We knew Emperor Palpatine would be back for months before The Rise of Skywalker ever hit
theaters, but we didn't know how or why.
Now that the film is finally out, we have the answers to some of our questions, but
it takes a little bit of consideration to assemble that knowledge into a clear picture.
Spoilers for Rise of Skywalker are, of course, ahead.
The Rise of Skywalker is a film with so much going on that, even with Palpatine's story
at the core of it all, viewers only get pieces of the full picture.
It's not totally clear how he returned after his death in Return of the Jedi.
When we first meet him again on Exegol, Palpatine is alive, but admits that he has been dead
before.
His somehow even-more decrepit appearance suggests that he's spent years hanging on
to what little life he has with the help of machines.
It seems Palpatine owes a great deal of his revival to the efforts of loyal followers
who became a cult of Sith resurrectionists bent on enacting his will through any means
necessary.
Palpatine may have appeared as pure evil to a great many people in the galaxy, but to
others he really was their one true leader.
Thanks to them, he was recovered from the Death Star, given some kind of new life, and
brought to the legendary Sith world.
In the build-up to The Rise of Skywalker's release, fans posited theories from cloning
to the "World Between Worlds" of Star Wars Rebels as possible explanations of Palpatine's
revival, but we still have neither confirmation nor denial of any particular method.
What we do know is that Palpatine is constantly connected to a life support system that pumps
various liquids into and perhaps out of his body.
This would suggest some kind of dark scientific method of revival, perhaps similar to Darth
Vader's life support system but it's also possible that's only one part of a bigger
picture.
It's possible that other dark secrets, from Sith rituals to others pieces of magic, were
used to jumpstart Palpatine's livelihood again.
Palpatine apparently didn't believe he could simply announce that he'd returned and retake
his place at the top of the pecking order.
Instead, he needed a puppet to function as a disruptor for the New Republic.
Enter Supreme Leader Snoke.
"Our strategy must now change."
When he meets Kylo Ren, Palpatine declares outright "I made Snoke," and then provides
evidence via a tank full of discarded Snoke bodies.
So, the Supreme Leader of the First Order was, at some point, engineered and created
by Palpatine himself to both serve as a puppet leader and draw the darkness out of Ben Solo.
It worked, because Kylo Ren did rise as a powerful follower of the Dark Side, killing
Snoke in the process.
After his defeat at the Battle of Endor, Palpatine no longer wanted to simply rule the galaxy.
He wanted to impose a sense of fear in every single star system.
He'd need a whole fleet of planet killers.
Palpatine and his many followers deployed their resources to create the military machinery
of "The Final Order," a massive fleet of Star Destroyers each equipped with a planet-killing
cannon on the underside.
We saw "miniaturized Death Star tech" deployed by the First Order in The Last Jedi, and in
The Rise of Skywalker, it becomes clear that Palpatine and his followers have found a way
to make those tools even more deadly.
After waiting for decades, Palpatine felt the time was right to make his move with Kylo
Ren in place as the First Order's Supreme Leader.
But Palpatine couldn't just leave his life support machinery in his fortress on Exegol,
and perhaps he didn't want to.
Instead, he sent a mysterious message to the galaxy, in which he vowed revenge.
"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"
Rumors of a resurrected Palpatine quickly swirled, terrifying the Resistance and enraging
Kylo Ren.
Ren hunts down a Sith Wayfinder and seeks out Palpatine on Exegol.
Palpatine reveals to him that he was the architect behind Snoke, and he's been the Darth Vader
voice in Ren's head.
He makes Kylo Ren an offer of control of the Final Order fleet, and leadership over a new
Empire.
Ren accepts the offer and agrees to Palpatine's one condition: that Ren track down and kill
Rey.
To help facilitate this, Palpatine also provides Ren with a key piece of information that helps
explain why he wants her dead: Rey is Palpatine's granddaughter, and therefore a major threat
to his plans for the return of the Empire.
Palpatine soon begins reckoning with the other potential threats to his plan.
A spy within the First Order, later revealed to be General Hux, leaks information about
the Final Order fleet to what's left of the Resistance.
Commander Poe Dameron launches a covert operation with the hope of stopping the Final Order's
launch before it starts.
Palpatine has key allies in a position to provide help to eliminate the spy.
In the Order's rise to power, Allegiant General Pryde has emerged as a Palpatine loyalist
who'd fought with him in the Empire days.
Pryde kills Hux and assumes command of the Final Order fleet.
Palpatine commands Pryde to show what the Final Order is capable of by using a planet-killer
cannon on the planet Kijimi, Poe's old stomping grounds.
Palpatine doesn't actually want Rey dead.
He wants instead to establish a new Empire with his granddaughter as empress, after she
kills him and absorbs his Force energy.
And, as planned, Ren doesn't succeed in killing Rey.
Instead, he leads Rey right to Palpatine, and Rey discovers new layers of her own inner
darkness along the way.
What Palpatine didn't factor into his plan was his inability to fully draw Rey in, or
Leia Organa sacrificing her own life and Force energy to help redeem her son.
With Rey resistant and the now-redeemed Ben Solo ready to fight alongside her, Palpatine
attempts to absorb all of the Force energy from both young Jedi to fully resurrect himself.
It very nearly works, until Rey is able to call down the spirits of the generations of
Jedi before her and kill Palpatine once and for all.
A masterfully crafted plan ultimately fails because of kindness, determination, and the
Jedi legacy proves more powerful than Palpatine's own dark blood.
"It is finished, then."
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