They were a tantalising vision in The Force Awakens.
Rey’s rainy encounter with Kylo and his Knights of Ren sent shivers up fans’ spines and hinted at a major moment in The Last Jedi.
It didn’t happen.
The flashbacks shown of Luke and Kylo Ren’s tragic past showed the destruction of the Jedi school but no sign of the Knights of Ren.
Where were they? Rian Johnson has just explained.
After seeing the forceback vision, most assumed that the Knights of Ren were Kylo’s former fellow students who he had turned to the Dark Side during his rebellion against Luke.
Expanding this was the prevailing theory that Snoke took them in when he raised Kylo Ren as his apprentice and made them his Praetorian Guard.
Johnson just revealed why he didn’t include the Knights in Episode 8 and this totally debunked a huge part of that theory. It also still leaves hope for their inclusion in Episode 9.
Johnson told the Empire Film podcast: “You can see we have a very full movie already. There literally was just not room for another element at them.
“I guess I could’ve used them in place of the Praetorian guards, but then it would feel like wasting them because I knew all those guards had to die pretty quickly. And if Kylo had some kind of connection to them, it would’ve added a complication that wouldn’t have helped the scene. So the truth is I just didn’t see a place for them in the movie.”
This immediately proves that the Knights did not become the Praetorians.
Fans immediately expressed their unhappiness with this latest revealtion and bluntly suggested other sections that could have been cut to make room.
Yet again, the majority of fan comments singled out the lengthy excursion to Canto Bight as a waste of time with yet more criticisms of Johnson’s plot decisions in general.
Whether they are correct or not, it is probably timeto look forward.
JJ Abrams was the director who introduced The Knights of Ren and will resume control at the helm for the final movie. If they weren’t involved during the destruction of the Jedi temple and school, perhaps there is hope that the forceback vision showed someting that is still yet to come?
Which leaves us with two years of speculating before we find out if we will ever see Kylo’s gang again…