'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' Writer Is Defending the Return of Palpatine
Note: This article contains some mild spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
For better or worse, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker brought back Ian McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine for one last round of scenery-chewing and Force Lightning-blasting.
While Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has said that it was always the plan to have Palpatine return, fans were mixed about the decision, with detractors saying it undermines the events of Return of the Jedi and is nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.
However, Chris Terrio, who co-wrote the script with director JJ Abrams, has now defended the fact that the Sith Lord is back, saying they needed to find an antagonist who was a "bigger" bad guy than Kylo Ren.
"We felt that right from the beginning, when JJ established Kylo Ren in Episode VII, there was a war going on inside him and that he had been corrupted by something bigger than himself and had made bad choices along the way," Terrio told Awards Daily. "JJ and I felt we needed to find a way in which he could be redeemed, and that gets tricky at the end of Episode VIII because Snoke is gone. The biggest bad guy in the galaxy at that moment seemingly is Kylo Ren.
"There needed to be an antagonist that the good guys could be fighting, and that's when we really tried to laser in on who had been the great source of evil behind all of this for so long," Terrio continued.
"That's when we really started aggressively pursuing this idea that there is old evil that didn't die. The source of the evil in the galaxy is this dark spirit waiting for its revenge and biding its time."
Terrio also stated that Lucasfilm boss Kennedy "had this overall vision that we had to be telling the same story for nine episodes" and that she thought Palpatine's return would be a "strong" end for the saga.
"When you rewatch the earlier films," he added, "things start to make additional sense. Ren and his devotion to the idea of his grandfather. The voice that he's always heard in his head. The certain similarities between Snoke and Palpatine.
"The intention was that, by the time you get to [The Rise of Skywalker], you realize there were real reasons this is all happening. It all shows how this story is being fought cyclically through the series."
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is out now.
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