Is The Mandalorian’s Shadow Council Connected to Palpatine?
It’s hard to say. Given that the first Shadow Council was explicitly established as part of Palpatine’s posthumous plans to burn what was left of the Empire away entirely, we’ve not quite seen enough of the second to really say if its members are aware that the Emperor is not quite so permanently dispatched. But one intriguing line of dialogue in “The Spies” could give us a hint: Brendol Hux, who we can presume by this point is well at work developing the future First Order military in the Unknown Regions, is said by Captain Pellaeon to be working on something called “Project Necromancer.”
Given the way Pellaeon briefly discusses this as potentially separate to his eventual work on the First Order Stormtrooper program—he describes Thrawn’s return as the resurgence of the Imperial Military, rather than Necromancer—and given the connotations of a name like “Project Necromancer,” alongside Moff Gideon’s own oft-teased plans of cloning research with Dr. Pershing, could it have some connection to the long-planned resurrection of Palpatine in a viable cloned body?
Perhaps. But it’s just as likely that Project Necromancer is instead what Hux calls the program that creates the mysterious Praetorian Guards, given it is he that has to specifically dispatch a trio of them to Gideon’s base on Mandalore. Once again, time will tell.
