Emperor's return in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker left the galaxy reeling, especially when they realized the scale of the fleet he had built at Exegol. "At last the work of generations is complete," the Emperor proclaimed. "The great error is corrected. The day of victory is at hand. The day of revenge. The day of the Sith."
And yet, as shocking as Palpatine's return may have been, the plan doesn't feel anywhere near as meticulous as those he orchestrated in the prequel trilogy. The Final Order fleet took decades to construct, and was staffed by Sith cultists from Exegol who had absolutely no combat experience. In the meantime, the Emperor's clone body - already potentially unable to house the vast pool of raw dark side power, which is the closest Palpatine comes to having a soul - had decayed while the fleet was built. From an out-of-universe perspective, these problems are likely explained by the fact Lucasfilm decided to bring Palpatine back late in the day, when J.J. Abrams returned to Star Wars 9, and they hadn't quite ed up all the dots. But what is the in-universe explanation?
The most reasonable explanation is that this entire plan was put together at speed, and as a result it didn't quite work. In truth, for all the Emperor has always bragged about his prescience, he has always been noted for his adaptability. The Empire would not have been born at all had Palpatine not been supremely adaptable; the Clone Army was commissioned by Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas as the Grand Army of the Republic, and it took hurried manipulation of events for the Sith to take charge of the project and install the biochips that allowed them to initiate Order 66 at the end of the Clone Wars. In exactly the same way, the clone plan - and even Order 66 - appears to have been put together on the fly.
Palpatine Sought Other Ways To Conquer Death
It's long been clear the Emperor was driven by the desire to conquer death. In one crucial scene in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine told Anakin of the "Sith legend" of Darth Plagueis the Wise. "Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith," Palpatine explained to the fascinated Anakin, "so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life... He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying." Sith are deceitful, of course, and in truth, Plagueis only knew how to conquer death for himself - by using the technique known as Essence Transfer. "Plagueis had not acted fast enough in his own moment of death," Palpatine re in the novelization of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, clarifying this was indeed Plagueis' method. Tie-in comics have confirmed Palpatine continued to research Essence Transfer, learning lessons from the Sith architect Darth Momin, whose spirit had been trapped within his ceremonial helmet.
But did Palpatine originally intend to possess a clone body, or did he instead wish to possess Mustafar. Interestingly, the Emperor doesn't seem to have really settled on the idea of cloning until the time of the original trilogy; tie-in comics revealed he sponsored a scientist named Cylo, who figured out a way of creating personality maps that could be installed into a clone body. Cylo was essentially doing through science what Palpatine would one day do through the Force. The key point, however, is that this particular story is set shortly after the destruction of the First Death Star, meaning the Emperor's plans still seem to have been taking shape.
Palpatine Didn't Always Know About Exegol
Surprisingly, there's some evidence Palpatine didn't originally know about Exegol, and the Sith cultists there. Tie-ins have established that the Emperor was fascinated with the Unknown Regions, and launched extensive efforts to explore them; indeed, that was the precise reason he accepted the Chiss Grand iral Thrawn, whose knowledge of the Unknown Regions proved most helpful. According to Chuck Wendig's novel Aftermath: Empire's End, this was because the Emperor sensed something concealed within the labyrinth of solar storms, rogue magnetospheres, black holes, gravity wells, and things far stranger. As one of his closest allies, Gallus Rax, ed:
The Emperor was convinced that something waited for him out there — some origin of the Force, some dark presence formed of malevolent substance. He said he could feel the waves of it radiating out now that the way was clear. The Emperor called it a signal — conveniently one that only he could hear. Even his greatest enforcer, Vader, seemed oblivious to it, and Vader also claimed mastery over the dark Force, did he not? Rax believed Palpatine had gone mad.
Again, Rax is ing back to the height of the Empire. The clear implication is that Dark Lords of the Sith. Palpatine was presumably more interested in Exegol than Darth Vader, as proven by the fact he kept his Wayfinder close by at all times.
Palpatine's Final Order Plan Was Engineered... Because Of Anakin
This explains why the Emperor's plans in the sequel trilogy appear, frankly, to be a little flawed and incoherent. The pieces were only just coming into place during the sequel trilogy; Exegol had only recently been discovered, while Cylo's innovations in cloning technology were helping Palpatine prepare to transfer his spirit into a clone body. And then disaster struck, because Darth Vader discovered the name of the boy who destroyed the First Death Star. According to Rae Carson's novelization of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Palpatine realized this would inevitably lead Darth Vader to betray him. He sensed the light side of the Force stirring within his apprentice.
Thus Palpatine engineered the confrontation on the Second Death Star, and in truth his goal there was probably to remove Darth Vader, by having Luke kill his father just as Anakin Skywalker had slain Count Dooku all those years ago. Meanwhile, just in case things went wrong, Battle of Jakku, with the planet rigged to explode and destroy the galaxy's fleets. Only the Emperor's chosen few - people whose loyalty he trusted implicitly, ruthless enough to have followed a horrific scorched-earth policy - would be trusted with the coordinates to flee and regroup in the Unknown Regions. There, no doubt, the Emperor intended to them personally, resurrected in his clone body.
The Contingency was done at speed, however, and as a result, it went badly wrong. Jakku was not destroyed, with Rebel forces successfully sabotaging the planet-busting technology the Empire had secreted there. Worse still, Palpatine's spirit was too vast and powerful to be housed properly within a clone body, and the Emperor was bound to an Ommin harness, unable to safely leave Exegol and his loyalists. It took time for Palpatine to construct Snoke, an artificial being who he controlled through the dark side, and who he sent to the nascent First Order in order to fill the power vacuum left there by the Emperor's absence. No doubt the Emperor initially fixed on Ben Solo as a potential host for his spirit, just as he had hoped with his grandfather, but in truth at this point he was just looking for a vessel he felt could contain him. Meanwhile, he had the Sith cultists begin work on a new fleet of Star Destroyers, because he had come to understand the Rebels wouldn't just surrender in the face of Snoke's army; they had survived both Endor and Jakku, after all.
Putting the pieces together, then, it looks as though the Final Order was flawed from its inception. It had been prepared at speed, when the Emperor realized his apprentice was not quite so committed to the dark side as he had previously believed, and it underestimated the commitment and skill of the Rebels. Meanwhile, the Force added another variable when it bound Palpatine's granddaughter Rey and Ben Solo together in a Force Dyad, and as a result nothing quite turned out the way the Emperor had foreseen in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
