Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker leaves fans with some lingering questions , including a few that can only be answered if you pick up the recently released Visual Dictionary . But when it comes to one of the movie's biggest mysteries - how Emperor Palpatine survived the events of Return of the Jedi - the answer is locked away in deleted footage.

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In an interview with HuffPost (via CBR ), editor Maryanne Brandon reveals Episode IX was originally supposed to have shed more light on Palpatine's return . But ultimately, the scenes dealing with the hows and whys of Palpatine's return were trimmed in order to prevent fans from being bombarded with exposition.“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal,” Brandon told HuffPost. “Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with.”Brandon continued, "There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know.”Unfortunately, Brandon didn't actually reveal the secret of Palpatine's unnaturally long life, nor did she specify whether the Emperor somehow survived being tossed down the Death Star chasm or was resurrected later on. But knowing that the answers exist in the form of deleted scenes, we can always hope Lucasfilm will include that material on the upcoming Skywalker Saga 4K Blu-ray set . For now, here's what we do know about Palpatine's return to power Do you think the movie should have explained Palpatine's return? Let us know in the comments below.And for more behind-the-scenes insight on Episode IX, find out why Brandon said the movie's ending presented a "no-win" situation and why JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio didn't use any of Colin Trevorrow's original screenplay

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter