Somehow, “Project Necromancer”
So obvious. Too obvious. Sigh.
This season of The Mandalorian, its third, has been up and down. Mostly down, if I’m being honest. It’s not bad. But it’s not as good as the first two. It’s better than The Book of Boba Fett, but that basically morphed into a sort of season 2.5 of The Mandalorian. Anyway, I’m still enjoying it, despite the attempt to ruin it with the last episode featuring Jack Black, Lizzo, and Christopher Lloyd. The two times too cute cameos, Great Scott!
And then, this week, we get “Project Necromancer”.
Now, hopefully this isn’t a spoiler well over three years after the release of the last Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, but just in case…
SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!“Somehow, Palpatine returned.”
/END SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!It’s perhaps the laziest bit of dialogue in a series known for it’s truly awful dialogue. As a reminder, it’s a series which contains the following dialogue:
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.”
Anyway, the Poe Dameron line is remarkable. Meme-worthy. I mean, on one hand, it’s probably the right mentality not to worry about it? He’s back. They can’t really do anything about it. So why dwell? On the other, it’s just so comically lazy as a piece of dialogue in a movie. How did he return? It feels as if no one had time to figure it out behind-the-scenes, so they thought they’d just fix it in post, as it were. They just shipped it almost as if everyone watching won’t care. Just like they won’t care about Snoke, right? How did the long-thought-dead, ultimate villain and one of the most famous enemies in the history of cinema get resurrected?
Somehow! That’s how.
Okay now *actual* spoilers ahead of you haven’t seen the latest episode
of The Mandalorian, episode 7, entitled “The Spies”. And now, years later, we’re apparently going to get some semblance of an answer. As it turns out, Palpatine didn’t return somehow, he (again, likely) returned thanks to an initiative called “Project Necromancer”.
When this project name dropped in the latest episode of The Mandalorian, eyeballs simply had to roll. Commandant Hux (who is the father of General Hux from the latest film trilogy — and naturally played by Brian Gleeson, who is the brother of Domnhall Gleeson, who plays General Hux) drops the reference in the “Imperial Shadow Council” which Moff Gideon joins remotely via hologram (Zoom, eat your heart out). We’re clearly meant to be more interested in the reference to Grand Admiral Thrawn (a core character from the Star Wars Rebels animated series, and who is now coming back as a main live-action character in the forthcoming Ahsoka series). But then talk of cloning and cloning and Dr. Pershing the cloning doctor and cloning. It’s not exactly subtle. And then they name drop the project again.
At least call it something less on the nose? How about “Project Perseverance”? I mean, this is only slightly better than “Project Palpable”. It’s so blatantly obvious what it means that it’s silly. May as well call it “Project Patch the Plot Hole” (in Rise of Skywalker).
Because the reality is that Palpatine should never have been brought back — or, at the very least, there were a number of better ways to bring him back in that movie. Instead, it was lazy and dumb. And now The Mandalorian has been tasked with picking up those lame pieces.
I’m guessing they’re going to rope Snoke into it too. My fairly obvious hunch would be that all the clones of Snoke we saw in Rise of Skywalker were failed attempts at “Project Necromancer” and only once they succeeded in bringing life to Snoke — perhaps a resurrected Darth Plagueis after all?¹ — did they move on to bringing back Palpatine.
Poor Mandalorian. It shouldn’t be hung with such baggage. The need to clean up the pieces from what was clearly a bloody back-and-forth custody battle for the third trilogy between J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson. Somehow.
¹ Now that might actually be interesting. But I think far more likely is that Snoke was just a mutated version of Palpatine as they tried again and again to resurrect him. Hence his more deformed look mixed with Emperor vibes (and powers).
