The old saying claims, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs,” but in the case of The Last Jedi, a more accurate statement would read, “You can’t be Supreme Leader without subjecting your guards to constant pain and suffering.” According to Star Wars: The Last Jedi Visual Dictionary, the armor that Snoke forced his guards to wear would protect them from lightsabers, yet would also cause them pain.
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“The layered armor of the Praetorian Guard is a high-tech onion-skin of laminate, impregnated with conductive wirepaths that, once powered, create an intense local magnetic field,” the book reads. “Once this energy-intensive field activates, the powered plates can deflect blaster fire. Even a lightsaber will glance off, though a directed thrust will penetrate the shell. The mag-coils are costly, the plates heavy, and mag-field exposure is ultimately painful to the wearer, but such are the sacrifices of protecting the Supreme Leader. The Praetorians endure this out of unswerving loyalty and duty.”
While the Visual Dictionary may shed light on the armor worn by Snoke’s guards, their origins are still up for debate. Early theories regarding their identities surrounded the Knights of Ren, who audiences merely saw glimpses of in The Force Awakens. With these Knights seemingly being elite killing machines, they likely wouldn’t have been vanquished as easily as the guards we saw in The Last Jedi.
Another question surrounding these members of the First Order is whether or not new guards will be anointed to protect Kylo Ren, the new Supreme Leader, or if he’d rather rely merely on himself for his own well being.
The Last Jedi may not have answered all of the audience’s questions about Supreme Leader Snoke, but writer/director Rian Johnson isn’t ruling out future films or stories expanding on the character’s origins.
“In this particular story, it’s much more like the original trilogy, where with Snoke if you think about the actual scenes, if suddenly I had paused one of the scenes to give a 30-second monologue about who he was, it would have kind of stopped the scene in its tracks, I realized,” Johnson told the audience during a BAFTA Q&A. “Even though it could have been interesting, something that fans were interested in, as storytellers, we have to kind of serve what the scenes need to be.”
“Hopefully it can be addressed elsewhere or even [Episode IX director] J.J. [Abrams] may address it in the next movie,” Johnson added. “But it’s not something that’s particularly interesting to Rey, so we kind of had to follow through.”
You can see Snoke’s guards in action in The Last Jedi, in theaters now.
