As you may expect based on the headline, there will be a ton of spoilers for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” here, as well as for several previous “Star Wars” movies.

“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” is a very weird movie. It really functioned as a reworking of the entire “Star Wars” saga rather than just the conclusion of the story as we knew it, what with the return of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and all the plot baggage that came with him. What we see in this movie changes basically everything we ever knew about that character, if you care to think about all the implications.

But the film doesn’t really flesh out any of the details. It just is kinda like, “Hey! The Emperor is back, and now he wants to put his soul into Rey’s body!” But it does not, at least not in the finished cut, grapple with all the ramifications of the story it tells. We were left to sift through the rubble on our own.

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But things are different now with the release of the “Rise of Skywalker” novelization, which is actually dubbed the “Expanded Edition.” This book, authored by Rae Carson, takes some of the plausible implications of the events of the film and makes them text, as well as plugging in holes we didn’t even know were there, and in the process it actively changes the past movies in the Skywalker Saga. And I don’t just mean thematic changes, like how the Emperor’s survival alters the meaning of “Return of the Jedi.” I mean that what was going on in that final confrontation between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor was not at all what you thought it was.

It’s pretty weird, but that’s where we’re at now. For the record, this article is not intended as criticism of Rae Carson, who I think did the best should could with what she had to work with. She didn’t write the movie, after all, and so I think none of this is her fault.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the ways “The Rise of Skywalker” book retcons the previous movies.

1. The Emperor wanted Luke to kill him at the end of “Return of the Jedi.”

So in this novelization, there’s some extra dialogue from Palpatine when Rey (Daisy Ridley) first meets up with him. The Emperor gives his pitch about how Rey can become the heir to the Sith legacy by killing him and thus allowing his spirit to live on in her. Rey is not into this idea of course, since she is a good person and all that.

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And then, in the book version of this scene, Palpatine says something weird: “I’ve made this very proposal before. But on that unfortunate day Luke Skywalker had his father to save him.”

So, uh, that’s different. What this means is that in “Return of the Jedi” the Emperor was not just trying to get Luke (Mark Hamill) angry so he’d turn to the dark side. Instead, he was actually, literally trying to get Luke to murder him. Which in turn means that when Luke did take a swing at Palpatine and Darth Vader prevented the blow from landing, Vader was actually going against his master’s wishes.

This is an impossible reading of that scene, and even with the recontextualization provided by “The Rise of Skywalker” you still just cannot watch that scene and in good faith interpret it that way. But apparently this is canon now.

Something else fun to consider about this is that, by extension, Vader was probably in on that plan. And maybe even when Vader tried to get Luke to team up with him to destroy the Emperor in “The Empire Strikes Back” he was suggesting that because he was trying to keep his son from becoming the Emperor’s literal meat puppet. We could keep digging into all the ways this revelation changes the original trilogy, but I’d honestly rather not.

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2. Snoke actually had nothing to do with Rey and Kylo Ren’s weird Force connection

So in “The Rise of Skywalker” they keep talking about how Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey are a “Dyad in the Force” or whatever, but they never actually explain what that means or if it’s some kind of crazy rare thing. The novelization finally provides some crucial details.

Apparently this Dyad thing just kinda happens sometimes, but is very rare. It’s not necessarily a natural occurrence, however, because according to the book the Sith had something called the “doctrine of the Dyad” way back before the whole Rule of Two thing. But more on that in the next item.