Emperor Palpatine was one of the greatest villains in all media. He was a sinister bad guy in both the original trilogy and definitely in the prequel trilogy. But having him included in the sequel trilogy was one of the dumbest things that Disney ever allowed and that J.J. Abrams put into the script. It felt like a pretty big insult to the whole point of the last two trilogies.

So anyway, somehow… Palpatine returned, somehow… got a new body, and somehow… took over the First Order after the death of Snoke, who was somehow… his puppet clone.

This meant that all the First Order’s actions in the last two movies, plus the corruption of Kylo Ren, were all the work of Emperor Palpatine. It just seemed so forced and lame.

So he obviously serves as the main threat to the hero (his granddaughter), Rey, who has to fight him despite having very little training in the Jedi ways.

And she manages to kill him by sending back his Force lightning. But it seemed like Palpatine wanted her to kill him with a lightsaber, out of vengeance. Which kind of plays into the fan theory that Darth Bane started the Rule of Two so he could take over the vengeful apprentice’s body over and over again. And Rey killing him in an indirect way somehow destroyed this curse forever. This actually sounds kind of cool in theory, but if this was the intention, they did a very poor job of explaining it to the audience.