#Sheev Palpatine’s hand and influence (implied)

[ominouspuff]

Title: The Hand That Feeds

@ddeck’s prompt: Padme in her role as child queen

Part 1 of 2 in an art-trade with the wonderful @ddeck !! THANK YOU for such a good time trading ideas and drafts and getting jazzed over them; I’ve loved it. Can’t wait to dive into part 2!

[speedgeek]

Sheev Palpatine wasn’t an idiot. He’d known Padmé Amidala as a teenager and the Organa girl was her spitting image. Except for the smirk, that was pure Skywalker. He had never had cause to interact with the girl before her entrance into the Senate. Bail Organa had been intelligent enough to keep the girl from his and Vader’s sight until publicly unveiling her.

So, yes, Palpatine knew from her first moments in the Senate exactly who Leia Organa was.

He’d entertained thoughts of enticing her into his web, certain she’d be as powerful as Vader had been as a youth. Treats, a sympathetic ear, stories of her true parents and the power she was entitled to. The difference in politics was little matter- he was sure he could coax her to his side. He’d been able to manipulate both of her parents easy enough. She was young and reckless, inexperienced in political machinations, but her speeches had shown she had her mother’s keen mind.

A worthy apprentice after the disappointment of Anakin Skywalker.

It was customary for a new Senator to wait to be presented to the Emperor. She was no exception. Unfortunately, her scheduled appointment came on the heels of another public atrocity committed by Vader. Palpatine cared little about the violence his apprentice used, only about the public nature of the debacle. His people were working overtime to ensure the news did not spread further and spin what was public in the Empire’s favor. Vader was en route to answer for his mistakes.

The meeting started out well enough. He’d dismissed the guards and her aides. Tea and Nubian pastries he knew to be Amidala’s favorite were served, they made trivial small talk. She was intelligent, bright, and well-trained. Her words were guarded, deliberate, giving away little. While her words were very much influenced by Bail Organa and reminiscent of Padmé Amidala, the girl had fire in her soul, he was sure.

He would enjoy breaking her.

That was the moment, before Palpatine could even begin to tempt the girl, Vader decided to storm into the throne room and vent his displeasure.

On a normal day, Vader’s casual dismissal of Senators was an annoyance. On this day, it was a catastrophe.

Palpatine was actually impressed with how quickly the situation deteriorated.

Organa pointed out his lack of manners. Vader pointed out the uselessness of the Senate.

Organa pointed out his lack of official position within the Empire, implying he was little more than an errand boy. Vader pointed out her lack of biological parents.

(Get a clue, Anakin.)

Organa pointed out his violent tendencies, also implying she knew far more about the previous day’s events than Palpatine was comfortable with. Vader pointed out she associated with criminals, specifically Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Palpatine just put his head in his hands. Every time he thought he broke his apprentice’s obsession with his former master, Vader would start saying the dreaded name again.

(Was it too late to return him?)

When he looked up, the girl had her hands on her hips and her head tilted to the side, mirroring Vader. It was remarkable how much she resembled teenaged Anakin Skywalker in that moment. The sass coming from her mouth was all Anakin too.

His apprentice was too dense to notice.

His apprentice was also too dense to not to take the bait and stop arguing with a teenager.

“Silence.”

They continued to argue as if he wasn’t in the room. The gall of both of them. He pushed down the urge to unleash force lightning on them both. Appearances must still be maintained, after all.

“Silence!” he roared.

Both startled. The similarity between them would have been comical if he hadn’t been so enraged.

Organa showed the good sense to at least look guilty. She’d had diplomatic training, she surely knew the faux pax she’d just committed. Vader, on the other hand, he didn’t need the force to know Vader was still seething. He’d hardly bothered to use his diplomatic training when he was a Jedi, much less now.

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t deal with two of them at once.

He refused to spend his time playing referee between father and daughter. Refused.

Maybe if Vader finally got his wish and died, Palpatine would try again. But as it stood, he no longer had any desire to try and break Anakin 2.0 while the original was still around and causing him so many headaches.

“Senator Organa, I apologize for ending our meeting so early, but I must speak to Lord Vader quite urgently.”

The girl glanced at Vader and smirked. “Of course, I understand, your Majesty.”

“Please give my regards to the Queen and the Viceroy.”

“Of course. Good day, your Majesty.” She smirked at Vader as she turned towards the door. “Lord Vader.”

Palpatine waited until the door closed behind her to finally release his anger on his apprentice.

[themattress]

Holy Shit!

https://imgur.com/gallery/WKkli

https://imgur.com/gallery/j9OQylb

Beyond the proof that the guy who uploaded this is involved with Bad Robot that he provided at the end of his second post, these definitely seem legit because the first post was in 2018, before The Rise of Skywalker came out, yet the treatment contains some blatant concepts that ended up finding there way into that movie that I have a hard time believing anyone but J.J himself could have come up with (plus, the rest of the plot is very J.J-like, as I’ll get into.)

So these definitely seem to be the discarded Episode VIII and IX treatments. Thoughts?

- Luke’s reasons for coming to Ahch-To definitely seem more in line with TFA than in TLJ, seeing as if he wanted to just “go there to die” he wouldn’t have left a freaking map to the place behind, plus it seemed off that someone disillusioned with the Jedi ways would go to the site of the first Jedi Temple to begin with. His portrayal also matches what we saw at the end of TFA (seeming to be in mourning for Han), and fits the “kind but sad” description from the script. And far from cutting himself off from the Force, Luke has been influencing it from afar as part of his grand plan, explaining Rey’s vision when she touched his lightsaber.

- Luke has a wife and kids! Sadly for EU fans, the wife is not Mara Jade.

- It was Luke’s influence via the Force that explained the things Rey could do that fans deemed her a Mary Sue for, plus some other things that weren’t so routinely noted such as the remarkable coincidence that she and Finn just happened to run into Han and Chewie right after obtaining the Millennium Falcon. Not sure how well this would have gone down...

- Saccrum, Snoke’s home planet, is literally Exogol. Secret ancient Sith planet that is nigh impenetrable to all non-Sith, site of the final battle and (as we’ll soon learn) where Snoke is repeatedly cloned and where Palpatine is resurrected by Sith alchemists...it’s fucking Exogol.

- I recall concept art for Kylo Ren’s partly metallic face floating around.

- Dathan Naut seems cool, but she never really amounts to much.

- So it seems J.J Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan’s vision for the Sequel Trilogy always seemed to boil down to “All the generations of Jedi vs. all the generations of Sith reaching a climactic battle, with Skywalker vs. Palpatine at the heart of it, and the Palpatine who becomes a Skywalker as the key to victory.” That idea was always where they were going.

- Jedi/Sith Holocrons were always gonna be a thing, which is why Rebels worked them in.

- Live-action Ahsoka was also always an objective, it seems, and I bet the way they wrote her out in Rebels’ “Twilight of the Apprentice” was to potentially serve as a lead-in for her appearance in the Sequel Trilogy. But because that never came to pass, they brought her back toward the end of the series and set her on the new trajectory that she’s currently on. Honestly, I think that’s for the better, Ahsoka wouldn’t have really fit in the main film series.

- Not big on this Cfi-Xi character, she mainly seems to be here to “no homo” C-3PO. And her main role relating to the Sith Planet ended up played just fine by C-3PO in TROS anyway.

- BB-8 had the kind of fake-out death they ended up giving to Chewie.

- Wow, so Hux was supposed to die in Episode VIII and Phasma in Episode IX originally. Funny how that got totally flipped backward in the versions we actually ended up getting.

- OK, this “family time” that Rey’s getting is precious. It’s sad we didn’t get to see this.

- Hoo boy, “this is the bad ass Luke Skywalker we’ve been waiting for!” Really? Et tu, J.J and Kasdan? In light of the recent showing by Luke in The Mandalorian, I again question why this portrayal of the character is so widely beloved by fans when it has little to no basis in the OT.

- Rey vs. Kylo Ren in a raging ocean backdrop; here in Episode VIII rather than IX. Similarly, it’s a duel that Kylo clearly has in the bag, but a fluke in the Force allows Rey to survive, although I much prefer the fluke we got to the one this treatment proposes because....

- Goddamn it, J.J. You’re doing the time travel / time paradox shit again? Were Lost, Fringe and Star Trek not enough for you to explore that concept in? This is the biggest part of these treatment drafts that rubs me the wrong way, it’s just so needlessly convoluted and cliche.

- Also, yet another Mystery Box in Luke’s severed hand on Saccrum.

- No Jedi Leia in that flashback? Yeah, I can see why Kathleen Kennedy rejected this.

- Btw, Rian Johnson wasn’t the only one who was going to turn Luke into an asshole failure, it seems. Making this highly risky plan with Ben and not letting his parents know about it? Dick! 

- Snoke is the one who destroys Luke’s academy, not Kylo Ren. And he does so as he is dying; another clue-in that there’s more to Snoke than it seems given that he’s still around.

- Lando would have been in Episode IX anyway, albeit still running Cloud City.

- The idea for this Episode IX is that the Skywalkers are a Jedi dynasty that long predated Anakin (Shmi being a descendant of it), and the Palpatines were their Sith enemies. Sheev Palpatine also would have died his first death generations ago and was being constantly resurrected via clone bodies made on Saccrum ever since, so the one that Anakin killed wasn’t the original; Palpatine can’t be stopped unless Saccrum is destroyed. While not as convoluted as the time paradox shit, I appreciate the simpler route they ended up taking.

- J.J and Kasdan always wanted Rey’s father to be a defective Palpatine clone.

- There was never a planned origin for Snoke in these treatments; wherever he came from the bottom line was that Palpatine brought him onto his side by promising to share his key to immortality (constant cloned bodies made on Sacccrum) with him. Again, this ended up being simplified into Snoke just being a whole-sale creation of Palpatine’s from the very beginning.

- Since these are treatments, the “love” part of the dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren is highly underdeveloped and would likely have been fleshed out in screenwriting. The end result, with the deprogramming vision of Rey and Darth Vader, sounds pretty effective though, but I think I much prefer the Leia death / vision of Han version that we ended up with.

- LOL, the “droid way of making love”. I want to see this idea repurposed someday.

- That’s an interesting twist on Alderaan, although it really doesn’t amount to anything given that the planet Leia grew up on and called home still got destroyed by the Death Star.

- “Magic blood”, another J.J-ism. Again, I much prefer the simpler version TROS gave us.

- The climax’s structure is basically the same as in TROS, with Rey (and others) heading to the Sith planet from Ahch-To and then Leia’s Resistance forces going there from their base, with Rey and Ben facing Palpatine. The biggest differences is that we also have Luke vs. Snoke and Finn vs. Phasma battles going on, in addition to a Jedi vs. Sith ground battle.

- Yeah, I don’t really care for how Phasma’s death is handled: making her hideously scarred and treating her sympathetically don’t sit right with me. Rian Johnson did it better, IMO.

- No red stormtroopers here, but there are red Tie Fighters.

- Ben still gives his life to save Rey, albeit in a less literal manner.

- Palpatine still wants Rey to ascend to the Sith throne and rule by his side. Also: “he loves the smell of burning hair, it reminds him of home”!? Wow, that’s dark in what it’s implying...

- OK, so while not a Jedi, Leia is the Big Damn Hero in the end. That makes sense.

- WTF? Rey straight-up kills Palpatine with Sith lightning!? Yeah, that definitely wasn’t ever gong to fly with Lucasfilm, since it totally contradicts ROTJ’s message! It was inevitable that we’d end up with the more correct “Rey deflects Palpatine’s own Sith lightning back at him”.

- “Rey Skywalker” is the end point for the story here as well, but it ending on Tatooine is so much more emotional than ending it on Alderaan Prime, a place that only just now exists.

My final impression is that we probably could have had the best version of the Sequel Trilogy possible IF the right corrections were made when adapting these treatments into real screenplays, such as axing the more convoluted and pointlessly fanservice-y elements and making different choices for a few of the characters (Rey, Kylo Ren, C-3PO, Phasma, etc...also something more substantial for Poe since they clearly had no idea what to do with him). However, it was also an impossibility for it to ever happen due to many different factors, the biggest of which being Carrie Fisher’s passing in 2016. So as it stands, I am still satisfied with the version we got and am especially happy that J.J returned for TROS to provide the end of the Skywalker Saga with some of his original (mercifully fine-tuned and simplified) ideas.

[tarrkin]

i may sound dumb. but wasn't it implied in rots that it was plagueis who accidentally created anakin by manipulating the force? (i only watch the movies, so if that's been explained in other media then i have no way to know). it was also implied that sheev didn't actually know how to stop people from dying (anakin asks him and he goes like yeah, we can study together to find the answers), so the whole plot of TROS is ??? plz help!

Not a dumb question at all! It’s implied but left vague in ROTS (‘so powerful and so wise he could use the force to influence the midichlorians to create life’) and is virtually confirmed in the (now Legends) book Darth Plagueis, where Palpatine heavily speculates that his and Plagueis’s dark side midichlorian experiments inadvertently created a counter action in the light side of the force that led to Anakin.

In current canon, Palpatine’s possible ties to Anakin’s miracle birth are referenced in the comic Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith #25. Here it appears to be more explicit that Palpatine purposefully played a hand in creating Anakin directly:

However, as Matt Martin (who worked on the story) pointed out on twitter Shmi is literally already pregnant, so while it could be interpreted as Palpatine influencing Anakin from the womb he isn’t directly responsible. These images also need to be taken in context - Anakin/Vader is walking through a force vision and none of this should be interpreted strictly literally.

As to if Sheev already knew how to stop people from dying bc he would have absorbed that knowledge from Plagueis according to JJ logic - eh, Palps is enough of a snake that I can believe he would lie to Anakin in this moment and pretend he didn’t know just to draw Anakin in more and buy him time to properly dispose of Padme. So I don’t think this aspect of TROS breaks the Darth Plagueis the Wise story.

I do think it breaks some other aspects of Sith relationships (like is Dooku part of Palpatine?? and if the knowledge is always transferred with death then shouldn’t a Sith master just focus on physical training of the apprentice, if the knowledge will just be inherited?) but in this case it can basically be excused with Palpatine is a lying liar who lies lol

[jmkitsune]

so given that I know a lot of people compared snoke/palpatine after Last Jedi and w Ep IX looming on the horizon, time I had this rant thinking "Snoke was built up to be the new Big Baddie" ...no he wasn't here's why

in the OT- we don't like KNOW the Emperor til middle/end of Empire and at that point- just one holo communication with Vader, up TIL THAT POINT, Vader is the BIG BAD, no one challenged him, everyone feared him but then we see THIS GUY KNEELING to a hologram and say "master"

this...BLEW EVERYONE AWAY "Someone is ABOVE VADER?!" so we had intrigue, come Return when the Emperor shows up- seeing Vader kneel, and submit to this...frail, smaller, and seemingly WEAKER man was mind blowing, the Emperor commanded this walking machine of death!

So, pre-prequels we had established (through show not tell) how Palpatine HAD to be more powerful than Vader to have him on that type of leash, and of course come the Prequels, we now saw the Hero fall, become the slave (again) to a CLEVER and POWERFUL master (Palpatine)

BACK TO present- Snoke...he didn't break/manipulate Ben the same way Palpatine did. He had to start when the boy was in the womb. Snoke...must not be that powerful if he had to groom this boy from infancy- that way he would have a BRED slave, not a broken slave who hates himself

now, we see Snoke does have power- he single handed zapped Ben and without effort manipulated Rey's body mid air like it was child's play- no question, SNOKE IS POWERFUL however- Ben is STRONGER, Ben's the Vader of this trilogy, however a different type.

See- we KNOW Snoke feared Ben stepping out of line. Not because "the rule of two" but because he knew he couldn't STOP Ben if Ben fought with both hands not tied behind his back (notice how he belittles/degrades/infantizes the Solo Boy) nothing Ben does is enough

this is because Snoke spent all Ben's youth dividing Ben from his family- a family that was already...strained due to parents being distant (due to life and personalities) and then driving a DEEPER wedge between Ben's uncle + teacher this is abuse tactic- you weaken by isolation

Snoke is weaker than Ben so he destroyed Ben's support system so Ben would FEEL weak without Snoke. Palpatine KNEW Vader would be more powerful but WANTED that so he stoked the fire, hoping that his subtle grooming and nudging put Anakin in a place of self hatred

It's obvious because in RotJ- Vader is no longer trying to sway Luke into helping him kill the Emperor- he's instead...submissive. Because Vader knows all the shit he did when he fell...HE CHOSE to do. That responsibility is A LOT to hold. A burden Vader is still afraid of

that was Palpatine's ace in the hole- he didn't FORCE Anakin to do anything, he LET Anakin choose his fate, then showed him what it cost and reminded him "you did all this- but I'm still here and will always be, you still have me even when you're this monster"

Anakin out of SELF HATRED submits to Palpatine, Ben out of isolation, desperation for approval/recognition/love/etc submits to Snoke, the two are vastly different, one being WEAKER and more fragile (notice how Rey was able to sway Ben to a gray point in Last Jedi)

Now this being said, Snoke is NOT Palpatine (comparatively) because honestly, Rey's BIG challenge/destiny isn't to "over throw/stop Snoke" as the "Last Jedi" who the Force awakened- her Mission (so far) is to bring the Light BACK. Notice how she does this

1- Finn: a runaway who BECAUSE OF HIS COMPASSION FOR REY finds something to fight for, growing beyond her to include Rose/Poe/etc 

2- Han: someone who was lost in his grief/self blaming found a surrogate child to save and lead to a better life (Rey)

3- Luke: this man for AT LEAST a decade and a half (we dunno how old Ben was when he officially fell) was in self isolation/exile because of something he felt was his own fault (partially but still) Rey gave him a student worth teaching/believing in, Rey reminded him of hope

her NAME is literally her goal- a ray of light and life shining in the BLEAK darkness/desert of despair. Ben keeps feeling the pull to the light. As his darkness grew- her light rose to match it Rey's his beacon home.

Palpatine's return signifies the SKYWALKER family's biggest threat- the family has been PLAGUED by Sheev Palpatine since Anakin's birth when Plagieus and Sheev tampered with the Force resulting in Anakin's birth

Ben (as the last Skywalker) is tasked with saving the Galaxy ONE MORE TIME and freeing it/and his family, from Palpatine's influence, grip, and powers of the darkness. The force however realized- Ben needed HELP- queue up Rey.

They are BOTH protagonist One is a "True Hero" (Rey) One is the Fallen/Anti Hero (Ben) However the first two acts show Ben's despair/weakness consuming him but DID end with Rey closing the door- she did all she could, it's up to him now. He needs to stand up and make the choice

The Rise of Skywalker title implies A LOT the trailer SUGGESTS A LOT but more than that- like each trailer for the previous two- they focus on Rey/Ben's journeys Ben leading soldiers Rey guiding her friends they both lead to Palpatine "All roads lead to Rome"

in the end- to bring balance to the force a Skywalker is going to have to do what must be done- kill the past Palpatine is the past he has to be destroyed Rey is the future and Ben MIGHT be but he also may have to sacrifice more to ensure the past stays locked away

Snoke literally is the roadblock everyone has when we're self doubting, self abusing, etc Snoke is NOT the evils of the past Snoke isn't some GRAND SCHEMER like Palpatine Snoke is just a step in Ben's journey and he stepped through that section, he's now reaching the endgame

so yeah people stop comparing Snoke/Palpatine remember that while the trilogies DO echo (it's meant to have a rhyme scheme like poetry) Palpatine is the ONLY constant BAD guy in each trilogy (no matter how prevalent/much screen time he gets)