There are SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you’ve been warned.
At the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke Skywalker burns Darth Vader’s body, we presumed that was the last we were going to see of the his ominous black outfit. As we now know, however, that’s not the case, and Kylo Ren managed to track that bad boy down and build a creepy shrine to his dead grandpa. One of the big questions left unanswered in Star Wars: The Force Awakens was just how he acquired this artifact, and this new video may have the answer for us.
This video from Star Wars Minute (it’s three-minutes actually), may have figured out just how the Vader-obsessed Kylo Ren actually managed to track down the charred helmet of his ancestor (let’s hope the fire didn’t leave too many fleshy bits, or at least that he cleaned it out some).They believe the answer to this question can be found in Delilah S. Dawson’s canon short story "The Perfect Weapon," published as part of the "Journey to the Force Awakens" tie-ins.
The story centers on Bazine Netal, the First Order agent who sells out Rey, Finn, Han Solo, and Chewbacca at Maz Kanata’s cantina in The Force Awakens. A mysterious client uses, as they say, Mission: Impossible-style tactics (a droid that self destructs) to hire her to retrieve an equally mysterious package from a psychological hospital that used to be the home for burnt out stormtroopers. They’re all dead and gone, but the room where she retrieves the package belonged to a stormtrooper captain that we know was at the Battle of Endor. The theory goes that, he came across the funeral pyre and took home a morbid little memento, and that Kylo Ren is the mysterious client.
This is all speculation as the story doesn’t specify who hires Bazine and we never find out what exactly is in the package, but it is plausible. If this is true, it doesn’t really change how we look at Kylo Ren. We know he’s the galaxy’s biggest Darth Vader fanboy, and it’s certainly possible that he hired someone to track this down for him—one of the earliest rumors we heard about Adam Driver’s character, before we even knew his name, was that he was obsessed with tracking down Sith artifacts, which certainly plays into this.
We also know Kylo Ren is not the only one obsessed with Darth Vader in the days after the Empire splinters. In the novel Aftermath we see a group called the Acolytes of the Beyond buying what they believe to be Vader’s lightsaber. Whether it actually is or not, they’re similarly fixated on the dark lord.
If this is true it doesn’t really impact The Force Awakens (let’s be honest, such a side story would have been distracting and taken up too much time for too little payoff), but it’s a fun story and is a great way for Star Wars to utilize the ever expanding canon. It doesn’t contain any vital information that fans need to enjoy the movies, but it provides some fun trivia for those fans looking for something more.
