Originally posted the following in the Ascendant thread.
I pretty much re-wrote the dialogue in the first scene with Kylo Ren and Palpatine. Some lines are changed to make them feel less Chris Terrio-y, some are changed as I feel they sound more right than in the original film, I’m not going to spoil the rest, but they do have footnotes.
I feel like some of the new dialogue can be accomplished through AI synthesizers or whatever. Anyway, here you go.
[The enormous Sith Citadel comes into view, shrouded in darkness and lightning. Ren leaves his ship, draws his lightsaber and activates it as he walks to the temple’s opening. Brief cut to black. Ren descends down a hexagonal platform into the catacombs of the planet, filled with worn statues of ancient Sith.]
PALPATINE: At last.
[The platform finally lands. Ren, seeming uneasy, makes his way towards the source of the whisper, as lightning illuminates in the darkness.]
PALPATINE: [continued] Snoke trained you well.
KYLO REN: I killed Snoke, and I’ll kill you.[1]
PALPATINE: My boy, Snoke was just your beginning. I have influenced everything [as Snoke] you have ever heard [as Vader] all your life. [breathes]
[Ren, unshaken, proceeds further into the citadel, his path lit by the blade. He eventually wanders into a room in the citadel filled with Sith acolytes, connecting wires to a vat filled with red liquid and several mangled, deteriorating bodies — all closely resembling Palpatine, unique from each other in their own mutilated ways, except for one that closely resembles Snoke, but with some of Palpatine’s facial features[2].]
PALPATINE: The First Order was your failure. I can give you so much more.[3]
KYLO REN: No. You’ll die instead.[4]
PALPATINE: I have died before.
[Ren turns around to seek the source of the voice.]
PALPATINE: The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… [lightning illuminates his face] unnatural.
[It is clear that his body hasn’t exactly been so kind to Palpatine. His body is frail, his skin pale. He spreads his mangled fingers[5]. Ren thrusts his saber forwards, holding it mere inches away from the former Emperor’s throat.]
KYLO REN: What could you give me?
PALPATINE: Everything.
[Meanwhile, a massive fleet of Xyston-class Star Destroyers breaks through the icy ground and emerges into the tempestuous sky.]
PALPATINE: The might of the Sith Eternal[6] will soon be ready. It’ll be yours if you do as I ask — kill the girl, then strike me down in anger, and my spirit will pass on into you. We will be one. We will rule together as the new Emperor.[7]
[Kylo Ren lowers his saber.]
PALPATINE: But beware, she is not who you think she is.
KYLO REN: Who is she?
[Palpatine smiles sinisterly as thunder rumbles and the scene cuts to black.]
[1] Yes, the “and” is intentional. So it’d sound a bit more… right. Yeah.
[2] This would replace the original theatrical shot with Snoke clones and poppasketti’s current shot with Palpatine clones. It drives home the inference that Palpatine is shitty at making clones — let alone any lifeform — with his tech, whilst also having to sacrifice the explicit nature of the reveal that Palpatine manufactured Snoke himself, pushing said reveal into inference… that Snoke was made from another one of Palpatine’s shitty, failed clones.
[3] One idea the film establishes is that the First Order hasn’t exactly doing so well in the year after The Last Jedi. It is reinforced by the First Order seeming smaller than in the previous two films, and Kylo Ren wanting to take Palpatine’s fleet for himself so the First Order would, as he, himself, puts it, “become a new Empire.” This change reinforces that, and I feel it helps separate the First Order from Palpatine and his fleet and makes it more of its own thing.
[4] I changed it to that because, well… basically, I’m like: “How would Palpatine dying first give Kylo Ren the ‘more’, exactly?”
[5] Yes, the shot of his hands is moved here, to immediately drive the point home that his clone body is rotting and decaying. And I feel that, as a side effect, that it’d get MisAnthro Pony to shut up about Palpatine lifting the fleet.
[6] In canon, that is the title of Palpatine’s Sith cult. However, here, it is used to refer to the fleet as a whole, replacing the title “Final Order”, as I feel Palpatine would want the Sith to be eternal and rule for eternity, you get the picture. Hopefully, other lines that reference this name can be AI-changed into “Sith Eternal”.
[7] This accomplishes a similar goal to in the actual Ascendant edit — setting up the stakes for later. I do like the idea in the actual edit, but I feel it muddies Palpatine’s plans and the inference that he has been planning to possess Kylo Ren after he kills Rey and, thus, destroys his “conflicted soul”. So, I made the inference from the theatrical cut explicit. Yes, the parallel to The Last Jedi was intentional.
