ST Palpatine "Gran Palpa" Discussion Thread

Endor was also the Quenya word for Middle-earth in Tolkien's universe.

 

So have we finally located Earth in the galaxy "far, far away"?

 

Yes. And ewoks are vicious proto-hobbits in full bearskin suits.

 

In early drafts at one point Endor was called "Jus-Endor" - which is a more mysterious term, with a prefix spelled like the Latin word "jus", meaning "law" or "legal right".

 

Cool, I didn't know that!
Did Kasdan write that draft? Maybe George told him to call the moon just Endor and he misheard

 

Or perhaps it was "Endor without the Witch", referring to Max Weber's notion of modern rationalistic Western society being a "disenchanted world".

 

When you first watched Rise of Skywalker, what did you think were the origins of the Sith loyalists?

Were they former Imperials, and their descendants, who had fled the collapse of the Empire thirty years earlier and become radicalized into a Sith cult? Or were they an older culture who had worshipped and served the Sith Lords in secret for centuries?

I think the former is what the movie suggests the cultists were, since they’re called “loyalists.” Though it’s somewhat strange to imagine regular galactic citizens leaving the known galaxy en masse and becoming a ghoulish cult. But thirty years is a long time after all.

 

I got the impression that they were the latter. In fact, I got the impression that they go all the way back to whenever the Sith seemingly went “extinct” 1000 years before TPM if not longer. They remember a time when the Sith openly ruled the galaxy and desire to restore that.

 

Yes. But I think they consisted of two member factions.

1. The Sith cultists (already active probably for millennia. Most likely the elite group.

2. Hardcore Imperials (Probably the bigger faction, considering all the imperial officers and stormtroopers manning the Star Destroyers).

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Interesting interpretations. I hoped but thought it was unlikely that the Sith loyalists were a leftover from the older Sith rule of the galaxy. And I hadn’t considered their navy and army a separate faction from the main group.

My impression was that they were essentially another First Order, existing separately but in parallel to the group we’d already been introduced to. I think Abrams or another person involved in the movie described them once again as Nazis in Argentina, which was exactly how they’d described the First Order when TFA came out. But it seems a bit odd to do the same thing twice, just slightly differently.

 

It’s the JJ way

 

True. He did literally call them the Final Order. Supplementary materials say this name only refers to the navy. But why wouldn’t it refer to the entire Exegol faction if they’re meant to be an alternate First Order?

 

They're not meant to be an alternate First Order. They're all different parts of the same entity; the same plan. First Order, Final Order... Different stages on the road to the new Sith Empire.

 

Palpatine is behind both of them, but they are different groups in terms of their specific origins. In a way, the First Order’s origins are more mysterious, since we don’t know where they came from or how they built their fleet. With the Final Order, we know they regrew their forces in Exegol. But the concept behind both is essentially the same, only it happens in two different places.

Here’s how TROS co-production designer Kevin Jenkins described the Final Order:

“The idea for the design vernacular is that these are exiles that have gone to this dark place of the galaxy, and they have continued their belief in the Empire. And so, the technology has evolved almost like in a time capsule. . . . The loyalists are almost like the Nazis in Argentina, so to speak, but they have the resources of the Third Reich with them.”

That’s almost exactly how Abrams described the First Order in the lead-up to TFA. Both groups were created by Palpatine, but they were born and evolved separately in different places. But conceptually they seem to be the same idea repeated.

 

That does not in any way contradict what I said. It's all part of the same plan.

 

My bad. I thought you were suggesting that they had the same singular origin because they were both part of Palpatine’s plan. Which is true, from a certain point of view. But it’s also true that it was “Nazis regroup in Argentina” happening twice.

 

Perhaps Palpatine appointed Sith cultists to the Imperial military.

 

Certainly. But I think most of them were planned to be part of the government in Palps new Sith Empire.

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Are the Sith loyalists in Exegol meant to be smaller than most humans? Are they not human at all?



They always seemed regular-sized to me, but someone on Twitter referred to them as little, specifically seeing them as evil counterparts to the caretakers in Ahch-to. It’s true that in the concept art they appeared as smaller beings:



And McDiarmid even referred to the characters in Exegol who helped bring Palpatine back as diminutive. But I always assumed he had been shown earlier concept art and that they were as tall as normal humans in the final movie. But we never actually see them right next to humans, so is it possible they’re still meant to be smaller beings?

 

Well, I guess that's up to any future depictions of them to decide. I personally think they look as tall as average humans in the film but if they are, that could be retconned.

 

In the movie, the Sith loyalists tend to be hunched over. That made me wonder if perhaps the filmmakers intended for the Sith smith who looks like an ape to be of the same race. But the art book for the movie says he had a different origin, with his design being a repurposed alien design.

A careful reading of the art book did make me think of the loyalists differently, though. They’re not necessarily just the robed figures we see in the Sith Citadel. Nor are they necessarily all human. The group is more diverse and includes beings like the Sith smith, Ochi of Bestoon, the Mustafar cultists, and the Mustafar Oracle who was cut from the final film.

As Kylo searches for the origin of the Emperor’s transmission at the start of the film, he and the First Order start to go deeper into a darker part of the universe, a region where the followers of the Sith continue to exist and keep alive that ancient tradition. They come in all shapes and sizes, and Kylo has to essentially fight his way deeper into the ancient lands of the Sith until he can get to the source of this evil, which is the resurrected Emperor.

Even Snoke may have been originally intended to be a Sith loyalist, with his final origin as a clone being something that Abrams landed on in the editing process, something his editor had revealed in a past interview. But if the clone aspect was a later decision, then perhaps he was at first simply another in the diverse cast of Sith loyalists the movie introduced.

I know that books published after the movie have added more information about these groups to the canon. But I was curious about what the intention may have been in the movie itself, rather than later writer’s interpretations. Though that interpretation I described is essentially what the panel below from the visual dictionary states outright, I just didn’t quite get it when I first read through that book.

 

I wonder if Sidious in Rise of Skywalker is a Kaminoan clone, a Spaarti clone, or something else.

 

The presence of fully grown clones of Snoke suggests that the Sith had learned to clone adult bodies like the spaarti cloning cylinders did in Legends. That would also explain why Palpatine’s clone body looks closer to 80 years old than the 30 years old he’d be otherwise.

Slightly unrelated to that, I wonder if the presence of the oculus in Exegol is intended to suggest that Snoke’s attendants in TLJ are part of the Sith cult and with him as either fellow companions or to keep an eye on him (or both). I’d imagine Snoke might have believed himself to be a high-ranking member of the cult, if he did not know he was a clone.

 

No, that’s just UTAPUJA.

Unusually Tall Purple Jawa.

 

So...why was Rey's dad allowed to live for so long? It must have been clear from early on that he wasn't going to grow up to be evil Palpy 2.0 and allowing him to live must have created issues for the evil powers that be and yet he lived long enough to meet a woman and presumably tell her that he was a clone of evil Palpy but this woman didn't care because she loved him anyway and they ended up having a baby together? What?

Also, dumb question but when Palpy comes back why does he look like an older version of the OG Palpy? Wouldn't he appear younger like Rey's dad? Wouldn't the resurrected Paly actually be younger than Rey's dad since his body was created after Rey's dad failed to be a vessel for OG Palpy?