ST What's your opinion on Sheev Palpatine coming back as the main villain of the Sequel Trilogy?

I like it.

Personally I hope we find out Darth Bane discovered a way to kill other Sith Lords and absorb their midichlorians (really their souls) before they could vanish into the Force through death. Then he could in some way make their power and knowledge his own. While not exactly dead but certainly not alive, what remained of the defeated Sith Lords was mastered and controlled by Bane. Greed for power and the need to cling to life also keeps these Sith voices in check.

That greed also pushes them as a group in a lust for more power. They push the current Sith Lord to become more powerful.

After Darth Bane has killed most of the Sith Lords he starts the rule of two, ready to rule the galaxy as the ultimate Sith Master. But the voices inside him have a trick of their own. Bane’s own apprentice has become more powerful than he recognizes and thought skill, power, and cunning she kills her master. What neither master or apprentice know is when Bane is killed all those dead souls inside him - as a single Sith Spector lash out at the Apprentice and merge with her soul. She is in command now with the knowledge and power of the dead Sith Lords including Darth Bane at her disposal. And the dead Sith Lords get a stronger and more powerful host.

This goes on master to apprentice for a very long time. The Sith keep getting stronger and stronger with each new Sith Master. Eventually we get to Darth Plaguis. He takes things to new heights and seeks the power to remain Sith Master forever. He’s searching for the knowledge so when he dies, his own soul will replace that of his apprentice. The dead Sith Horde of spirits get a new more powerful host body but Plaguis stays in the driver seat.

To unlock this power Plaguis finds it requires him to kill his apprentice Darth Sidious. But he also needs Darth Sidious and doesn’t want to take years training new apprentices to kill. So Plaguis repeatedly kills Sidious dead and then brings him back to life. Dying and coming back to life like this give Darth Sidious knowledge and insight no Sith has.

That knowledge later let’s Palpatine kill his master and makes Palpatine the first Sith Lord who can take over another persons body. Darth Sidious is basically the forever Sith Master. Sidious can even stay alive without a body for a limited amount of time. Just a cloud of Midichlorians like a Pac-Man ghost returning to home.

So when Sidious says, “I am all the Sith” he sort of means it. Their are hundreds or thousands of Sith Lords inside him.

 

IMO it effects the Skywalker legacy from the PT set up with the Chosen One prophesy.

The OT sets no expectations for what happened on the second Death Star. We don’t even know the Emperor or Darth Vader are Sith Lords. Don’t know anything about balance in the Force.

 

I go back to what I've felt all along. Palpatine - in the flesh - could have worked if set up properly within the ST. Not just subtly, not just with hints of music, but within the narrative and onscreen. That way the story becomes a race against a revived Palpatine, and in the sense of Luke and the Jedi, a chance to fix the old mistakes. To make sure the Palpatine cycle doesn't happen this time.

But what really would have worked better was just dealing with Palpatine's .... legacy. Not himself. Not his descendants. Not his grandkid. But just the legacy of his work and evil. His shadow is still there effecting the galaxy and the lives of our heroes. He doesn't need to be literally, physically, around anymore for that threat to feel real still.

And since the ST is largely about the Skywalker legacy, or should have been more clearly about the Skywalker legacy, it would have tied nicely as a parallel to that core theme. The legacy of the light and dark are now duking it out. The OT heroes have a real legacy, they won the war, they have children, who are now picking up the torch and carrying the story forward, whereas Palpatine's legacy, his so called child, his Empire, died.

So what's that legacy look like? It looks like a Remnant who doesn't have a future. Time is running out. It's dying. It's desperate. It is left with stealing children, because they have none of their own, no future so to speak of, and brainwashing them into his 'family', in the desperate last hope to survive and come back.

Some of those elements are even in the movie we got, but were never developed outside of a single line or two. What a shame. Stealing people like Finn, who was kidnapped as a kid, and who breaks his programming is a wonderful set up. It could have been used as foreshadowing to show all the troopers are real people underneath it all, and need to be saved, or guided to rise up against this lasting Imperial legacy. It could have been even used to setup Ben's story and eventual redemption.

 

QFT...

For me personally, Finn and the Stormtrooper revolt/uprising is the story that SHOULD have been told. It’s the one good idea in the ST that, unfortunately, never gets developed beyond the initial concept.

 

The one good original idea (within the saga) that the ST has and they don't give it more than 2 thoughts. But come on, I bet it felt really good to kill all of those other brainwashed kidnapped soldiers in TROS and not watch their programming get turned off once Palpatine is dead (mirroring EP1)

 

Yeah, that we didn't get Finn leading an uprising from within the First Order's ranks in the third act of this trilogy will forever be one of its greatest failures, in my opinion. It seemed perfectly set up in The Force Awakens with Finn's defection, and The Last Jedi doubled down on it as the probable outcome with Finn's exploration of the 'constructed' nature of the conflict at hand now that he an outsider from the First Order's regime. And then in The Rise of Skywalker we're just right back to business as usual, with Finn and the rest of the gang shooting Stormtroopers without remorse.

This moment with the Stormtroopers learning the truth about Phasma in The Last Jedi is something that should have been left in, in my opinion, as I find that it thematically gels really well with where that whole Finn arc should have gone in the third chapter.

 

This is exactly how I was viewing it.

I agree with this as well.

 

The rule of thumb in dramatic writing is to leave out all information except those things without which the audience will have no clue what’s going on. Whereas I felt the PT didn’t leave out enough info, much of the ST left out too much, and the logic of Palpatine’s return was the most conspicuous of them.

[edit] That being said, if I had to choose between too much info and being taken out of the movie vs not I enough info and wondering what’s going on, I’d choose the latter because at least I can fill in the info with my own imagination

 

You make it sound like it was intentional.

 

If only there were seeds of his existence and his role in the way things played out in TFA and TLJ. There were many theories of a villain behind the scenes, pulling Snoke's strings but that was down to Snoke being a very shallow and expendable villain. If only seems to be the by word for the ST.

 

You thinking leaving out specifics on how Palatine returned was unintentional?

 

Palpatine coming back wasn't intentional until they got to the last part of the story and was trying to figure a way to wrap everything up.

They didn't include the specifics because they didn't know either. They just needed it to happen because it was the best idea they had to clean up.

 

Right. Their approach to covering this up was to hit us with over-the-top theatrics and a fast moving plot, so audiences would hopefully not realize and say "wait, what?".

 

The first two films were all subtle hints, and random themes, because they didn’t want to do the hard work of committing to a specific plot and left the ohhhhh poor bastard in charge of the third film to figure out how to solve the first two films.

 

The baton being passed by Abrams to Johnson and then back to Abrams:

 

It dawned on me recently that Dave Filoni’s approach to post-ROTJ era seems to mimic the Third Age of Middle-Earth from LOTR, and especially right before Sauron’s reemergence. There are hints and whispers of evil having survived and of factions reorganizing in the fringes, but little is known. The heroes are working mostly on their own to hunt down the rumors of surviving enemies, like Ahsoka looking for Thrawn, or Luke searching for the darkness he sensed. I think that’s actually pretty cool, and really works well toward integrating Palpatine’s resurrection with the rest of the story.

 

It's like having 3 chefs make a dinner.

The first one wanted to make his favorite Roasted Chicken and Potatoes. He laid out a pan, seasoned the chicken, quickly laid out some veggies, and started cutting the potatoes. The buzzer goes off and the second chef walks in. He doesn't want Roasted Chicken because it was on the menu before a few years ago and really thinks Spicy Sausage Potato Soup would be new and exciting. So he places the raw chicken aside and starts boiling a big pot of broth on the stove. He adds the cut potatoes to the pot and throws in those veggies that were on the counter, and then adds in some cooked spicy sausage. It just starts to boil when the buzzer goes off again, but unfortunately the third chef was fired. So the first chef had to come back to make it work. He really didn't want spicy sausage potato soup, though, and he so goes about draining the pot, placing the boiling potato contents into a pan, and removing all the sausage bits that was sticking to the potato. He then adds that raw chicken back into the oven to roast and places it all back in the oven.

An hour or so later out pops ... "dinner".

 

I think that the Sequel Trilogy is particularly weak in the area of villains. While the Emperor was the best villain in the trilogy, I wish it had been someone new.

 

So leaving a justification out of the movie was intentional. That’s all I was presuming.

 

Yeah but that's like presuming someone who said asks you to borrow money left a million dollars at home intentionally. Reality is they never had it.

 

I think you’re confused about what I said. I’m saying regardless of whether or not Palpatine’s inclusion was intentional, I would rather they have left no explanation then some fabricated one. It was the lesser of the two evils, IMO, because at least with no explanation, I can supply my own.