“Sheev” Palpatine was a fixture in the original Star Wars trilogy (he appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, as a hologram, and Return of the Jedi) and the prequels, but he was absent from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, making his return in The Rise of Skywalker a complete surprise. Leaving aside whether he should have stayed absent, The Rise of Skywalker fails to answer one huge question: how did Palpatine go from being thrown into the Death Star’s reactor to telling Rey that he’s her grandfather?
“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal,” editor Maryanne Brandon told the Huffington Post about Palpatine’s post-Return of the Jedi, pre-The Rise of Skywalker backstory. “Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with.” There was originally more information about how he survived, and what was keeping him alive, but “it seemed to go off topic.”
“There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know.” (Via)
She’s right: I would classify “Palpatine’s sex life” as a thing we don’t need to know.
(Via the Huffington Post)
