14 Stupid Blunders That Ruined Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker
9. Palpatine Was Behind It All... Apparently
J.J. Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy may claim that the plan was always to have Palpatine come back at the end of the trilogy, but anyone with a brain knows that that's bulls**t.
The Rise of Skywalker not only retcons Palpatine's death in Return of the Jedi, but both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi by revealing that Palpatine was pulling the strings all along, and he has an entire fleet of star destroyers at his disposal ready to take out the Resistance and the Jedi.
It's so painfully forced that not a single person watching actually believes that this was what was really happening all along. It's clearly a result of Snoke being killed off in The Last Jedi, and they needed a big villain to close out the trilogy.
Speaking of Snoke, it's revealed that Palpatine actually created Snoke to seduce Kylo Ren to the dark side, and there's a tank of Snoke clones visible. There was probably an actual backstory for Snoke that they didn't explore, and instead it got retconned into this garbage.