Star Wars 9 Rise of Skywalker: Details of how Palpatine returned REVEALED in official book

After being absent from the sequel trilogy, Emperor Palpatine suddenly announced his presence in the opening crawl of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Kylo Ren used a Sith Wayfinder to locate the blind and zombified Darth Sidious on Exegol, where he revealed his life was prolonged via the unnatural methods of the Sith. And now the official The Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary, written by Lucasfilm Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo, has explained more details of Palpatine’s return, including the creation of his Final Order fleet.

Remember those hooded minions of Palpatine’s on Exegol? Well, they’re known as the Sith Eternal.

According to Movie Web, it turns out that their devotion brought them to the Sith hideaway to revive Palpatine.

Apparently, these baddies used “technology and the occult” to resurrect their master.

The method took them the three decades between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

READ MORE: Freddie Mercury had affair with Star Wars icon while he was with Mary

The most recent version of his story seems to be from after Leia star Carrie Fisher’s death in December 2016.

Allegedly, Duel of the Fates saw Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico have a much bigger role than in The Rise of Skywalker.

In the latter, The Last Jedi star had only around one minute of screen time at the Resistance base.

While in Duel of the Fates she and Finn were to travel to Coruscant and activate a beacon at the old Jedi Temple as a rallying cry for their cause.

Finn was going to head up an army of stormtroopers who switched sides just like him, while Rey and Pole would have been on a mission elsewhere.

Perhaps, one of the biggest shocks was that Palpatine, who was absent from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi was not going to feature in Duel of the Fates except for a mention.

That also means Rey wouldn’t have been his granddaughter, but the plot would have followed Rian Johnson’s assertion in The Last Jedi that her parents were nobodies.

Specifically, nobodies who were slaughtered by Kylo Ren, who would have been the big bad instead of Palpatine in Duel of the Fates. As for the third act battle, Luke, Obi-Wan and Yoda’s Force ghosts helped Rey fight – presumably actually manifesting this time – while trying and failing to redeem Kylo Ren.