Credit: LucasfilmThe Sequel Trilogy has plagued Star Wars for years and has caused Lucasfilm to waste five years of storytelling to justify one detail from Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker (2019), thanks to JJ Abrams.
The Sequel Trilogy ended with Ian McDiarmid’s Emperor Palpatine returning to Star Wars despite falling to his death in Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi (1983). Kylo Ren finds a planet called Exegol and meets what’s left of Palpatine on the dark planet, where he reveals that he lives due to advanced cloning.
Star Wars fans hated that Palpatine’s return was so sudden and rushed and found that saying he was a clone was a lame reason for why the villain had to return. Now, Lucasfilm has invested a lot of time in cloning and explaining how it would be possible for someone like Palpatine to return from the dead. JJ Abrams even went as far as to say that the Sequel Trilogy had always planned for Palpatine’s return, but very few fans believe this to be true.
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In The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch, Disney made a lot of focus on cloning, which has been great for creating more connections and making this detail more understandable, but both series have taken this too far. For instance, The Mandalorian’s whole focus with Grogu was that the Empire needed him alive for his midi-chlorians and blood samples, but that research has been absent. Why did it have to be Grogu? Why not any Jedi?
Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin doesn’t care about the Empire, and since the show is starting to focus more and more on reuniting all Mandalorians, it feels like the Empire’s research arc might be left behind, and that hurts the show because now, what’s the arc for Grogu? Is he supposed to be a Mandalorian? His species ages very slowly, so it will probably be decades before he starts to grow taller, meaning that he might be a foundling for several more years.
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The Bad Batch has made a huge focus on cloning as the Kaminoans were huge cloners and had special research done past making genetic soldiers. In Season 2, Mount Tantiss became a huge part of the series as villains like Doctor Hemlock wanted to advance the cloning research for the Emperor himself, leaving fans to see the obvious connection.
Sadly, the fate of the clones is also tied to this cloning endeavor, as Hemlock is using clone prisoners as lab rats for his experiments which is terrifying and disturbing. The main problem for that series is that fans know the Empire will achieve its ends.
Since we know what the final product will be, there is no tension; there is no surprise. It’s just storytelling for fans to clearly see the setup for the big twist in Episode XI, which by now, most Star Wars fans have seen. While this helps the Star Wars canon, make sense of cloning force users, Star Wars needs to stop focusing so much on cloning overall since having two shows with the same focus can be quite repetitive because fans know that somehow Palpatine returned, and having two series reminds us of that isn’t necessary, and JJ Abrams is the one to blame for this cloning debacle.
Do you think Star Wars needs to spend more on cloning? Let Inside the Magic know what you think in the comments below!