Interesting and makes sense and — slightly different question then @metsuken’s — why would any Supreme Leader go by an undistinguished name like “Snoke” voluntarily?
There’s well established precedent permitting dark side actors to “kill” their prior identities and adopt formidable sounding new Darth or Ren affiliations which obscure their personal history.
Or if Snoke is someone known to Leia, Solo and/or Skywalker, then why the need for a new body? He must already have one. Is he really a bad guy who constantly needs new bodies? Please, no.
Eewww, nah. I think the ‘Plagueis was horribly injured by Palpatine but survived, and has been slowly preparing his return and fetus-Rey was a spectacularly good potential host’ bit works, but anything else is just adding a whole bunch of new things that don’t really mesh with the past, and it would be a pretty elegant way to tie everything together, wouldn’t it?
But otherwise who could it be? Plagueis has an excuse for being gone and a possible method of survival…but we’d then have to go with somebody from the original trilogy that we haven’t seen yet…so…Darth Lando? Emperor Fett?
Well, for Plagueis it makes sense because he’s been in hiding for a couple of decades and has obviously seen better days, so announcing his name would probably be a bad idea. Besides, maybe ‘Snoke’ means ‘Kickass’ in whatever language it’s from.
But yeah, otherwise it’s a bit odd for him not to be a Darth anything, wouldn’t it?
Hmm, I suppose one other possibility is that he’s already dead and what we’re seeing is his force ghost talking, I hadn’t followed that angle. Then he’d still be able to train Kylo. Hmm.
Maybe before he became supreme leader of the First Order he would go by that name. And maybe Leia, et al. discovered him back when he was rabble rousing in the beer halls.
And Kylo is not a Sith, and Snoke is training Kylo. That’s another reason Darth Plagueis is a long shot for Snoke. Darth Plagueis is Sith and would be training a Darth Kylo, not a Kylo Ren.
That still fits the ‘Plagueis is hiding who he is because he’s not fully recovered yet (if he’ll ever be)’ theme though. Plagueis the wise would indeed be quite wise to wait until he’s consolidated power before doing so.
And Snoke is wise…interesting choice of words to emphasize in Force Awakens, wasn’t it?
Plus there’s the whole shared soundtrack bit, I hit on in the article, which is certainly a nudge towards and not away.
Obviously we won’t know until the next film and it’s quite possible that some things are deliberately being kept in flux. But as much as I’m fully aware that this is a goofy made-up universe, I still do my due diligence!
Okay, that’s pretty subtle. But assuming the two pieces really match as closely the graphic suggests, that’s compelling evidence of deliberate foreshadowing.
I’m going for viewing number three of TFA today or tomorrow and will listen more attentively during the Snoke scenes.
The only thing that would make sense is if she had some training as a child that she doesn’t remember. Any other explanation is midi chlorians all over again.
There are other approaches than covering your ears whenever you hear the dreaded M word.
That was the whole point of the whole endeavor, to disrespect the intent of Mr. Lucas and to find a way to create something good in the mess that was made of our mystical duct tape.
Besides, why cling to what was a kind of hokey idea? A mystical power that only those with royal blood have? It wasn’t THAT awesome after all
Let’s don’t go overboard. Just because Darth Sidious understood his mentor’s power in terms of midi … never mind. The force can still be a mystical energy known through feelings. JJ Abrams has given us a Mr. Spock who falls in love. He can keep the force on the right track.
Stop dancing at the edge of the pool! Dive in, there’s a cave full of wrongly right in here!
Microbiology is fun!
Edit: In fact, want to hit this from a different angle? One that hits on the fantastic molecular machines inside us and perhaps plants the seeds for something more interesting? Most of us have very little appreciation for how amazingly sophisticated life inside our cells is or how absurdly gigantic we are compared to the rest of life on this planet.
Okay … well … conflicted, but you have my vote to write the screnplay for Episode X.
You’ve clearly tapped into something meaningful here and are the best writer to rehabilitate the midichlorians’ story.
Oh man, we should have the folks at Small Things Considered do that! I’m just a hack, those guys are the next level and then some!
But it’s not so much ‘rehabilitating midi-chlorians’ as ‘making the entire thing watchable despite George Lucas being a complete derp’. I consider ‘covering my ears and going la la la la’ to be the lazy option…not that I hadn’t done the same for years…but a friend challenged me and it’s hard not to rise to those, y’know?
I was actually studying transposons and such at the time and the whole ‘the cellular membrane is a red herring’ bit was finally starting to click, so it was pretty timely. Life IS the little molecular machines inside cells and in a lot of ways those first strands of RNA were the first AI (well, Natural Intelligence technically)
This is a new perspective on the story of TPM for me. I thought the glaring, apocryphal mistakes had more to do with failing to tell the story of the characters’ relationships to each other and Trade Federation oppression — not their gut microbes.
Well, this was kind of a ‘solve the worst problems first’ mission. So Jar-Jar and Midichlorians were the primary targets.
But yeah, Eps I-III are pretty hard to fully salvage…it has a little more hope when you look at it as if the biggest battles we’re seeing weren’t the ones that seemed obvious. You’ll note that Jar-Jar WAS pretty close to successful at exterminating the ‘carriers’ and nearly wiped out the plague (even the younglings!)… but when the last remaining Jedi scattered they made the rest of the job impossible. They’re reservoirs after all.
If he hadn’t gotten captured and interrogated by Palpatine then they’d be even worse off because he took on the mantle and went on his own mission of every-host-but-him extermination (hey, he wasn’t going to kill himself, right?) and was well on the way to saving the galaxy, but then Vader killed him so he wasn’t able to finish his stable empire with no reservoirs. Heck, he probably was so human-focused because they’d figured out how to inoculate humans Then him and Vader being Typhoid Mary’s would have been a non-issue, right?
Now everyone’s back to talking about The Force as a mystical thing and only BB-8/Jar-Jar is trying to do anything about the real problem.
But we knew that, because that whole ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ bit was a warning that we all missed.
(Yes, I love taking things too far, plus this way I get two whole ways to watch the whole series!)
I prefer an asset-based strategy. The best moment was when Qui Gon meditated briefly before facing Darth Maul. Reboot the story using moments like that one and delay telling about Jar Jar, midichlorians and Anakin’s haircut for another day.
That’s the ‘I can’t hear you la la la la la’ based strategy I used the moment Jar Jar and the Force Bugs reared their ugly heads.
Now that ‘Canon’ is so small that approach doesn’t have much appeal to me. Those movies are among the only ‘official’ things left and pretending they don’t exist is totally cool for personal enjoyment but really doesn’t fit when it comes to theorizing, y’know? Theorizing is about taking all the information available, ESPECIALLY when people like to ignore it.
Besides, aren’t you wondering how they communicated with Qui Gon?
