History will remember many, many things about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Some (not many, but some) of those things will be good. A great (great, great) many will be bad. But above all else, when the world speaks of J.J. Abrams’ capper to the Skywalker trilogy, most of it can be boiled down to a single line: “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”
Poe Dameron’s line, 15 minutes into the movie, feels like a hilarious and probably inadvertent admission that this story doesn’t adhere to much of anything. Plus, it’s delivered with such over-the-top exasperation that it became one of the internet’s favorite memes, especially with the ability to sub “Palpatine” out for anything you’d like. Interestingly, and probably not all that surprising, the person who delivered the line, Oscar Isaac, recently admitted that “Somehow, Palpatine returned” was captured in a reshoot.
“Those were reshoots. We had to do reshoots,” Isaac said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Cause when I look at it, I’m like, ‘That wig’s pretty good…’ But yeah, man, those are like those surgical strikes where you come in, [they’re] scrambling, trying to get everything going. And I think that was like a new addition at the end. So there was a lot of movement and flux throughout that whole thing. But if you’d asked me at that moment, if I thought that was going to be [chuckles] that line, I wouldn’t have known.”
“Hey man, I committed to the exasperation, that’s for sure,” he added. Here’s the clip.
Oscar Isaac is the best, and this line, dumb as it may be, is also the best. The audience, thanks to the opening crawl, knows that Palpatine is back, but the Resistance doesn’t necessarily have that info. And they definitely don’t have any logical explanation for it. So, “Somehow” feels like a hilariously obvious, easy way to casually skip over this tiny detail that the most evil being in the galaxy, believed to be dead for many decades, has now returned.
This revelation does make us wonder, though. How is it possible that this was a reshoot? It’s such a crucial piece of information. The whole reason everyone is so desperate to fight and win at this point is Palpatine’s return. Did the movie just forget to tell the Rebellion about Palpatine at that point? Why else would the line need to be added later? That part of this mystery, we may never know. But either way, it’s a wonderful piece of trivia about one of the most infamous moments in Star Wars history.
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