I consider myself a prequel fan, and I’ve never felt able to defend the infamous sand line. It’s just an awkward piece of dialogue, made worse by Lucas’s directing of the actors (which, granted, it was never his biggest strength).
It what? Say it! Are you the king? ARE YOU THE KING?! You’re what? Say it!
Lol I never noticed I didn’t finish my point 😄 I meant to say I’d prefered if TROS had devoted more time to build on what was set by its two immediate predecessors rather than introducing and solving a completely new aspect to the story in a rather short time span. Again, I believe Palpatine being brought back could have worked well in another context (in fact I wish it had been the driving force from the beginning, rather than having a literal stand-in in the form of Snoke), but here it feels rushed making for a payoff that for many seems less satisfying that it should have been.
Snoke mind-probing Rey has Palpatine’s theme playing. Palpatine has a desire for immortality in RotS, and implies he DOES know how to keep himself alive during the opera scene. Kylo Ren asks for Vader’s helmet to show him that power AGAIN. Snoke is very similar to Palpatine and even repeats his lines in TLJ. Even Snoke’s guards have the same color scheme as Palps’ guards.
I’ll grant you that Snoke having Palpatine’s theme feels now better in retrospective (instead of being just an unsubtle remainder of ‘remember! he’s our Emperor stand-in’). But the rest were just similarities to drive home the parallelisms with the OT (almost everything in the ST, from the ships to the armors, is a reimagining or visual callback to familiar elements of the OT). Since Snoke plays the part of Palpatine (at least until he’s killed off), it was expected TLJ would feature familiar OT iconography in the form of red guards and even its own version of the ROTJ creepy advisers.