Star Wars Characters Whose Identities Are Still Unknown

In all the excitement surrounding the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it's easy to forget that we know almost nothing about anyone who wasn't a character in previous films. The movie that includes a few familiar faces is also jam packed with plenty of unfamiliar ones. We really only learn about one of them...and not as much as we'd like. Meanwhile, the rest are left as mysterious as ever. And with that in mind, let's see who we were left hanging to wonder about until the next movie shows up.

Finn is a character so mysterious he literally doesn't have a name. He's given an offhanded nickname by a guy who met him on the fly and needed to call him something besides FN-2187, his Stormtrooper serial number.

Naturally the filmmakers want us to be aware that Finn is more than just a Stormtrooper, and to speculate about who he really might be, but we have nothing to go on at all. He picks up a lightsaber, so is one of his parents a Jedi? Maybe. There were rumors he was related to both Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu, but neither even gets mentioned in The Force Awakens. Fact is, one of the two heroes of the film doesn't even know his own name or where he came from. He was raised in as much of a haze as the rest of us. Now that's a secret identity.

The Force Awakens' other main protagonist is Rey, who at least has a name before the movie starts. She even has a tiny flashback of being abandoned by someone, so we know she probably wasn't cloned or grown in a bowl like those snazzy instant bread puffs she eats.

You could make a good argument from the way the film plays out that Rey is the child of a Jedi. She manages to use the Force, she fights with a lightsaber, and she's drawn to the weapon when she discovers it in Maz Kanata's place, having some mysterious visions because of it. And the last scene in the film is Rey finally tracking down the long lost Luke Skywalker. Is she his daughter? Niece? Massage therapist? We'll have to wait until the next movie to get any more clarification. For now she's just a girl who taught herself some Force tricks in about 30 seconds when it seems like everyone else needed weeks if not months and years of training.

One of the biggest mysteries of The Force Awakens is the story behind Supreme Leader Snoke. If Kylo Ren is our Darth Vader substitute, Snoke is our new Emperor. But how did he rise to such power? Is he a Force user as well? If not, why does Ren defer to him so easily?

We know Ren reveres Darth Vader, so he's a bit of a Dark Side groupie. Is Snoke actually Emperor Palpatine? The Emperor's old teacher, Darth Plagueis? Some new being altogether? Too many questions with so little revealed, except that it seems Snoke felt the Empire was weak, so maybe he is someone new...someone from the shadows who wants to be a little more ruthless than those who came before. And he apparently feels that Luke Skywalker could be integral to that...

Poe Dameron is an interesting but underused character in The Force Awakens. He's entrusted with BB-8, the little droid packed full of valuable maps—because email doesn't exist in a galaxy far, far away—and he's said to be the best pilot the Resistance has. He's kind of a mishmash of both Han Solo and Luke Skywalker from A New Hope, this heroic yet roguish character who takes on the bad guys no matter what the risk. And of course he gets caught. But then he's busted out! But then he crashes in the desert. Oops.

Here's the thing: Poe and Finn crash land in a TIE Fighter on Jakku. Poe's jacket is in the wreckage but he's nowhere to be seen. Only later does Finn discover Poe survived, apparently by being ejected from the cockpit. But right out of his jacket? And he couldn't go back to the wreckage? And he still got off the planet somehow? There are a lot of theories about Poe's sketchy story out there, and hopefully some of them will be addressed in later movies.

We've had Stormtroopers of various forms in nearly all the Star Wars films. The prequel trilogy introduced them as a clone army, and the original trilogy made them kind of bumbling but numerous and with bad aim. Now, in the new trilogy, we know the First Order has abandoned the idea of clones as unreliable, and instead raises and trains soldiers from childhood, brainwashed to be a part of the cause, then tossed into the field in their identical uniforms to do the bidding of Kylo Ren and crew. And then there's Captain Phasma.

Another underused character in The Force Awakens, Phasma is the only Stormtrooper given a name, a different look, and some degree of responsibility. Obviously she's the Stormtroopers' immediate superior, but why? How did she come into this role? What separates her from the others that makes her special in some way? Is her armor different simply for aesthetic reasons or is there a purpose? We know Phasma is played by Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie even though we never see her face, so it feels like there should be something more to her character.

Kylo Ren isn't the character's proper name in the film, and it seems like "Ren" may be a title, not unlike "Darth" in the past. Kylo is a member of the Knights of Ren, a mysterious organization that apparently has ties to the Dark Side of the Force. It's so mysterious, in fact, we're left to speculate as to whether Ren is a word that has meaning regarding what Kylo believes, or if it's an actual being who assembled these Knights.

It's established early on that the Force is mostly gone from the universe, at least as far as everyday people like Rey are aware of. But Kylo is clearly trained in it. Are the other Knights of Ren? How many are there and what are the rest of them doing? At one point Snoke calls him "master of the Knights of Ren." So if he's the master, where are the rest of his disciples?

We spend a good deal of time getting to know Maz Kanata in the movie, but what we don't know is probably much more relevant. Han solo tells us she's a friend, a former pirate and a smuggler. And she's over 1,000 years old. She can sense the Force in others, it seems, and is on the side of the Light. So who is she? If she's been around for a thousand years, she's outlived Yoda. She's seen the rise and fall of the Jedi as well as the Empire and now the First Order. It's possible she spent a millienium on the sidelines being completely quiet until now, but how likely does that seem? Especially when she's storing little trinkets like Luke Skywalker's lost lightsaber.