via File770, Star Wars: Celebration just dropped the trailer for Season 3 of Rebels. Big reveals: the Darksaber is back and more Mandalorian lore, Grand Admiral Thrawn returns to canon, and Ezra slips ever closer to the Dark Side. The trailer is amazing:
Everyone is going to flip out over Thrawn, which is cool (though extremely muddles the Empire’s command structure). But the bigger clue is Ezra. In many ways, Ezra is Luke (and the same age, notably) – being trained ad-hoc, growing in strength, and convinced he is immune to the Dark Side’s corruption. We saw Luke flirt with the Dark Side’s power throughout the original trilogy and in ROTJ Luke dresses more like a Sith than a Jedi. There’s an entire theory that Luke actually went full Dark Side.
TFA basically refuted that, but there’s no denying Luke was walking the line between Light and Dark the entire time. He is a Skywalker, his grandfather is the Force, so I guess he had some plot protection in that respect. However, Ezra does not have that lineage. And the path that Ezra is walking is very similar to Luke’s – seeking more power, embracing the Sith holocron, not for its own sake but to protect his friends and family, and justifying the dalliance with the Dark Side on that basis.
My prediction: Ezra fails to walk the line as Luke does, and ultimately becomes Snoke.
Ezra’s dark side master is clearly Maul, which is appropriate because Vader is Maul’s replacement as Palpatine’s apprentice. As a result, Kylo Ren is the heir to Palpatine’s teaching via both Maul and Vader.
Since Maul went off the reservation, that would explain how Snoke has taught Kylo Force abilities we haven’t seen yet, like mindrape and forcefreeze. We can even speculate that Ezra’s final act to turn fully towards the Dark may be killing Ahsoka.
Obviously I’m not the only one to have speculated along these lines before, but the trailer for Rebels S3 makes it much more plausible, especially the Luke/Ezra parallels. But Ezra is no Skywalker.