This is a thread for proposing and discussing ideas to fully remove Palpatine as a living, resurrected character and an active antagonist from Episode IX. I know there have been one or two edits to attempt this, but simply removing Palpatine’s scenes requires losing a lot of material integral to both the plot and the structure of the film. So it’s understandable that most conversation has gravitated toward more feasible lines of editing.

However, after sharing a few ideas in the general TROS Redux thread, I was inspired to do some more brainstorming, and I think I’ve hit upon some novel solutions to those issues. I’ll detail and explain them in the next post, but hopefully this thread will also serve as a clearinghouse for anything and everything related to leaving the Emperor’s ROTJ death intact, so please feel free to propose or debate other ideas as well.

This is an ambitious topic for sure, but also one that deserves much more exploration than it’s gotten to date. Multiple projects exist for making the most of TROS on its own terms, and there have been discussions and efforts to make the Sequel Trilogy cohere and Palpatine’s return work by teasing or revealing him in the previous movies. But there’s something to be said for devoting more energy to making the trilogy cohere from the opposite direction, in a way that doesn’t compromise the good in Episodes VII and VIII by retrofitting a major plot element at odds with their original intent.