The return of Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars: The increase of Skywalker would’ve stimulated more sense to love familiar with The Clone Wars. With Supreme Leader Snoke killed off in The Last Jedi, J. J. Abrams was looking for another big bad to are incorporated in his Star Wars sequel trilogy closer, and Emperor Palpatine was the chosen relieve, with the wrinkly villain’s survival revealed in the first Rise of Skywalker trailer.

It transpires that Palpatine was behind the whole sorry mess right from the start. The Emperor was the utter inside Kylo Ren’s head luring him towards the dark side, the puppet-master looming over Snoke, and the inventor of the Empire’s revival as the First Order. Now ready to make a grand return, Palpatine attains himself in bumpy chassis, but hopes to revitalize that ailing body with the aid of his granddaughter, Rey. Luring the Jedi-in-training to his nest on Exegol, Palpatine aims to force Rey into assassination him, thus taking the entire legacy of the Sith into her own person and ruling unchallenged as Empress Palpatine.

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Unfortunately, The increase of Skywalker spurred a highly contentious response from supporters, and a largely negative one from critics, with Palpatine’s return playing a significant part in the backfire. But some of the problems with the villain’s resurrection and subsequent proposal might’ve been easier to understand for those who had already seen The Clone Wars.

There was an undoubted aura of excitement when Palpatine’s return was first exposed, but rebuts were desperately needed if the ruse was going to work. Would Palpatine’s survival realize Anakin’s sacrifice in Return of the Jedi irrelevant? What happened to the Emperor after falling down the shaft of the second Death Star? The warning signs began as early as The increase of Skywalker’s opening text creeping, which indicates that there is the first thread that Palpatine had not only returned, but has so far been announced himself to the galaxy. This rapid off-screen development immediately hinted that Abrams wouldn’t be giving the answers love were looking forward to, and so it eventually proved.

The car-mechanics of Palpatine’s survival are intimated at in The Rise of Skywalker, but never explicitly addressed. Whether he braved Vader’s attack or whether he was dead and was brought back remains unknown, as does the secret behind his continued existence, with apparatu, cloning and magic all throw into the mix without any meaningful context or rationalization. This has been partially compensated thanks to the Visual Dictionary tie-in book, but the film itself is frustratingly vague.

Palpatine’s grand scheme was even more devised. The Emperor kept years of careful work into his successful manipulation of Kylo Ren, simply to assign Ben Solo digression in favour of Rey. Palpatine likewise framed great effort towards impelling Rey angry and sucking her towards Exegol to kill him( something she was planning to do anyway ), because he’s abruptly exposed as the living realization of the Sith. And all this only to realize Rey wasn’t needed after all, and Palpatine could simply leech her and Ben’s Force dyad vitality to restore his own body. For those who only knew Palpatine on the big screen, this was a labyrinthine plot, worsened by the confusion over whether these machinations were his true plan all along, or simply a contingency.

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Palpatine in the original Star Wars trilogy is largely of a single intent – defeat the Jedi and consolidate the Empire’s grip on the galaxy. His scheming became notably most complex in the prequel trilogy, where he provoked the Clone Wars to put down the Republic. But it’s his appearances in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars invigorated lines that best predict Palpatine’s role in The Rise of Skywalker.

One of very best samples comes when Palpatine boards a recompense hunter to break into a Jedi temple and steal a holocron which will act as a beacon, illuminating the locations of Force-sensitive offsprings all over the galaxy. After superseding, Palpatine immediately began rounding up the younglings and intended to turn them into his own personal Sith agents, before being outwitted by Anakin and Ahsoka. Unlike his previous movie figures, in which Palpatine would only nurture other Siths as apprentices, this area inklings towards a wider interest in younger Force-sensitive beings. Although the intention is very different, there’s a thematic affinity between find these children and earmarking a young Rey as a possible future vessel.

Alluding more to Palpatine’s return is the incident related to the Zillo Beast. Hailing from Malastare, Palpatine petitions the soul be cloned in order to uncover the secrets of its invulnerable security. Although Palpatine’s interest in cloning goes all the way back to Kamino and Obi-Wan’s uncovering of the Clone Army, this occurrence foregrounds a more personal interest in the process. Previously, Count Dooku had outsourced the Empire’s cloning places to Kamino’s specialist facility, but The increase of Skywalker registers Palpatine had crafted his own clones of Snoke on Exegol. The Zillo Beast is perhaps the missing link between those two steps – a signaling that Palpatine’s reliance on others for cloning was short-lived.

Perhaps the most significant Palpatine instants in The Clone Wars come in the incident “Sacrifice, ” where Yoda tours the Sith planet of Moraband. One of the most jarring parts of The increase of Skywalker is when Beaumont Kin recommends supernatural might be behind Palpatine’s resurrection. Considering magic has never been a feature of the Star Wars movies( apart from when the naive mistake the Force for creating ), the following statement shaped little sense. However, in “Sacrifice, ” Palpatine works a sorcery, working in partnership with the Force, to capture Yoda in an apparition, despite the two sworn adversaries being on separate planets. In the same episode, Yoda interacts with the spirit of deceased Sith, Darth Bane, which proved beyond mere belief that Sith have their own way of cheating death after the physical pattern dies.

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Palpatine’s return and propose in The Rise of Skywalker weren’t completely compatible with his previous big screen impressions. His personal timeline between the original and sequel trilogies wasn’t addressed, and numerous previously-unseen Sith subterfuges were introduced, including eternal forces, wizard, cloning and the pas of minds into another. In this gumption, Palpatine’s return was a calamity; a “get out of jail free” card after Snoke was nixed as the sequels’ proposed archway scoundrel, but Palpatine as the true enemy wasn’t amply interpreted and didn’t fit neatly with the character’s history.

Taking into account Star Wars: The Clone Wars, however, The increase of Skywalker doesn’t feel like such a big leaping. The Snoke clones are foreshadowed, as is Palpatine’s interest in younger Force-sensitives, which ultimately leads towards picking his granddaughter as the ideal vessel. Viewers too learn that Sith have their own version of Force haunts, which improves pave the way to revealing Palpatine is possessed by the order’s entire history. Meanwhile, Palpatine’s Force powers take on a more enchanted side, which manufactures Beaumont Kin’s suggestion that magic might’ve been utilized to resurrect Emperor seem far more plausible. Delving into other media such as Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath stories and the Visual Dictionary companion books runs even further towards smoothing over the questions The Rise of Skywalker leaves unanswered.

But it would erroneous to claim that watching The Clone Wars will determine all the problems followers had with Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker. Disney are fully aware that the majority of their Star Wars movie audience won’t be familiar with The Clone Wars, meaning the studio wouldn’t intentionally exhaust a film that stimulated watching the enlivened serials beforehand a necessity. The Clone Wars might expedite as a supplementary companion to Palpatine’s plot in The Rise of Skywalker, but that almost certainly wasn’t the intention. The gaps in Palpatine’s narrative weren’t designed to pay off storylines from The Clone Wars, they were left because The Rise of Skywalker tried to fit far too much into its feed time.

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Read more: screenrant.com