While Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hardly had any screentime to delve deeper into the structure of the Sith, Disney took the opportunity with the official novelizations to amend one of their past mistakes.
Of course, we’re referring to countless characters and stories from the Expanded Universe that are now deemed non-canon under the branding of Legends. By making this choice back in 2014, the Mouse House essentially restricted the continuity of Star Wars to the main movies in the saga alongside a select number of other media, like the Aftermath trilogy by Chuck Wendig and The Clone Wars animated series.
The “Legends” part of the galaxy far, far away includes a lot of badass characters, including the likes of Darth Nihilus and Darth Revan. As such, Lucasfilm used this chance in the last movie of the Skywalker Saga to bring back some of these familiar characters and make them canon. For instance, in the movie’s prologue, we can clearly see the mask of Darth Nihilus as one of the gigantic statues that embellish the Sith world of Exegol.
Additionally, each legion of Sith Stormtroopers from the Final Order was named after an ancient and powerful Sith Lord, including the Revan legion. The novelization also revealed the equipment that was keeping Palpatine alive is a crane known as an Ommin harness, worn by a powerful dark-side practitioner of yore from Tom Veitch’s Tales of the Jedi comics.
Now, it seems that The Rise of Skywalker‘s junior novel, written by Michael Kogge, canonizes another dark-side warrior from Legends; the master Sith alchemist, Naga Sadow.
Here’s an excerpt from the novel’s first act when Kylo enters the last dwelling place of the Sith on Exegol:
“Statues had been chiseled into the rock walls around him. He recognized some of them from his studies. Locphet. Mindran. Sissiri. Felkor. Sadow. All lords of the dark side. Their mouths did not move, but he heard their unintelligible whispers.”
Sadow was a powerful magician of the Sith who stoked a war between the Sith Empire and the Old Republic and almost conquered the entire galaxy until another Sith Lord defeated him. As for the rest of these names, they seem to be new additions to the lore, and we may even get to see more of them in future stories, like The High Republic publishing initiative.
It seems, though, that for as much as it failed to meet expectations, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has somehow managed to pave the path for more possibilities so far as the future of that galaxy far, far away is concerned.