We all remember Supreme Leader Snoke, right? For a time, he was the Big Bad of the sequel trilogy — until Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) showed him the pointy end of a lightsaber him and usurped the throne in The Last Jedi. By the time the sequels came to a close, Snoke’s significance had diminished even more. Not only was he a placeholder for Emperor Palpatine, but a clone as well, one whose origins the movies couldn’t even be bothered to explain — until now.
Though Star Wars is really taking its time in unfurling the mystery behind Snoke, The Mandalorian might finally be setting us up for a big reveal. The art of cloning has played a role in the series from the very beginning when Dr. Pershing and Werner Herzog colluded to steal Baby Yoda’s midi-chlorians. The Mandalorian Season 2 gave us our first glimpse of what looked a lot like the original Snoke experiment. And in Season 3, the return of Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) bought us one step closer to an answer.
But is it possible that Gideon’s connection to Snoke could be even bigger than we think? Could Gideon and Snoke be one and the same? It might sound ridiculous, but this Mandalorian theory actually makes a lot of sense. So let’s take a closer look.
The latest episode of The Mandalorian, “The Spies,” affirms what most fans have already guessed: the Empire is trying to reverse engineer Kaminoan cloning technology, all to bring Emperor Palpatine back from the dead. Moff Gideon has been spearheading the Empire’s campaign from the very beginning, but as with most power-hungry Imperials, he’s got bigger plans.
As we learn in “The Spies,” Gideon and his forces have been carving out an Imperial base on the planet Mandalore. Despite having major beef with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his Mandalorian sect, Gideon is uniquely obsessed with Mandalorian culture. The Darksaber, the beskar armor, and even Mandalore itself seem to fascinate him. He’s equally captivated by Kaminoan technology and Jedi weapons. This all gets laid out in a brilliant villain speech in which Gideon lays out his plan to combine the best of each culture — plus the most important ingredient: himself.
Gideon also has recruited a new security force in the form of the Praetorian guards. These scarlet-clad mercenaries protected Snoke in The Last Jedi, which only further connects Snoke to Gideon and his master plan. There’s enough here to suggest that Snoke may have been created by Gideon, or — if we want to get really macabre with it — created from him.
Moff Gideon clearly has an ego the size of a small moon. His pursuit of power has seen him appropriating the most powerful cultures of the galaxy to create an all-new super culture and place himself at the center of it. So is it so inconceivable that Supreme Leader Snoke was a clone of Moff Gideon combined with the Jedi genetics?
The biggest problem with this theory comes from an unlikely place: the official novelization of The Rise of Skywalker. The technically canonical book reveals that early attempts to clone Emperor Palpatine came out either disfigured or without Force powers. Snoke was one of the disfigured clones, which means he probably didn’t have any Gideon DNA mixed in.
Then again, Lucasfilm has never been afraid to rewrite canon when it comes to its novels, and The Mandalorian has proven itself adept at retconning Star Wars history in positive ways. So it’s entirely possible that the live-action show could ignore the book and change Snoke history for the better.
Whatever Gideon is up to, he might not be able to complete his master plan. As “The Spies” also teased, a reckoning is coming in the form of Grand Admiral Thrawn — and he does not take kindly to sedition. A potential showdown between Thrawn and Gideon could potentially explain how Snoke came to serve Palpatine, but the Mando-verse will still have to work hard to patch up one of the most frustrating mysteries of the sequel era.
The Mandalorian is streaming now on Disney+.
