitter account Emo Kylo Ren is amazing. Today, I want to try and sort through this a little.

First of all, let’s cover the basics. Kylo Ren is a villain. For sure. There’s the stuff he does to characters we love, of course, like capturing/interrogating Rey, killing his own father, and attacking Finn. But there’s also the much, much larger stuff he does to many more characters who we don’t really know, given that he leads the fascist First Order that terrorizes the galaxy with a ton of bloodshed. The man ordered the atomization of a planet. He’s not just a good guy waiting to happen.

It’s also true that he turned to the Dark Side in part because of the malevolent influence of Snoke poisoning his mind, and it’s also true that he spends a lot of time trying to convince himself that he’s less conflicted than he is. It’s a different sort of characterization: I don’t often a “complex villain” character desperately trying to run away from a deep-down belief that maybe they’re not really as evil as they wante to be. His fascination/obsession with Rey at times leads him to give her outs, attempting to win her over rather than just killing her, which provides her the openings she needs to stay alive. And at the very end, he does stand with her against the Emperor, even trading his life force in a sacrifice for her. (Note: to the extent that Redeemed Kylo Ren works for me, it works mainly based on how doggedly Adam Driver sells it.)

He’s a lot of things is what I’m saying, and while I’d be reluctant to categorize him as pure evil, the places where he was manipulated or the moments when he does something good can’t mitigate or erase the countless devastation that’s been wrought either by his own hand or at his command. If he’d lived at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, I’d have certainly wanted to see him face punishment for his crimes. But I’d have liked to see something more along with that as well.

Just what that something would’ve been? I hesitate to say “redemption.” I’m not sure if I can take it that far. But “reform,” or even just “change,” might be a little closer. Oddly enough, the thing that most brings me around to this feeling has nothing to do with Star Wars itself. Instead, my willingness to have seen more from Kylo Ren can be traced back to The Good Place.

In the middle of its final season, maybe a month before The Rise of Skywalker came out, an episode of The Good Place aired in which Michael is tasked with defending humanity to a higher being who thinks that humans just aren’t worth the trouble. He’s spent the year collecting data on whether humans are capable of change in the afterlife, and here, he’s speaking on Brent, the toughest nut to crack in the experiment: “Brent spent a year being an absolute diaper load of a human being, and the point total tells you that. But what the number can’t tell you… is who he could have become tomorrow.”

That right there is what gives me pause when it comes to writing off Kylo Ren. To be sure, he’s a much worse person who’s done far worse things than any human we saw on The Good Place, and a desire to change shouldn’t mean he ought to get a free pass on everything he did in the first 95% of the trilogy. But I also think that the world (or a galaxy far, far away) can be bettered by people choosing to change, and that means making room for that to happen, albeit in a way that preserves justice for their victims.

Star Wars and The Good Place. Not two properties I ever would’ve thought to put together, but when I started to sort out how I felt about The Rise of Skywalker’s stab at “redemption” for Kylo Ren, the speech of Michael’s was the first thing that came to mind, and I realized I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand.