The “HOW Palpatine came back” isn’t important to the story - the fact that Palpatine SURVIVED is.
And facts require a logical basis in the story itself. This is Fiction Writing 101.
I advise you to re-watch that scene. It’s Beru who says that, and Owen says that is what he’s afraid of.
Which….is all I said.
Obi-Wan was sad that Luke’s father - a good friend - was killed by Vader […] is about Luke leaving and how Owen can’t accept that - this implies he didn’t want Luke’s father to leave Tatooine as well and avoid being a farmer like himself (Owen) and Beru.
Of course those are the initial, superficial meanings of both scenes. That’s not the point. The point is that the scenes also have hooks and hints at something more which fit perfectly with the revelation that Vader is Anakin, regardless of whether that was the original intention.
Except Palpatine’s return DOES enrich the ST. He’s been the mastermind all this time from the start, pulling the strings behind [etc.]
I do not find anything in Episodes VII or VIII more interesting when viewed in the context of Palpatine being above Snoke and by extension everything else.
Just a point, Rey already deals with her parents believing she’s worthless in TLJ - she doesn’t care about them anymore, and now has the Resistance become her newfound family who’ll give her validation and belonging.
That’s exactly my point — the question of Rey’s family already got a satisfying resolution in VIII, and in a proper Episode IX that resolution could have informed her struggle as the story moved onto dealing with the stage that had been set for the final phase of the war. Instead of letting that resolution stand on its own, Abrams and Terrio felt the need to reopen the case, cramming an all-new (and much more repetitive) family drama into a final chapter that was already overstuffed with half-baked ideas and dangling threads.
On that topic, Rey DOESN’T deal with two (I’m assuming the other one is “They were nobody”) - she deals with ONE. When she says her parents were nobody, it meant they had no actual reason to care about her - they hated her, they threw her away like garbage, they thought she was WORTHLESS.
Huh? Of course she deals with two (contradictory) revelations: “they were random bums who sold her for drinking money,” and “they were heroic relatives of the Emperor who sacrificed themselves to protect her.”
Yes, his body’s literally decaying and has to use a life support machine, and the Sith clearly haven’t returned by TRoS (“The Sith are reborn, the Jedi are dead!” “Nothing will stop the return of the Sith!”). The prophecy is that Anakin would destroy the Sith - and he did.
He isn’t dead. He’s a Sith. Through him the Sith are active and powerful enough to have been — in your words — “pulling the strings behind Snoke, Kylo Ren, the First Order, Luke’s exile, the destruction of his Jedi Order and the bridging of Rey and Kylo Ren’s minds.” The state of his physical body doesn’t change any of that.
I already explained why this is wrong.
And that explanation doesn’t convince me. Sorry, but it doesn’t.
I’m pointing out your hypocrisy, you dislike Palpatine’s undoing of the Chosen One yet literally reinforced the undoing of the OT heroes’ accomplishments.
First, I didn’t say I disliked undoing the prophecy, and in fact I laid out ideas for how undoing the prophecy could have been done well. What I said was I didn’t like TROS’s failure to deal with the significance of undoing the prophecy.
Second, you’re quoting from one of two alternate ST ideas I tossed out in that thread — and one I specifically said was a less ambitious option than the one that would have been my own ideal.
But Palpatine still essentially committed suicide, he was the one who started shooting lightning in the first place - if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been killed. If the same thing happened between him and Vader in RotJ, he WOULDN’T have survived.
There’s that word “essentially” again. Even if that was the writers’ intention, the fact that Rey effectively gets off on a technicality despite the fact that she consciously acted toward the very outcome she was told would assure his victory—killing Palpatine—makes it all the sillier. It’s like some bizarre space-fantasy inversion of suicide-by-cop.
First off, it’s an INFERENCE. It doesn’t have to be spelled out to you.
“Inference” is not a magic word that papers over shoddy plot construction. Good stories are not fill-in-the-blank activity books.
Secondly, all the Knights of Ren are dead, there was no indication he knew any of them were Force-sensitive, and he certainly didn’t know where they were specifically at even before their deaths.
They weren’t dead in the years between Kylo becoming their master and the Battle of Exegol. They show up on Exegol to do his bidding. If they and Kylo served Snoke, Palpatine could have manipulated Snoke to send one his way. And “master of the Knights of Ren” wouldn’t be a very impressive title for Kylo if they were just normal, no-Force thugs.
Thirdly, there was no indication any of his cultists were Force-sensitive.
See, “odds are at least a few people among thousands upon thousands of dark Force worshippers can use the Force” actually IS a logical, acceptable inference based on existing information and common sense.
Lastly, he targeted Rey and then Ben because she was his granddaughter (and he’s foreseen what she’d become) and Ben was the Chosen One’s grandson.
The idea that only a Force user that powerful could contain a spirit as powerful as his would be an adequate explanation—except TROS didn’t use it. (I know, I know, “inference.”)
EDIT: One more point about Rey killing Palpatine. The plot device of something bad happening if a Jedi kills a Sith the wrong way (which Star Wars has used many times over the years) has never been about the mechanics or technicalities of the cause of death, but about the Jedi’s intentions and emotions behind the act, and the moral message they convey.
TROS takes this simple trope and reduces it to a matter of the rules of a brand-new supernatural power — rules which the movie never sees fit to share with the audience. Kill Sheev out of hatred for him? He gets your body. Kill Sheev out of love for your friends? He still gets your body. Kill Sheev by deflecting his lightning? (With no obvious distinction from the amount of lightning he pumped into Luke OR the amount of lightning Mace Windu reflected back at him.) He apparently DOESN’T get your body. Why? No idea!
If a Sith Lord’s own lightning cancels out the ultimate power of the Sith — something every Sith has apparently done since Darth Bane — then one might reasonably expect SOMEBODY in a thousand years to realize that maybe they should stop using lightning. It also makes Palpatine look kind of dumb that he keeps pouring on the juice as it comes back to hit him — although, to be fair, one can hardly blame the poor guy for not expecting Force lightning to suddenly behave differently than it behaved every other time it was used in the saga.