Bringing back Palpatine, and then just saying ‘somehow Palpatine returned’, is as dumb as John Cleese saying (in Monty Python’s Holy Grail) “she turned me into a newt…(awkward pause)…but I got better”.
I’ve bored folks with this before but I’ll say it again - the villain in the sequels should have been Mon Mothma.
She would be presented as a shadowy figure like Sidious in the prequels, the difference being she would actually be anonymous to the viewer. She would appear throughout the series as ‘herself’ in a fan-service kind of way, but there would also be red herrings (ie Holdo) to draw suspicion away from her true identity. And it is she who would be reconstituting the Empire in secret, as well as being a confidant to the son of her ‘friends’ Han and Leia and thus drawing him into her plot to honour the glorious ambitions of his grandfather Lord Darth Vader.
In the end it would be revealed that she had been promised a seat of power at the side of Palpatine in RoTJ. She had killed the Bothan spies herself and had delivered the false information to Akbar and co. And of course when the Rebels defeated the Empire, she began to plan her revenge.
This would make the sequels entirely valid. It leaves the Endor victory intact, it honours the prequels’ ‘balance of the Force’ crap, it gives a good reason for a reconstituted Empire, and it leaves Palpatine in the grave where he belongs. It justifies the conversion of Ben Solo and, best of all, makes the rebel briefing room scene in RoTJ really dark and nuanced in hindsight. We get our nostalgia fix without harming the OT (and the PT) whatsoever.
P.S. the construction of this idea would have predated Rogue One and Andor…
I’ve never heard that idea before, but it makes sense and would have been very cool, better than Leia turning evil as some have suggested.
I don’t see that really doing much. Like, what does this add to the overall story or main characters for this character to be the big bad? Especially considering she was only in one scene in one movie? Why would she care to have revenge? Why would Palpatine, if he had a spy in the rebellion, not use her to lead the empire to them? And why would Palpatine offer anyone a seat of power at his side and why would someone buy into that if he did?
Well the problem is that there is no story after RoTJ. RoTJ was the ending - definitively. So all you can do is what has already been done ad nauseam - just posit a ‘new threat’ and dust off some TIE fighters. Snoke was useless because, in the end, no one cared. He had no connection to anything. Palpatine’s ‘return’ was silly, unexplained, illogical, and ruined the ending of a 6 film saga.
At least with Mothma you get someone with emotional weight - a beloved (despite her screen time) character whose betrayal of Han and Leia would actually mean something. And the idea that she was in the Rebel briefing room basically laying a trap on behalf of her boss because he’d promised her power (or to spare her world or whatever) is infinitely more satisfying than ‘a new threat has emerged from beyond the outer rim…’
I don’t see how this justifies Kylo’s return. Still comes off like, “oh yeah, he betrays his parents because someone he knew told him Vader was cool”.
Kylo had no backstory really, until Rian destroyed Luke Skywalker in order to give him one. In the Mothma version Kylo is betrayed by an adored friend, someone masquerading as an ally whilst filling his eager mind with distortions regarding his ‘true’ grandfather and using him for his power. Again, seeing Mothma as the nice robed lady on the Mon Calamari ship and realising she would later turn Leia’s son against her is way more interesting to me than ‘random Palpatine wannabe appeared out of nowhere for no reason and turned Kylo bad’.
I don’t really see a just older politician adding much as a villain, personally for me.
Fair enough, but I would add - what exactly did Snoke add to the saga? What did resurrected Palpatine add to the saga? More pointedly, what did they take from the saga? The Mothma idea, to me, is a way to continue the story with all the good elements of the sequels intact without undermining the 6 films in any way. And it even adds a nice little twist to RoTJ.