The Belonging You Seek Is Not Behind You ... It Is Ahead

Third up in my reverse chronological order viewing of all 11 Star Wars movies: The Force Awakens!

I think I actually noticed more things that sit differently in TFA, after The Rise of Skywalker, than struck me in The Last Jedi. Here are a few of them:

• When BB8 tells Rey that where he comes from is classified, Rey says, "Me too. Big secret." It's a cute, flippant remark on her part -- but now we know that it's also completely true in a huge way.
• The scene where Snoke tells Ren, "There has been an awakening" is made even more similar to the Vader/Palpatine scene in Empire Strikes back by the knowledge that Palpatine was behind Snoke all along. Both have the holo-projected master looking down on the apprentice and warning of a new enemy arising.
• When Finn tells Rey, "I was ashamed of what I was," his resolve to be better than his past is setting her up for finding her own resolve against her origins two movies down the road.
• There's a fresh and dark second meaning to Maz's line, "Whoever you were waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. But there's someone who still could."
• When Starkiller Base destroys the Hosnian system, Finn is the first one we see turning to look at the sky. He does so because he hears screams of shock and terror ... but we don't actually see anyone around him screaming or wailing. We do hear almost identical cries on Hosnian Prime as the people there see the blast burning through their atmosphere. Was anyone at Maz's place actually screaming at the lightshow in the sky? Or did Finn hear the people of Hosnian Prime through the Force? Is it possible that when he shouts at Rey in TROS, "I never told you --" the end of the sentence might have been, "-- I felt the destruction of the Republic through the Force"?
• In light of the TROS scene between Ben and Han, a lot of Leia's dialogue sounds eerily prescient: "Luke is a Jedi. You're his father." And, "If you see our son, bring him home." I always previously interpreted those lines as kind of wishful thinking on Leia's part, and thought she kind of screwed Han over by encouraging him to try something that ended up getting him killed. But now we know how that last touch he gave his son, before falling off the bridge, stayed with Ben and really did end up bringing him home.
• Leia's Jedi training also puts a different light on a number of things, like her choice to say, "There's still light in him" rather than "There's still good in him." Likewise, a lot of fuss was made over the fact that Leia didn't acknowledge Chewie when the Falcon returned after Han's death. But we now know that Leia sensed who Rey was almost from the start and knew how critical it was to give her that sense of belonging that she always craved.
• When Rey has Kylo all but beaten in their lightsaber duel and is circling him like a predator, there's something in her movements that hits me as very similar to the scene in ROTS when Palpatine admits to Anakin that he's a Sith, and circles around him trying to sink his lure.

Closing thought: I have no idea how people to this very day insist that TFA is just a beat-for-beat imitation of A New Hope. I mean, the Falcon Flies Again sequence alone is absolute peak Star Wars, and there's nothing in Episode IV that remotely lines up with the duel in the snowy forest at the end -- much less the Rathtar sequence (which I love and will never understand the hatred for). This is a damn good Star Wars film, and I honestly think it's made even better by both TLJ and TROS.