Palps, why didn’t you tell me?

The Rise of Skywalker was a lot of movie. J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio treated Star Wars fans to a real feast with the finale of the Skywalker saga rich in… well… a big galaxy defining plot and similarly seismic character moments.

To do justice to all of the narrative choices would have probably taken a runtime to dwarf The Irishman. As a result, certain plot points aren’t fully explained during the film itself – most notably, how a certain Sheev Palpatine was able to return to once again menace the galaxy.

A leaked excerpt from the upcoming TROS novelisation – written by “Most Wanted” author Rae Carson – confirmed suspicions that the Palpatine we see in episode nine is a clone body, housing the Sith Lord’s spirit. ‘Mecha-Palpatine,’ to quote the brilliant Joseph Scrimshaw of the ForceCenter podcast, is not built of the same Palpatine flesh and blood that was launched down the Death Star reactor shaft by his disgruntled understudy.

And after critics had argued that Palpatine’s sudden and supposedly unexplained return was one of TROS’ weakest elements, it’s been pitched that this clone revelation should have been delivered as exposition in the movie itself.

Sure, Abrams and Terrio could have had Palpatine tell Kylo Ren that he was a clone in the opening moments of TROS. Palpatine actor Ian McDiarmid confirmed that a line did exist in an early draft of the script, but was eventually cut from the movie.

Which is a perfectly justifiable and, dare I say it, the correct decision. After all, this was a dense movie – one that has been criticised for allegedly having a first act uncomfortably thick with exposition. It seems that a portion of those same critics have been the ones to call for a Palpatine explanation.

All the hints were there to suggest that Palpatine was a clone anyway. He says to Kylo, “I’ve died before” and Beaumont Kin, Resistance historian played by Dermot Monaghan, later delivers “dark science, cloning, secrets only the Sith knew.”

We shouldn’t need every detail to be explicitly defined in the movie. Just as in A New Hope, we didn’t need to know the mechanics of the force – in fact, The Phantom Menace‘s Midichlorians are all the evidence you’d ever need to prove that sometimes explanations aren’t all they cracked up to be.

One of my favourite elements of The Rise of Skywalker was the fact that Abrams and Terrio managed to deliver a satisfying end to not only the Sequel Trilogy, but also the saga as a whole, while leaving some narrative threads to be pulled in supplementary cannon material.

Books, comics and TV shows have room to explain the subtleties and details and that’s an exciting prospect. Rae Carson’s novelisation will hopefully contain some answers and titbits beyond the Palpatine revelation, while also creating new narrative threads because in the end, it’s all an opportunity for future world building.

I’ll take subtle hints rather than sledgehammer exposition if it leads to richer explanations down the line.