Somehow Palpatine Returned

One more time, with feeling

One of the most roundly (and unfairly) mocked moments in Star Wars was the return of Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, but here we are. A desiccated, malignant husk, fueled by hate, wheeled out in front of a chanting cult, has reemerged as a threat to freedom and peace. Didn’t we already throw this guy down a shaft and watch him burst into blue flame?

How is he back again?

This is why that moment never felt particularly off to me: that’s how it feels to live in a Democracy with term limits. One battle ends and the other begins. There is not a final fight for freedom, there is a generational fight for freedom. The needle must be moved, day by day, towards inclusion, towards equality, towards justice, towards peace. And strong, virulent, persistent forces do not give up their desire to divide and hate easily.

I remember watching George Bush win a second term and thinking, this cannot possibly be, he could not have been worse. Now, again, I see a man who was not only a historically terrible leader, but one of the worst people imaginable from a character standpoint, returned by the voters to power. It can make one want to get off the merry-go-round and let the world choose it’s terrible fate. You wanted, this, one is tempted to say, you got it.

In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker, mythological savior of the galaxy, initially retreats to Ahch-To after one too many loses. He believes that the Jedi versus Sith cycle can only be broken by stepping away. He’s tired of the war, and boy do I ever understand that. In the end, though, he reemerges to inspire the Resistance, reinvigorated by the next generation, by a generation that has no patience for his exhaustion or cynicism. They need him now, to be who he was, or at least represent what he was, and he answers the call at last.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. The once-defeated must be defeated again, and even if we’re exhausted, even if we’ve been here before. You might feel like this…

…but eventually you’ll have to do this…

…so you can inspire the next generation…

…and they can get to this.