this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I agree that it’s a pretty bad idea to bring back Palpatine, and that the execution of that idea was also really bad, but this idea has been in the Star Wars universe for a long time - in the early 90s the Dark Empire comics were all about a clone of the emperor secretly working to assemble a powerful industrial and military machine in the galactic core, before going on a crusade to restore the galactic empire, with Luke Skywalker as his new enforcer, to replace Dark Vader.
The comics were and are extremely popular and a lot of the sequel movies seem to pull some ideas from them, but never in a way that really makes sense. For example, in Dark Empire, the republic has to deal with a mysterious new military force conducting heavy strip mining of planets long before they know anything of the new imperial threat.
It’s well known (and good) trait of Star Wars movies that they jump straight into the action without too much context, but the writing on episode 9 was so sloppy it feels amateurish. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I believe they could have got a fanfic author to do a better job. Delivering exposition like “somehow, palpatine has returned” directly to the audience is a fucking joke.
To be fair, though, I think the scenes on Exegol pretty much confirm that it was cloning, or some kind of Sith alchemy, and subsequent works (the Mandalorian, for example) are definitely leading in that direction, but that’s a post-hoc explanation for something that already damaged our immersion, not foreshadowing or a further explanation of something that was already plausible but a mystery.
I do think it’s a really good thing to have mystery in Star Wars, not everything needs to be explained and every new story should add new mysteries. I think things being mentioned and not explained (the Clone Wars mentioned in ep 4 being the best example of that, imo) is part of what makes the universe feel vast and real, like it has a full history that you could study for years. So I don’t agree with that “an intriguing story hook is shown and never explored” is always fair criticism. Sometimes it is, but often it’s just a cool mystery that will inevitably be answered in some minor novel or comic a few years later.
Anyways, I’m not saying they should have copied Dark Empire, or demonstrate/explain exactly how Palpatine returned or how he built his fleet. They should have just hinted at it by having the resistance interact with a new military force with a different aesthetic than the New Order. Have Rey bothered by a growing darkness that she assumes is Kylo, but reveal that Kylo had felt it too and doesn’t know what it is. Show the cloning vats and Sith alchemy on Exegol before we know that Palpatine’s back.
Definitely, 100%, don’t announce the twist villain of your movie on Fortnite to generate buzz. Make less money, probably, but a much better movie. I’ve written way too much in this comment, sorry, I’m having an autism/adhd moment
That is still the stupidest bit of it, it's not even revealing the twist villain that's the issue even, like that could have built mystery if it was in the trailers and shit right, it's using a third party studio to reveal a critical plot point in a media that is pretty young, both in it's age and audience, and in a game that's looked down upon by the generation that would probably be the target audience for the reveal
Also it's time limited so it's just a matter of time before his reveal becomes lost media, so great thing there too
What's funny is that I didn't know about that (I'm a movies only type on SW, never known much about the extended universe), but I actually think it's fine as an idea. Just needed to be presented better.
I would like, for instance to know how, if at all, Palpatine and Snoke were connected. The sudden loss of Snoke in TLJ really robbed the sequels of their villain far too soon. If he had stuck around to IX, and then was revealed to be a front for Palpatine (with explanation for his survival) that would have worked better.
Still though, I really enjoyed IX, which I know is an unpopular opinion, but after TLJ, it just felt right again, even if lots of it was very silly.
In my opinion, and this is gonna be deep Star Wars legends theorising rather than canon, Snoke was almost definitely intended to be Darth Plagueis (of “the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise” fame), Palpatine’s former master. He was obsessed with Sith alchemy, cloning, biological engineering, that kind of thing, and famously could “keep the ones he cared about from dying […] but not himself”. He roughly matches the appearance of the character, with some extra scarring. He would be one of the few characters capable of producing a viable force sensitive clone (I’m ignoring X-1 and X-2, because they’re minor game characters which probably didn’t get much thought put into them) something which Vader and the Kaminoans had been working on secretly with limited success.
I think the reason that we didn’t get a Snoke=Plagueis reveal in Rise of the Skywalker (RotS) is because fans had been speculating about it from the beginning, and “defying audience expectations” was vogue in media at the time (e.g. the game of thrones final season), and extremely heavy criticism of The Last Jedi (TLJ) influenced the story team to almost completely ignore TLJ entirely, almost as if it was cursed and if they referenced any events in it, RotS would also be cursed. So they had to, essentially, cram two whole movies of storytelling into RotS, which is why the pacing of that movie is so absolutely ridiculous.
The likelihood is that we’ll never get a direct answer as to Snoke’s origins, or if we do, it’ll be in some random novel or comic. I get the feeling that Disney want to brush a lot of the sequel trilogy’s bigger mistakes under the rug, so to speak.