Luke calls her Rey Palpatine, so that would have to be cut around.
True, ugh. Whatever, don’t think you lose anything there.
Instead of a Rey Palpatine story, the narrative could be changed to where Palpatine shows Kylo a vision of Rey’s future, and it is her as Sith Empress. Rey sees it too, which is why it scares her. Maybe he says he saw a vision of her sitting on a throne next to him. Which causes Rey to call him a liar and such. You could replace the visions of the past with visions of the future.
It’s funny I’ve been on a similar train of thought and came here to post as much. Palpatine had a vision that Rey would usurp him, which is why he had her parents killed. Kylo has the vision, and wants it to become a reality so they can join forces and defeat Palpatine, so he goads her into fighting and using the dark side. He tells her about the vision, which is what rattles her (because it squares with her growing potential for darkness).
I feel like we need to see the vision though, right? ROTS style? Don’t know how that’s accomplished (honestly fingers crossed that just happens to be something they shot and made a deleted scene of). I don’t think the random flashes that they currently have at the beginning does the job very well. It’s almost impossible to tell what the point they’re trying to make is. Maybe the worst case solution is just have Kylo clearly see Dark Rey at the beginning, then after Kylo does his new reveal, Rey sees a comprehensible flash of Dark Rey, then again she sees her and fights her on the DSII?
This is my train of thought. Palpatine could reveal to Kylo Ren that he made Snoke, AND he made Vader, revealing he created Anakin and in effect making Kylo his heir. But, he wants Kylo to kill Rey because he has seen a vision where she actually destroys him. Kylo has other plans, and when Palpatine senses that Leia has turned Ben’s heart, he decides to try and use Rey as his new vessel.
I think the creating Anakin stuff is an added complication, honestly. It’s going to be hard enough to do the rest. But I do like the idea. Part of what’s stupid about Rey overcoming being a Palpatine is that that’s already what Ben’s story is about, overcoming the darkness of his lineage or giving into it. So yeah it’d have made more sense to make Ben essentially the Palpatine to double down on that. But whatever, like I said it’d be tough to do.
The problem is though (and naturally it’s a problem with the film as is), what about when Rey actually gets to Palpatine? He goes from wanting her dead to wanting her to kill him?
This is pushing it but it’d be cool if in the final showdown between Rey and Palpatine, she doesn’t just say “I’m all the Jedi” (which is lame), she says something like she is the light and the dark.
Also this is crazy (impossible?) but I wish Rey had a black outfit for the entire film until the white for the final scene. And I wish Ben had white in the climax.
For the final sequence, by the way, where we want everybody to be prepared to battle again, what if we have relevant soundbites from the rest of the saga? Like Maz’s “We must face them, fight them,” Holdo’s “In every corner of the galaxy the downtrodden and oppressed know our symbol,” etc. that kind of thing. There’s not a lot of speechifying in these movies so it wouldn’t be terribly easy but it’s an idea.