Somehow… the Green Goblin has returned.
That is in effect what happens in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it’s a touch more complex than that. Legacy villains require a delicate balancing act to be folded back into a long-running series, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a Star Wars fan who thinks J.J. Abrams pulled it off in The Rise of Skywalker.
Palpatine was revealed to be the big bad pulling the strings behind the scenes for the third trilogy in a row, and we’d be selling it very short to say that longtime supporters of a galaxy far, far away were left feeling less than impressed. A viral tweet highlighting the differences between No Way Home and The Rise of Skywalker‘s handling of their respective big bads has gone massively viral, as you can see below.
The tweet has racked up over 17,000 likes already, and if you scroll through the comments you’ll struggle to find anybody who disagrees. The Rise of Skywalker was even forced to explain the machinations behind Palpatine’s resurrection in supplementary material that arrived long after Episode IX hit theaters, something that Spider-Man: No Way Home handled with relative ease thanks to some handy exposition outlining the who, what, when, where and why.
