Supreme Leader Snoke was a mysterious and strange addition to the
Star Wars franchise in
The Force Awakens, and after he was unceremoniously killed in
The Last Jedi, we were left without any answers. Well,
The Rise of Skywalker went some way towards helping with that after confirming that he was a clone created by Emperor Palpatine, but the entire situation is still a little confusing.
As of right now, we're forced to assume that "Snoke" was an identity created by Palpatine to control Kylo Ren and The First Order, especially as the remnants of the Empire probably lost faith in him after the destruction of the second Death Star. The Emperor presumably possessed that clone body in the same way he inhabited a broken down version of his own in the Skywalker Saga finale.
Now, visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett has revealed that director J.J. Abrams was originally planning to bring back a clone of Emperor Palpatine in 2015's
The Force Awakens.
"Ian was such a major part of the original films. J.J. wanted to bring him back to reveal that Palpatine wasn't completely destroyed in Episode VII," he reveals.
"He created a clone of himself and, with the help of Sith loyalists, rebuilt himself to a fragmented and unstable state."
"When Kylo meets him, Palpatine is not fully formed, and he relies on tubes and mechanics, moving around this Sith laboratory on a mechanism that Kevin Jenkins designed," Guyett continues, presumably referring both to what would have happened in
Episode VII and what we eventually saw in
The Rise of Skywalker last December.
"He has the spirit of the Sith, but he's trapped inside a body that's incomplete."
Having Palpatine appear in
The Force Awakens definitely would have made a greater impact than the introduction of Snoke, and his later return probably wouldn't have felt so random and forced.
Do you think bringing him back in 2015 would have been better than waiting until this finale?
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