Boba Fett, one of the most iconic sci-fi characters ever created, only had four lines of dialogue across six-and-a-half minutes of screentime before he fell in a pit and perished.
That’s easy to forget, given that he became a staple of Star Wars toys and spinoffs, spawned his own TV show, inspired an entire fictional culture, and currently sports an 11,000-word Wikipedia page. But that such a minor presence gained such a sprawling reach simply because meeting fan demand for it proved profitable goes a long way towards explaining how, though he’s only on screen for a few minutes himself, Emperor Palpatine’s baffling role in Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker has dominated the franchise in the five years since the sequel trilogy’s conclusion was disgorged into theaters.
