As was revealed in the very first teaser for STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), the Sith Lord who orchestrated the downfall of Republic and the rise of the Galactic Empire, would be returning…somehow. With THE RISE OF SKYWALKER now behind us, we now know that very little explanation was given to Palpatine's resurrection, but the upcoming novelization of the film confirms one of the theories behind the Emperor's return – he's a clone.
"All the vials were empty of liquid save one, which was nearly depleted," reads the novel. "Kylo peered closer. He’d seen this apparatus before, too, when he’d studied the Clone Wars as a boy. The liquid flowing into the living nightmare before him was fighting a losing battle to sustain the Emperor’s putrid flesh… 'What could you give me?' Kylo asked. Emperor Palpatine lived, after a fashion, and Kylo could feel in his very bones that this clone body sheltered the Emperor’s actual spirit. It was an imperfect vessel, though, unable to contain his immense power. It couldn’t last much longer." It turns out that Ian McDiarmid actually addressed the whole clone theory just last month at Comic Con Brussels, and confirmed that the original script made Palpatine's cloned origins more more explicit.
The cloning thing? Yes. Well, of course, there were all sorts of explanations for why I might return. But it’s interesting because, I think I can reveal something, at one point the script had the line in that first scene with Adam [Driver], when he says, ‘You’re a clone,’ and I said, in that original script, which is no longer with us, ‘More than a clone. Less than a man.’ Which seemed, to me, to sum him up, really, because we know the camera has already snaked past the clone tank in which there are various versions of Snoke, that you probably noticed.
"So Snoke was a clone, Palpatine was responsible for everything," McDiarmid continued. "He made everything, in one way or another. Talk about power. If you think back, and I'm sure you will, to watch them in the correct sequence, that threaded throughout all of the movies, is that sense of evil. In a sense, when everyone commits a bad act, it's because of this character, this influence. Either in public or pervasively in private."
STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER will hit Digital on March 17th, followed by a DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD release on March 31st.