Emperor Palpatine met his maker at the hands of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. However, in the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker novelization (which explained a lot more than the movie did), it was revealed that the version of the villain we saw in the Skywalker Saga finale was, in fact, a clone.
Palpatine's spirit actually left his body as he fell into the depths of the Death Star II and inhabited the unfinished clone body created by his loyal Sith cultists.
Now, The Rise of Skywalker creature and makeup effects supervisor Neal Scanlan has confirmed that director J.J. Abrams explored a lot of alternate ideas for Emperor Palpatine's appearance in the movie, most of which were quite a bit more gruesome than what actually ended up on screen.
"Luke Fisher, who is one of the concept designers that works with us, did a lot of sketches of Palpatine being on a kind of life support system. Something that is keeping him alive and keeping him in one piece. And then some parts of his physicality are almost independently being fed the necessary nutrients of life-giving entities. So the idea of him being held on a rig which allowed him to move around and almost the Nosferatu aspect of that sequence, all of those things were part of trying to come to understand how much we would show with that.
"In the early concept days they were quite extreme. We explored a dismembered version of him. We explored more abstract versions of what he might be. You slowly get to the point where in [director] J.J’s [Abrams] world, that [Palpatine clone] story is still being told, but to an audience that maybe is not so familiar with Star Wars, you don’t have to know the backstory so much. You can understand and be part of that story without necessarily having too much history. It’s that combination of being able to tell the story but at the same time have some depth to it, which is referring back to a larger meaning or a greater explanation."
It's certainly interesting to imagine what a "dismembered" version of the Emperor would have looked like, and a shame in many ways that Lucasfilm didn't get a little more experimental in terms of how he was portrayed. As it stands, those who haven't read the novelization or online excerpts just think Palpatine somehow survived his fall, as the fact that he was a clone was never made clear.
With no deleted scenes on the upcoming Blu-ray release, we don't even have any extra material to fill in the gaps, and that's something that's going to ensure that The Rise of Skywalker continues to frustrate.
The novelization has been mined of all its biggest reveals at this point, but you can learn more about how the franchise's biggest villain made his return to the land of the living by clicking
HERE.