Star Wars: 7 Ways That Palpatine Could Return For Rise Of Skywalker

In a unique and kind of innovative way, the comics and books released in the Star Wars universe since Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm have actually been hinting towards this reveal for a long time.

Over the course of several books and comic book arcs, the narrative has been laid out that during the events of the original trilogy, Palpatine became increasingly obsessed with exploring the outer-most reaches of space, or the ‘space beyond space’, referred to canonically as the Unknown Regions.

It was here that Palpatine planned to store entire reserves and fleets of Empire ships, just in case something were to happen to him. And indeed, it has also been heavily hinted at that this is in fact where the First Order originated from, Empire gear and all.

Palpatine could have very well just been hiding out in the Unknown Regions for the past thirty years, regaining his strength while secretly still running the First Order the whole time.