In Star Wars: Darth Vader, the Sith Lord discovered one of Emperor Palpatine’s plans that could lead back to an infamous Legends canon figure.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Wars: Darth Vader #11, by Greg Pak, Raffaele Ienco, Neeraj Menon, and Joe Caramanga, on sale now.
After being pushed to the limits by Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader finally made it to his master’s lab on Exegol in Star Wars: Darth Vader #11. While on the hidden Sith planet, he uncovers some of his master’s secrets including a massive kyber crystal, a fleet of Star Destroyers and Palpatine’s cloning laboratories. However, the most shocking revelation that Vader uncovered is a severed hand that was once likely attached to Luke Skywalker.
And if that’s the case, this reveal could set up a way to bring an iconic Star Wars Legends storyline back into the franchise’s main canon.
The series is set directly after the events in The Empire Strikes Back, and Luke’s refusal to join him against Palpatine sent the Dark Lord on a quest for revenge against everyone and everything. Prior to this, the Emperor left Vader for dead on Mustafar and forbade his use of the Force against the Sith assassin Ochi of Bestoon. Since surviving that encounter and other threats along the way, Vader has found his way to the hidden planet of Exegol, and he’s ready to take revenge on his master.
When Vader arrives on Exegol, he is enraged and challenges Sidious outright. First, Vader tries to use a giant Lovecraftian space monster called a Summaverminoth as a weapon against his master. The two battle for control of the beast, but Sidious bends the creature’s will into destroying itself, so Vader is forced to pursue his master into the Sith temple. There he finds laboratories and vats full of clones screaming at him. That’s when he sees what appears to be the hand that he just severed from his son’s arm in Cloud City. Somehow, Darth Sidious has seemingly acquired Luke’s hand and appears to be using it as part of his maniacal cloning plots.
In Legends continuity, something similar happened to Luke’s hand. After their first duel, Vader found his son’s hand and lightsaber himself. He presented the saber to the Emperor but had ideas about keeping the hand to clone his son and use the clone as an ally against the Emperor. Sidious’ saw through Vader’s plots, though, and quickly put a stop to them by sending the severed hand and famous lightsaber away to his fortress on Mount Tantiss. There, it stayed for years until Sidious was dead and Grand Admiral Thrawn was in control of the remnants of the Empire. During that time, that Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth, a crazed clone from the Clone Wars-era and one of Thrawn’s lieutenants, decided to put the hand to use.
In secret, Joruus C’baoth made Luuke, a clone from Luke’s DNA, and armed it with the original Skywalker lightsaber. He pitted the clone against the real Luke and made them fight each other. During their duel, Luke would not kill the clone, but Mara Jade, the Emperor’s Hand, killed both Luuke and C’baoth, and she would later become a Jedi and Luke’s wife.
If Palpatine truly does have Luke’s hand in his possession, that opens the door for part of this Legends story to be reused or recycled into the current canon.
Even if Sidious is not actually cloning Luke, his words indicate that he is actively using the hand’s DNA to make other clones. In fact, he boasts to Vader, “I used it to make all of these things. I can use it to make anything,” That means that all of the clones in the vats around Vader could have some Skywalker DNA in them. At this point in time, Palpatine could have also been tinkering with early versions of Snoke, even potentially injecting enough Skywalker DNA in them to explain how easily Ben Solo’s Kylo Ren connected to him.
Since it’s been established that Palpatine used gene-splicing to create his own clone too, that makes it quite possible, if not likely, that Palpatine’s clone could have some Skywalker DNA in them. If all of that is true and Palpatine’s clones indeed have some Skywalker DNA, that could also give Rey a biological Skywalker connection. All of this would explain her power in the Force and her emotional connections to Han Solo, Ben Solo, Luke and Leia.
While there are still plenty of questions about this hand and what it might be used for, it brings a world of storytelling possibilities into the Star Wars Universe.
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