TheStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker book adaptationis currently doing its best to fill in the holes left by the movie that audiences saw in theaters. The upcoming book has already now informed fans that the resurrected Emperor Palpatine is, in fact, a clone, and now it has revealed a very interesting, if a little bizarre, detail about Rey’s father. Namely, that he is a failed clone.
During the scene inThe Rise of Skywalkernovelization when Rey is pretending to take part in theSith Ritual on Exegolin order to trick Palpatine, she has a vision that recounts her grandfather’s past. The passage in the book reveals that following his apparent death inReturn of the Jedi, Palpatine “thrust his consciousness” into a clone body.
However, “the transfer was imperfect” and members of the Sith Eternal worked tirelessly to engineer a new vessel to harbor Palpatine’s essence. One of these vessels is described as “a useless, powerless failure” who was “a not-quite-identical clone”. While this replacement body was not fit to hold Palpatine’s awesome power, it was able to live and eventually becameRey’s father.
One of the burning questions left behind byThe Rise of Skywalkerregarded the mysterious identity of Rey’s grandmother, with many fans left feeling quite queasy at the thought of Palpatine making a child the old fashioned way. Well, thankfully that is not what happened, instead, Rey’s father was a failedclone of Palpatinethat lacked the ability to maintain the Sith power of the original.
Though this does answer some questions, it sadly still leaves others, such as why was Rey’s father allowed to leave and live a life rather than be destroyed? Did he escape somehow? Or, perhaps Palpatine knew that he would be useful way down the line and so allowed him to go on his merry way? Maybe another novelization will answer these questions in the near future.
This revelation comes off the back of the novelization pulling back the curtain on Palpatine’s mysterious return. As it turns out, the Emperor Palpatine we see inThe Rise of Skywalkeris not the same one we saw in the Prequel and Original Trilogies. Before being hurled down an endless shaft by Darth Vader at the end ofReturn of the Jedi, ol' Palps transferred his consciousness into a clone body that, due to being somewhat incomplete, ended up decaying and thus looking like his original form.
Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter was one of the biggest surprises inThe Rise of Skywalker. Though some fans had, of course, predicted this quite early on. It seems a strange choice to have all the details surrounding her lineage out of the movie, with actor Ian McDiarmid recently stating that the means of Palpatine’s mysterious return were included in an early version of the script. Still, at least we have now received a few answers to the questions the movie left behind. This comes to us fromthe official StarWars.com website.
