12 Stars Wars Mysteries STILL Not Answered After Rise Of Skywalker
Seriously, how is any of Palpatine's return and legacy possible?!
Star Wars likes to seed story details that might not necessarily pay off for a long time. That's the benefit of setting something out as a saga rich in lore and a mythology that presents itself as ageless and infinite in potential.
It's also a franchise that encourages its fandom to ask questions and explore philosophical and narrative possibilities through teases, long-gestating hints with distant pay-offs and even more overtly carefully placed leaks designed to manipulate fans into doing the marketing department's job for them. And few things achieve that last one quite like unanswered mysteries.
When a big mystery turns up, you naturally expect an answer to come somewhere later, which can either lead to a satisfying resolution, or in the case of Star Wars, an infuriating lack of closure even after the point where the saga has supposedly ended. And while The Rise Of Skywalker was supposed to be a full-stop, it didn't quite cross every t and dot every i on the way...
12. How Did Palpatine Survive?
It's all well and good the very first big bad of the Star Wars universe being brought back as a fitting end for the end of the Skywalker Saga, but shouldn't there have been even a slight allusion to how it was possible?
When he comes back, he's visibly more decrepit and moves around with the help of a sort of personal crane system, suggesting his body is broken, but the last we saw of him he was hurtling towards certain death. Gravity has a habit of messing up your day to normally pretty fatal degrees and yet Palpatine comes back mostly ok without so much as a whisper of how he managed it? Shouldn't such a feat have been used as a celebration of his terrifying power?
Come to think of it, how did Darth Maul survive too? Being cut in half isn't something you can usually just walk off.