Bingowings said:
I don't think it's in the same league as the midichlorians as a proposed explanation.
Is the holy grail pseudo science?
Is the ark of the covenant?
It could be an ancient Sith artifact that Palpatine wanted to retrieve that the people of Naboo hold without remembering what it originally was for.
The observation that it's used as a symbol of peace could be because it was taken from an ancient Sith warrior when he was defeated but it's so long ago people have forgotten the specifics.
Sith lightning in general couldn't do that to him so even in the established storyline Palpatine himself has something 'odd' about him to end up with that look.
I think Bob García is playing with the idea of showing Palpatine as the exaggeration of what a Sith reppresents in terms of passionality.
When Windu confronts him, Palpatine stands up in anger and things start to heat: the lights behave strange, there comes a low-frequency sound, and he is so possesed by his hate that even his face gets pruned.
The ultimate proof of this "extreme non handling of wrath" would be the force lighting, which was distinctive of him till Dooku used it too, weakening the Emperor's character.
In the end, IMO this all would have been much easier and more coherent if the Emperor's face had its reason in his age; if there were more than only 20 years between ROTS and ANH.
ObiWan speaks of the Jedi in ANH with such romanticism that convinced me that the events he told Luke happened 40-50 years before. Same with ROTJ; that idea that remained floating in the air, of Anakin somehow confronting the emperor and being defeated...I know Im deviating from what we're discussing now, but If someone ever wants to make the PT half a century before the OT then he will have to deal with Luke being Vader's son and not Anakin's. With this I mean of course, splitting in the timeline the rise of the Empire and the birth of Luke and Leia.
Maybe ObiWan supported the Empire in its beggining? Maybe the foolish idealistic crusade was to believe exactly the opposite the PT shows us; ObiWan and Anakin were the only Jedi to support the Reppublic turning into a "presidential reppublic", not knowing what was gonna come up next...ObiWan doesn't have to have a perfect past. In fact that's even distant from the impression we got of him in the OT, and very early in Star Wars.
This "Dumbledore" twist was effective in Harry Potter, and I think could have worked in this saga if done well, since the idea of SW is pretty much the same "nor the wise (Yoda), the powerful (Vader, the Emperor), the knight (ObiWan), but the simple people (the farmboy Luke) can achieve victory.