In His New Comic, Snoke Says What Would’ve Happened if Luke Skywalker Turned to the Dark Side.

There’s a moment buried in a 2019 Marvel comic that completely changed how I think about Luke Skywalker’s place in the Star Wars saga. It’s not in any of the movies, it’s not part of a major storyline, and yet it contains one of the most chilling revelations about Luke’s true potential that we’ve ever gotten in canon material.

The comic in question is “Age of Resistance – Supreme Leader Snoke,” and what happens inside its pages is both fascinating and deeply unsettling. Because for the first time, we get to hear Supreme Leader Snoke—one of the most calculating and dangerous villains in Star Wars—give his honest assessment of what Luke Skywalker could have become if he’d chosen a different path.

And let me tell you, it’s absolutely terrifying.

The Training Session From Hell

“Age of Resistance – Supreme Leader Snoke #1,” written by Tom Taylor and illustrated by Leonard Kirk, takes us deep into the toxic relationship between Snoke and his apprentice, Kylo Ren. This isn’t the sanitized version of Sith training we sometimes see.

The comic opens with one of the most brutal training exercises I’ve ever seen in Star Wars. Snoke uses the Force to dangle Kylo above a pit filled with jagged rocks in the Rarlech system. It’s a simple test with deadly stakes: use your fear, turn it to anger, turn that anger to power, or die on the spikes below.

When Kylo manages to save himself at the last second, he asks a question that reveals everything about their twisted dynamic: “Would you have caught me if I hadn’t been able to catch myself, Supreme Leader?”

Snoke’s response is brutal in its honesty: “Skywalker would have, and in doing so would have held you back from your true power and potential.”

Right away, we’re seeing how Snoke operates. He’s not just training Kylo—he’s deliberately using Luke as both a measuring stick and a psychological weapon. But this is just the beginning of what becomes a much darker revelation.

Return to Dagobah

The real gut punch comes when Snoke decides to take Kylo’s training to the next level. Their destination? Dagobah, the same misty swamp planet where Luke Skywalker trained with Master Yoda and took his first steps toward becoming a true Jedi.

The symbolism here is intentional and deeply disturbing. Snoke is bringing his apprentice to the place where Luke became a legend, but he’s going to use it to push Kylo further into darkness. It’s like taking someone to a cathedral to teach them to curse, a deliberate perversion of something sacred.

They arrive at the dark side cave, that mysterious hollow where Luke once faced a vision of Darth Vader and learned about the thin line between light and dark. But before sending Kylo inside to face his trial, Snoke drops the first bombshell that completely reframes everything we thought we knew about his relationship with Luke Skywalker.

“He has earned my respect and my fear,” Snoke says, speaking about Luke with a reverence that clearly bothers Kylo.

Kylo, perhaps trying to diminish his uncle in his master’s eyes, responds dismissively: “He is weak.”

But Snoke cuts him off immediately, and what he says next is absolutely chilling: “He is not weak. He is misguided. If I had your uncle by my side instead of you, the galaxy would have been mine a long time ago.”

And we know from The Rise of Skywalker that Snoke was created by Palpatine himself. This means we’re essentially getting Emperor Palpatine’s assessment of Luke’s dark side potential, filtered through his artificial creation. Palpatine, who manipulated Anakin Skywalker’s fall and witnessed firsthand the incredible power of the Skywalker bloodline, is telling us through Snoke that Luke would have been an even more valuable apprentice than Kylo Ren, and possibly even more powerful than Vader ever was.

After this revelation, Snoke sends his apprentice into the cave to face “what he’s been too weak to bury.” Inside, Kylo encounters a vision of Luke Skywalker—not the broken hermit from the sequel trilogy, but Luke as he could have been, as Kylo remembers him. The vision-Luke doesn’t want to fight, just like the real Luke tried to avoid conflict in their final confrontation.

But Kylo, fueled by years of resentment and now stung by Snoke’s clear preference for his uncle, strikes the vision down without hesitation. It’s a symbolic killing of his past, his family, everything he once respected—and a desperate attempt to prove his worth to a master who’s just told him he’ll never measure up to Luke Skywalker.

The Vision Gets Darker

But the psychological torture doesn’t end with Luke’s vision. Inside that cursed cave, Kylo faces even more painful confrontations—visions of his parents, Han Solo and Leia Organa, appear before him. This is where the comic gets really twisted, because we see Kylo’s internal struggle play out in real time.

Here’s the thing that makes this moment so complex: Kylo actually tricks Snoke. While he pretends to strike down his parents in the vision, he actually spares them. Despite all of Snoke’s manipulation and years of psychological abuse, there’s still some part of Ben Solo that refuses to completely embrace the darkness.

What happens next is both shocking and symbolic. In a fit of rage and frustration, perhaps angry at being forced to relive these painful memories, or maybe just tired of being constantly compared to his uncle, Kylo does something unthinkable. He destroys the entire dark side cave itself.

When the dust settles and Snoke sees what his apprentice has done, Snoke, surveying the destruction of this ancient, sacred site, makes an almost casual comment about how he might have brought other apprentices here to test them in the future.

But Kylo, standing in the rubble of what he’s just obliterated, delivers a line that’s both chilling and revealing: “You won’t need other apprentices.”

And that’s where the comic ends—with this moment of dark certainty from Kylo Ren, this declaration that he’s going to be everything Snoke needs, despite knowing he’ll never measure up to what Luke could have been.