Last Friday, director J.J. Abrams took to Twitter with the announcement that filming on Star Wars: Episode IX had finally wrapped. Along with a message thanking the cast and crew, the director posted a photo of John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Oscar Isaac on what appears to be the film’s Wadi Rum desert set.
Naturally, the image has been the subject of some scrutiny, but while the attention of fans has mostly been on the three people in the foreground of the pic, a new piece from Screen Rant suggests that an object of note could be visible on the right-hand side of the frame. Poking out behind a pair of crew members is a tall, blurry shaft that’s been compared to the moisture vaporators that were seen in Luke Skywalker’s home on Tatooine.
With an image this blurry, any conclusion we draw is going to be inherently questionable, but even assuming that the object is indeed a vaporator, that doesn’t especially narrow down our options on where the leads could be. After all, Tatooine is hardly going to be the only desert planet in the galaxy to use such a piece of equipment.
Nonetheless, some fans are already jumping to the conclusion that Abrams’ film could be taking us back to the place where both Luke and Anakin were raised, and seeing how Episode IX is set to draw the Skywalker Saga to a close, this would certainly be an appropriate way to bring the story full circle.
At the same time, there’d also be a fitting degree of symmetry in journeying back to Rey’s home world of Jakku, which is another prominent theory of the gang’s location. But regardless of where Star Wars: Episode IX takes its heroes, all will be revealed when the film hits theaters on December 20th, 2019.