The Emperor’s Broadcast
Rise of Skywalker immediately throws us in at the deep end with its opening crawl, dropping the major bombshell that Emperor Palpatine is back and has announced his return to the galaxy with a “mysterious broadcast” in which he threatened his revenge. We hardly get any context for this in the movie that follows, but that’s because the broadcast was actually already revealed elsewhere.
Days before the film released in cinemas, a cross-promotion with Fortnite turned out to be way more significant to Episode IX‘s storyline than expected. The video game revealed Palpatine’s broadcast, with Ian McDiarmid’s villain heard to cry: “The great error is corrected. The day of victory is at hand. The day of revenge. The day of the Sith.”
The Voices In Kylo Ren’s Head
As the opening crawl suggests, Rise wastes no time in reintroducing Palpatine. In fact, the film’s first scenes follow Kylo Ren as he goes on a quest to locate Darth Sidious, eventually finding him on Exegol – the fabled hidden world of the Sith.
When he finally arrives, Palpatine reveals that he’s been manipulating Ren all along. A brief shot that’s easily missed though shows a couple of lifeless copies of Snoke in some kind of incubator. As further proof that the Emperor was the one pulling Kylo’s strings all these years, he tells the First Order leader that he’s been every voice inside his head. As he says this, he speaks in two other voices – allowing for a couple of vocal cameos.
Firstly, Palpatine impersonates Snoke, meaning Andy Serkis gets to reprise his role one last time. Likewise, we also hear the unmistakable voice of James Earl Jones AKA Darth Vader, who was last heard as Vader in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.