They could have done the return with Snoke. But noo, we need to fuck up the long established canon by adding in old characters. We can't explain how they survived so let's say "somehow they did".
I didn't mind the idea of Snoke. A power vacuum means someone else moves in. He didn't even have to be the rumored Plagueis, just someone connected or whatever. Create a new lore that makes sense.
But then he just died. Not even in a fight, but through arrogant ignorance. He could see Kylo's thoughts before, but somehow missed that he was being played? Stupid writing. I'm actually still a fan of TFA, and will defend what it was trying to do, but the other two movies can rot.
I maintain that killing Snoke as a red herring could be fine, too. I find a tragically irredeemable Kylo Ren to be much more interesting than tall skinny emperor anyway. But even if one didn't like TLJ, TROS was almost the worst possible way to follow it up. It satisfied no one.
I was convinced that they were setting up Kylo as the big bad, I can't think of the last time Star Wars had a tragic, irredeemable villain. It could have worked really well.
I like what they were going for in TFA with kind of an inverse Luke Skywalker, where he was struggling with the "pull" to the Light, before fully committing himself by killing his Master in TLJ. Then whatever the fuck TROS was happened and none of that really worked anymore.
Extended universes always have some really bizzare power creep / weird situations happening. The authors need to one up each other and think of stupider stuff with every book.
Did they not show a cloning facility that was constructing bodies for him? And have we not seen that force users consciousness survive after death? And wasn’t there a whole setup for his consciousness to be transferred into a new body through some dark side ritual? It wasn’t a great explanation but it was sufficient. I’m confused about why people think this was entirely left out. That one line of dialogue is bad but just because those characters don't have an explanation doesn’t mean we as the audience do not. We do!
The "somehow he returned" betrays bad writing. Palpatine returning invalidates movies 1 - 6, Anakin's redemption, Luke's journey. It invalidates "I am your father" completely because who cares that Vader is his father when ultimately he does jack shit by sacrificing himself to kill one of many Palpatine's bodies. Suddenly the story stops being Anakin is the chosen one, it starts being "let's do this again ahyuk"
That’s a good question because the clone army based on Jango Fett shows that cloning tech is basically perfected in this universe. But the conditions were less than perfect in Palpatine’s case. Jango Fett was there in the facility, young and healthy and giving fresh blood samples daily. It’s not explicit but I took it that there was something special about him that made him ideal, too. Perhaps his genes were more compatible with cloning somehow. Palpatine was not such a specimen. He died unexpectedly, was already old, and they might have had to clone him from whatever they could find, like the smell of his farts on his throne cushion or whatever. Cloning is copying so source fidelity matters.
You'd think he would have kept some younger clones around, just in case. But then, he also was sure that Luke would join him and Anakin wouldn't betray him even though that's literally how the Sith work.
He wasn’t thinking ahead there was he. But then again in the Sith world, a clone of you would probably stab you in the back and replace you. The rule of 2 doesn’t allow clones ;D