It seems that the more you think about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the more it starts to break down as a coherent narrative. Plot holes continue to haunt J.J. Abrams’ concluding act in the Sequel Trilogy, whether it’s continuity errors that contradict the established lore or things that Episode IX introduced to canon for the first time.
Apart from Force Healing, which was as convenient as it was unheard of before the last movie in the Skywalker Saga, what bemused us the most was the concept of the Force Dyad. In fact, we’d never been introduced to such a thing before Palpatine used the phrase for the first time in the story’s final act.
Simply put, a dyad is when two people become one with the Force and share a bond. Rey and Kylo’s connection formed all the way back in The Force Awakens, but Snoke tried to take credit for it in The Last Jedi by revealing that he was the one who bound their minds together. And yet, even after he perished, the two continued to interact with each other through the space-time continuum. Palpatine described this unison as a “power like life itself, unseen for generations.” Though even with the explanation in The Rise of Skywalker‘s novelization, the prophecy doesn’t really make sense.
As Darth Sidious explains in the book, the Force Dyad was there even before the Sith Rule of Two. In fact, the idea that there should only be two Sith Lords at any given time came out of this very prophecy. “[The Rule of Two] was a pale imitation, an unworthy but necessary successor to the older, purer doctrine of the Dyad,” Palpatine notes.
What the Sith failed to recognize was that a Force Dyad required both the dark side and the light. But if the whole idea of the Rule of Two is based on the Force Dyad, shouldn’t we have heard about it? Even from other legendary Sith lords in the days of the Old Republic?
In fact, there’s nothing in the canon that even remotely refers to this phenomenon. Before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, that is. Which, of course, when you think about it, is another one of the things that J.J. Abrams’ flick can’t explain without somehow breaking the continuity of that galaxy far, far away.
