The years between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were a strange time in the Star Wars community. J.J. Abrams had set up a whole bunch of puzzle boxes for fans to theorize over. Who were Rey’s parents? How did Luke’s blue lightsaber end up at Maz Kanata’s bar? And, most pressingly, what’s the deal with Supreme Leader Snoke?
Is he a giant or just projecting an oversized hologram? Could he be an existing character warped into a new form? Theories abounded, naming him as a clone of Grand Moff Tarkin, a resurrected version of Emperor Palpatine, or even a corrupted Mon Mothma. But there was one unlikely theory that got a surprising amount of traction: Snoke is Mace Windu.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, fans are wondering why anyone would have ever believed this:
The first reply points out that prior to The Last Jedi all we’d seen of Snoke was a projection:
Could Mace Windu ever somehow return?
To be fair the actual answer was pretty weird:
Maybe it would have been better if it were Mace Windu all along.
There are still those who hope that Samuel L. Jackson will return to the franchise as Mace Windu. After all, we never saw his body, and such a powerful Jedi Master should be able to theoretically survive being thrown out of a window. The counterpoint is that if Mace were alive, you’d have expected him to reappear in Star Wars by now, as the Rebel Alliance could have really used his talents during the original trilogy.
The canon story is that Mace’s aggressive dueling technique flirted with the Dark Side, so perhaps he could have turned to evil while recovering from his Revenge of the Sith injuries. To be honest, we’d rather Star Wars stopped bringing back dead characters as the more they do it, the cheaper every other death becomes.