What do I know about this series going into it?
I’m generally familiar with the Star Wars universe and Star Wars lore. I’ve watched about half of the movies, the first season of Andor, and isolated episodes of The Clone Wars. Earlier this year I watched and reviewed the series finales of The Bad Batch and of Star Wars Rebels.
I know nothing about this series.
Previously On
Sol1 asks how the twins were created. A “vergence” created massive power. Lots of people are killed. Mae burned down the witches’ fortress – or at least that’s the lie they’re telling the Jedi Council. Sol needs to find Mae’s master. He begins training Mae. She tries on a “sensory deprivation headpiece” so she can be tuned fully into the Force.
Recap
Osha2 is breathing heavily in the sensory deprivation headpiece (so it wasn’t Mae in the headpiece; I clearly got confused during the Previously). Sol is trying to take it off of her and weird things happen: day keeps changing back and forth to night; he shapeshifts into other people; his eyes go black; until he finally manages to remove the helmet. She reports what she saw: Mae is killing Sol (so this guy isn’t Sol either – I must really have things backwards). That’s a vision of the future, says not-Sol, who I’ll call Trainer Guy until I learn his name. Osha says she can still stop Mae (so I guess Mae is the bad guy). Trainer Guy asks how Osha will do that if he’s taking the ship, but she says he has to take her with him if he wants to know where to go.
Elsewhere, the real Sol has the real Mae tied to a bed; she and Osha are identical twins, which is why I got confused. Mae accuses Sol of killing their mother; he says no, you’re the one who set the fire and locked everyone inside the house to burn to death. During the debate she secretly activates a device to disable her restraints, then uses it to zap Sol. No, wait, the captions say his name is Pip? Ah, never mind, Pip is Mae’s handheld robot. Mae flees; her captor pursues; Mae makes it to an escape pod and ejects.
Opening credits.
The escape pod has no hyperdrive, so Mae’s captor – I’ve lost all confidence that I know his name, so I’ll call OTG, for Other Trainer Guy – pursues. Mae flies the pod into a planet’s rings, and he follows. But OTG’s small funny sidekick Bazil3 betrays him, ripping out cables that disable the ship and force it to stop. Mae crashlands onto the planet below.
Meanwhile, on Coruscant, a senator is asking to meet with a green Jedi woman named Vernestra.4 His accusation is serious:
She is dismissive of his concerns, but also has no choice but to at least partially explain that somebody killed multiple Jedi (four, if these are the same murders mentioned in the Previously). He isn’t happy: the Jedi are an unchecked power center masquerading as a religion, and their policy of suppressing all emotion is extremely dangerous. If and when one of them snaps, who will be strong enough to stop them?5
Meanwhile, Osha and Trainer Guy are on a planet. I think it’s the same one that Mae crashed onto. He wants to make some deal with her, but she is hesitant.
Meanwhile on “Brendok”, OTG has landed and uses the Force to search for Mae (so I was wrong just now; Osha and Trainer Guy aren’t here yet). He leaves Bazil in the ship, and Bazil messes with the controls. I don’t yet know what’s up with Bazil, where his allegiances lie, or why Sol hasn’t smacked him upside the head for sabotaging his ship.
Vernestra is informed that Sol’s transponder has just been activated and he’s on Brendok (I’m guessing Bazil’s doing). So that clears it up: OTG really is Sol.
Sol, searching for Mae, enters a sort of courtyard. He shouts her name and has a flashback/Force memory/something of the young Mae mourning her dead mother.
Having arrived on Brendok, Osha and Trainer Guy reach an elevator. This is the only way in, she says. “Are you sure?” says Trainer Guy – but his voice is strangely echoing, and when she looks back at him he isn’t there. Was he just a figment of her imagination?
Sol enters one of the buildings in the complex, all dark tunnels. As he explores he calls out to Mae repeatedly – in one case barely missing her, as she climbs onto a walkway from below just after he leaves. Meanwhile, outside, Osha has gotten the elevator working.
Sol encounters another man in the complex, who is wearing the sensory deprivation helmet. “Thank you for leading me to her,” says the latter, who is clearly Trainer Guy and who has secretly been the bad guy all along. They pull out lightsabers and began to battle. “I will destroy you if I must!” says Sol. “Not if she gets you first,” says Trainer Guy. Sol is clearly the superior fighter, but Trainer Guy won’t go down easily.
Meanwhile, inside the complex, Osha finally encounters Mae. Osha says she failed: she could never calm her negative emotions, her hatred of Mae, her grief over her mother, and that’s why she never became a Jedi. But Mae says to blame Sol: “Sol killed our mother. He was the reason you have the negative emotions in the first place”. They fight – I’m not sure why – during which Osha notices Pip on Mae’s belt and calls out to him for help. Pip rewards her by spitting oil in her face; he’s on Mae’s side.
The fight between Osha and Mae is impressively and appropriately symmetric. And I’m genuinely not sure which one’s good and which one’s evil; I keep going back and forth based on their conversation and behavior. Which I think is a large part of the point. The symbolism of Osha wearing black and Mae wearing white is clearly deliberate – but is it there to confirm or to subvert expectations?
Both fights briefly pause as they watch a ship fly overhead and land somewhere nearby, then resume. Sol tells Trainer Guy to give up, but Trainer Guy says, “They’re here for you, not for me.”
Finally, Sol defeats Trainer Guy, cutting the latter’s lightsaber handle in two and destroying it. He removes his helmet revealing… he’s Trainer Guy! But before Sol can kill him, Mae surprises him from behind and steals his lightsaber.
Even after revealing his face, Trainer Guy is still referred to as “the stranger” in the captions, so I wonder if he even has a name (that’s been revealed to the viewers). He tells Mae to strike Sol down and her journey into the dark side will be complete. But Mae doesn’t want to kill him; she wants Sol to confess to killing her mother and pay for his crimes in front of the Council and the Republic.
Sol explains a little bit: Mae and Osha are not twins, but rather “the same person”, who their mother created somehow, using the Force and the “vergence”. And everything he did, he did to protect them – though protect them from what is never really explained.
Meanwhile, Osha picks up the discarded lightsaber; Mae notices, Sol doesn’t. Is it going to be her, rather than Mae, who kills Sol? If Sol is right and they’re the “same person”, that would still fulfill the prophecy…
“You killed our mother,” Mae says, trying to goad Sol into admitting it before Osha. “Yes,” he says, remorsefully. “I did.”
“Is that true?” Osha asks, revealing herself. Sol is horrified that Osha heard, but continues to justify himself: “It was the right thing to do.” Osha won’t accept that: “Why didn’t you tell the Jedi?” He doesn’t really answer, merely continuing his self-righteous justifications and condescension. “Stop talking,” Osha says, but he can’t stop; he needs to prove to himself no less than to her that he did the right thing. Then he does stop talking, as Osha force-chokes him to death.
Osha collapses onto her knees, sobbing. The Stranger approaches her: maybe she was the dark side disciple he searched for all along! She pulls out the lightsaber and swings it at him, and it changes color from blue to red.
Vernestra lands on the planet with a company of Jedi. She stops to reach out with the Force and detects the Stranger, who detects her in turn. He puts on his helmet and flees. Mae and Osha notice he is gone and flee as well, climbing down a ridiculous bottomless pit together.
Vernestra arrives in the courtyard and she too hears the Force echoes of the deaths that happened here. She orders her Jedi to set up a perimeter and search for the twins, then pauses to kneel beside Sol’s body and mourn.
Osha and Mae escape the complex and reach a Special Tree of some kind, where the Stranger finds them. Osha wants to stay and explain everything to the authorities, but the Stranger asks how she can still have faith in the Jedi after all this. This cuts deeply, so Osha makes an offer: “Let my sister go and I will train with you.” He agrees, and wipes Mae’s memory so the Jedi can’t use her to lead them to Osha.
The Jedi arrive, only too late, to find and arrest the memoryless Mae.
In the denouement, Mae is brought before Vernestra. All she remembers is the fire that destroyed her home, and the man who killed her mother. She remembers running away and needing to tell somebody about it, but she couldn’t find her. Her last memories are from when she was eight.6
Vernestra makes her report to her superiors (the Jedi Council? a Senate committee?), and throws Sol under the bus: he committed the murders on the planet sixteen years ago, then killed his accomplices. Antagonist Senator says that this is proof that the Republic needs to hold an external review of the Jedi, but Vernestra disagrees: Sol did this alone, the rest of the Jedi didn’t help, and he killed himself anyway so it doesn’t matter.
Vernestra recruits Mae to help her find Osha and the Stranger, then enters a room to talk to… Yoda.
Unresolved questions
What is a “vergence”? How did Mae and Osha’s mother use it to create life? Did she create both of them, or split an already-existing child into two bodies? What precisely does it mean to say that they’re the same person?
Will the Senator get his way and impose an external review on the Jedi, or will Vernestra succeed in blocking it? What will such a review reveal? Will a Jedi ever “snap”, as he fears, and if so who will be powerful enough to stop him?
Where are Bazil’s loyalties?
What is the Stranger’s real name?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 7/10. The fate of the galaxy did not rest on this episode but certainly the fate of these two young women did. Overall I was pleased with the way the plot played with our expectations and refused to tip its hand. Will Osha change the future and save Sol? Which teacher will leave with which student? Who here is good and who here is evil?
Part of those expectations, I’m sure, were unique to my experience, having not watched the rest of the series. Maybe from the beginning it was obvious from the beginning that the Stranger was the bad guy. But with Sol being a severely flawed character as well, it was anybody’s guess where things would end up. And I liked that there were six different people on the planet (Mae, Osha, Sol, the Stranger, Vernestra, and Bazil), each with their own agenda.
Writing: 9/10. I was very impressed with the complex discussion of morality presented by the writers of this episode. It was head and shoulders above the bright growing line between good and evil that you generally see in the Star Wars universe.
Sol is a good guy led into making incredibly stupid (perhaps evil? I don’t know enough to say) decisions thanks to the misguided application of his ideal of protecting the innocent.
The Senator could easily have been a strawman antagonist, but he was given a logical and sensible framework through which to present his suspicion of the Jedi’s power, independence, and belief system. His critiques are well-supported, are in line with critiques of the Jedi I’ve already seen from people in real life, and– crucially – are destined to be proven 100% correct in hindsight.
Production: 9/10. Good acting from the four main characters7. Manny Jacinto was fantastic as the Stranger; I only realized who he was when I saw his name in the end credits. I cheated a bit and looked up just now whether Osha and Mae were played by one actress or two, and it turns out Amandla Stenberg did a good job of making them feel like different people – helped by good special effects and the excellent wardrobe choice to dress them in black and white. With a lesser script that would have been a cliché, but I was kept guessing as to whether the black one really would end up evil and the white one good, or vice versa.
The fight choreography was excellent. I liked the way they leaned into the symmetry in the fight between Osha and Mae, and the actors and body doubles timed their simultaneous and symmetric blows perfectly. I was a bit less impressed with the lightsaber duel between Sol and the Stranger (there was one moment of pure silliness), but even there they added a couple of tricks to keep it from feeling stale.
My main criticisms are two: First, the camera work didn’t do a good job of giving me a sense of spatial relations. I had no idea where things were happening – how far away Mae threw Sol’s lightsaber, where the elevator was in relation to the rest of the complex, even (in one case) which planet people were on. Second, Vernestra had a real “university linguistics professor” vibe that really didn’t fit the character.8
Characterization: 9/10. For the last eight paragraphs, I’ve been praising the character work in the wrong categories, and I have little left to say here. Sol, Osha, Mae, the Stranger, Vernestra, and the Senator all came across as complex characters with interesting backstories that I want to learn more about.
Accessibility: 6/10. This is one of those times that I have to emphasize that the accessibility rating is not necessarily a measure of episode quality. In this case, the accessibility rating was reduced by the very thing that made the episode shine the most: the complex character histories of Mae, Osha, and Sol, so crucial to the plot, so fascinating – and completely opaque if this was the only episode you saw. I know where they ended up, and I know a little bit of how they got there, but I don’t know where they came from. How clear were Mae and Osha’s intentions and allegiances prior to this episode? How much did they change? What actions, exactly, did Sol take in the slippery slope that led to his death?
I can’t begrudge the finale for lacking that context; if the backstories were simple enough that they could have been presented here, the characters – and therefore the episode – would not have been nearly as good.
Closure: 3/10. It’s clear this series was cancelled early, because this is definitely not a natural conclusion to the story. Unless Mae and Osha are supposed to appear in other media later, there are a lot of unanswered questions about who they are and what makes them so important and/or special. The same with the Stranger; I hope his story will be picked up somewhere else in the Star Wars universe because it would be criminal to leave him where he is.
Do I want to watch the series now?
After Andor, this is only the second Star Wars property that I’m actively interested in watching. And Andor had some severe flaws (for example, continuing the storyline on Ferrix after the main character left; while it would turn out to be necessary for the conclusion of the season, they didn’t telegraph during the middle episodes that this would happen, so you tended to wonder why they were wasting your time). If I’m right, and The Acolyte was cancelled before reaching its natural conclusion, I’m a bit worried that the cancellation is due to similar flaws that reduced its viewership. But because I know where things will end up, I’m less concerned.
Most names in the Previously come from the captions.
Name given in captions.
Name given in captions
“Vern” means “green”, so Vernestra’s species probably doesn’t normally have green skin. You wouldn’t name your daughter “green” if everybody in your species is green. It would be like if you named your kid “Hasanose”.
This is an excellent debate, with the Senator clearly the antagonist but also making good and difficult points. And the conversation helps pinpoint when the series takes place: in the pre-prequel era.
Eight years old, not eight people. I normally wouldn’t need to clarify this, but if she’s already two people…
With the exception of whenever Sol said the word “vergence”. Something in how he said such a silly word so seriously always made me want to burst out laughing.
She also looked very familiar, and looking her up now it turns out I know her from Russian Doll – where her character gave off the exact same vibe.
wow, this is probably the most favorable coverage of "the Acolyte" I've seen so far