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Star Wars Fans Are Furious About Palpatine Being A Clone In The Rise Of Skywalker

Eventually, you reach a point where you have to wonder whether the creatives behind Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are actively trying to anger the fandom. The novelization of the film has revealed, among many other details the movie glosses over, that the Palpatine we saw in the pic was not his original form reborn, but a clone body in which his spirit was housed.

Palpatine Star Wars

Eventually, you reach a point where you have to wonder whether the creatives behind Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are actively trying to anger the fandom. The novelization of the film has revealed, among many other details the movie glosses over, that the Palpatine we saw in the pic was not his original form reborn, but a clone body in which his spirit was housed.

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The book isn’t actually on sale until later this month, but advance copies were made available over the weekend at Chicago’s C2E2 convention, giving fans the chance to re-experience the film’s stark mediocrity in text form. In the book, when Kylo arrives on Exegol and encounters Palpatine, he recognizes the machinery the former Emperor is attached to from studying the Clone Wars, deducing that the liquid being pumped into the undead body is all that sustains its grip on life and that without imminent intervention it will expire. The revelation has spread, and as you might imagine, people are far from happy about it.

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Just proving that there’s apparently nothing new in the saga, the idea has marked similarities to the 1992 EU comic series Dark Empire. This was set six years after Return of the Jedi and also had Palpatine return from the dead in a clone body, and saw him attempt to turn Luke to the Dark Side to replace Vader as his apprentice. It also pre-empted Rise of Skywalker with the World Devastators, planet-killing superweapons far more imaginative in operation than simply Star Destroyers outfitted with Death Star lasers.

What the book does not explain is exactly how Palpatine’s death in The Rise of Skywalker can be definitively considered as his final one, and what there is to stop lazy writers obsessed with rehashing the past from resurrecting him again instead of bothering to come up with a new big bad for the heroes to face off against. Honestly, the sooner we can all move on from this divisive trilogy and onto things that have nothing to do with Skywalkers, Solos or Palpatines, the better.