No one's ever really gone. The first trailer gave us an eerie send off with Palpatine's iconic chuckle closing out on a dark screen. In the most recent trailer we got actual lines from him, seemingly directed at Rey or Kylo Ren. For those who have delved into the wider universe of Star Wars media, the survival of Palpatine may not be all that surprising. After all, in Episode III, he flat-out told us he was the apprentice of a Sith Lord capable of cheating death (and potentially creating life itself, but we'll get back to that in a second). There are more concrete hints as to how Palpatine may have achieved this, however. In one of the recent Darth Vader comics (volume 22 of Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith), a previous Sith Lord called Darth Momin preserved his own consciousness in his helmet before death. Said helmet actually made its way to Disney's Galaxy Edge park in Disneyland, hanging as a prop in Dok Ondor's gift shop. Could Palpatine be haunting the ruins of the Death Star we saw in the trailers?