James Whitbrook
“Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not,” George Lucas once said in a 2005 interview with Wired, heralding the end of the Star Wars prequel trilogy—seemingly at the time, with Star Wars at all—in Revenge of the Sith. The movie gave us the fall of the Republic, the fall of the Jedi Order: the twilight of a golden age wrought by a series of choices, personal and systemic, that saw grasps on power slip and and tighten on all sides of its conflict until even its ultimate survivors were left forever scarred in some form or another.
The story of Star Wars is about the nature of power, and what it does to people, and so it should be a surprise to no one that The Acolyte‘s tale of power—set at the beginning of that inevitable twilight—operates in a similar manner. Throughout this season, we have seen how the balance of power twists anyone touched by it: now it’s time for that corruptive influence to come festering to the surface, and leave scars.
“The Acolyte,” the self-titled eighth and final episode of the season—a second season has yet to be confirmed, but if there’s one thing you cannot fault the episode for, it’s leaving plenty on the table for The Acolyte to dive into should it return—is an episode about a series of compromises, that in and of itself feels awkwardly compromised at times. In bringing an end to this particular chapter of Osha and Mae’s story, as the truth of what happened on Brendok finally comes to light for the both of them, The Acolyte struggles to balance the high melodrama of its emotional climax with the sheer number of spinning plates it has to keep twirling to let the audience know that not only can there be more to this story, but there are many other threads left for the series to tell (threads that are, arguably, left in more interesting places than the switched status quos of Osha and Mae).
Not helping that struggle is the out-of-nowhere, single-shot appearances of two major Star Wars characters—one heavily implied to be, but not yet explicitly confirmed as, none other than the first on-screen appearance of Darth Plagueis, the Sith Lord who goes on to be train Palpatine, the other the series’ parting shot of Grand Master Yoda signaling the escalation of The Acolyte‘s Jedi collusions—that feel like hail mary throwouts for a show that desperately wants you to know it has more ideas up its sleeve outside the central twin story, yet in and of themselves feel like they ultimately detract from that story.
The Acolyte has frequently struggled with a tumultuous flow in its edit and pacing, relying on the strengths of its ideas—no matter how awkwardly they are ultimately communicated, or how the plot shuffles its characters from one emotional beat to the next to get them in a place to support that ultimate communication—to carry it to its most interesting places. This in and of itself is an interesting mirror to the era of Star Wars the series is most trying to emulate in the prequel trilogy—a trio of films that, through years of generational re-evaluation, have more broadly be come to known at this point as ambitious undertakings with plenty of ideas and things to say about Star Wars, while not necessarily always fully executing on their potential. “The Acolyte,” then, already has this unfortunate parallel down pat. But thankfully, it also has the interesting ideas parallel down too—especially in what it has to say about both personal and systemic power, and its corruptive influence on those who seek to hold it.
On the personal level, this power is represented in the leverage Sol has now that the truth of what happened on Brendok has been revealed to Osha, as, blinded by the weight of years of keeping what happened that night to himself, he now brings the captive Mae back to her home, hoping to prove once and for all the nature of her and Osha’s shared creation—and in turn justify his and his fellow Jedi’s actions in what happened there 16 years ago. The first half the episode, in which Sol and Mae separately land on the world after the latter attempts to escape her Jedi captor, is a fascinating role-reversal. Sol is treated almost like the stalking villain of a horror film, walking through the ruins of the Brendok coven—ruins he and Mae’s actions alike helped create that night—as he attempts to re-track Mae, as she faces the emotional wounds of that night and desperately attempts to find a way to turn the tables on the Jedi. Not to kill him, as we eventually learn, but so that she can finally bring him to justice in the eyes of his peers in the Republic and the Order, to expose the fallacy of the Jedi’s perceived perfection.
Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t counted on the corruptive power now likewise wielded by her sister, as Osha and the Stranger themselves arrive on Brendok before the Vernestra’s chasing Jedi detachment can—leading to an emotional confrontation between sisters in which their roles are now tragically reversed. As Sol and the Stranger lock sabers once more (a more traditional, but nonetheless compelling action sequence compared to the slasher horror of episode five), Mae and Osha likewise brawl, but it’s Mae who is reserved, logical, and caring for her sister, while Osha—whose dark impulses have been felt throughout the season, now amplified between her brief time at the Stranger’s side and in returning to her home for the first time in decades—is full of fury and hatred. The balance of the scales of light and dark has already begun to tip, but they overwhelmingly shift when Mae manages to break away from her sister long enough to disrupt Sol and the Strangers’ duel… long enough to force him to admit, unaware that Osha is now in earshot, that the events of that night 16 years prior, almost exactly where they’re all standing, were caused by his own blinded judgement.
The revelation that Sol killed Aniseya, no matter how much he tries to justify it—even now, having seen his fellow Jedi conspirators die for their roles in it, even now, in the implicit understanding of him knowing what he did that night was a mistake—is what ultimately pushes Osha firmly into the dark places that have always been with her. The power erupts violently: in both her inability to stop herself from choking her former master to death with the Force, but in her inadvertent first step into Sith practices by bleeding the kyber crystal of his own lightsaber in her rage. With the weapon of a Jedi—the weapon she knows now killed her mother—corrupted in such a way, now Osha is corrupted in and of her self, complicit in the mess and murder that has lead to this moment over the last decade and a half of her life. As the Order comes knocking, our trio of dark-touched figures flee into the shadows once more… but not before another compromise has to be made.
Realizing that Mae and Osha’s connection, their very nature, will always give a way for them to find each other—or be used to find each other, as the Jedi wish to—the Stranger offers Mae freedom through a Force-induced memory wipe, to forget all recollections of her life and her sister after the night of the fire on Brendok, in exchange for freedom. A freedom earned, in part, by Osha willingly deciding to leave with the Stranger as his new acolyte. On the surface, the moment works, in part thanks to Amandla Stenberg’s fantastic dual performance, but there is another layer of that structural awkwardness here, a handwave to get Osha and Mae reasonably separated for future stories. Plenty of the moment makes sense for Osha: her story has been one of a slow-burning corruption from within, an inability to control the darkness she now compromises with in accepting the Stranger’s tutelage. For Mae, it’s less so—a character that has felt more often like a tool for her sister’s arc rather than an individual being (putting aside the nature of the sisters as a singular power born into two bodies for a moment). Now, she is rendered even less of a character in the moment, emotionally and largely mentally reduced to her childhood state to be found by Vernestra’s Jedi as Osha and the Stranger flee back to their mysterious base for training.
Vernestra’s side of the episode, and the remaining fallout for which we follow in its back half, sets up the other twinned parallel of corruptive power “The Acolyte” has ideas about. If Osha’s turn to darkness is a more personal corruption, Vernestra becomes the embodiment of systemic corruption as she becomes increasingly desperate to keep the fallout of Brendok strictly within the Order’s limits. From her tense repartee with Senator Rayencourt (a surprise but incredibly welcome appearance by David Harewood, who is immediately captivating as the justifiably terse politician), to her eventual decision to keep the cycle of lies about Brendok going by the climax of the episode, Vernestra represents an aspect of the Jedi that is rarely explicitly tackled on-screen in Star Wars. By the time of the prequel films, the Order already exists as a compromise of religious order and arm of the state, largely in part apparently due to events we watch unfold here. Vernestra chooses, coming across Sol’s body after the twins and the Stranger (who seemingly has a connection to her, an apparent former student), to throw her fallen friend at the gnashing senators clipping at her heels: pinning not just the events of Brendok, but the murders of his fellow Jedi, on him as a rogue agent. It’s a calculated move of desperation for her to try and maintain the Jedi Order’s not-so-impartial state of power, a compromise that pushes her to lie and conceal while also completely sacrificing her friend’s reputation in the process.
But it’s a fascinating calculation to watch her make. After all, we cannot deny that the the Jedi Order is afforded a great deal of power. In the micro-scale, there’s power to use the Force, power to wield weapons so unlike anything else in the galaxy the mere presence of them on their waistbands is, in any given situation, a statement of power in and of itself. At the macro there is power enshrined in Republic law, even as the Order itself is not entirely beholden to that law—hence Rayencourt’s desire to review and investigate the Order’s broad independence even before the revelation that it has been covering up a serial killing spree—to take children from across the galaxy and test whether or not they can be inducted as the next generation to inherit that spiritual power, as well as the Order’s vast institutional power. We have seen this power on display throughout The Acolyte in many ways, from arrogance and bluster to how the events on Brendok unfolded in the first place, and we have seen in turn how that power, no matter the intent of its wielders, can ultimately influence those wielders into as many compromises as necessary to maintain it.
Having Vernestra be the one that keeps this cycle of deception going—as she now has to chase covering up a murder spree with covering up the return of a student fallen to darkness—iis a fitting use of The Acolyte‘s sole primary character from the High Republic transmedia books and comics. As a character that has lived long enough to have been witness to the apex of the Jedi and the Republic in its prime in those stories, to have Vernestra as the catalyst for its twilight in the series of decisions she makes here sends a message that the acquisition of this kind of power is, inherently, a compromised endeavor: that once obtained, it will be controlled. And in that control, corruption can turn even the most noble of intentions to darkness.
It is in this mirrored stories of corruptive, compromised power—Vernestra seeking the guidance of Yoda, for the cover-ups that she continues to make, Osha and the Stranger beginning their path to training in darkness together—that The Acolyte ends its season on, with clearly plenty more to say about it, too. Whether or not it gets the chance to currently remains to be seen, but it is an idea compelling enough to warrant further exploration… perhaps in a slightly less compromised manner that much of this first season has had to deal along the way.
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