Caffeinated Clint
While we last saw The Emperor being tossed into a black passage of nothing from a disgruntled student, the new novelization of “The Rise of Skywalker” has a little more to shed on Palpatine’s final moments at the end of “Return of the Jedi”.
Turns out, the ghastly-looking MF had set up his return in last Christmas’s “Rise of Skywalker” back in 1983.
“Falling…Falling…Falling…down a massive shaft, the betrayal sharp and stinging, a figure high above, black clad and helmeted and shrinking fast. His very own apprentice had turned against him, the way he himself had turned against Plagueis…whose secret to immortality he had stolen.
“Plageuis had not acted fast enough in his own moment of death. But Sidious, sensing the flickering light in his apprentice, had been ready for years. So the falling, dying Emperor called on all the dark power of the Force to thrust his consciousness far, far away, to a secret place he had been preparing. His body was dead, an empty vessel, long before it found the bottom of the shaft, and his mind jolted to a new awareness in a new body — a painful one, a temporary one.
“Although the Emperor had planned on Vader’s inevitable betrayal, the moment arrived sooner than expected: “The secret place had not completed its preparations. The transfer was imperfect, and the cloned body wasn’t enough. Perhaps Plagueis was having the last laugh after all. Maybe his secret remained secret. Because Palpatine was trapped in a broken, dying form.”
Just stop now, Disney. Please.
