Q&As About 'Star Wars': Why was the character Snoke such a letdown in Star Wars: The Last Jedi after his build-up in The Force Awakens?

Why was the character Snoke such a letdown in Star Wars: The Last Jedi after his build-up in The Force Awakens?

There wasn’t any build-up. As Yoda might tell you, “Only build-up, in your mind it was.”

Supreme Leader Snoke did not have much of a role in Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens. He appears only in a few brief scenes as an imposing-looking hologram, utters a few Palpatine-lite lines to General Hux and Kylo Ren, and gives a few plot-necessary orders to his minions. The heroes of the Resistance only refer to him once, and that’s when Leia reminds Han that it was Snoke who turned their son Ben into his Vader-wannabe Dark Side apprentice. He never wields a lightsaber like Kylo Ren’s idol, the aforementioned Darth Vader, and he’s not present on Starkiller Base when the First Order uses its superweapon to decimate the New Republic.

That’s it. I don’t see any evidence of a huge character build-up.

Look, the problem with Sequel Trilogy dislikers is that they don’t realize that whether they want to see it or not, the films being made by Lucasfilm are following the same “it’s like a piece of music; certain themes recur in Star Wars but with variations” idea that George Lucas used to say when he was asked why the Prequel Trilogy seemed to echo beats and themes from the Original Trilogy.

The big difference is that whereas the Prequels were doubling back to the Star Wars galaxy’s past to show the fall of the Republic, the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the Rise of the Empire, this Sequel Trilogy depicts the aftermath of the Empire’s defeat and the effects it’s had on galactic society and especially the heroes from the Rebel Alliance.

None other than writer-director J.J. Abrams has said that the First Order is analogous to the famed ODESSA network of Nazi die-hards who fled to Argentina and the Middle East after the fall of the Third Reich on Earth in 1945. Like Hitler’s Germany after V-E Day, the Empire after the Battle of Jakku is dead, vanquished, and what is left is weaker than a newborn baby. Most of its former citizens are content merely to be alive and accept the Galactic Concordance that ended the Galactic Civil War a year or so after the Battle of Endor. Only a few fanatics flee to the Unknown Regions and hide there, waiting for the day when their new splinter group, the First Order, can return and get its revenge upon the Rebel Alliance that destroyed their socio-political structure.

Snoke’s back story is not important. Snoke himself was only important as a focus of Ben Solo/Kylo Ren’s motivations. Though Snoke is not a Sith (the Order having been destroyed when the Death Star II exploded near the Endor moon, he is a Dark Side user who apes Palpatine but is not Palpatine. He is only there as a means to Kylo Ren’s ends; mainly, to be murdered by his powerful but unstable apprentice so that Anakin Skywalker’s grandson can become the Trilogy’s true villain.

Still, some Star Wars fans were probably expecting the “big bad” of the Sequels to be a resurrected Palpatine or a reasonable simulacrum thereof. Snoke, though clearly an individual powerful in the Force, had all of Palpatine’s ambition but few of his other skills, except maybe for James Bond-villain speechifying before being struck down in surprise.

That, my dear friends, is why some fans were “let down” by Snoke. They invested a lot of time coming up with “origins of” theories and imagining their own scenarios for The Last Jedi. When the film came out and they didn’t “get what they expected,” they were disappointed.