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The reveals from the novelization of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker have confirmed that Disney has no solid plan for Star Wars. This is despite the existence of the Star Wars Story Group, which is supposed to plan things out and keep all Star Wars media consistent with a broader vision.
There have been signs of this messiness in Disney’s Star Wars before. Directors J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson seemed to have relatively free reign to make their movies however they wanted. Johnson took The Last Jedi in a different direction than what Abrams originally envisioned after The Force Awakens, and then a number of choices in The Rise of Skywalker seemed to move counter to the direction The Last Jedi was going.
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The novelization of The Rise of Skywalker takes this to a new level by spilling huge details that were left out of the movie. Rey’s father is a failed Palpatine clone, not his son. Palpatine is a successful Palpatine clone. Rey and Ben’s kiss wasn’t romantic, it was about gratitude. And this is just some of what’s in the novel.
The problem isn’t that Rae Carson’s novelization doesn’t match the movie perfectly. That’s normal, as a novel can spend more time on the story, going into details a movie would cut for pacing reasons. The novels are also usually based on earlier versions of the script, before changes made while shooting and editing the movie. The problem is that, rather than adding some depth or more background to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s story, it feels like Disney is walking big moments back and giving explanations that should have been in the movie in the first place.
The revival of Palpatine as a clone is one of those things. In the movie, Palpatine’s return was covered in the opening crawl and a quick scene with the rebels reacting to the news with the now-infamous line, “Somehow, Palpatine has returned.” No explanation of how or why – he’s just back. In the novelization, there’s a moment where Kylo Ren sees the cloning machines at work on Palpatine. This could have been a shot in the movie, but it wasn’t. There’s a pile of Snoke bodies to imply cloning, but nothing makes the connection to Palpatine himself. The only explanation of Palpatine’s return is a handwave: “The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some would consider unnatural.”
Every major reveal in the novel comes across like this, raising the same question of why it wasn’t in the movie. Had Disney been following a solid plan for Star Wars, these problems wouldn’t be plaguing the novel and there would have been fewer holes in the movie. While the novelization’s delay may not have been enough time to make these changes and retcons, the amount of explaining it does feels like scrambling to fix things in reaction to the negative reception that The Rise of Skywalker received.
