‘Star Wars’: Some Fans Are Still Disappointed Snoke Wasn’t Darth Plagueis
With no definite theatrical movies in the foreseeable future, Star Wars fans these days spend a lot of time lately playing a big game of “I wish” or “What If.”
With Disney’s sequel trilogy prompting a lot of grief, fans are still trying to create that perfect Star Wars movie in their heads, since the ones on the screen left them wanting.
One aspect of The Last Jedi that surprised many fans was that Snoke didn’t turn out to be quite the big bad that everybody thought he was. Now they’re wondering if maybe something in the prequel trilogy could have improved his storyline.
‘Star Wars’: Who was Darth Plagueis?
In Star Wars mythology, “Darth” is shorthand for the bad guy. People know Darth Vader, certainly, and maybe Darth Sidious (the other name for Emperor Palpatine), but they may be fuzzy on Darth Plagueis. That’s because, in the movies at least, Darth Plagueis was heard about but never seen. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker had this exchange;
PALPATINE: It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life … He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.
ANAKIN: He could actually save people from death?
PALPATINE: The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
ANAKIN: What happened to him?
PALPATINE: He became so powerful . . . the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. (smiles) Plagueis never saw it coming. It’s ironic he could save others from death, but not himself.
This, of course, proves tempting to Anakin, who is desperate to fend off the terrible fate that he sees for his wife Padme. To make a long story short, things do not end well for him.
How might Darth Plagueis have improved Snoke?
It has been argued that the Star Wars sequel trilogy is like the junior version of the original trilogy. Rey is the junior version of Luke, Poe is Han Solo Jr, Kylo Ren is Darth Vader Jr (almost literally), and so on.
Snoke seemed to be the new trilogy’s take on the Emperor. So most fans were surprised and some were outraged when Kylo Ren killed him in The Last Jedi.
On Reddit, fans talked about their favorite sequel trilogy predictions that turned out to be wrong. One fan said, “Snoke being Plagueis would’ve been pretty cool. And since TFA (The Force Awakens) had so much backstory I was speculating for TLJ to pull a Godfather II and be a Prequel and sequel to TFA at once.”
That fan was referring to the fact that The Godfather Part II, in addition to continuing the story of the first film, also told the story of how Don Corleone rose to power in the early 20th century. That movie is considered one of the greatest sequels of all time. Generally speaking, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is not in that class.
Would a plan have improved the ‘Star Wars’ story?
The Rise of Skywalker revealed that Palpatine created Snoke as a puppet to swing Kylo to the Dark Side, so Palpatine was pulling the strings all along. Many fans thought this was a cop-out, the direct result of there not being a “plan” in place to hold the sequel trilogy together.
People generally thought Force Awakens did a good job setting the story up, but Last Jedi upended it, for better or for worse, and that left The Rise of Skywalker to race to a confused conclusion.
This discussion is all academic, because the Skywalker trilogy is done, and we are very unlikely to get the special editions we saw with the original and prequel trilogies. Folks on Reddit and elsewhere will have to content themselves with fan edits.
