PREVIOUSLY, ON TWITTER: I discussed the role of love as the overarching motivating force in Star Wars until TROS, in which it was abandoned in favor of power. After, I asked myself what TROS would look like with an on-theme ending. https://twitter.com/necromancydrew/status/1330987760455475202

My challenge is to change as little of the movie as possible, focusing only on the ending.
There are a lot of narrative problems in this movie, and there's only so much I can do to fix some of them. Good for you if you can rewrite the whole movie but oof, not me.

But the central moment for me is the fight on Exegol. That's where the movie trivializes everything that happened in the saga before it, so I want to start there.

I have my biases, but my goal is to try to make the climax more reflective of the past movies while still being unique, and in the process add meaning to a movie with a lot of nonsensical choices.

So let's pick this up with my favorite moment, something I really thing feels very Star Wars: the lightsaber pass. That whole moment was triumphant, it was powerful, it built on something established in another movie. Perfect.

Ben joins Rey. They raise their sabers to Palpatine. He's livid, but this is an opportunity.
"Enough!" he shouts. And suddenly everything goes dark.

We're close to Rey's point of view again. She's breathing hard. A light comes up. It's the mirror wall from the cave on Ahch-To. She comes close to it and raises her hand.

As happened on the second death star, she sees her reflection as a dark side of herself. But when she recoils, she realizes she's not seeing a dark reflection, but herself as she is. She panics, unsure of what to do.

Behind her, a familiar voice. It's Unkar Plutt, insulting her and denying her food again. She feels the rage of years, and she's not afraid of it now. She lashes out. Over and over she strikes.

More monsters from Rey's past appear. Snoke. Ochi. Every fear she ever had manifests around her and she unleashes that anger and fear, over and over. It's just like her first Force vision in TFA, but darker now.

A veil lifts, and we see that this is Palpatine playing in Rey's mind, attacking and killing the sith around her. Ben snaps to attention and realizes what is happening.
It's the same thing that happened to him all his life.

He runs to attack Palpatine, to make it stop, but he's caught in Palpatine's grip.
A close-up on his hand reveals that he's being restored with each life Rey is taking. Her destruction is literally making him stronger.

(I admit this is me taking a lot of liberties with the Force, but I really love the idea of him being a Force vampire, stealing the living Force from every person Rey kills)

So Palpatine has some banter with Ben, holding him up and mocking him, letting him see that he failed, Rey was under his control. Ben squirms, desperate to stop this. But Palpatine's waiting for the right moment to use him once more.

We cut back to Rey's dark side beserker rage. She's seeing her friends in the haze and she's so desperate to protect them. She's seeing now a series of phantoms rising before her: the Knights of Ren.
And in the middle, there's Kylo.

She's on the offensive again, her anger occasionally punctuated with memories of their past fights, one on Star Killer, one on the death star, but now he has his mask on.

This fight is long with the battle raging above them in space.
She's aggressive, he's defending, until finally she gets the better of him.

A voice in her mind, a voice that she thinks is her mother, sweetly tells her to finish him.

She knocks Ren to his back at the edge of the pit, and as she prepares to deliver the final blow, she hears her name.
Lightning flashes above and when she looks down, she sees Ben as she imagined him the night Luke tried to kill him, young and fearful and dressed in white.

"Rey?"
The illusion breaks, just enough for her to see him, Ben, the one whose hand she wanted to take.
But the darkness is pulling on her. She's trying to fight it.
She hates it. She hates that it's part of her.

Ben tells her it's alright. It's okay to have that darkness in you. That's not what defines you; it's what you do. He had to learn this the hard way, but he tells her she is good enough as she is, and she is strong enough to fight this.

And with that, the hold Palpatine had on her breaks, and she falls to her knees. Ben catches her and holds her as the relief floods her. They're both weak, exhausted.

But the battle isn't over yet. Palpatine is stronger, thanks to Rey's killin'. He launches the lightning at the fleet. All seems lost. Ben makes a heroic charge at Palps and his thrown over the ledge.

Rey is struggling to stand, to keep going.
In the pit, Ben wakes, in great pain. He wants to keep going. He doesn't think he can. He's already fought so hard…
Then a figure appears to him.

"Get up, kid."

Luke's ghost is there urging him to his feet. "Told you I wasn't going anywhere."
Ben looks up. It's not a far climb. It's not impossible.

Rey's weak, Palpatine stealing some of her life as he used her to take down the fleet. She can't get up. She has the "Be with me" moment.

The spirits cheer her on. She rises.

Just as she stands, Ben emerges from the pit.
Once again, they stand united. Rey has faced the Darkness within her, Ben has helped her. The darkness cannot win.

This can resolve in a few ways. They can both walk forward, staggering together but reflecting the lightning, their power combined, love in the face of fear and death, enough to defeat it.

I kind of like that one because even though it's very similar to TROS, it means something more than two lightsabers. The power is their unity, and it wins.

Palpatine tries to take Rey's strength again in one last effort to survive, but he fails, leaving her weak and wounded. Ben, also weak, shares a bit of his strength with her. Leia's body vanishes.
Rey stirs. Again, love saves both of them. I like the Reylo kiss, let's keep it.

The battle resolves in the sky. Rey returns to the base, finds her friends, hugs them.

And in the forest, watching the celebration, is Ben. He wanders over to his mother's tent, staring at where her body was.

Maz finds him. There is a moment of recognition between them, but they don't have a greeting.

"I was too late," Ben says quietly.
"It's never too late," Maz says. "All that matters to her is that you came home."

They have some back and forth about what it means for Ben to be alive after his parents' sacrifices. Maz tells Ben it's up to him to decide what to do with this new life he's been given. Clearly Ben is afraid, remorseful.

"Ben?"
He turns, and Rey is at the entrance to the tent. There's an understanding look on her face.
"There are some friends of mine I want you to meet."

He's reluctant. Maz nods. Then suddenly, Rey extends her hand, a mirror shot of the many times he's offered her his.

And with some hesitation, he takes it, and she leads him out into the flurry of joy around them.

The last scene is the hardest. It doesn't have to be the Tatooine scene, but in this context it works pretty well.

When Rey goes to bury the sabers, Ben is looking on. They're saying goodbye to the past.

In the Falcon, there's banter between Finn and Ben about where the other stormtrooper training facilities are so they can be liberated.

Rose asks about charting a course. She hands Ben a datapad; he drops it, and Finn catches it with the Force. It was clearly on purpose

My dream dialogue would be Finn asking if that was a test and Ben saying that he's sworn off the Force, mostly. He's done with politics and Jedi things; he just wants to be a pilot now. Finn and Rey are the new Jedi. He wants no part of it.

And when Rey gazes into the twin suns, her friends call to her from the Falcon, and the film ends with her taking one last look at the sky before the ship takes off, flying the crew to new adventures.

So! As you can see, I really only changed 3 sequences: the Exegol fight, the celebration, and the ending. And I think fixing these three elements really center the story around redemptive love.

Some underutilized elements, like Dark Rey, are pulled to the forefront, and again we have Palpatine watching in glee as two people fight for his pleasure. But the stakes here are that if Ben is killed, Palps will be indestructible.

I also wanted that Every Voice in Your Head to mean something, so through Rey we get to see what Ben suffered for his life, and what the silence in his mind means.

I really liked the ability to revisit Rey's force visions from TFA with a dark twist. I think that would have been a really powerful narrative connection.

The titular Rise of Skywalker is a parallel, as Rey and Ben rise simultaneously, both aided by the past but now bound by them. They are still weakened, but they help each other.

Leia's death helps revive Ben and Rey, so it's more meaningful than battery Ben. And Ben now gets to process the loss of his mother and his own turn.

We don't get to see Ben's reunion with society, but if we can get Palps back with a throwaway line, I can say "Somehow, everyone is cool with Ben Solo and no one insists on Space Law and Order." Fair?

I kept this pretty Reylo agnostic but you can lean in more than this. I think Disney didn't because they were afraid if Rey had help, it would be anti-feminist. But her arc is more complete and personal with her brief Dark turn, so Ben is supporting her narrative.

And I think this addresses a lot of the ire of his death by not having that.
I don't know where LFL is taking the ST in the future, but people want Ben back, and his death is an open wound.
Rey's story is incomplete because we don't know what direction she's headed at the end.

This has her traveling with her friends with a goal of bettering the galaxy. It's not a long term resolution but neither was ROTJ.

The point is that this is a much happier ending.

The loss of Leia is a bit of bittersweetness; she died doing what she did best, saving the galaxy, and we see her sacrifice bearing fruit in the joy others experience. She fills the Vader role indirectly.

The sense of community here brings a much clearer levity to the story. I think this parallels Luke's ending much better without the weird necessity for the naming stuff.

Rey's ending is that she found a place, she faced her past, her inner darkness, and saved the galaxy with her friends and her new friend/Dyad Ben.

If Disney wants to use this to make a special edition ending, they can have it, please. Get the cast back for these few shots and you'll never need them again.
Otherwise, this is my headcanon.
I hope it helps you.