The Acolyte is a new series streaming on Disney+. It is set in the Star Wars universe and occurs 100 years before the fall of the Jedi and subsequent rise of the Empire.
What happened: Flashback to 16 years prior. The Jedi, under Indara's leadership, are investigating the planet Brendok. A century earlier, a survey charted it as a barren, lifeless rock. This raised questions as it was now teeming with complex life. The Jedi suspected a Force vergence, which is a kind of nexus of concentrated Force that could've given rise to life. Indara's padawan, Torbin, is cranky and bored and wants to return to Coruscant. Sol is a cocky know-it-all and wookie Kelnacca is inscruitable because there are no captions when he speaks. While surveying an uncharted region, Sol happens upon Osha and Mae. He follows them back to the Witch's fortress, which is an abandoned mining base, and is alarmed at the Force Witches training them for combat. He rushes back to Indara, certain the girls are being abused at best, prepped for human sacrifice at worst. Indara reluctantly agrees to check out the situation. Once at the Witches' fortress, Indara wants to go in alone--all four Jedi marching in there would be seen as a threat--but Sol argues it's too dangerous otherwise. Mae completes the ascension ceremony but the Jedi interrupt before Osha can. The Witches react as badly as Indara feared. Mother Aniseya enters Torbin's mind, learns how badly he wants to return to Coruscant, and uses that to get him to submit to her control. This alarms the Jedi but the stalemate is diffused with an agreement to let the Jedi test Mae and Osha for Force sensitivity. It turns out the Jedi (apart from Sol) have little interest in this but it was a gambit to buy time to wait for instructions from the Jedi Council. Mae fails the test on purpose, but as Indara and Sol ask her questions the ambiguous answers she gives seem to confirm Sol's fears the girls are being prepared as human sacrifices. Osha, on the other hand, passes the tests easily after Sol coaches and prods her extensively. Torbin takes blood samples and the girls' M-count (midi-chlorians make a return appearance!) is not only exceptionally high, it's identical in a way that's impossible even in identical twins. The girls are literally one person in two bodies. Sol and Indara suspect the Witches somehow used the Force vergence to create the girls. The Jedi Council's guidance then arrives and is quite ambiguous: Stop bothering the locals and leave them be. This doesn't sit well with Torbin, who sees the twins as proof of the Force vergence and his ticket back to Coruscant. Perhaps still experiencing aftereffects of Mother Aniseya's mind control, Torbin jumps on a speederbike and rushes off to abduct the girls. Sol ostensibly gives chase but when he finally catches up with Torbin at the fortress, he decides kidnapping it a pretty good strategy. He and Torbin scale the fortress' walls and confont Mother Aniseya and Koril. The Witches are pissed the Jedi are back as uninvited guests. Insults and threats are exchanged and when Mother Aniseya suddenly turns into smoke, Sol stabs her with his lightsaber, killing her dead. As she lays dying, Aniseya tells Sol that she had decided to let Osha join the Jedi, which does not reflect well on Sol's conduct. Koril is understandably enraged, attacking the Jedi. Indara flies the Jedi ship close to the fortress and sends Kelnacca to help Sol and Torbin. The Witches, acting as a group in another chamber, promptly mind-control Kelnacca and the wookie Jedi beats the ever-loving tar out of Sol and Torbin. They're only saved by the timely arrival of Indara, who places her hand over Kelnacca and uses the Force to breaks the mind-control, apparently (?) killing the entire coven in the process. Elsewhere, Mae, angered that Osha plans to leave, locks her in her room then attempts to burn Osha's beloved journal. Mae fumbles the lamp, however, dropping it and setting the whole damn place on fire. Mae runs for help only to discover the Jedi have pretty much wiped out the coven. She flees and enecounters the escaped Osha on a bridge as the entire fortress is collapsing around them. The bridge buckles but Sol arrives and used the Force to keep it from falling. Realizing it is too heavy for him, he lets Mae fall to her apparent death while rescuing Osha. Back on the ship, with Osha unconscious, Indara is not happy to say the least, but she puts the kibosh on Sol's plan to turn himself in to the Jedi High Council. Indara points out that he committed every crime out of the belief Osha needed him and deserved to become a Jedi, and that if he were imprisoned, or defrocked, or whatever happens to naughty Jedi, Osha would be completely abandoned. She's older than children the Jedi usually take in, so nobody would accept her as a padawan. Indara dictates their story will be that the coven perished in the fire Mae started, and the group reluctantly agrees just as Osha wakes up and asks about her family.
Disturbances in the Force: Well, we finally got the much anticipated second flashback episode. It was... adequate. Honestly, it fell far short of
Rashomon, but I suppose that was inevitable. In Kurosawa's film, the viewer is shown multiple viewpoints of the same incident, and each perspective is different--sometimes contradictally so. In this episode, nothing is shown that contradicts what was shown in the episode 3 flashback--instead, it shares scenes that were intentionally withheld from that episode. Whereas the previous flashback is predominantly from the perspective of the Witches, this time out it's primarily from that of the Jedi. As a basic fill-in-the-blanks narrative it works, but its not terribly sophisticated. What I'd have preferred were two very different takes on the flashback, sharing the same events but mutually exclusive in the way they were perceived, with the audience left to determine which take to believe (or, really, which moments from each were likely true and which were distorted by inherent bias). But that may well have been too arthouse for Disney+. Instead, we learn that Sol is impulsively self-righteous, absolutely convinced that the conclusions he leaps to are absolutely correct and justify repeated insubordination without though of consequences. We learn Torbin is a whiny, impuslive, homesick brat. In retrospect, I'm glad he drank the poison. We learn Indara is a wise and powerful Jedi master who tried her damnedist to avoid conflict and failed only when everyone conspired against her. And Kelnacca... well, we don't learn much about the wookie other than he's a kickass fighter, even when mind controlled. The episode title, "Choices," is a little too on-the-nose, as a cascade of bad choices (mostly by Sol) brought about this shitshow on Brendok. Even they had the best of intentions, and Indara makes every effort to diffuse the situation, there's no way around the fact that the Jedi fucked up big time and many lives were lost. As has been pointed out elsewhere online, in
Revenge of the Sith there was no law against actually being Sith. And presumably during the High Republic, there's no laws against being Force Witches. Jedi religious prejudices came into play, and anyone that views or manipulates the Force differently than the Jedi are automatically suspect, and very probably evil. I actually like the way
The Acolyte handles this, as it goes unspoken yet is not entirely subtle and makes an effective point against sectarian strife that has plagued humanity for millennia.
Unfortunately, while the episode is tense and has engagingn action, it has its dumb moments. At almost any point the carnage could've been avoided if the characters simply talked to each other rather than posturing. The Witches remain a cipher, powerful equals to the Jedi one moment and then easiy defeated the next. My big question from episode 3 remains unanswered: How the hell does a STONE fortress--a mining outpost at that--catch fire and rapidly burn from a simple dropped lamp? Notre Dame Cathedral didn't burn as fast and that entire thing was made of wood! Indara defeating the entire coven seems more like a plot contrivance than plausible, as does the death of the coven (although I remain unclear of Koril's fate). The deeper purpose of Mae and Osha's existence remains murky, as does the ascension ritual and the goals of the coven, actually. I'm not confident we'll ever get any answers on that front.
One thing I suspect going forward is that Osha and Mae will switch places. This flashback is essentially Sol's confession to Mae, which she won't like but will provide understanding and closure of sorts for her. On the other hand, Osha learning that Sol needlessly killed her beloved Mother Aniseya and then lied about it for the past 16 years is not going to improve her already shaky relationship with the Jedi. She's more than halfway been seduced to the Dark Side by Qimir already. And speaking of Qimir, I'm not sure we'll get much in the way of an origin for him in episode 8. At this point there are too many dangling plot threads for everything to be tied up neatly in the one remaining episode. Which means the answers I'm looking for won't be coming forth unless
The Acolyte is picked up for a second season. At the rate they're going, Mae and Osha may be the only characters who survive to see another eight episodes--I would not bet on Sol making it out of the finale alive, and Qimir better not get complacent, either.
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