Since 1977, when the first Star Wars movie came out, the public hasn’t been able to get enough of the franchise. George Lucas had ideas of what else might exist in the Star Wars universe, but the first film was initially intended as a stand-alone project. In light of its massive success, it has since been expanded into movies, television shows, video games, comic books, novels, and even theme parks.
Disney acquired the rights to Star Wars when they bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion back in 2012. Since then, they’ve made five new Star Wars films, and intend to make eight Star Wars-based television series. The Mandalorian was the first of these and has been very successful since its release. Disney has announced bits and pieces of what these different shows might entail, one is to follow Lando Calrissian, one about Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars series, and there is even one about Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen reprising their roles from the prequels. What has not yet been announced but could be an interesting show to answer a lot of questions from the sequel trilogy would be a series following Emperor Palpatine.
In the sequel trilogy, or really any of the films in the franchise, there is virtually nothing to allude to the fact that Palpatine had a granddaughter, let alone a child in the first place, before the most recent film, The Rise of Skywalker. From the little information presented in the franchise, the background of this could be fleshed out into a television show.
Palpatine’s lineage could probably be presented in a prequel film like Solo: A Star Wars Story, or even a prequel trilogy like the one that began in 1999. However, it seems that the Star Wars franchise (after the original trilogy) has had the most success with television as opposed to film, so this idea would probably function best as a miniseries. If it were to be about 6-8 episodes, each one roughly an hour long, it would be about the length of three feature films, but it could have a slow burn, with each episode ending with a larger and larger conflict, ending with the death of Rey’s parents.
This show could learn from the mistakes of the prequel trilogy, by avoiding a long story with essentially no conflict by making a television show with many small conflicts. In the prequels, the main conflict didn’t really come until the third film in the trilogy, and the first two movies were largely just exposition. However, it is true that there is even less information about Palpatine’s lineage now than there was about Darth Vader’s lineage when the prequels were being made. The show could also learn from the mistakes of the sequel trilogy by having a finite story from the get-go. The writers should know what every episode will be and what the overarching plot will be before they start production on any episode, something that was not really the case in the making of the sequel trilogy.
It did feel almost as though the notion of Rey being the granddaughter of Palpatine was sort of just thrown in at the last minute when the makers of the film decided they needed a more engaging twist, and that perhaps they shouldn’t have killed Snoke in the second film. It is possible that the writers really wanted to hide who Rey was the descendant of in the trilogy, going as far as to call the final film The Rise of Skywalker, but it is not necessarily a bad thing for the audience to be able to guess what might happen with the various characters in a film. That way, when the audience finally gets the big reveal, they aren’t left feeling so uncomfortable when two characters who they thought were cousins for two full movies suddenly decide to kiss on screen.
The first half of the miniseries could involve Palpatine and his wife, or girlfriend, or whoever the person who bears his children happens to be. How they met, what their relationship was like, and how they came to conceive a child all are questions the show could answer. In the films, the issue is addressed so minimally that is unclear whether it is Rey’s mother or father who is the child of Palpatine, as he kills them both. From how old the parents look when they’re killed, and from how old Rey appears to be, Palpatine likely had a child at around the same time that Luke and Leia were born. So, this part of the miniseries would likely be occurring around the time of the prequels, or fairly soon after.
The second half of the miniseries could further address the life of Palpatine’s child, potentially how Palpatine comes to know of their existence, depending on how his relationship with the child’s mother worked out in the first half. All throughout the sequel trilogies, Rey’s parents are referred to as nobodies, so it seems a plot point would likely be Palpatine’s disappointment in his child for not showing strength in the force. He probably wouldn’t be so involved in the child’s life, choosing to focus on shaping Vader to do his bidding, up until he finds out about the existence of Rey and her powers. There could be an assessment on the force ‘skipping a generation’ or something of that nature. Perhaps Palpatine’s parents were ‘nobodies’, unable to harness the force as well.
An episode close to the end could follow how Palpatine’s child believes him to be dead, as everyone did once Vader killed him in the original trilogy, and thus thinking that Rey is safe, or even at this point deciding that it is safe enough to have a child. But Palpatine will of course reappear in the story, as it is now known that Vader did not actually kill Palpatine. How Palpatine survives is another unanswered question, although in the original trilogy Luke does fall down a similar shaft to the one that Palpatine is thrown down, and Luke survives. So reasonably, since Palpatine is much more powerful than Luke, or at least more powerful than Luke was at this time, it doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch to say he could have survived this. The series would end with Palpatine making it apparent that he wanted to shape Rey as he did Vader, Rey’s parents deciding to take her to Jakku, and then Palpatine finding and killing them.
Palpatine is one of the few characters to be in all three of the trilogies, and to consistently be a part of the main conflict, so it seems odd that there are so many unanswered questions about him, potentially enough to make an entire television show. Although as long as Disney continues to make content in the Star Wars universe, it seems that they surely will have something to address Palpatine and his lineage at some point, especially since it became such an important plot point in the most recent film.