This review contains full spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte Season 1, episode 7.
Damn it, Acolyte, why do you have to be so messy?
In theory, this episode’s approach was simple: show the events of this season’s earlier flashback episode from the Jedi’s perspective (plus a bit more of Mae’s side of things) rather than Osha’s, thus fully explaining exactly what occurred that left all the witches dead.
In a broad sense it did just that, with some strong touches along the way. But this episode also left a lot of those events feeling needlessly complicated or convoluted, with some strange moments that still feel unexplained – and not in a “that’s a cool plot thread for later” way. Instead it feels like the audience is being asked to do too much of the heavy lifting for it all to make sense.
The explanation of what exactly the Jedi’s goals were was, mostly, pretty satisfying and the best part of the episode. It gave these events a lot more weight as we came to learn that Indara was the one trying to avoid conflict. Ultimately she was trying to not interfere and leave Osha and Mae with the witches. And on the flipside, it was compelling to find out that Sol had become rather obsessed with trying to take the girls, convincing himself they were in danger in order to justify his intentions. The fact that he felt a connection to Osha but not Mae was effective and harshly underlined when, as the broken bridge was collapsing beneath them, he made the split second choice – hey, that’s what the episode was called! – to use the Force to only hold up Osha’s side and save her, sending Mae to her death (except she somehow survived, of course).
The explanation of what exactly the Jedi’s goals were was, mostly, pretty satisfying and the best part of the episode.
In the midst of all this though was stupid, dumb ass Torbin, who went all in on helping Sol not for interesting, complex reasons, but because he was just superduper homesick. Seriously, what a lame Jedi. Sure, he started out feeling this was an unimportant, boring mission, but then it actually turned out to be pretty freaking interesting, what with the witches and the rarity of a Vergence in the Force. Yet he still was just whining about missing Coruscant. You suck, Torbin.
An odd aspect here was the sequence where we saw exactly what happened when Mother Aniseya possessed Torbin and how she used his wish to go home to manipulate him. It created a nice parallel to Qimir’s approach with Osha to have her take such a literally seductive tone with him. But nothing ever came of this interaction except to show us the witches could possess others, essentially just set up for Kelnacca being taken over later in the episode, which could have been done just as easily in the moment when Kelnacca attacked the others. You can go down a rabbit hole and speculate that Aniseya wanted Torbin to be so determined to leave that he’d help incite violence, because perhaps she had some darker big picture plan in mind. But I truly don’t think that’s the case and, if it were, it would undermine everything we saw about Aniseya as the one more willing to put her feelings aside and let Osha go compared to Koril.
Aniseya’s death felt like it skipped over necessary beats. As is often the case with The Acolyte, the big picture idea is solid – Sol thinks Aniseya is doing something that may harm Mae and so instinctively cuts Aniseya down with his lightsaber. But we’re left wondering what Aniseya was actually going to do when she pulled that whole turning into black mist trick and began to float towards Mae, which got Sol panicking in the first place. With her dying breath she tells Sol she was going to let Osha leave. Okay, great, but she could have let him know that before everything escalated. And was she just going to float over to Mae to say “Calm down, how can I help?” What was supposed to happen, from Aniseya’s perspective?
Worse, the reveal of how all the other witches died felt so anticlimactic. Indara used her Force powers to break the hold the witches had over Kelnacca and that… just caused them all to drop dead?? These witches had some pretty crappy Force powers, apparently, if that was how it works for them. And it was poorly conveyed, too. It wasn’t even clear they were supposed to be dead, rather than passed out, when their connection to Kelnacca was first broken, until we see their corpses later.
The frustrating thing is, there was other good material in this episode. We got way more of an exploration of what a Vergence in the Force is, building on the term that was first introduced in The Phantom Menace. Once more, there are a lot of explored parallels between the twins and Anakin, as they are all powerful beings whose birth did not occur in a traditional manner. And learning the concentration of the Force the twins exuded was able to bring back life to a barren planet effectively conveyed just how much unharnessed power a Vergence can contain.
It was also a great touch to reveal Mae and Osha aren’t simply identical twins, they are essentially the same exact being split into two. This gives a good retroactive explanation for Sol not realizing Mae was impersonating Osha. Showrunner Leslye Headland has talked about her hope for more seasons of The Acolyte and revelations such as this demonstrate that there are enough elements at play to explore in a future season. The problem is the finale is next week, and right now it doesn’t feel like the show has honed in on enough of a specific focus for the impending ending. Hopefully we get a definitive decision on Osha joining Qimir or something else that feels like this journey is complete in some manner, because right now, it feels all over the place.
Other explanations don’t feel satisfying or interesting at all, instead just creating a lot of silly coincidences.
Still, this episode helped bring more overall perspective to the Jedi during this era. In the big picture, The Acolyte has shown the danger of their rigid approach and why it’s understandable some would push back against them. But this episode helped explain what happened with Osha and Mae was more about Sol (and stupid Torbin) going on a misguided quest rather than anything the Jedi at large masterminded or condoned. Not only did Indara and Kelnacca never agree to Sol’s plan, but we learn that when they were told the situation, the Jedi Council had decided the twins should be left alone. For those worrying this show wouldn’t just make things more complex in terms of the Jedi’s place in the galaxy, it would paint them as more overt villains, this was a relief.
Also, that fight sequence between the possessed Kelnacca and Sol and Torbin was well done – and not just because we finally got to see that wookiee swing a lightsaber. It didn’t match the heights of the combat in the fifth episode, but there were some cool and clever touches, such as Torbin holding his lightsaber underhanded to block Kelnacca’s death blow or Sol, not wanting to hurt his friend, turning his lightsaber off at the last second and using the metal hilt to hit Kelnacca hard on the head.
Still, the overall feeling this episode exudes is frustration. Even the material giving more context to Mae starting the fire just felt silly and sloppy. It seems she didn’t want to start a fire at all, just burn Mae’s journal. Yet we still have to contend with Mae telling Osha “I’ll kill you” right before that, as seen in episode three. Did she mean she was going to fake her death in some way, to keep the Jedi away? And if so, why not explain that both to Osha and the audience? I wish I had confidence we’ll get more follow-up on this. But right now, it feels doubtful.
Just think about the rather wacky series of events this episode tells us happened pretty much concurrently:
Mae accidentally started a fire, which ended up spreading and causing massive explosions, destroying the witches’ home, yet somehow the flames didn’t kill anyone at all. Sol killed Aniseya because he didn’t trust her and had decided Osha was safer with him. All the other Witches of Brendok died because they were collectively possessing a Jedi and breaking that link hit the magic death switch for them all.
At least Sol killing Aniseya is interesting and adds to his character, even though it felt off in how it occurred. But the other explanations don’t feel satisfying or interesting at all, instead just creating a lot of silly coincidences.
Lastly, I have to talk about The Song. I’m guessing there is already some hyperbole online about the choice to end this episode with a song by Victoria Monét and how it “ruined Star Wars forever” or such. And no, it didn’t do that, but it certainly felt off. It’s tricky figuring out how far you can push previously established parameters to the format and still feel like Star Wars. We’ve now seen that you don’t need an opening crawl and you can add onscreen text identifying planets or include flashbacks, among all sorts of things that never occurred in the early Star Wars films. But a pop song over the closing credits? It just doesn’t sit right.
Hey, in an alternate universe, maybe The Empire Strikes Back played a pop song over its closing credits, and bam, it became an accepted part of the franchise. But that didn’t happen, and now, this many decades in, it just felt super weird and out of place. A wonky touch to end a wonky episode on.
Other thoughts
One thing that felt less frustrating and more of a normal ‘laying the groundwork for the future’ touch in terms of unanswered questions is what happened to Koril, who isn’t seen again after she goes all black smoke. Clearly she’s still out there as a lingering threat and could possibly have had contact with Qimir. She’s also a possibile explanation as to how Mae survived the big fall Sol thought had killed her. We learn the reason Brendok was previously devoid of life was because of a hyperspace disaster a century before, a nice reference to The High Republic novels and comics which covered that event in detail. As I mentioned in my review of episode three, I think the director of the two Brendok episodes, Kogonada, is a very talented filmmaker (watch After Yang if you haven’t!) but he just doesn’t seem to mesh well with Star Wars. The way he showed the witches powers was especially cheesy, with it coming off laughable every time we cut to them all swaying in unison as they controlled Kelnacca. Since they did make the choice to end this episode with a pop song, they should have gone full 1980s movie title theme with it and called the song ‘The Acolyte’ not ‘Power of Two.’ “I never wanted us to fight, but you’ve turned into The Acolyte!”
