So, with the recent release of the first teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode IX, we learn that the movie’s official title is Rise of Skywalker, and that Ian Mcdiarmid will be back as Palpatine. Meanwhile people are scratching their heads, wondering how it’s possible that he could somehow be alive after we see him disintegrated in the bowels of the second Death Star. The fan theory I’m going to float is that while Palpatine may be in the movie, he isn’t back from the dead, cloned, or somehow otherwise present in the current story. It’s a flashback. And while this is just a fan theory, I am one of the people who figured out the big twist ending in The Sixth Sense within the first ten minutes of the movie, and I often irritate my wife by figuring out plot twists well before they happen. In other words, I’m pretty good with narrative structure. In fact, I’ve worked as a narrative designer for what was a major video game studio, but I digress.
In The Force Awakens, we see Rey suddenly come into force powers she never knew she had. She said that it felt like it had just woken up inside her, and then with literally no training she was doing things that it took other jedi years to learn. This was a clue that there is something interesting and unique about her origin.
The next clue comes from earlier in the same movie, when Rey touches Luke’s lightsaber. As we all remember, that lightsaber had originally belonged to Anakin Skywalker, and then was given to Luke by Obi One in A New Hope. Luke loses this lightsaber on Bespin while fighting Darth Vader. The presence of the lightsaber and her obvious and unexplained connection to it provide us with another clue.
Moving on to The Last Jedi, Rey goes to the dark side cave because she feels that she’ll be able to learn something about her parents. What she sees there however are just endless copies of herself. Now, it could be argued that this might just be mirroring a scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke sees his own face in Vader’s helmet, I mean this is a dark side cave after all, but it’s also possible that what the force was showing her was the she’s her own parent.
Wait… what?
It’s the original trilogy and Empire Strikes Back has just ended with Luke deciding it would be better to let himself fall to his death than join Darth Vader. Palpatine still wants to take another Skywalker as his new apprentice. He knows Vader is going to reach a point soon where he’s going to turn on him and he’ll be forced to destroy him. Vader says as much when he confronts Luke on Bespin. It’s inevitable, and Palpatine has had to arrange the death of at least one former apprentice, Count Dooku. He’s also not so convinced that Luke can be turned. Despite this, somehow, Luke’s lightsaber is recovered, and if his lightsaber is recovered, odds are pretty good they found his hand too. That means they had his DNA, and in Star Wars if you have someone’s DNA, you can clone them.
We also know that clones can be altered. In Attack of the Clones, we find out that the clone army are clones of Jango Fett who have been altered to mature faster and be better soldiers. We also find out that everybody’s favorite anti-hero, Boba Fett, was unusual in that he was an unaltered clone of Jango that he took as a son. In other words, just because Rey isn’t male doesn’t mean that she can’e be an altered clone of Luke. It also means that Disney didn’t have to go out and cast the new lead as someone who looks remarkably similar to a younger Mark Hamill.
So, Palpatine being back in Episode IX will be a flashback that will show the truth of her origin, which is that the Empire clones her. When the Empire fell, she was likely too young to remember anything, and she was adopted, either by someone who was with the Empire, or by some junk dealers who found her later on. Kylo Ren wasn’t lying when he said that her parents were nobody, but they weren’t her real parents. Either he is unaware of this, or he was intentionally trying to deceive her.
Also, if Rey is a clone of Luke then it makes sense that she would feel a connection to the lightsaber and that it would awaken latent force powers within her. Maybe a clone wouldn’t have the same memories as the being it was made from, but the force is a kind of magic, and maybe that magic was already developed within her because Luke had already developed his own force skills before he lost the hand. Or maybe it’s just that potent Skywalker blood.
To support all this, I’m going to say that Disney isn’t stupid. There has been this narrative about the production of these movies that Rian Johnson just jumped in and did his own thing with the characters without any oversight. JJ Abrams has said as much.
We’re supposed to believe this? Really?
Disney paid $4 billion to buy up the Star Wars franchise, and we’re supposed to believe that the producers of these movies didn’t get together and figure out everyone’s backstory and major plot twists ahead of time? This is an utterly ridiculous narrative. It’s a total red herring. And they’re trying to sell it to us to mislead us and keep us from jumping to this conclusion. It’s so easy to just shrug and tell us that Rian Johnson screwed it all up. That might be how they did things with the original trilogy (they decided that Leia’s Luke’s sister while they were making Return of the Jedi), and I think they’re trying to convince us that they’re flying by the seat of their pants now. But I don’t buy it. This is too important for Disney to get right, and they’re deceiving the fans when they tell us that they didn’t coordinate the major plot points of the movies well ahead of time.
They want the movie to come out and then they’ll smile and say they planned it this way all along, and oh boy did we have you going!
Or at least that’s my take. I could always be wrong, but at least my personal fan theory is supported and is internally consistent from a narrative perspective.