Dathan

Details surrounding Dathan's life were scarce, but his beginnings can be traced back to the Imperial age when the Sith's Dark Lord Darth Sidious—publicly known as Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine— and his adherents conducted duplication experiments on the world Exegol for several years leading up to the Sith Lord's passing at the Endor confrontation. Secure in his position as ruler, Sidious receded from public view and commenced exploring the mysteries of the Force's dark influence. In his pursuit of eternal life, the Sith master and his followers experimented with cloning technology to prolong his existence and sustain it indefinitely. The Sith Eternal employed a cloning technique referred to as Strand-Casting in conjunction with modified cloning technology, yielding numerous altered cloned versions of Sidious' original form in an attempt to provide him with a vessel capable of containing and preserving his essence, ultimately granting him immortality.

The progeny of Darth Sidious was brought into existence around 12 BBY on Exegol. An unnamed hybrid strandcast, the infant boy was a consequence of the Sith Eternal's endeavors to generate a form worthy of his immense power, but the sole survivor of the cloning procedure, thus being the primary outcome of Sidious' genetic research. However, he would prove to be nothing more than a source of disappointment for the man who fathered him through science. Despite carrying the blood of the Palpatine family, he lacked any strength in the Force's energy, unable to wield its powers like his donor, who reveled in such abilities.

Sidious ultimately disowned the "inferior" child spawned from his flesh; although the Sith master did acknowledge their blood relation to each other, indeed recognizing his own status as the boy's "father" and the failed clone as his "son", he nevertheless regarded the strandcast as a "worthless being"—referring to his son as "it"—and rejected him. However, despite being powerless and deemed a failure, the strandcast's health afforded Sidious with other potential uses for him.

Reasoning that his cloned offspring, carrying the Palpatine bloodline within him, might one day prove advantageous regardless of not possessing a sensitive connection to the Force, Sidious permitted his genetic offspring to live. The strandcast's health provided the Emperor with the means to continue and preserve his bloodline, and potentially yield more favorable results in producing a vessel worthy of containing his spirit through more natural means.

Due to the disappointment his "son" turned out to be, historians speculated that Sidious likely neglected the boy. Indeed, Sidious could not bear to gaze upon his powerless failure of a strandcast, disgusted by what he considered an example of such "disappointing ordinariness" and viewing the strandcast as unworthy of his family's legacy.

As a failed strandcast created from the genetic template of his Darth Sidious, Dathan was also shunned by the Emperor's Sith Eternal acolytes, who refused to give him a name and instead called him the "Abomination." The only reason the cloners on Exegol did not "recycle" him was because Sidious offered the strandcast a modicum of protection, believing there might still be some usage to the failed clone. However one of the Exegol slaves acknowledged him; he was raised by the slave administrator Dathan, a Symeong slave who enjoyed a limited degree of autonomy. Dathan showed him how to find food and survive on the barren world of Exegol. He also educated the boy by hooking him up to teaching machines.

Around 3 ABY, the boy witnessed the arrival of Ochi of Bestoon and his father's apprentice Darth Vader, watching from the shadows as they entered the Sith Citadel. After wandering some more and pondering what the meaning of his life was, as if possibly by the design of his father, the clone decided to leave Exegol and seek help from Dathan to leave the planet, finally rejecting a life of darkness and the ways of the Sith. Dathan arranged for him to be smuggled offworld on the visiting starship that had carried Vader and Ochi. Before leaving, Dathan gifted the boy with an songsteel amulet, with a Sith Eternal crest on the end, that would render him "invisible" during the journey. Vader and Ochi's ship then traveled to the space station Koke Frost. After arriving, the boy finds work with a sun-scooper's engineering team. As such, he relinquished his identity and assumed the name "Dathan" in honor of the Symeong who had assisted him and served as his sole friend.

Having developed a longing for the life of an ordinary man by the time he matured, he also harbored resentment towards his cruel "father," ultimately rejecting him as the man had rejected him as his "son." Despite that mutual rejection, Sidious nevertheless viewed this as an unforgivable betrayal to himself, and that once his son had fulfilled his purpose and was found, he would be punished accordingly.

Darth Sidious' dominion concluded with his demise at the betrayal of his apprentice Darth Vader during the Endor confrontation in 4 ABY. Dathan became aware of his father's fate, but like the rest of the Galaxy would be unaware of his father's spiritual resurrection in a clone body of his original on Exegol for several years to come.

In addition to renouncing Sidious, Dathan entered into matrimony with a woman named Miramir, with whom he fell in love. Together, they conceived a child, their daughter Rey, who was born in 15 ABY. Although he renounced the Sith Eternal and his donor, the Palpatine bloodline would prosper through him, just as Sidious predicted.

While Sidious had not anticipated Dathan's relationship with Miramir, he nonetheless saw it as an opportunity because his granddaughter, unlike his clone, inherited his connection to the Force. Rey was therefore deemed the perfect vessel for her grandfather's essence. Dathan eventually settled with his family on Jakku, a backwater world where Rey's parents struggled to survive as salvage vendors and moisture farmers.

Despite his efforts to stay hidden from his father's agents, they eventually tracked the clone and his family to Jakku. Following the Sith assassin Ochi's hunt for them, Dathan and his wife stole Ochi's starship, the Bestoon Legacy, to return to Jakku; the threat of discovery compelled Rey's parents to leave her with Unkar Plutt. As reluctant as they were to leave Rey behind, they did so to protect her from Sidious. As they bid their goodbyes, Dathan also noticed as Miramir took a necklace of Aki-Aki beads from Plutt, which she stated would be their insurance.

As they departed Jakku, Dathan and Miramir were captured by Ochi, who had tracked them aboard a Corporate Sector Authority ship due to a homing beacon implanted on the Bestoon Legacy by High Colonel Enric Pryde. With Ochi reclaiming the Bestoon Legacy, he held them prisoner. The alien demanded to know the whereabouts of his master's granddaughter, but neither of them would cooperate. The clone remained silent while his wife lied to Ochi, claiming that Rey was nowhere on Jakku. Ochi knew that they had tried to deceive him, an action he considered intolerable.

Failing to coerce information from either captive, Ochi killed both of Rey's parents. The clone was the first to die as Ochi impaled him in the stomach with his knife. Miramir, who watched her husband die in front of her, was then impaled to death, also on Sidious' order. Their bodies were subsequently disposed of; Ochi stuffed their bodies in a crate and sent it drifting in space. The crate was soon found by Lando Calrissian and R2-D2, who recovered their bodies and took them to the frozen world of Neftali, where they buried them together with the help of Luke Skywalker and Komat. However, Miramir's misdirection with the Aki-Aki beads worked, as it tricked Ochi into traveling to the dangerous world of Pasaana instead of heading to Jakku.

The name of Rey's father was forgotten; both Dathan and Miramir became little more than fragments of memory to the daughter that they left on Jakku. There was no record that Sidious' cloned son inherited his father's power in the Force, leading historians to surmise that the strandcast was a source of much disappointment to the Sith Lord who created him.

In his book, The Secrets of the Sith, Darth Sidious remembered Dathan as his errant clone whom he rejected for not possessing any sensitivity to the Force, who rejected him as his "father" and the ways of the Sith Order, and who betrayed him for taking his granddaughter away into hiding with his mate, temporarily robbing him of the chance to ensure that his legacy as a Sith Lord arose once again.

Rey remained on Jakku for years, learning to support herself as a scavenger while unaware of her dormant Force powers or her relation to Emperor Palpatine. During this time in her life, she had all but forgotten the parents who left her when she was a child, having subconsciously suppressed the memories of her childhood. Despite this, she was hopeful that her father and mother would eventually return to her, giving her a reason to stay on her homeworld instead of exploring the wider galaxy. Yet a lifetime of isolation also left Rey struggling with feelings of solitude and abandonment, which contributed to the emotional bond she would form with Ren during the First Order-Resistance War.

Ren, having seen who Rey's parents were and how they lived through the Force-bond that he shared with their daughter, urged Rey to admit the truth about her parents. When Rey confessed that her father and mother were no one significant, Ren elaborated, revealing that they were junk traders who bartered their daughter away in exchange for money. Ren had learned the identities of Rey's parents through a Force vision, and told Rey that her father was an insignificant junk trader who sought money to feed his alcoholism. Though she later believed that Ren had only divulged this information as a means to turn her to the dark side, Rey sensed that he had not tried to deceive her, yet was still reluctant to admit that she was born to parents of no background.

Although Ren had not lied to Rey about her parents, he later realized that the vision he saw of them was incomplete. He eventually learned the full truth from Sidious while confronting the Dark Lord of the Sith on Exegol. Sidious revealed that Rey's father was his son, making Rey his biological granddaughter. The revelation of the scavenger's origins reignited Ren's desire to rule the galaxy with Rey at his side. In addition, he discovered that together they formed a rare and powerful dyad in the Force, which only further convinced him of their shared destiny.

Rey, who began training as a Jedi apprentice, was astonished to discover her biological connection to the fallen Emperor. As a Jedi, she struggled to control her anger, but the knowledge that Sidious gave the order to kill her parents fueled her desire for revenge. Yet her devotion to the Jedi Order and the light side of the Force helped to restrain her from giving into the impulse to kill in anger. It was also the memory of her father and mother that prevented Rey from turning to the dark side; whereas Sidious believed this made her as weak as her parents, she considered them to be strong for protecting her. During the Battle of Exegol, their daughter vanquished the reborn Emperor with the aid of the spirits of past Jedi.

Dathan was genetically a human male; a hybrid strandcast that was the produced as the offshoot of the Darth Sidious' follower's cloning experiments with donated blood cells and other tissue samples. Though a modified specimen created from the Sith Lord's genetic template through the Strand-Casting method, Dathan was not a direct clone replicate of his donor, therefore not quite identical in appearance to Sidious either. The son of the Emperor had short, dark hair, blue eyes, and light skin. He was young when he became a father, and had a scruffy red beard by the time he lived on Jakku.

Though he was cloned from the Sith Lord who masterminded the fall of the Galactic Republic and ruled the Galactic Empire through fear, the strandcast sought to live as an ordinary man with his family; he rejected his father and the ways of the Sith, and pursued a life apart from darkness. Having inherited neither his progenitor's power nor his character, he was regarded by Sidious as a powerless and useless disappointment. Despite the harsh conditions of Jakku, he took on the difficult life of surviving in a desert environment in order to keep Rey hidden from her grandfather. Dathan was haunted by his past, and revisited his time on Exegol in his nightmares, truly not looking back on his time on his homeworld very fondly. He also loved his wife very deeply, and fondly remembered his time with her on her own homeworld. Like his wife, he was saddened by their decision as parents to sell their daughter. Before leaving Rey with Unkar Plutt, Rey's father promised that she would be safe on Jakku.

During his time of Exegol, Dathan knew fear, but not of his father, the dark side of the Force, or the cultists, but instead of himself; he often pondered the meaning behind the protection his father granted him and what he was meant to do with his life, fearing what he could become, if he were to lead the Sith cultists in their quest to find the secrets of the planet, or become evil and cruel like Sidious. Regardless of not being like his father in terms of character or power in the Force, he was known to have a "glib tone and a charming smile," traits that he shared with Sidious, his progenitor, who was known to be a charmer and a manipulator.

Despite being created from the base genetic template of Darth Sidious, one of the most powerful Sith Lords to have ever lived, the Emperor's son was an ordinary man who had no ability to harness the powers of the Force. However, as Dathan was part of the Palpatine bloodline and in excellent health, he was able to sire a Force-sensitive child with strength in the mystical energy comparable to the Emperor.

Dathan was physically strong enough to survive the harsh conditions of the desert planet Jakku, and was skilled enough with his wife Miramir to keep himself and their child hidden from Sidious for years until being found by Ochi of Bestoon.

Dathan was first mentioned, albeit indirectly, in the 2015 film Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens, the first installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. He first appeared in a flashback sequence of the 2019 film Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker, where he was portrayed by Billy Howle.

In Star Wars Legends, Emperor Palpatine also had experimented with cloning himself, to which he intended to transfer his spirit. In another work, he also had a son named Triclops, who first appeared in the 1993 book Mission from Mount Yoda, the fourth installment of the young-readers Jedi Prince series written by Paul and Hollace Davids. Similarly to Dathan, Triclops also conceived a child with a woman, and that child became an apprentice of Luke Skywalker as well.

Adam Christopher, the author of the book Shadow of the Sith, named the character after a childhood friend named Dathan. The author wanted a name that sounded earthly, like Luke and Ben, but not too common. According to the author, "Dathan" rhymes with "Nathan." In The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren claims that Dathan and Miramir sold Rey to protect her. Shadow of the Sith, however, retconned this by revealing they actually paid Unkar Plutt to keep Rey hidden. Dathan and Miramir's brief appearance in The Rise of Skywalker is an emotional moment for Christopher.