- Who the heck is Supreme Leader Snoke?
We might have the Snoking gun on today's Nerdist News?
It's so bad.
I can't even sell it.
(cheerful electronic music)
Over the past few years,
the Star Wars franchise has been through
some pretty major stuff.
It got all blowed up like Alderaan
when Disney bought the rights and removed
all traces of the expanded universe,
the old comic books, novels,
games, and other spinoffs from Star Wars canon.
Now, like the second Death Star,
that canon is being rebuilt
with the introduction of new sequels,
standalone prequels, and of course new comic books,
novels, games, and other spinoffs.
Chuck Wendig's Star Wars Aftermath books
are one of the latest endeavors
to permanently restructure the Star Wars universe,
and like all good aftermaths,
the series has left some pretty revelatory (beeping)
in its wake.
And now that the final book in the series,
Empire's End, has hit store shelves,
we may finally be able to resolve
some of Star Wars' most prickly mysteries.
A few weeks ago,
we cracked open the book's breakdown
as to what happened to Jar Jar Binks
after he brought down the Republic
by convincing the Senate to turn over emergency powers
to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in Attack of the Clones.
Spoiler alert, he's a homeless fountain clown.
Oh, I know.
- This embarrassing.
- Also, though there aren't too many specifics,
Empire's End addresses Luke Skywalker's lonely destiny
after the events of Return of the Jedi.
Apparently, the old new hope goes on a space walkabout
to find ancient relics and Jedi lore all over the galaxy,
but when Leia has a Force dream,
we find out that Luke is, quote, lost among the stars,
searching for something and failing,
never returning.
It's a sad story, but hey,
at least he's not a homeless fountain clown,
plus, if we're free to speculate,
what he was searching for was probably just Rey,
and we all know that he finds her
or she finds him at the end of Force Awakens.
So that's another destiny fulfilled by the Skywalker.
Now the book also discusses
why everybody's all hot and bothered to get to Jakku,
the desert planet setting for Force Awakens
where Rey was abandoned.
Turns out, Jakku is the site of the ultimate battle
between the New Republic and the Empire
and is home to a special observatory
commissioned by Emperor Palpatine
which contains maps that delineate routes
through a territory in space
called the Unknown Region.
Hey, it is no homeless fountain clown,
but it does bring us to perhaps
the book's most important revelation,
the origins of Supreme Leader Snoke.
Now ever since we met the giant, busted up hologram
in Force Awakens,
people have been wanting to know
who the eff Snoke is.
Some have speculated that he's really Darth Plagueis,
the Sith Lord mentioned briefly in the prequels
who was Palpatine's old master
and had the ability to create life and death with the Force.
Others have guessed that Snoke is a character
introduced in the Aftermath series known as Gallius Rax,
a particularly Machiavellian member
of Palpatine's inner circle,
who was tasked with delivering a contingency plan
should the Emperor suffer an untimely demise,
which, spoiler alert, he does,
but double spoiler alert, so does Gallius Rax
in Empire's End when he's killed by Admiral Rae Sloane,
so that theory at least has been put to bed.
And most controversially,
a Redditor named Lumpawarroo
chilled the internet to its core
when he hypothesized that Supreme Leader Snoke
was actually Jar Jar Binks.
- Meesa back.
- But as I mentioned earlier,
Empire's End put the kibosh on that theory
by turning Jar Jar into a homeless fountain clown.
So who the eff is Supreme Leader Snoke?
Well, given the events of Star Wars Aftermath,
we're still not exactly sure.
However, and this is a big however,
the series does give us some useful dirt.
In Empire's End, Gallius Rax observes
that Emperor Palpatine was obsessed
with the aforementioned unknown region,
believing that, quote,
"something waited for him out there,
"some origin of the Force,
"some dark presence formed of malevolent substance."
Rax brushes this off as a form of space Alzheimer's,
and thinks no more of it.
Little does he know, though,
that somewhere across the galaxy,
Leia Organa is being tormented
by a dark force that seems to be fixated
on her unborn child,
who we all know grows up to be spoiled hipster
Sith wannabe Kylo Ren.
- Kylo Ren's a punk bitch.
- Finally, at the end of Empire's End,
using coordinates he procured from Jakku,
Admiral Sloane discovers that the eclipse
is Star Destroyer ominously hidden
in the mazy Unknown Region.
Though we never find out who is on the ship,
author Chuck Wendig frames this event
as the birth of the First Order,
and based on what the book tells us,
it seems likely that the dark force
in contact with both Leia and Palpatine
is Supreme Leader Snoke,
an ancient being tied to the origins
of the Force itself,
lying in wait for the right time
to emerge from the darkness.
So who is Snoke?
Turns out, Snoke is Snoke,
an immortal cosmic menace
that could ultimately be more powerful
than Emperor Palpatine himself.
While that sounds a little Thanos-y to us,
we highly doubt that Disney is planning
a Star Wars Infinity Wars crossover,
so for now, we're going to stick with Snoke
as an entity unto himself.
How will Snoke differ from the other Star War's villains?
Are you intrigued or disappointed
by the fact that Snoke isn't Jar Jar Binks,
and if Disney did make a Star Wars Marvel crossover,
how would any of us ever recover?
Let's discuss,
and are you guys ready to go a little ape-y?
Because King Kong is back,
and he's both King-ier and Kong-ier than ever.
In Kong's Skull Island,
the colossal gorilla will go a special kind of bananas
when a scientific expedition
crashes his island paradise
and pokes around where it doesn't belong.
Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson,
Brie Larson, John Goodman,
and John C. Riley star in this classic tale
of monster versus man,
revealing once and for all
how Kong became king.
Grab the nearest vine and swing off
to get your tickets
because the gargantuan monkey business is going down
starting right now.
(cheerful electronic music)