ST Rey as Palpatine's granddaughter

We don’t choose our family though. Your lineage is your lineage, like or not. If that’s how it works then I "choose" to be Jeff Bezos junior. . Blood is blood. You cannot deny it. You can disown your family or whatever but we don’t just get to change it on the fly like a pair of socks.

I suppose Rey being a Palpatine is bearable but her just calling herself a Skywalker was the final nail in the coffin for TROS for me. I was already pretty irritated at that point and then that’s the final line in the movie? Ugh. I almost threw up. She ain’t no Skywalker. Nope.

 

I agree. We all know that 'family', in Star Wars, is more than just blood anyway... Han Solo, Chewie, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Lando, 3PO and R2 etc. etc. SW is a story that's predicated on the strength of kinship and extended family. So the ST, in an attempt to establish the narrative 'it's not the family you're born into, but the family you choose', seems repetitive and inconsequential... because doh!, it's kind of obvious. However, in terms of 'blood lineage' and the potential that gives to be a 'powerful Jedi'... well that was fundamental to the OT/PT. So (in terms of Star Wars), one can choose whom one refers to as 'family', but one can't choose whom one takes the genetic makeup/'force power' from.

 

I mean, it isn't like Leia and Luke are offended or anything.

 

Maybe not, but *I* am! Rey SHOULD have been a blood Skywalker.That would have tied the trilogies together, and would have made the Skywalker family story more satisfying and positive. With the ending we got, Rey Palpatine basically steals the Skywalker name, but she truly gives nothing positive to the Skywalker family. The whole family ends up dead and failures. They accomplished absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, and Palpatine gets the last laugh because his granddaughter ends up being the big hero and he has offspring, while the Skywalkers have NOTHING!

Having her take the Skywalker name when she should have been a Skywalker, but isn’t, just kind of rubs salt in an open wound.

Plus, Rey should have respected her own GOOD parents who died for her, and kept their name.

 

How is it stolen? She has the full acknowledgement and tacit support of the Skywalkers.

Last laugh? Do you really think Palpatine cares about family at all, let alone its survival? To Palpatine, the universe begins and ends with himself; if he's not around, nothing matters—not even the Sith. Rey was only ever meant to be his new meat puppet, and her continued existence in a galaxy devoid of Skywalker descendants is completely irrelevant to him.

What name do you think they adopted? It certainly wasn't Palpatine.

 

No, but I was. . It just was the icing on the proverbial poop-cake that TROS was for me. Just my opinion of course but I hate that movie. I cant believe Im saying that about a Star Wars film. But I cant help it. If I even think about the film my systolic blood pressure number starts climbing.

Yes - if she would have actually had that lineage I would have been much better with it. Even though it seems like such a small universe with everyone seemingly related, lol. And yes - Rey's parents tried to help her and it cost them their lives. She could have honored them by using that name. Meh and Bleh.

 

What name? They not have adopted any family name; the whole point was to remain inconspicuous.

 

Right. In the film, he wants Rey dead. Killed by Kylo. And 'Rey Palpatine' was a way of 'seducing' Kylo into talking to her. Seducing, because Rey Palpatine meant bloodline, and Kylo could relate to it. 'My mother was the daughter of Vader, your father was the son of the emperor'.

Palpatine knew Kylo would betray himself and kill Rey. It almost happened, but Leia intervened. Palpatine 'lost' Kylo. So he tried to possess Rey. She was his plan B.

'Rey Palpatine' could be a lie, at least in the way is presented in the film. The source is Palpatine himself and that alone makes the idea suspicious.

Besides, something is off. Vader-Leia-Ben is natural bloodline, Palpatine-clone-Rey, not so much. If the clone was not FS, and therefore useless to Palpatine, and the mom was not FS either, how could someone like Rey, FS grandchild of Palpatine, ever be born? Or, maybe the mom was FS, but in that case there's another FS bloodline at play.

And Luke is maybe using a lie -'because you are a Palpatine'- to motivate Rey. Confronting fear. A convenient fiction.

Luke was once both Vader and Luke (Dagobah cave) Who is Dark Rey, besides Rey?

 

No, Rey Palpatine didn't work for me. It was a cheap twist and another element once again repeating something from the OT for no good reason. The only thing that makes it slightly easier to swallow is the fact that it wasn't natural, she's really just the daughter of his clone, but calling her a Palpatine and "Palpatine's granddaughter" sounds more suspenseful and attention-grabbing, so they went with that. And making her into ''Rey Skywalker'' in the end didn't help.

 

Recessive genes. If Force sensitivity were guaranteed to be just as potent generation to generation, then Jedi and Sith would likely be dynastic. Instead, most Jedi and Sith come from families without Force potential.

 

Interesting idea and point here. I had pondered in another thread about exactly how the Jedi picked their next candidates or younglings for force training. Did every kid get tested for midichlorians at a certain age? Did they just use some lineage data and automatically request kids from families with prior force histories? Of course, Jedi aren’t allowed to love or have relationships, right? I always hated that idea but I get it. Without many ways to reproduce you’d think they’d run out of good Jedi rather quickly. So yes….to your point, many must come from families without force blood in their veins. Weird.

 

Jedi aren't allowed to have relationships. They are allowed intimacy though - it's forming a proper relationship that they are discouraged from doing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1989505.stm

Jackson said the example of Shaolin monks from Hong Kong kung fu movies had informed his take on a Jedi knight, with characters meditating "like most men are supposed to do in monk-like situations".

But Lucas revealed that despite their monastic regime, Jedi were permitted to have sex.
"Jedi Knights aren't celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments - and possessive relationships."

 

The Jedi aren't dynastic, but not because of their parents: it's because of their sons. They are not supposed to form dinasties, or even to form that kind of parent/son attachment. Those are the rules.

Maybe they were dynastic once and it didn't end well, hence the rules. 'Dynastic' can easily degenerate into 'tribal' when there are several dinasties around: warring clans.
(ANH's 2nd draft, c.1975, had 'hundreds' of jedi families in it, but placed them thousands of years before. Maybe that situation led to tribalism and war - and that's how the sith were born. In the Plagueis novel the sith were a 'jedi sect' born from a 'family feud')

We don't know if recessive/dominant FG genes is a thing in that universe when it comes to FS descent.

Not saying that's impossible, but I think there's another explanation, one that also combines force lore and real world genetics. That explanation makes the Palpatine-clone-Rey lineage even more improbable.

As it turns out, in SW you can have
-a fatherless FS child (Shmi>Anakin), or
-a FS father/non FS mom (Anakin/Padme>Luke&Leia), or
-a FS mother/non FS father (Leia/Han>Ben)

But not a motherless FS child (Palpatine's son/clone). His mom was in fact a lab. As a result, he was not FS. That's why he was a failure. No womb, no FS lineage.

And this would be related to midichlorian>mitochondria, a real world reference made by Lucas himself.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/02/star-wars-george-lucas-story

And in our world mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother. So midichlorians would have to do with a womb, and not with a lab.

Force inheritance can work through recombination (Padme+Anakin>Luke&Leia) of through direct inheritance (Leia>Ben) In both cases the result is a FS individual. Palpatine could not replicate that; that's why the son was a failure. He was, in a way, the FS Palpatine lineage back to normal (=non-FS)

But how do you create a FS child (Rey) out of a non-FS child (son/clone)? That which happens naturally (FS suddenly being born from non-FS, as @Lord Exor says) can maybe be replicated. Can be made to happen. Not through science, but through sorcery.

Theoretically you only need a womb and the power to create life. You need a Shmi and what Plagueis came to know. And 'he taught his apprentice everything he knew'

This sorcery would be rooted in balance itself, in the very nature of the force. 'Death and decay that feeds new life' at the cellular level. You only have to use that in your benefit. Create death and decay, link it to a womb, and life will follow.

Rey was born the same year Ben was sent away. Too much Vader in him. That's 'decay'. So maybe Palpatine used Ben's decay or corruption to cause Rey. A force bond at a micro level.

(When Kylo and Rey fight and interact in TROS across space they seem to be inhabiting some kind of womb or bubble. Maybe the sorcery was done using Vader's helmet. That's how Kylo connects with Rey in the film)

According to this theory, Rey's parents in the film are not her FS bloodline parents. Palpatine used Ben to cause Rey inside a certain womb after the son/clone idea failed - and that womb, that person, was maybe a Palpatine by blood: someone sharing a common ancestor with him.
The idea is in the film. That throne in Exegol was ancient: and Palpatine's by birth. 'It is your birth right to rule here. It is in our blood'. It was also his birth right then.

That means ancient lineage. Ancient parents and sons. Ancient blood that maybe Palpatine and Rey (and this hypothetical mom) shared. So Rey Palpatine was true at that bloodline level, but not directly (=Palpaltine-clone-Rey)

Some kind of evil mom, perhaps. This is Sydney Bristow's mom from JJ Abrams' Alias:

And, of course, Sydney was some kind of chosen one in that show.

'He killed my mother', Rey says...but we don't see that.
'...And [then] my father' But the son/clone was killed first.

Luke's father was dead once, and then he was not.

The TROS mother (Jodie Comer) looks very like Leia's 'real mother' in the ROTJ novel, who later was retconned into non-motherhood by Padme Amidala.

Spoiler

Convoluted, but such are the workings of insidiousness. And the son/clone is a dead end from a storytelling POV, literally. He was killed. He has no post-TROS future.

This hypothetical mother would be there behind the horizon, just like Vader at the end of ROTS.

 

@ScreamingWoman2019 - Nice post here about how using your logical three possibilities makes it the Rey-Palps things a huge reach. It sure does.

 

I get what you're saying, and I agree I'd have preferred Rey to be a Skywalker or even a Solo.

Though I wasn't a huge fan of her being a Palpatine, I didn't mind her taking on the name Skywalker. IMO it was like the ultimate final middle finger to Palpatine and the Sith! I suppose the way I saw her taking the Skywalker name was less about her feeling part of that family or choosing to make herself a Skywalker personally, and more about ensuring which name is the one that lives on in the galaxy. For me it was all about legacy; she was choosing to carry the torch for the Skywalker name-and everything good it represented, instead of Palpatine and the evil that name was remembered for.

 

It didn't work for me either but even if she had stayed a nobody I still wouldn't have liked her calling herself a Skywalker. It's just a WTF moment for me. Literally just the Palpatine saga all the way around. Palpatine kills a Palpatine then claims the name Skywalker?

 

Short summary from me - could have worked ... wasn't executed well

 

Yeah - Its a "ba fungu" to the Palpatine lineage but no Palpatines were there to see or hear it. . My problem is that I disliked TROS immensely so by that time I was so bummed that the Skywalker line just iced the cake for me.

Its a monumental WTF moment, IMO.

Not even sure it could have worked but it didnt as it went down. Ugh..... TROS kills the sequels for me. I will probably stop watching the saga from now on after ROTJ. Just cant do it. It feels so over at that point. It kind of is.

 

The saga has orbited around Palpatine for nearly 40 years, it's not exactly novel. He's at the center of everything. That said, the protagonists in this story remain Skywalkers, including Rey—I'll never understand why anyone cares if she's related by blood or not. She's an honorary part of their family, and it's not an "insult" to anyone or anything.

Yes, the saga is over. It's time for a new saga.

 

After what unfolded in TROS, I think a film/ST featuring Palpatine's son would have been infinitely more interesting than what we got. Someone born into 'evil', expected to be 'evil', but chooses to reject that path in favour of love and light... that is infinitely more interesting than the ST as it is.

 

No, she should not have been a blood Skywalker. She should also not have been a Palpatine. That was a desperate attempt to appease the terminally online critics of the Last Jedi, which given critical consensus and BO receipts, were a minority contingent better ignored.

The dynastic tendencies in Star Wars are silly, and I loved that Rey wasn't a special name, just a really good person in a terrible situation whom the Force had chosen as its avatar.

But, suggesting she "steals" the name is churlish and unfair. Firstly; the name belonged to the thuggish henchman of a dictator, and then his son who redeemed him. They're 50/50 on amazing acts to pin to the name. Leia and Ben were never given the Skywalker name, just the bloodline.

Secondly, though, by adopting that and rejecting her Palpatine name (again, Rey Palpatine is a bad, bad choice) she is ensuring that more good deeds than bad are linked to it. Which is not just preserving it, it's honouring it. It's continuing to chose to do good, something Rey does througout every film and that makes her unique.

The best outcome was that Rey was, in fact, a nobody. The ending of TLJ, with broom boy, showed why this mattered.

 

No, that was Abrams unable to find any conflict for Rey to face and overcome in TROS since he wasn't committed to the idea of Rey Palpatine during filming.

And I never recall anyone actually wanting Rey Palpatine. Maybe a hypothetical situation as to what the revelation might mean for her or the galaxy, but it was just one of many possible scenarios for Rey to face in the future. And people honestly thought Rey Nobody was set in stone in TLJ.

The fact that Abrams reversed it only vindicated what many critics suspected Rey Nobody would actually cause.

Zero conflicts. Zero story for Rey. It ultimately goes nowhere.

 

People wanted Rey Kenobi or Rey Skywalker. I get that. I am saying I wanted none of it.

Rey Nobody was set in stone in TLJ; the Ep9 overreaction committee just had a chisel.