The story of Dune is an intricate tapestry of plots and politics woven together with intriguing cultures and heavy philosophical ideology. Every fight and every victory has huge sweeping consequences that ripple through a culture for generations.
By contrast, the Star Wars series is a fun romp through an epic space fantasy. The original three films charmed the childhoods of an entire generation, and those viewers passed their love of Luke, Leia, Han and Chewy on to their children.
Creator George Lucas was inspired and heavily influenced by legendary works of fiction including the Flash Gordon series, Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, as well as Frank Herbert’s Dune series.
Sprinkles of Dune's special seasoning is littered throughout the Star Wars universe. It can be tasted in the heavy political plotting that reverberates through several generations, the diversity of cultures, the strong female characters, as well as a fascinating seed of science that can potentially connect the two vastly different stories.
George Lucas is no longer involved in the new Star Wars stories which have spun off from his original creation, and with his absence some of the Dune flavoring was lost.
I believe Dune could have been of further inspiration, adding a dash of its spice to the weaker plot points of the Star Wars sequels that left so many fans disappointed.
How? What if Rey isn’t just Palpatine’s granddaughter. What if she is his female clone which he had specially made to raise as his replacement? He just needed his inferior clone reserves to keep him alive long enough for Rey to grow up and rise to power.
Spoilers ahead for most of the Star Wars, as well as the first three Dune novels.
The main thing that bothered me about Rise of Skywalker was its setup. Somehow Palpatine returned. Seasoned fans will have guessed within moments that he's simply using his clones to regenerate himself. Though no longer official canon, Tom Veitch's six-issue comic series Dark Empire introduced this concept to Star Wars lore in 1991. Rise of Skywalker clearly used this concept for inspiration, but was uninspired in its implementation. A slew of what ifs spring to my mind, but the greatest of them is this; what if Rise of Skywalker had better used the ideas within Dark Empire, and then added a heavy sprinkle of inspiration from Dune?
To preface my idea I must make a couple of points first. The first is that this isn’t entirely my idea. Frank said it first.
What does Dune Have to do with it?
In Dune, Lady Jessica finds herself amongst the Fremen, natives of the desert planet Arrakis. To become their Reverend Mother, she must undergo the Spice Agony by consuming the Water of Life, a toxin created by a drowned Sandworm. This process awakens her ancestor memories, thus allowing her to look back and learn from the wisdom of her maternal/mitochondrial ancestors. And she does this while pregnant with her daughter, Alia. As a result, Alia is “pre-born”, born fully self-aware with a mature mind, and also filled with the memories of her ancestors long before she’s had a chance to develop her own personality.
Mitochondrial DNA is the common cellular chromosome that we all share with our mothers. It’s what ancestry trackers use to trace a person’s bloodline back through time.
Alia’s mind ages faster than her body. She’s born a fully realized Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother but without any of the training needed to control her impulses, or focus her mind.
She’s merely a child when she kills her own grandfather, the Baron Harkonnen, to defend her big brother Paul. This allows Paul to establish his reign on Arrakis, but Alia is left vulnerable to her own hyper-sensitive mind.
Through two books Alia struggles with the voices in her head who are trying to take over her mind and body. She is an abomination and yet she is left in charge of Arrakis when Paul disappears into the desert.
The only one that steps up to help her is the ghost of the long dead Baron Harkonnen.
The Baron is able to speak directly to Alia’s mind because he is Jessica’s father, ergo Alia’s maternal grandfather. The Baron’s personality possesses Alia: he sleeps with her husband and her servants; he conspires to kill her niece, nephew, and mother; he takes over her guards. Her potential victims look at Alia with pity instead of fear. They know she is too far gone to be saved and too blind to be a real threat to them.
Second: According to George, Palpatine was always cloning around.
When the plot of Star Wars is considered from the dark side point of view, it could be seen as the saga of Palpatine and his quest for immortality. Every third Star Wars movie in the main series shows the rise, fall, and eventual success of Palpatine’s mission to escape death.
At a young age Palpatine discovered that it was possible to gain immortality. He’d heard stories of the dark side master who’d found the secrets he sought. Uncovering these methods for himself became his personal quest.
Everything Palpatine did, from conquering the galactic government, to killing off the Jedi in order to unbalance the force in his favor, was to gain more power while he sought immortality. He seduced the young Anakin Skywalker to be his apprentice easily because Anakin was also interested in this ability. As the Emperor of the galaxy he’d had the resources to research and chase every lead.
This research lead him to be interesting in cloning. He'd learn by cloning himself he could make copies that he could then jump into when his current body died. He didn't care about the clone army he'd created - only the information that could gained from the project.
In Attack of the Clones The Jedi discover a factory already in the process of creating a clone army from the DNA of a man named Jango Fett. Jango has agreed to this under one condition - that he be given one special clone that ages at a normal rate which he will raise as a son. This boy grew up to become the legendary Boba Fett.
This introduces the concept that such a clone, one with a slow healthy growth rate, is possible. We learn later that Palpatine is behind the creation, training, and programing of this army as part of a plot to whip out the Jedi with the infamous Order 66.
The new Disney animated series The Bad Batch reveals to us that the empire experimented with gender switching in clones. One of the main characters of this story is a female clone created with the Jango DNA.
In Conclusion:
Perhaps Palpatine ultimately learned that immortality was really a sort of ancestor hopping through time, probably by using midi-chlordans - or force molecules. Such molecules might influence the mitochondrial DNA of one’s descendants. It would make since then that a female body would be able to pass this DNA on to her offspring, thus providing stronger vessels in the future for his soul to hop into.
It therefore makes since to Palpatine's character to have experimented with these things and found out that they could be done. So why not do them? Having a female clone capable of carrying parts of his DNA into future generations could give him exactly what he's looking for. He only had to be a little patient while his female clone grew to an independent adult and came looking for power.
Check out part two to see how I think this might have made for an interesting addition to the Star Wars lore.
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