Long time lurker, I’m excited to finally join this community! I think we could really make something special out of the sequel trilogy.

I would say that it actually won’t be too hard to make Palpatine’s presence in the sequel trilogy more natural. Here would be my general layout.

Episode VII: Palpatine should never be explicitly mentioned in this one, but he should be strongly hinted towards. In order to gain this effect, I think we could use the classic fanediting trick of turning Snoke’s dialogue into a new language (a Sith dialect), and using subtitles to rewrite him and Kylo Ren’s interactions. Through these subtitles we would make it clear from the start that Snoke is more of a gatekeeper/messenger for some higher power. He can motivate Ren to continue his sith journey by dangling the carrot of meeting the “dark lord” or something along those lines, creating intrigue.

Episode VIII: this is where we need to see Palpatine so that his inclusion in the finale will feel not so out of left field. We would double down on Snoke bringing the mysterious figure up throughout the film, until Kylo finally kills Snoke and decides to go directly to him himself. We would then use the Kylo Ren and Palpatine scene at the end of this film, to build a major cliffhanger that leaves fans wondering what will happen in the finale while hopefully not feeling like Palpatine is an ass pull.

Episode IX: can mostly proceed as it was, and what we do with Rey’s background can go whatever way. If we want a better scene to establish Palpatine’s public presence, we could do a recut version of the Hux Nazi speech from TFA. Instead of Hux delivering his speech, we could have the first order army watching a hologram of Palpatine as he delivers his Fortnite speech. From there he could be the final boss that Rey and Ben overcome.