The Acolyte Was Almost the Most Radical Star Wars Story Since The Last Jedi . What Happened?
The Acolyte started out with one of the most provocative questions of any Star Wars story—really, any piece of franchise entertainment—in years: What if the Jedi were wrong? Not just fallible—they’ve been susceptible to trickery as far back as the time Lando pulled a fast one in Cloud City—but profoundly, even catastrophically mistaken about their place in the cosmos? Mae (Amandla Stenberg), a powerful Force-wielder on a mission of vengeance against the Jedi she believes slaughtered the entire community in which she was raised, certainly fit the profile of previous Star Wars villains drawn to the dark side by their overwhelming rage—except for the fact that when she caught up with her Jedi targets, they seemed to more or less agree with her.
Then, it all fell apart. A flashback episode, the season’s third, revealed that it was Mae, not the Jedi, who set the fire that destroyed her home, killing everyone but her twin sister Osha (also played by Stenberg), and that the emotion that drove her, and especially made her susceptible to the manipulations of the mysterious, powerful, and outright evil Qimir (Manny Jacinto), was not a desire for revenge but simple guilt. The Jedi, led by Lee Jung-jae’s Sol, were high-handed and short on diplomatic skill, making such mistakes as assuming that a coven of reclusive space witches would be happy to have the only two children in sight tested for their sensitivity to the Force then offered the choice to become novice padawans and leave home forever. But they seemed more clumsy than murderous, certainly not culpable for anything that would inspire a lifelong death quest.
In its middle stretch, The Acolyte got busy with badass lightsaber battles and the revelation of Qimir’s true motives (as well as the revelation of Manny Jacinto’s upper arms). But in its penultimate episode, the show circled back to that fateful night on the planet of Brendok, and to the initial ideas it seemed to have abandoned. Although the flashback was cued by a captive Osha trying on Qimir’s helmet, allowing her to plunge fully into her own memories, the perspective we took on this time was Sol’s. And while we still saw Mae set the fire and lock the compound’s doors shut, we also saw Sol, in the heat of a confrontation with the girls’ mother, Aniseya, plunge his lightsaber through her heart, and his Jedi colleague, Indara, use her powers to either kill most of the rest of the coven or render them unconscious and fatally vulnerable to the fire. (Show creator Leslye Headland says it’s meant to be ambiguous how responsible Indara is for their deaths, although in one interview, when asked if Indara killed them, she answered simply, “Yeah.”) The Jedi’s motives were still pure, but if Indara did indeed kill most of the coven’s members before Mae’s fire got to them, then they’d effectively perpetrated something close to the High Republic equivalent of the My Lai massacre.
The Star Wars universe has always allowed for the possibility that the Jedi can be corrupted by less admirable emotions—fear, anger, hate, and so on—but what if their innate sense of moral superiority was just as dangerous? Even years later, Sol is still convinced that he needed to protect Osha and Mae, that he acted in their best interests, or at least what he believed those interests to be at the time, and that the near-erasure of an entire culture, practically a pocket genocide, was a tragic but unavoidable mistake. When an adult Mae blames him for the massacre, he tries to shift the responsibility back to her for setting the fire, as if a child of 8 shared equal culpability with an adult. It’s only when Osha learns the truth and responds with an anger every bit as hot as her sister’s that Sol is forced to admit he was in the wrong—and that a punishment of death is, if not necessarily called for, at least justifiable. By lying to Osha, putting the blame on Mae for their mother’s death and estranging her from her only living kin, Sol has driven her toward the dark side, to the extent that it’s she, and not the bloodthirsty Mae, who crushes his throat with her powers, choking the life out of him as if she were Darth Vader himself.
Even worse, after Sol’s death, the Jedi Council member Vernestra uses him as a patsy, blaming him for the deaths of the Jedi killed by Qimir—who, as it turns out, was trained by Vernestra in the first place. She does this to fend off a meddlesome and ambitious politician who wants to place the Jedi under investigation, but when he calls them “a delusional cult that claims to control the uncontrollable,” it’s no longer so easy to be sure that he’s wrong. Vernestra argues that the “terrible tragedy” on Brendok was “the work of one flawed man,” but it sounds, quite deliberately, like the excuses that governments trot out to minimize war crimes. Sol was a bad apple, but the barrel is just fine.
This is incredibly fertile terrain, edging up to the most radical rethinking of the core Star Wars mythology since The Last Jedi. But given the furor into which even a cursory mention of that movie still sends a noisy minority of fans, it’s not surprising that The Acolyte backs away in the end. After steering clear of the entanglements of lore, the finale works in a cameo that will be unintelligible to all but the most devoted followers, and ends with Vernestra turning to a familiar pair of fuzzy green ears for help. We’re back in the land of servicing fans rather than challenging them, and if all is not right with the world, at least Yoda is in the loop now. When it was a largely self-contained story, The Acolyte had the freedom to invent at will, to kill off or warp as many characters as it liked without worrying about their place in some future installment. But the moment it’s tied back into the larger universe, that freedom evaporates, and all that’s left is the feeling of a promise unfulfilled.
