Last week, on The Acolyte, Sol finally gets around to telling his side of the Osha and Mae flashback we saw in “Destiny.” This week, on The Acolyte, we watch an episode written by Charmaine DeGraté and Jen Richards and “Destiny” co-writer Jasmyne Flournoy and directed by “Destiny” director Kogonada. I phrase it that way because there’s no way we’re seeing the actual story Sol is telling to Mae, since there are a couple of scenes not from his perspective. It’s a narrative conceit you have to go with, and I do think it’s a clever idea in theory to revisit many of those scenes from a new perspective.
In practice, however, it frequently amounts to little more than new camera angles and underwhelming revelations.
So we’re on Brendok sixteen years earlier again, and we find Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Ann Moss); her Padawan, Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman); Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca (Joonas Suatamo); and Padawan-less Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) surveying this thriving planet, which was once catalogued as lifeless a hundred years ago. It turns out they’re looking for a vergence, which is, as Indara helpfully explains to Torbin, “a concentration of Force energy centered around a location.” Um, sure. Well, this explains what they were doing on the planet in the first place! Wow, this episode is giving us answers already! Apparently a vergence can create life, so this is a very noble mission the Jedi are on.
During his search, Sol stumbles across Osha (Lauren Brady) and Mae (Lea Brady) messing around with the Force, which shocks Sol not only because this is the first sign of human life on the planet but also because they’re Force-sensitive humans! Yet there’s a voyeuristic quality to this scene that makes Sol come off very creepy, and it’s hard to shake that feeling for the rest of the episode as Sol continues to make bad, baffling choices throughout the episode.
Anyway, the next few minutes are just scenes we saw in “Destiny” except it turns out Sol was creepily watching from the shadows the whole time. This is supposed to help us understand Sol, except it only confuses me. He sees Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva) training Mae and Osha, and while she does have a hint of aggression in her voice, it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for trying to teach your students how to defend themselves against attacks in the real world. Sol, however, runs back to Indara completely freaked out by what he’s seen, and he’s frankly pretty prejudiced against witches! He assumes that whatever ceremony they have planned for the girls must be dangerous, and he’s determined to save them.
(Oh, as someone who recently watched all of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I got very excited when Torbin referred to them as Night Sisters. I love the Night Sisters! I was hoping we’d get live-action Night Sisters!)
In any case, it’s very hard to understand what’s got Sol so riled up. Is he concerned about Mae and Osha because they’re girls or because they’re potential Jedi or because they’re potential Jedi girls? He leaps to a huge conclusion that the girls are being mistreated, and perhaps it’s hard for me to grasp his reaction because I have more of the story than he does, but it’s extremely frustrating to see this strange obsession form. He acts like someone who just discovered child trafficking exists. Sol could be the star of the next Angel Studios movie.
Anyway, then about half the episode goes by showing us scenes we already saw except with bonus features like actually seeing Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) inside Torbin’s mind and forcing him to kneel. This is one of the most visually engaging scenes in the episode with its 360° camera pan and intentionally disorienting editing, but I didn’t really see the point of it. Ostensibly, it’s there to emphasize how much Torbin wants to go home and explain why later in the episode he decides to go kidnap Mae and Osha, but like so much of this episode, it’s not actually effective at selling any character’s motivations.
The saving grace of this episode is Indara, really. Not only because Carrie-Anne Moss brings a natural Trinity gravitas to the character but also because she’s a constant voice of reason challenging Sol’s unhealthy emotional attachment to Osha. She even calls him out on his witch bigotry, pointing out that Mae’s “dark magic” mark is a cultural mark and doesn’t mean she’s the Bad Twin. Obviously when the series opened by killing her off, I knew that couldn’t actually be all that we saw of her, but I hope that if the series continues, they find more ways to use her. Why not revisit this same flashback from her perspective? Recycle all this footage! It’s economical!
We already knew that the Jedi wanted to take Osha and Mae, so it is somewhat interesting to be privy to all the discussions they were having about the kids and attempt to understand why things went down the way they did. The Jedi Council is none too pleased about all of this, so they don’t sanction anything. I wonder if Indara told them that Mother Aniseya’s philosophy of leadership, per Mae, is “Everyone must walk through fear. Everyone must be sacrificed to fulfill their destiny.” Now that’s the first time I believe that these kids might actually be in danger! Get them off this planet!
The most shocking revelation regarding Mae and Osha, however, is that their M-counts are extremely high—as someone who is currently watching The Bad Batch, I got very excited about this—and their symbionts are exactly the same? Their what now? I am not enough of a Star Wars nerd to know what the heck symbionts have to do with the Force, but the gist of the matter is it means Mae and Osha are not identical twins—they’re literally the same person split into two consciousnesses. Now, that’s a fascinating avenue to explore, but it also makes Sol look even worse for continuing to put all his energy into saving Osha specifically when he knows that Mae isn’t just her sister, she is her.
As I mentioned earlier, Torbin apparently acts on his psychic suggestion and hops on a speeder to get Osha and Mae so he can go home, and Sol is eager to help. And the climax of the episode does contain most of its best scenes, even if they all tend to have problems.
I am not including the scene where we see Mae’s terrified reaction to her simple fire burning out of control because nobody actually believed that Mae set fire to her home on purpose, right?
I am including the scene where Mae, in her terror, runs out to the courtyard where Sol and Torbin are confronting Mother Aniseya and Mother Koril, and Sol… addresses her as Osha? He reaches out a hand to stop her and says, “Osha!” Which implies that he thinks Mae is Osha. Osha, to whom he has an unhealthy emotional attachment. Osha, with whom he just psychically connected to a few minutes ago. He’s spent the whole episode obsessed with Osha, and now he can’t tell that the girl running up to them is not Osha?
And then, for no apparent reason that I can tell, Mae’s arrival inspires Torbin to saber up, Koril to prepare for attack, and Aniseya to disintegrate into black smoke and move toward Mae because of… reasons? And so Sol fucking stabs her smoke form with a lightsaber, killing her right in front of Mae? I have no idea what is going on here and why. The fact that Mae sees Sol killing her mother at least explains her feelings toward Sol and the Jedi in general, but this all feels very contrived and clumsily staged.
Thankfully, however, it’s followed by one of the best action sequences of the series, as Torbin turns out to be pretty adept with that lightsaber, deflecting arrows with ease, while Sol attempts pacificism in response to Koril’s furious attacks, which eventually end in her disintegrating into black smoke and flying away, never to be seen again. Oh, she’s probably Qimir’s master, right? Who else could it be? She has every reason to send him on a mission to kill Jedi, though why she couldn’t just directly reach out to Mae is beyond me.
But the action gets even more intense once the witches somehow take control of Kelnacca and force him to attack Sol and Torbin, and this rules. You don’t see a Wookiee Jedi in a lightsaber battle every day, folks, and the fight choreography is fast and furious. Torbin barely survives, and Sol does a flying leap over Kelnacca’s lightsaber swing. AWESOME.
And then Indara arrives in the nick of time to use her Force powers to sever the connection between the witches and Kelnacca’s mind, and they all collapse. And die? It’s very unclear what is happening here, yet again, as the show has not done any real work establishing how the magic works and what the consequences are. So if Indara really did kill Mae’s entire family, it sure makes sense that Mae killed her first. But something this important should not be staged so confusingly!
This show doesn’t care because it also decides to confusingly stage the scene in which Mae and Osha find each other on a collapsing bridge and Mae informs Osha that their mother is dead without providing any additional details. We see this scene with Osha on the left and Mae on the right, but when Sol arrives, the scenes flips to show his perspective, where Mae is on the left and Osha is on the right. And then the editing cuts back and forth between the two perspectives as everything is exploding and they call each other’s names, so it’s hard to tell which is which in the chaos. Sol apparently isn’t strong enough to save them both, so he makes the titular choice to save Osha… I think?! I honestly had to watch the scene two or three times to confirm, but I couldn’t. I only knew it was Osha because obviously he would save Osha. Yet again, the impact of a potentially powerful moment was diluted because of a lack of clarity on what is happening where and why.
So that’s the true-ish story of what happened on Brendok sixteen years earlier, but Indara decides that the best course of action is to tell Osha and the Jedi Council that Mae burned down the witches’ fortress and everything was lost. It’s pat, it’s easy, it can’t be contradicted by anyone since they think Mae is dead along with all the witches. I like how the show has not been painting the Jedi in the best light, and this even puts a stain on Indara, who seemed like the best of them.
As with so much of the show, this episode had some solid ideas, but the execution left a lot to be desired. There’s a lot of going through the motions and characters acting for the sake of the plot, and it’s not clear about how it’s recontextualizing what we thought we knew. It’s just a mess, and also I really don’t like Sol now! He’s stubborn and he has no sense, and I could see him turning to the Dark Side very easily. Is that where they’re going with this? I hope the finale is more effective at making whatever statement they’ve been trying to make here.
