Palpatine in Hell

How did Palpatine end up in Hell? It’s an interesting story, but boils down to a simple answer. He set himself up for it.

A lot of Star Wars fans have pointed out that the Death Stars were so vastly huge, they were a waste and an act of hubris. Avid fan fiction writers love the story and understand the internal logic George Lucas used to create the rules of his fictional universe. These fan theorists are almost certainly right. It would have been smarter for Emperor Palpatine to use all that material and labor to construct several thousand more super star destroyers. A thousand ships could cover much more territory than one slow, hulking space cannon, and could just as easily sterilize a planet if they wanted to.

In concept, a death star is basically a sci-fi equivalent of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons are terrifying but didn’t cause more violence in WWII. I’m sure it was terrifying for Japanese civilians to see Hiroshima, and Nagasaki shortly afterward, instantly vaporized by one bomb, but those attacks didn’t kill more people than existing conventional weapons. Allied strategic bombers were already annihilating whole cities as they did to Tokyo and Dresden.

But despite the vast amount of effort required to build death stars, Palpatine might have actually had a good reason for it. Thnk for a moment. What would be the worst fate imaginable for a person to face after death? A lake of fire and brimstone? A subzero arctic wasteland? No. Something much worse than all of that.

The worst hell is to be trapped with Admiral Holdo. Skeptical? Then tell me, can you imagine someone worse to be stuck in hell with? No, that’s impossible. Even Hitler and Stalin were cool guys to hang out with, according to contemporary sources. It is literally impossible to be a more annoying and miserable person than Holdo.

But how did Palpatine get stuck with Holdo of all people? Let’s unpack this.

Maybe when Holdo did her… errrgggggggghhh… Holdo Maneuver (Yes, Jar Jar Abrams actually doubled down on the stupidity and called it that), there were unexpected consequences. Some witnesses speculated that Holdo was actually trying to run away but was so stupid she went the wrong direction and collided with the enemy fleet. Nevertheless, she died hero. But hero or not, all that light speed energy had to go somewhere; it turned her into a Force ghost (like that nuclear test created Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen). Not one to be content unless she’s making people miserable for no reason, Holdo found Palpatine’s Force ghost and went off on a tirade about what a sexist bigot he was.

“Why did you blow up Alderaan?” Holdo demanded. “You had a thousand ships, and you used them to destroy a planet that’s 98% white? Weren’t there any POC planets around? Smacks of racism to me, you privileged cis male filth!” a planet filled with white people?” Every time Palpatine had a glimmer of hope that, while Holdo would never shut up, at least her rambling wouldn’t possibly get dumber. Oh, how wrong he was, and hope always turned to despair. Holdo’s nonsensical rants became so obnoxiously and mind-numbingly annoying Palpatine just couldn’t stand it anymore.

So the Palpatine Force ghost reached back in time and instructed his past self to build a death star at all costs. Then use it to blow up planet after planet after planet after planet, desperately praying that he might get lucky and kill Holdo as a child or something. She would never grow up, die in her stupid Rian Johnson Nonsense Maneuver, turn into a ghost, and drive Palpatine insane for the rest of eternity.

However solid his plan was, it backfired horribly.

In the original chain of events, Palpatine successfully reigned for a thousand years, quietly died in bed, and became Ghost Palpatine. Even though he was dead, he still got to float around the galaxy, look at the cool bases and fleets he built, and cackle about how he easily killed Leia and crushed the rebellion.

That wasn’t even his greatest achievement. In this timeline, Obi Wan hesitated to send Luke to battle. He was still traumatized by how he had so completely and utterly failed to train Annakin properly and it destroyed his self-confidence as a teacher. He was indecisive and waited until it was too late. Luke got bored and joined the Imperial Academy. The first time he was ordered to kill innocent civilians it was an agonizing moment of moral conflict, but he still went through with it and pulled the trigger. After that, destroying innocent life became routine. Within a few years, he became a brilliant fleet commander who wiped out entire races of people without even batting an eye.

Predictably, Palpatine noticed young Skywalker’s talents and converted him. Luke’s first task was, naturally, to kill Darth Vader. Thanks to Palpatine’s tutelage, this was easy and Darth Vader survived the fight for about five minutes before Luke turned him into a scrap heap. Obi of course tried to stop this horrifying turn to the dark side but Luke killed him just as easily.

Han Solo and Chewbacca, despite being heroes in the timeline us fans are familiar with, never got involved at all. They just went around smuggling stuff. Then Jabba the Hutt’s mercenary, Boba Fett, caught up with them over an unpaid debt and vaporized the Millennium Falcon with an anti-ship mine hidden in the asteroid belts. With the rebellion destroyed and Luke as a new Sith Lord, Palpatine was truly all-powerful and did many other awesome bad guy things throughout his life.

But by ordering his past self to build death stars, Palpatine inadvertently screwed up the timeline. That one little change created a butterfly effect. Leia stole the death star schematics, R2D2 found Luke, and Obi-Wan Kenobi was forced to put aside his self-doubts and start training Luke like he should have been already. Stormtroopers scouring the planet for the death star plans casually murdered Luke’s aunt and uncle, so obviously, he didn’t want to join the academy anymore and vowed to become a Jedi instead. While trying to get off the planet they randomly encountered Han Solo and Chewbacca. Along the way, they ran into the death star, rescued Leia, and the group of them threw a wrench into the Empire’s plans.

In Palpatine’s obsession to get Holdo to please for the love of God shut up and die, he sabotaged himself and created the timeline that everyone is familiar with. The very timeline that culminated in the final battle between Luke and Darth Vader that caused Palpatine’s sudden death.

Just to make the disaster even more horrifying for Ghost Palpatine: in the new timeline, Holdo ended up in a similar battle and did the Holdo Maneuver anyway. She still came back to haunt him with her nightmarish nails-on-chalkboard lectures about social justice and the patriarchy. He couldn’t escape because she was a ghost too and could follow him anywhere.

Ghost Palpatine was right back where he started, except he never got his thousand-year empire and his mistake was impossible to reverse. In his initial message to his past self, Ghost Palpatine said warned that Ghost Jedi would probably realize what happened and try to interfere with attempts at deception. After the disaster, Ghost Palpatine tried to go back dozens of times and warn his past self that he was wrong; the death star was actually a terrible idea and not to do it. But Past Palpatine always assumed Ghost Palpatine was just a Ghost Jedi in disguise trying to trick him.

His initial message was so carefully designed to prevent Jedi sabotage, it also prevented Ghost Palpatine from doing anything to change it. He even timed that first message to within the first few seconds that Past Palpatine had reached the sufficiently high level of enlightenment to be capable of communicating with future ghost versions of himself. It was impossible to get a second message to Past Palpatine before he had already heard the first one and wouldn’t believe anything else.

Seeing their defeated enemy this miserable was just too delicious, so Ghost Jedi started to make fun of him. Ghost Yoda pointed out that if Ghost Palpatine had thought through his time travel scheme properly, he would have wondered why the Ghost Jedi hadn’t already done it to prevent their extinction. The reason they hadn’t was because they understood that screwing around with time is too dangerous and they probably would have just made it worse. If Ghost Palpatine wasn’t an arrogant moron he would have realized that too.

Ghost Palpatine could do nothing except resign himself to the fate of being a permanent involuntary audience for Holdo’s shrill emotional meltdowns about toxic masculinity and the internalized misogyny of Leia for not wearing a space bra in the first Star Wars movie, falling in love with Han the toxic woman hater in the second movie, and colonoliazing Ewok culture as a form appropriation (Palpatine was pretty sure that “colonializating appropriation” isn’t even a real thing, and Hold was just making crap up as she went along). As hundreds of thousands of years passed, Holdo’s rants got increasingly delusional. Ghost Palpatine assumed that sooner or later she would hit the ceiling and it would be literally impossible to come up with something more deranged, but she continued to always prove him wrong.

One day Holdo declared that if you watch the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Howard the Duck films one after the other, except they’re all dubbed in Wookie, playing backward, and you’re standing on your head while looking through a mirror, it’s all actually a subliminal message telling boys that rape is cool.

Ghost Palpatine possessed one of the strongest psyches to ever exist, but even he had limits. His mind finally snapped. He screamed that even though he had been subjected to her irrational nonsense for roughly 600 thousand years, this was mind-bogglingly stupid even for her. How would subliminal messaging formatted in such an absurd way even be useful? Who would ever want to watch movies like that? For that matter, why had she watched them like that?

Force ghosts are blue, but Holdo became so enraged her form turned a crimson red. Ghost Palpatine shrank back in terror. This was going to be bad. She went into her worst tirade yet. How dare Ghost Palpatine mansplain to her like that! What he had just done was as bad as rape. No, it was worse than rape. It was like being raped thousands of times. It was like being raped by every warrior in the entire Mandalorian army in the Third Nebulon War, all 500 thousand of them.

Despite being ethereal and not able to interact with the physical plane in a conventional way, Ghost Palpatine figured out how to manipulate temperature. With this new trick, he built himself a little ice castle. He could only do it a few molecules at a time, so this project took him tens of thousands of years, but he was pleased with the end product. Of course, Ghost Palpatine still couldn’t touch or interact with it, but pretending he could brought him some comfort.

Holdo invited herself in and immediately concentrated into a steaming ball of rage so powerful, every single chair in the house exploded into a billion pieces. Ghost Palpatine burned with fury. Holdo constantly escalated her mindless, violent attacks on his sanity. It had taken him so long to make those wonderful chairs and Holdo just randomly wrecked them for no reason. He demanded to know why she did that. Holdo replied that it’s possible to manspread on a chair, therefore chairs are symbols of oppression and silence women. She went on to explain that for this very reason, when she joined the Republic Navy and took command of her first starship – which had roughly 25 thousand crew members – she personally threw every chair out the airlock.

Ghost Palpatine almost asked how she could sign up for the navy and instantly be given command of one of the most powerful dreadnaughts in the galaxy, despite having no experience and not even the slightest understanding of space combat. That’s utterly insane and would never have happened in the Imperial Navy, or any navy because no remotely rational organization would ever do such a thing. He quickly stopped himself, shuddering at the thought of provoking Holdo’s rage again. It was probably best to not know the answer anyway.

Holdo continued her story. The furniture holocaust included all the chairs in the crews’ personal quarters. If someone didn’t stand up fast enough, Holdo would shock him unconscious with a cattle prod. One teenage female crewmember remained seated, under the mistaken impression that as a fellow woman, she was safe. That was a big mistake, and her last one. Holdo accused the young midshipman of transphobia and threw her out the airlock as well.

Ghost Palpatine didn’t have the slightest idea how transphobia had anything to do with chairs, and that poor girl no doubt wondered the same thing as she slowly drifted through space and crystalized into an ice cube. Ghost Palpatine was the evilest tyrant to have ever lived. He destroyed entire solar systems for questioning his authority. But even he had never murdered someone for sitting in a chair. How many degrees of separation are there between “sitting” and “transphobia” anyway? How does Holdo’s mind even function? No one has ever dared to find out, because that revelation would probably cause immediate, violent, and irreversible insanity.

One good quality about Holdo, no, actually not good, there was nothing good about Holdo… one quality about Holdo was that she left nothing a mystery. Not sure what her ideological motivations were for something? Oh, don’t worry. She would tell you. She would tell you in such extreme detail you would regret being born. That’s exactly what she did here. She explained to Ghost Palpatine exactly why she killed one of her own crew.

The reason she tossed that naïve midshipman out the airlock was because of the girl’s privilege. She thought she had some sort of sisterhood with Holdo because of her virtue of being a woman. A woman. A woman! That made the midshipman a TERF (Ghost Palpatine didn’t know what a TERF was, and didn’t care). Holdo explained that not all people with vaginas are women. In fact, being born a woman is a form of privilege, so all women should be ashamed and hate themselves. The midshipman clearly didn’t hate herself enough, so she had to die.

Ghost Palpatine deeply envied the midshipman. She got to die. He wouldn’t. Ever.

That night he went to his private chamber to sleep. Force ghosts don’t sleep. He would just sort of hover in place and pretend he could sleep. But when he arrived in the room, he was dismayed to find that Holdo had destroyed the bed. She’d destroyed the bed in Ghost Palpatine’s guest room as well.

His existence was never-ending pain, but this was just getting to be too much. Ghost Palpatine stormed into the main room where Holdo was reading Handmaid’s Tale.

Ghost Palpatine never read Handmaid’s Tale, but he’d watched an episode of the television series in his hotel room while on a trip to the Outer Rim Territories. He always tried his best to give a movie or show a fair chance and approach it with an open mind. But he couldn’t understand the point of this. It was weird.

As the Emperor of the whole Galaxy, Ghost Palpatine was the most tyrannical dictator to ever live. But Margaret Atwood’s dystopia in Handmaid’s Tale is just… dumb. Why would anyone want to live like that? It made no sense to him. Being a supreme dictator is supposed to be fun, and he wouldn’t have any fun at all ruling that dreadful place. He would hate it. Still determined to be fair, the Emperor wanted a second opinion. So he woke up Darth Vader. They always shared a room. The Death Star was way over budget so the Sith lords had to cut back on travel expenses as much as they could. Double rooms were alright, but Vader was kind of a dick and always took forever in the shower. Every time Palpatine yelled at him to hurry the hell up, Vader would grumble and make excuses. He liked to pretend his prosthetics took a long time to screw on and off, even though the Emperor knew perfectly well they’re waterproof.

Vader watched the story of poor oppressed women living in a weird theocratic dystopia. After a few minutes, he commented that this was the most ridiculous bullshit he’d ever seen and Atwood would have to be a moron to believe a dumb regime like that had any chance of ever happening. Then he went back to sleep.

Now back to the present moment of confronting the awful and unwelcome guest about why she destroyed all his beds. Holdo looked up from the book floating in front of her and scowled. Ghost Palpatine wondered if she was going to accuse him of gaslighting, intersectional violence, or… something. She always insisted the words she threw around everywhere regardless of context were real things and not made up gibberish. But a while back, one of the Ghost Jedi told Ghost Palpatine that when she was alive, Holdo would throw dictionaries into a woodchipper and run with whatever came out the other end.

Trying not to yell, he asked Holdo for what conceivable reason did she destroy the beds? Holdo told him not to raise his voice because that’s a form of violence. As for the beds, it’s possible to rape someone on a bed, therefore the beds had to be destroyed. Ghost Palpatine couldn’t fathom how a human like this could even exist. He screamed at her then why stop with the beds? You could theoretically rape someone on any flat surface. Ghost Palpatine regretted saying that but it was too late now. Every countertop, table, mantlepiece, the floor, everything, all immediately exploded. His entire castle collapsed on itself and that was the end of it.

Alas, this nightmare would not end. Ghost Palpatine knew all too well that he would be trapped in this hellish existence for billions of years until the heat death of the universe. He feverishly hoped that Force Ghosts aren’t able to exist after the universe ends and this wouldn’t be an eternal punishment.

He spent his whole life obsessing with the secret to immortality, but now he just wanted to die, and he wanted it more than anything else in the universe. After the destruction of his ice castle, Ghost Palpatine was well past his breaking point. Seeing no other option, he went to Ghost Yoda and asked if Force ghosts can survive past the end of the universe.

Ghost Yoda just chuckled and acknowledged that was a good question. Maybe they couldn’t. Or maybe scientists were right; though the universe was expanding at the moment, maybe the residual gravitational field of the object that the Big Bang originated from would eventually pull everything back in. Then it would explode again, causing the universe to start all over.

Seeing the agony on Ghost Palpatine’s face, Ghost Yoda told him that wasn’t the most serious question he should be thinking about. Ghost Palpatine demanded to know what could possibly be more serious than the universe restarting and having to go through all this again, except for a hundred thousand times longer?

Chortling, Ghost Yoda reminded his old enemy that the two of them have something in common. In fact, all the Jedi and Sith Force ghosts have something in common. They attained this ethereal state by achieving true enlightenment, and the normal restraints of the physical plane no longer applied to them. In his old life, Palpatine was evil, but he was just as wise as even the greatest Jedi Masters so attained this enlightenment too. Ghost Palpatine was beginning to find this Zen-like conversation irritating. Everything Ghost Yoda was saying was true, but so what? Why did that matter, or have anything to do with his question?

Ghost Yoda told him to think about that. Most of the Force ghosts achieved this state through enlightenment, but not all. There was one extremely notable exception. Ghost Palpatine’s heart, or at least something that felt like a heart, plummeted. Holdo.

Seeing the realization on the former emperor’s face, Ghost Yoda nodded. Both masters knew that, while they came here thanks to an exceptional achievement of self-awareness, Holdo wasn’t self-aware at all. She was barely a human being, more of an automaton. But the biggest problem was the way she ended up in this place. It had nothing to do with enlightenment, obviously. Holdo got thrown here by an explosion not so different from the Big Bang. She ripped through the very fabric that comprises the universe, stitching reality together. The very fact that she was here as a Force ghost showed that not only was she thrown through the universe, she was still, in some sense, connected to it.

Which meant… Ghost Palpatine felt despair worse than any other he’s felt over the eons of his cursed existence. Ghost Yoda affirms his hypothesis. It was possible that when the universe reset, Holdo would reset along with it, like a clock. As bafflingly stupid as she was, and how much she’s tormented Ghost Palpatine with her endless, insufferable nonsense, at least each day it was always something new.

But the second time around… oh no. Holdo would regurgitate everything she’d already bashed into Ghost Palpatine’s head, starting right from the beginning. She wouldn’t even be aware she was doing it, any more than a clock is aware that someone turned its dials back. And this time, Ghost Palpatine’s torture wouldn’t begin near the twilight of the universe. It would start at dawn, literally from the moment of the next physical reality’s birth.

Seeing the deep, emotional pain cutting all the way into the fallen Emperor’s soul, Ghost Yoda pours salt on the wound and reminds him that there’s no reason the Big Bang would only repeat once. It could repeat a third time and a fourth. It could repeat again and again and again. Forever. And every time, Holdo would reset along with it.

If only there was a God for Ghost Palpatine to scream at. But he screamed anyway, whether or not a deity was listening. Why was Holdo doing this to him? Why couldn’t she take a break? Why couldn’t she go annoy someone else, even if it was only for a few minutes? A single moment away from Holdo’s irrational, mindlessly stupid wrath would feel like the proverbial drip of water on the tongue of a man burning in hell.

“Because an asshole you are.” Ghost Yoda said. “And deserve it, you do.”

Ian Kummer

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