This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

When the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker dropped earlier this year, it left fans with a whole lot of questions. First and foremost: was that really the voice of Emperor Palpatine laughing villainously? The arch-villain of the original trilogy was killed in an act of redemption by Darth Vader in 1983's Return of the Jedi, and while Ian McDiarmid reprised the role in the prequels, he was presumed dead for good in the current timeline.

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Of course, maybe that was naive. This is, after all, a fictional universe in which clones and glowy blue Force Ghosts exist. Palpatine wastes no time in making an entrance in The Rise of Skywalker, and while he remains somewhat frustratingly vague about how he is still walking and talking and cackling after all these years, he drops enough details for the viewer to be able to infer what happened.

"The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities, some considered to be unnatural," leers Palpatine, taunting Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and echoing a line he first uttered in Revenge of the Sith. While plenty of fans have scoured all memory of the prequels from their minds, some of Palpatine's dialogue from those movies is pertinent here. In a key scene with Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), Palpatine recounts "the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise," a Sith Lord who just so happened to be his master.

As the story tells it, through studying the forbidden secrets of the dark side, Darth Plaguis found a way to conquer death and achieve immortality. How he was able to do this exactly, whether through mysticism or technology, is unclear. But it stands to reason that he would have passed this secret onto his student Palpatine, who was fast ascending from Senator to Emperor, as a means of ensuring the Sith's stranglehold on the galaxy.

It is suggested that this secret involves the "dark science" of cloning, in a line of dialogue by Beaumont Kin (Dominic Monaghan), and that theory certainly holds up against everything else we know about Palpatine. In Attack of the Clones, he seemed very interested indeed in the possibilities of cloning technology, and he has been known to deploy it on at least one occasion. Many fans had already speculated that Supreme Leader Snoke, the antagonist of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, was somehow connected to Palpatine, and they were correct. Snoke was a puppetor a clone, to be exactwhich Palpatine used to control the First Order after his "death," leaving him free to continue his own dark designs in the shadows of Exegol.

Another explanation ties back to a key plot point in The Rise of Skywalker: the Jedi ability to heal somebody via a transfer of energy (or regenerate oneself by stealing the life force from others, as Palpatine does to Rey and Ben).

So, long story short, Palpatine survived being thrown down a pit and the explosion of the second Death Star by either sucking the life out of the nearest stormtrooper and hotfooting it out of there in a ship, or he backed up his consciousness in a clone of himself. Either way, you'd think he'd have invested in some skincare over the last 30 years or so man is looking gross.

Originally posted here:

Explaining How the Hell Palpatine Is Still Alive in 'The Rise of Skywalker' - menshealth.com