The Acolyte Season-Finale Recap: Original Sins

Well, the fight scenes were good. And the ending? Pretty neat.

But let’s not oversell this. The first seven episodes of The Acolyte’s first season leaned on promises of dark mysteries and major revelations, most of which had been slowly — perhaps too slowly — spilled in the weeks before the season finale began. After all of that setup, I expected much more oomph from the season’s big finish.

First, let’s recall where we were in the story before last week’s extended flashback. Osha had just been tempted by Qimir, who was offering to teach her how to use a fuller, more powerful version of the Force. Mae, meanwhile, had been riding undercover with Sol, hoping to push him to face what he and his cohorts did on Brendok 16 years ago during the destruction of the coven that raised the sisters. This week, these two would-be Masters and their two wayward pupils return to Brendok, where between some thrilling lightsaber battles, they talk, getting each other all up to speed on everything they need to know.

The two key points that get shared are:

1. That the Jedi earnestly believed Mae and Osha’s mothers and their whole coven of Force Witches were dangerous, because they’d developed the power to create life out of the Force. Specifically, the witches created Mae and Osha, who are actually one person in two bodies.

2. That Sol killed Aniseya in a moment of panic, then conspired with his fellow Jedi to lie about what happened. Sol confesses this in a moment of real pathos, where he insists that he still believes he did the right thing, even as he acknowledges the lingering damage that choice caused.

The first point, strangely, doesn’t appear to rattle anyone. Osha and Mae seem more confused by it than alarmed, and even Qimir takes it all in with a kind of huh expression. The second point, though, lands like a ton of bricks on Osha, upsetting her whole understanding of herself. She responds with anger and vengeance, using the Force to crush the breath and life out of Sol, Darth Vader–style.

This all, quite frankly, plays a bit small. Yes, it’s a big deal that Sol gets killed, given that he’s arguably the primary protagonist of The Acolyte (if you think of the show as a procedural mystery, with him as the detective). But after seven episodes of buildup, the resolution on Brendok comes awfully quickly, and aside from Sol’s death, it’s largely devoid of surprises. Too much of this episode involves moving pieces into place — and there are way too few pieces, given that this is meant to be the ending to book one of an epic saga.

There’s a lot of rote gap-filling here, too, as Sol, Mae, and Osha get all they need to say off their respective chests. Osha explains that she flunked out of Jedi training because she couldn’t get past her grief and anger over the loss of her sister and mothers. Sol explains that he couldn’t tell the truth about Brendok because he would’ve needed both sisters to come back to Coruscant, to prove the existence of a vergence on the girls’ home planet. Osha finally fulfills Mae’s mission of killing a Jedi with no weapon when she Force-strangles Sol. We get quite a bit of dot-connecting here, much of which could probably have been done several episodes ago.

Really, the biggest development in this finale isn’t so much Sol’s death as its aftermath. Osha, having tapped into her rage and experienced the rush of power it brings, agrees to become Qimir’s acolyte at last, while Mae, less bent on vengeance now than on justice, surrenders to the Jedi, with the intention of making Sol’s malfeasance part of the official record. Unfortunately, Qimir only agrees to let Mae go after a memory-wipe, so when she gets back to Coruscant, she can’t really tell all.

Tellingly, these two women, created by the Force, are dressed in black clothes (Osha) and white clothes (Mae) as they head off in opposite directions, toward the dark and light sides of the Force. Also, Osha’s lightsaber, inherited from Sol, changes color from blue to red while she’s using it.

These visual cues are, I admit, a nifty touch. And there are other memorable moments in this episode that keep it from being too much of a letdown. Mae’s escape from Sol’s ship (with the help of her newly reprogrammed buddy Pip!) via a small shuttle leads to an exciting spaceship chase through a Saturn-like ring of tiny rocks. Plus, it’s been a while since The Acolyte went as fully “Force-fu” as it does in this episode’s lightsaber duels. Qimir and Sol float lightly to the ground and back up again, like the combatants in a wuxia film, and their tactics involve a clever mix of weapon-wielding and hand-to-hand counterattacks. There’s a nice match-cut too between the crossed legs of Mae and Osha — kicking at each other in their own fight scene — and Qimir and Sol’s crossed sabers.

But the finale’s boldest move comes in its epilogue. Early in the episode, we see the ever-nervous Jedi bureaucrat Vernestra on Coruscant, answering questions from Senator Rayencourt (David Harewood), a man who believes the galaxy has become overdependent on the Jedi as an adjudicating agency. (“When you’re looking up to heroes, you don’t have to face what’s right in front of you,” Rayencourt warns.) With the Senate threatening a full investigation of the Jedi’s necessity, the news of Sol’s failure is unwelcome.

Or is it? Given that a mind-wiped Mae can only recall pieces of her past, Vernestra comes up with a diabolical idea. She tells the powers that be that Sol led the conspiracy to hide the Jedi’s whole Force Witch debacle on Brendok, and that he then killed his colleagues and himself after they threatened to expose him. She also privately declares to Mae her intention to hunt down a former pupil (presumably Qimir) who “turned to evil,” and she asks for help from a hard-to-reach Master, who in the season’s closing shot is revealed to be …

Yoda! (Or at least a Jedi from Yoda’s species. But it’s probably Yoda.)

So if The Acolyte gets a second season, it looks like there will be new mysteries to solve, like: What happened between Vernestra and her now-evil Padawan? What can Yoda do about it now? And will the creators of this show be able to tell a multilayered, richly populated story with forward momentum, rather than one that’s always looking back?

Force Ghosts

• As Qimir and Osha are leaving his planet, they are watched from a nearby cave by a mysterious cloaked figure with pale skin and reddish eyes … looking very much like one of the withered old Sith Lords we’ve seen in Star Wars stories before. The internet’s various Star Wars reference sources seem certain that this is Darth Plagueis, who has appeared in some of the ancillary media and was mentioned in the movies as the mentor to Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious. If this is so, he is someone else whose mastery of the Force has given him the power to create life.

• When this episode went live, Disney+ didn’t list a title other than “Episode 8,” although Wikipedia and other sites are listing it as “The Acolyte,” which would certainly be apt. I’m not sure why Disney (or perhaps the folks on the Star Wars side of the business) insisted on withholding The Acolyte’s episode titles every week until the last second, as though knowing them in advance would somehow be a spoiler. Maybe it’s the same impulse that led to Qimir being called “the Stranger” in the episodes’ subtitles, even though no one on the show calls him that. There seems to be an overemphasis here on preserving all mysteries — even the very minor ones.

• That wraps season one of The Acolyte, folks! I had high hopes for this show, as someone who has generally enjoyed spending time in the Star Wars TV universe. (I even kinda liked Obi-Wan Kenobi!) I did appreciate what this series has to say about the self-justifications and self-delusions of the Jedi, and I dug the well-crafted action sequences, too. But given the potential of the premise, the results were, for the most part, rather disappointing. That said, I still think there’s a lot to work with here, and I hope we get a second season so that the show can deliver on its promise.