ST Snoke/Andy Serkis Discussion Thread

Right, but that's a straight-up retcon. Like I said, I have no doubt things can be made to fit together. But it's also seems to me like whatever had been set up ended up not being used. Andy Serkis's hints at Snoke's backstory? If they were ever anything, they may have just been the actor's own backstory for the character that he could use when doing his job. The bits and pieces from the novelization? They were from a previous version of the character, who actually did experience those things.

None of this is certain, of course. I'm just saying this is how it seems now.

 

The WWI thing Serkis talked about...Snoke's theme had chanted lyrics in it, belonging to a poem from Kipling. Some guy on reddit -such is my source, but I'm some guy too- identified the poem, or words belonging to it. 'A death bed', about the german Kaiser ('WWI'):
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_deathbed1.htm
'Some die suddenly, this will not'. And:

Spoiler

For Snoke 'darkness' was the true nature of things. So the GFFA was uncivilized, or at least misguided. The GFFA was the Yellow Peril and Africa.
Maybe connected to the heart of darkness idea, with a touch of Ming the Merciless.

Well, pure speculation, but I think those ideas are related to the UR, and that's where Snoke came from supposedly; he knew the place.

As for his memories, there's the Force Unleashed idea...Vader/Starkiller.

I mean, Starkiller -a clone- had in him 'the memories of a dead man' as Vader says - the memories of the original host.

Vader didn't survive the OT, Palpatine did. So the idea was available for him in the writer's room, and not for Vader.

By the way, those tanks with Snoke(s) in them are there when Kylo arrives; but later Rey goes to Exegol and walks through the 'lab' and they seem to be gone. Is that the case?

 

Mando spoilers

Spoiler

I wonder if Mando season 2 will end with Snoke or something similar to him being created. They do have a fresh batch of baby blood now and I think they'll use it.

 

Imo pretty sure they told Serkis he was Palpatine or an avatar basically at that time. How he described his background while hiding it and saying a few times he knew exactly what his background was which now certainly doesn't match what he says but the Ep 8 novel thoughts of Snoke seem to match up with what Serkis claimed.

 

Ah I remember seeing that, although I'm not sure if that was definitively proven to be Snoke. I do recall some of the concepts of Snoke from the TFA artbook that even had the character as a woman at one point.

What was in the Ep 8 novel, out of curiosity?

 

So if Snoke was based on a character from Lucas’s sequel treatment, that most likely means Maul. I wonder if his original backstory, what Abrams and Serkis developed, was essentially the same but with a few differences.

In other words: former apprentice of the Emperor, maimed by the Jedi, abandoned by the Sith, laid low for decades, made use of power vacuum once the Sith were destroyed.

 

I think it's likely Uber was a placeholder for Maul. Lucas seemed to have kept Maul being the one holding the strings to Darth Talon pretty tightly to his chest.

 

I think Maul was specific to just one version, which appeared to be something based somewhat closer to Lucas' sequel ideas form the 80s that he updated around what I'm guessing was the mid-2000s or so. After that he developed things further, and Maul I think was dropped--if he had seriously been considered by the time we got to Ardnt processing Lucas' treatments, we'd be seeing more solid proof in the concepts and so on.

 

Well, the concept art is hand selected, so if there were any of Maul, it could simply not have been shown. I’m guessing Disney would not have wanted to let on that Maul had been considered for the trilogy’s villain. I mean, we’ve seen how fans have reacted in the last few months, so at that more vulnerable time, they may have wanted to avoid any controversy.

Regarding Uber, what leaks or rumors did we ever get of that version of the character?

 

I think if there was any serious consideration for Maul, it would've inevitably leaked--he's a pretty distinct thing to notice after all. I don't think Lucas himself mentioned it when he's been discussing his ST treatment ideas in recent years, so I lean to it being a thing for just one iteration.

Though we got very little on Uber AFAIK, but there are more concepts of the 'Jedi Killer' character who evolved into Kylo, with suggestions that he would've been wearing armor to deliberately mimic Vader.

 

Potentially, though that may be vague enough to just be coincidence--with the exception of the legions bit, which does intrigue me.

 

My take on that bit of backstory from the TLJ novel was that it referred to the people Snoke killed (or had killed) in his rise to power: that is, other former Imperials in the emerging First Order. And that’s mainly because the internal monologue segues from that to discussing other potential leaders he had pushed aside or eliminated.

But who knows how much of that was genuine backstory given to Jason Fry versus material he was able to develop on his own. Similarly, we can wonder whether TFA novelization writer Alan Dean Foster got any backstory info when he gave brief hints about Snoke’s history, though his stuff mainly came through in the form of dialogue, so it may have been from a longer version of the script. Indeed, part of that seemingly cut dialogue is heard in the first teaser to TFA (“The dark side and the light.”)

To my mind, there’s definitely a pre-Episode IX backstory that shifted once the final movie was developed. Palpatine’s late inclusion in the trilogy meant he took over some aspects of Snoke’s original role. The clearest example is a line about how he had always been manipulating things, from the beginning, from the shadows. In a deleted scene in TFA and in the novelization, this was specifically referring to Snoke, but that footage was reworked to refer to Palpatine. (Likely, also, because they now had a limited amount of footage with Carrie Fisher.)

But it’s interesting to think about how much of Snoke’s original backstory was shifted over to Palpatine. The dark side planet seems likely, at least. But maybe Abrams originally meant for Snoke to be the leader of the Sith loyalists rather than a creation of the cult. I truly don’t think he intended to have Palpatine be behind things from the start, and although some lines can be seen as fitting with Palpatine, I think that’s just because Snoke was a very similar character. Heck, maybe originally they even intended to have Snoke be the true threat behind Palpatine rather than the other way around. That certainly seems to be what Alan Dean Foster had in mind. But maybe they decided against making so bold a retconning of the saga’s main villain.

 

Alan Dean Foster had his own theories about who Snoke is. Likely those ideas were an influence in his novelization. You can read his treatment for Episode IX (here) as well as his theory on who Snoke is:

Spoiler: ADF's Snoke

I think it's likely that Snoke (like Rey) was a mystery box that JJ didn't have a good answer for.

 

Indeed. Though his treatment, which can be quite eccentric at points, seems partially like a not-entirely-serious commentary on TLJ. But I do think parts of it reflect his true thoughts about the characters, in this case about Snoke.

If we ignore the odd cloning ideas Foster introduced in his treatment, we can see that he basically sees Snoke as a dark sider who was around during the Clone Wars and was defeated by Kenobi. He hints at Snoke’s having had influence over Palpatine rather than the other way around, though that’s ambiguous. But his primary focus is revenge on Kenobi and on those closest to him. This resonates with what we heard a few months ago about Rey originally being set up as being related to Kenobi.

This also matches up with the idea that Snoke, the “uber baddie” for the sequels in concept if not execution, was developed from what was originally Maul in Lucas’s treatments. In this case, though, he’s a “de-Mauled” dark sider defeated during the Clone Wars (or earlier), but who is also focused on getting revenge on Kenobi.

I also recently read that some of what eventually became the canon book Bloodline came from early Episode 7 drafts and backstories set up by Michael Arndt when he was working on the script in its earliest days. So I wonder, too, if Snoke would have featured more prominently in the Senate drama that preceded the movies. Some early leaks definitely suggested that, with Snoke essentially corrupting the Senate slowly to enable the rise of the First Order, and even persuading Senators to support the new regime.

 

Wasn't there also a New Republic Senate scene that was shot for TFA and then cut? I could be wrong but I remember hearing something about this, it would also explain why the New Republic Senators get 2 whole pages dedicated to them in the TFA VD when they only have 2-3 seconds of screentime.

 

Although to me Snoke was obviously an Emperor stand-in for JJ, I was very interested to see what they did with him. I thought there were some really interesting theories about him being some sort of Unknown Regions entity that may have helped make the First Order as powerful as it was. Really a shame in my opinion what Rian did with him and then TROS course corrected with a really non-sensical explanation.

 

@Resistance_Man There was a scene in which Leia tasked her aide, Korr Sella, to go to Hosnian Prime, warn the Senate about the First Order, and ask for their support. That scene took place in the Resistance base, though. I don’t know if more was filmed for the Senate itself beyond what we actually saw. But it certainly seems like more was initially planned, including a backstory for most of these events, but neither Abrams nor Johnson felt like that was needed in the movies. Once again, this may have been part of the apparent desire to distance these movies from the prequels.

And I agree, @mtt02263, that Abrams likely did not have too much planned beyond Snoke’s role as the new Emperor. The character designer was told to make him look like a ghoul out of Hammer Horror films, and presumably Abrams developed some kind of tentative backstory with Serkis. But ultimately it was a thread Johnson wasn’t interested in. It’s unclear what was being set up for Snoke, but the novelizations make it sound like he was a former Imperial who encountered some kind of powerful dark side knowledge in the Unknown Regions, which then allowed him to take over the First Order.

I think some of this concept survived in Exegol, though it may never have been more specific than there being a dark side planet somewhere out there just like there was a light side planet where Luke was in exile. My theory is that this is descended from story elements related to the Whills in Lucas’s sequel treatments. Not in the sense that Snoke was a Whill, but rather that knowledge of them was a pathway to greater power, which might be especially attractive to a Force user who has been severely injured. That’s just my theory, though, based on what little we know of early plans for the sequels. And that would have been attractive for Maul as much as it would have been for a “new” darksider like Snoke, who was similarly damaged.

 

That artbook even talks about the artist envisioning Snoke being handsome in his younger days and the darkside twisting him. This mess about him being made in a vat and having the twisted mess of a body originally and that his creation was about Kylo doesn't go along with any of that stuff about his history. I guess the different versions they considered does leave open the possibility that Snoke was going to be an artificial creation I guess however. How they dealt with it was pretty crazy and I think they would have been better off just having Palpatine reveal himself at the end or something like that than to having this crazy explanation that shoots down so many other things from Ep 7 and Ep 8 related material.

 

True, though Ivan Manzella, the artist who designed Snoke, has said he didn’t have much guidance from Abrams beyond a few visual references and knowing the character’s role in the film. So it’s likely, as with other comments about concept art pieces, this was just part of the concept rather than necessarily related to the story.

Having said that, yeah, it does feel like the story changed. I wish the Palpatine reveal didn’t feel added on, but it does, probably because it was. Ultimately I think it boils down to storytellers losing sight of the purpose behind telling a sequel trilogy and, more specifically, introducing a new villain.

We now know Lucas wanted Maul to be the big bad of the sequels. Though no longer a Sith Lord, Maul seemed to be a last gasp of the dark side, trying to stop the Jedi from restoring the Republic. His role is primarily that of creating chaos and breaking things as he goes out.

I think this character role shifted to a placeholder “Uber” villain with a similar role, who then became Snoke. But any context Maul had was stripped away. In fact it seems they stripped away more and more until there was very little left explicitly stated. Lucas wanted to retain that chaotic element to explore ideas of democracy, ecology, and spirituality further through the conflicts he envisioned, but that seems to have been lost along the way.

To be fair, the final switch of uber villain from Snoke to Palpatine does restore some of the context that would’ve been there with Maul. But it did feel last minute, which is unfortunate. To see the Dark Lord of Exegol from the start would’ve been controversial, yes, but also could have set up a stronger foundation for the overarching story.

 

It seems SW does have a history of introducing new villains for every movie, as if we would consider crane clone Palps a new character. It added an darker, scarier part to SW. Even if Maul would've added some of these elements to the ST, Lucas was never one to approve of something too "over the edge scary".
However I am really interested in the many conversations above going into concept art and early details on Snoke and his origins. I agree with the post about how they shouldve kept Snoke as the main villain throughout. I think JJ gave in under pressure and also the direction TLJ went. However he could've had Snoke return as another dark side clone project to direct the First Order to the final order. Maybe have his entity jump to another host. Whether it would be Plageuis or Palps behind it I wouldn't mind. I like this idea. One of my ideas included Kylo hearing the Vader mask "speak to him". Having Snoke lie about how Anakin was speaking to him and then Kylo finding out it was a lie and that it was Snoke or Palps wouldve made his turn even better. I think JJ had this in mind as in TROS Kylo goes straight to the mask to "listen" right after Palps tells him "I've been every voice you have ever heard inside your head" part.

 

Snoke could've been so much more had Abrams in TFA and Johnson in TLJ wanted to have something more than Palpatine circa ROTJ 2.0.

Whether its the oversized holograms or the inactive throne dweller, who'd have guessed when watching TFA, he'd be situated on a Stardestroyer in a red throne room that was effectively a massive curtain... unlike the rest of the film it just screams "lack of imagination".

 

Wait for it.