Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker editor Maryann Brandon reveals the filmmakers removed additional backstory concerning Emperor Palpatine. After hearing the villain's iconic laugh at the end of the first Rise of Skywalker teaser trailer, fans began wildly speculating how the Emperor was back after all these years. He seemingly perished at the end of Return of the Jedi and wasn't mentioned in The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi - save for a brief line from Luke when he tells Rey about the Jedi's past failures. Viewers were very curious to see what answers The Rise of Skywalker would contain.
Unfortunately, the movie really skirts around the topic of Palpatine's return. The only explanation given for his survival pays lip service to Revenge of the Sith's Darth Plagueis scene, as the Emperor tells Kylo Ren the dark side is a pathway to unnatural abilities. Audiences are led to believe Palpatine had mastered Plagueis' trick to cheat death and that's why he's still pulling the strings, but exact specifics aren't revealed. According to Brandon, it was difficult to determine how much information they wanted to share.
In an interview with HuffPost, Brandon said at first The Rise of Skywalker had "a little more information about it, what was keeping Palpatine alive," but she ended up trimming a lot out in an effort to condense what was already an overstuffed film:
“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal. Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with... There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know."
Since there was no Palpatine setup in the previous two sequel trilogy films (despite claims this was mapped out from the start), the villain's return comes across as sudden and raises numerous questions that go unanswered. Because of that, this is an area in The Rise of Skywalker where more details might have been appreciated, but it's also easy to understand where Brandon is coming from. The film had a lot on its plate, wrapping up the trilogy and the entire Skywalker saga as a whole. Getting bogged down in the minutiae of Palpatine's survival wasn't entirely necessary, and Abrams tried to be economic in tackling this aspect of the movie. He utilized classic Star Wars opening crawl hand-waving to have Palpatine be alive before the proper film began, and incorporated the aforementioned prequel callback. It's true fans would have liked to learn how Palpatine ended up on Exegol (and where that Sith fleet came from), but in a way there's enough there for viewers to fill in the gaps.
The exact nature of Palpatine's return is something easily explained through dialogue; the bigger issue with the Emperor's role in The Rise of Skywalker is that it's very underdeveloped, which ends up hurting other character arcs. Palpatine, of course, is connected to both Rey and Kylo Ren, but those revelations aren't made until the third film - arguably minimizing the impact of the twists. Obviously, Abrams couldn't go back and add Palpatine teases to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, so there probably wasn't much else he could have done. It'll be interesting to see if anything else about Palpatine is revealed later on, perhaps in the Rise of Skywalker novelization.
Source: HuffPost