Honestly the whole idea is really nagging at me. I have so many thoughts about it going through my head. Like how long have they planned this? You would think they just came up with it now, but it ties in very, very well with a lot of the expanded material stuff in the last few years. It actually sounds to me like something George might’ve come up with in his treatments. But then, if they had it plannned, why are there no hints at it in either TFA or TLJ?
You should know by now they’ve been winging it the whole time. Here’s JJ talking about just that:
But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else…the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge…I feel like we might’ve done it. Like, I actually feel like this crazy challenge that could have been a wildly uncomfortable contortion of ideas, and a kind of shoving-in of answers and Band-Aids and bridges and things that would have felt messy. Strangely, we were sort of relentless and almost unbearably disciplined about the story and forcing ourselves to question and answer some fundamental things that at the beginning, I absolutely had no clue how we would begin to address.
I mean… obviously. I’ve already read that interview and anyway it’s not new information. I just mean it’s possible it’s an idea that’s been kicking around LFL as a possibility for awhile. JJ says there wasn’t a structure but that doesn’t means there wasn’t any idea about where things might go.
It certainly seems like they’ve been setting up the possibility in other things.
Like I said I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something in George’s treatments. I could see a concept image of Palpatine circa 2013 showing up in the Art of TROS book. But I would just as easily not be surprised if they just came up with it now, like I said before.