29/10/2026
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐚 𝐅𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭
𝑷𝒂𝒍𝒑𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒆, 𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒈𝒐𝒍 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑭𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑶𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓’𝒔 𝑶𝒖𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑴𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝑰𝒔𝒔𝒖𝒆𝒔
Right then. We need to discuss the Galactic Republic, because after reviewing the available evidence I have concluded that the entire civilisation was being run on approximately the same constitutional basis as a disused carpet warehouse outside Braintree, except the carpet warehouse would probably have had a fire certificate and somebody who knew where the stopcock was.
We shall begin with Emperor Palpatine, who by the end had ceased to resemble a human being and had become more like something discovered behind a radiator during a housing inspection, still technically warm but no longer covered by the maintenance agreement.
He had retreated to Exegol, a planet so manifestly unsuitable for human habitation that even the weather appeared to be objecting to the planning application, and established himself beneath several miles of rock and thunderstorms in a cavern illuminated almost entirely by lightning and poor decisions.
The Emperor himself hung from an enormous mechanical gantry like a condemned piece of agricultural machinery in a museum nobody visited. Tubes disappeared into him, cables emerged from places one would prefer not to consider, and the entire arrangement suggested that someone had attempted to keep a deceased parish councillor alive using parts from a combine harvester, an intravenous drip and the lifting mechanism from the old multi-storey car park in Chelmsford.
This was, apparently, the headquarters of the Final Order. There were no windows, no visible catering facilities and no evidence that anyone had conducted a workplace assessment, although thousands of hooded people had been successfully accommodated in recessed seating and appeared to spend most of their working day chanting into a hole.
Palpatine’s physical deterioration was itself an administrative warning. The dark side had been eating through his succession arrangements faster than a yeast infection in a leisure centre changing room, leaving him dependent on cloning, occult engineering and increasingly elaborate machinery merely to remain upright long enough to menace visitors.
His fingers had become ceremonial twigs, his skin had taken on the colour and texture of a parsnip recovered from estuary mud, and his eyes suggested that several departments had independently marked the same file urgent without actually opening it.
𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑺𝒖𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑷𝒍𝒂𝒏 𝑾𝒂𝒔 𝑬𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒂 𝑩𝒂𝒅𝒍𝒚 𝑫𝒓𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑻𝒆𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒚 𝑨𝒈𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕
Nevertheless, the Emperor had devised a plan of enormous complexity. It involved secret laboratories, cloned bodies, experimental offspring, hidden fleets, Sith cultists, navigation devices, underground temples, strand-casts, planetary destruction systems and enough concealed capital expenditure to require a dedicated scrutiny committee with powers of subpoena.
The central mechanism of this plan, however, was astonishingly fragile. Rey had to kill Palpatine in hatred so that his spirit could transfer into her, thereby allowing the Sith to continue through another body like an especially aggressive tenancy dispute.
Palpatine then explained the mechanism to her.
This was the point at which thousands of years of Sith tradition should have been quietly folded into a cardboard box and left outside the civic offices with a note saying 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐖𝐄𝐃𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐃𝐀𝐘𝐒. If your route to immortality depends entirely upon the other party unknowingly satisfying a supernatural contractual condition, revealing that condition before completion is generally considered poor practice, even in Basildon.
A competent Sith solicitor would have concealed the relevant clause on page 94 of a document entitled Supplemental Essence Transfer Provisions and Related Dark-Side Covenants. Palpatine instead placed the crucial information directly in front of the person whose ignorance was necessary for the scheme to work, thereby converting an ancient occult trap into a multiple-choice questionnaire.
His confidence rested on the belief that everything beyond the room had already been settled. Resistance ships were being destroyed, the atmosphere was full of lightning, enormous statues were looking menacingly downward and the assembled Sith faithful had reached that stage of collective enthusiasm where nobody asks who signed off the electrical work.
Rey simply refuses to participate in the intended mechanism and eventually reflects Palpatine’s own force lightning back towards him. This is not so much an assassination as the supernatural equivalent of returning an incorrectly delivered parcel to sender, except the parcel contains several thousand volts and the sender is sitting underneath a mountain attached to a crane.
Palpatine responds in the only manner available to a man whose political philosophy is based entirely upon escalation. He produces more lightning. This creates the unusual spectacle of the most powerful Sith Lord in history repeatedly increasing the voltage of the force that is visibly travelling back into his own face.
No one intervenes. The hooded audience continues observing from the darkness as if this has happened before and is covered by procedure.
The Emperor ultimately destroys himself because he cannot imagine stopping. His entire political system has trained him to interpret resistance as a requirement for greater force, so when force begins literally dissolving his own skeleton he increases force again.
This is the dark side in miniature. It possesses no braking mechanism, no internal audit function and no employee empowered to raise a red flag when the Supreme Leader begins vaporising himself during a board meeting.
𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒂𝒓𝒌 𝑺𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝑰𝒔 𝒂 𝑷𝒉𝒐𝒕𝒐𝒄𝒐𝒑𝒊𝒆𝒓 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑹𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔
Its deeper problem is that it cannot really create. It can only reproduce, enlarge, weaponise and degrade what already exists, like a council regeneration scheme in which every consultation produces a larger roundabout in Chelmsford.
The Empire builds a Death Star, loses it and builds another one. The First Order then effectively builds another one at planetary scale. Palpatine dies, so a defective Palpatine is manufactured. That Palpatine is unsatisfactory, so derivative organisms are produced from the defective Palpatine. Snoke appears somewhere in this process, followed apparently by several replacement Snokes stored in tanks like surplus heads of department awaiting interview outcomes.
It is a photocopier with religious convictions, not a civilisation.
Every generation receives another black corridor, another triangular warship, another masked man with unresolved family issues and emphysema, and another spherical object capable of destroying municipal infrastructure from orbit. Nothing evolves because evolution would require uncertainty, and authoritarian systems regard uncertainty in much the same way Maldon regards unauthorised signage.
Even the architecture has given up. Sith buildings do not seem to contain kitchens, nurseries, laundries, schools or places where anyone might sit with a cup of tea and reconsider their life choices. They contain pits, bridges over pits, doors leading to pits and large circular windows through which senior management can watch distant explosions.
There must be entire Imperial departments devoted to pit maintenance. Somewhere there is a man with a clipboard responsible for certifying that the railings remain absent.
𝑮𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝑯𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝑰𝒔 𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝑭𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒚’𝒔 𝑶𝒏𝒈𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑫𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝑫𝒊𝒔𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒆
The wider political absurdity is even greater because the fate of the entire galaxy repeatedly depends upon an implausibly small number of related people. Trillions of citizens appear to live ordinary lives producing food, repairing engines, processing freight, cleaning ventilation shafts and trying to get home before the last shuttle, yet history continually narrows itself into the emotional difficulties of approximately nine individuals with unusual blood chemistry, a camp tin man with generalised anxiety disorder and his bleeping dustbin.
A moisture farmer on Tatooine may spend forty years wrestling evaporators through drought, debt and sandstorms, but one unusually gifted teenager can wake up feeling cross about his father and the entire constitutional order has to be rebuilt. This is hereditary wizardry masquerading as public administration.
The political system repeatedly collapses because one family has not resolved its intergenerational trauma, while millions of ordinary people presumably continue submitting forms for bin collection.
The absurdity becomes clearer if applied to Essex. Imagine the entirety of Chelmsford being evacuated because two members of the same family from Danbury had developed opposing views about destiny. Imagine Witham railway station being destroyed because someone’s grandfather had once fallen to the dark side near Braintree. Imagine the A12 being closed indefinitely because a prophetic child had experienced conflicting emotions on the Boreham Interchange.
There would be questions. There would also, very quickly, be a Facebook group, several photographs of unrelated potholes and at least one man in Heybridge claiming the prophecy had been caused by 5G.
𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑱𝒆𝒅𝒊 𝑻𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆 𝑾𝒂𝒔 𝒂𝒏 𝑰𝒗𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝑻𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒓 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑩𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝑭𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈
The Jedi Order, unfortunately, offers little relief from this arrangement because by the end of the Republic it had developed into an ivory tower in the most literal possible sense. Its enormous Temple occupied prime real estate space on Coruscant while whole strata of the city below existed in poverty, darkness and atmospheric conditions normally associated with industrial extraction sites.
The Jedi remained above them, surrounded by polished floors, ceremonial chambers, meditation gardens and libraries, while beneath them countless citizens lived so far below natural light that sunrise had become a rumour.
The symbolism appears to have escaped everyone. An institution devoted to serving the galaxy had physically elevated itself several kilometres above the population and then wondered why public trust was deteriorating and net ratings were tumbling.
The recruitment model was equally peculiar. The Order travelled around identifying very young children with unusual Force potential, removed them from ordinary family structures and raised them inside a highly controlled religious institution in which emotional attachment was regarded as hazardous. This produced generations of people expected to understand ordinary citizens while having almost no experience of ordinary life. They could levitate heavy objects, sense disturbances across star systems and fight while blindfolded, yet many had never negotiated a leaking roof, a difficult neighbour or a disputed service charge.
The Jedi therefore became experts in universal compassion while remaining largely unfamiliar with the specific irritation of waiting 15 months for Moat housing association to repair the communal doors.
𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑪𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒖𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝑴𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑼𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑲𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒎
Their separation from normality gradually turned into institutional self-certainty. Like Uttlesford District Council, the Jedi Council occupied itself with omens, visions, prophecies and disturbances in the Force, while the Republic around them became increasingly corrupt, oligarchic and militarised.
This was the galactic equivalent of sitting in a committee room discussing vibrations while the leisure centre roof came off in the wind.
Corporate interests accumulated power, slavery continued across substantial regions and entire planetary systems lost confidence in the Republic. The response from the centre was usually procedural, which is what institutions do when they no longer understand the problem but still possess a sufficient quantity of stationery.
𝑺𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝑴𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑼𝒏𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒅 𝑺𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝑾𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑭𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝑪𝒖𝒑𝒃𝒐𝒂𝒓𝒅
The Clone Wars then transformed mission drift into something approaching performance art. The Jedi had spent centuries describing themselves as keepers of the peace and were suddenly appointed military generals commanding vast armies of genetically engineered men created in secret on an ocean planet resembling Tendring nobody on the Council seemed to know much about.
The army itself should have caused mild concern. Several million identical soldiers had been manufactured without normal democratic authorisation, trained from birth for obedience, deprived of civilian lives and delivered ready for combat by an organisation operating outside ordinary Republic oversight.
The Jedi accepted command. At no point does the institution appear to have stopped proceedings and asked why somebody had secretly ordered an army. This omission is remarkable because the provenance of the army was not merely unclear. It was glowing red and making a noise.
The Republic had effectively discovered several million unexplained soldiers in a cupboard and decided to proceed because they were already wearing uniforms. The clones themselves represented industrialised exploitation on an almost incomprehensible scale. They had numbers rather than ordinary biographies, accelerated ageing, no meaningful political rights and a life expectancy largely determined by whether a Jedi general required someone to run towards artillery.
The Republic’s defenders were therefore fighting authoritarianism using a mass-produced slave army. Nobody seems to have noticed the irony, possibly because everyone was extremely busy saluting.
𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒂𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑶𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝑱𝒆𝒅𝒊 𝑨𝒅𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒏𝒐𝒗𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔
As the war progressed, the Jedi became embedded in command structures, logistics chains and emergency politics. Mystics who had once contemplated balance were now discussing troop deployments, aerial bombardment and supply corridors, while still maintaining that they were fundamentally peacekeepers.
Meanwhile Palpatine controlled both sides. This is possibly the most extraordinary aspect of the whole affair. The Republic’s political leader was secretly directing the enemy leadership, manipulating the war, manufacturing crises and gradually expanding his own emergency powers, while the Jedi sat within walking distance discussing why the dark side felt unusually close.
It was in the building. More precisely, it had an office, staff, diary access and probably a reserved parking space beneath the Senate. Palpatine may even have received the minutes.
The Jedi sensed something sinister surrounding the Chancellor but continued attending meetings with him because there was a war on and calendars were difficult.
By the time they finally understood the scale of the problem, the Republic had already become a military state, emergency powers had become normal, the Jedi were scattered across multiple fronts and the clone army contained hidden biological instructions enabling the Chancellor to turn it against them instantly.
This was more than a strategic defeat - it was institutional self-disassembly conducted over several years with regular progress updates.
𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝑰𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑯𝒂𝒅 𝑺𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝑫𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑰𝒕𝒔 𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝑺𝒖𝒈𝒈𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒅
Every organisation in the Republic had stopped doing what its name implied. The Senate no longer represented effectively. The peacekeepers commanded armies. The soldiers lacked freedom. The Chancellor was destroying the Republic. The separatist leadership answered to the Chancellor. The Jedi served the Chancellor’s war while investigating the Chancellor.
It was an ecosystem of administrative contradiction. Somewhere far below the Senate chambers, ordinary citizens were still trying to renew parking permits.
That is the great absurdity at the centre of the galaxy. Everyone speaks endlessly about balance in the Force while constructing political systems of extraordinary imbalance.
The Jedi possess spiritual power. The Sith possess spiritual power. The Senate possesses political power. Corporations possess financial power. Crime syndicates control entire regions.
The ordinary citizen has a kettle. Occasionally the kettle is confiscated during a planetary emergency, after which the citizen receives a compensation form requiring proof that the kettle existed before Alderaan was destroyed.
𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑮𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒙𝒚 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝑵𝒆𝒆𝒅𝒆𝒅 𝑾𝒂𝒔 𝑺𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒍𝒂 𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑨𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒕
The citizen then watches another generation of aristocratic space mystics destroy transport infrastructure while discussing destiny.
Perhaps the galaxy did not require another chosen one. Perhaps it required functioning drainage, independent procurement oversight and a constitution preventing anyone with supernatural powers from becoming simultaneously a military commander, religious authority and unelected adviser to government.
Perhaps the decisive institution was never the Jedi Council at all but the Office of the Galactic Auditor, which should have been based in an unremarkable building near a ring road and staffed by terrifying people called Sheila.
Sheila would have noticed the clone army. She would also have noticed that the Chancellor’s emergency powers had been renewed seventeen times and that approximately forty per cent of Imperial capital expenditure appeared to involve spherical superweapons. The Death Star project would have reached her desk and stopped there because Section 6 had not been completed correctly.
Darth Sidious could have manipulated the Senate, corrupted the Jedi, engineered a galactic civil war and uncovered the secrets of immortality, only to discover that final release of funds required two signatures from Procurement and a wetlands impact assessment. He would have been defeated by a woman from Wickford with bifocals and a laminated flowchart.
Instead the Republic chose prophecy. The result was dictatorship, genocide, planetary destruction and several decades of men in capes standing on bridges over pits while machinery hummed ominously.
A complete and utter shambles, although I expect parts of it have since been listed.
There will be a plaque eventually.
