Prior to watching this episode of The Acolyte, I tried to explain the experience of watching the double premiere to my 13 year old. They understood the situation without needing to be told: “So it’s better than Ahsoka, but not as good as Andor?”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” I replied.
“At least it’s interesting,” they said.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“Well, maybe it’ll get better. See what happens, I guess.”
Reader, what happened is a hell of a lot more promising than what we’d seen before. The third episode of The Acolyte is not going to wind up on my my year-end best-of list for reasons we’ll discuss, but it’s a Star War with both vision and depth, one more or less worthy of the name.
In a move now standard for TV science fiction — Outer Range, Fallout, Foundation, and The Last of Us all did it in the last year and a half, off the top of my head, though the best example I can think of is the Zahn McClarnon showcase episode of Westworld — this is a standalone episode set in the past, allowing it to set its own terms and its own tone. Sci-fi shows, which in so many cases are all about establishing rules, tend to come alive when given the chance to break them.
In this case, we travel back to the origin of Osha and Mae, played here by twins Lauren and Leah Brady respectively. They do a fine job, but given that their older selves are both played by the same actor, casting fraternal rather than identical twins had me wondering if this had some story significance I was missing for a distractingly long time.
Anyway, Osha and Mae live on the remote, almost entirely uninhabited planet of Brendok, with a coven of Force witches that includes their mothers, Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Koril (Margarita Levieva). The latter, who appears to be a Dathomiri Nightsister if you’re hip to Star Wars mythology, bore the twins; the former “created” them in some apparently forbidden way. The mothers are divided on how strongly to discipline their children, especially the meek yet rebellious Osha.
For their part, the daughters are divided on how strongly to adhere to the ways of their mothers and the other witches, the only people they’ve ever known. This is an interesting dynamic given what we know of the twins’ future selves. Mae, the villain, isn’t the rebel; she’s the mama’s girl, the true believer, the religious conservative. Osha rebels not out of wildness, but out of self-knowledge; she knows she belongs out in the galaxy somewhere, not cooped up where the only other child she’s ever seen is her twin sister.
All this takes on an extra dimension when the four Jedi whom Mae will later hunt show up planetside, in search of rumored children receiving illicit Force training. (The witches call the Force “the Thread” and distrust the Jedi as lunatic monks or something to that effect.) On one hand, our instinct is to regard the interlopers as colonizers, imposing a foreign religion and luring children away from their heritage. On the other, our instinct is to regard the witches as puritans or cultists, restricting an intellectually and emotionally restless child to the ways that suit them, not her.
So which instinct should prevail? Are we right to recoil at the way Koril infantilizes Osha as incapable of knowing her own heart, forcing a belief system and future upon her that she doesn’t want? Or is she the lesser of two evils, when the alternative is a lifetime of service to a holy order that’s perfectly comfortable luring children away from their families for life?
Of course, there’s the added wrinkle of the long-running fannish debate about the nature and degree of the Jedi’s benevolence as rulers and space cops. Some of it is trolling, and some of it is intellectually overburdening what is essentially a children’s property, but some of it is a sincere attempt by fans of the setting to follow certain threads about Jedi teachings and practices to their logical endpoints. Whatever the case, many viewers will be bringing their preexisting feelings about the Force-wielding warrior-monks with them.
In story terms, the debate gets cut short by Mae, who goes berserk and tries to burn Osha to death rather than allow her to voluntarily leave the sisterhood. Mae’s repeated cries of “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?” at the nonconformist Osha will ring ugly in the ears of a lot of people who received similar treatment from their own families for whatever reason. However you feel about the Jedi, only one side here is trying to burn heretics at the stake.
While Sol is able to rescue Osha, Mae falls into a chasm, and the rest of the sisters are show mysteriously dead, even though there’s little sign of fire or smoke or debris or any other cause of death in the chamber where their bodies lie. My guess is the poison of the native bunta plant they keep talking about is involved, and that at least one of the four Jedi knew or knows something about it, but we’ll see.
While the script, by writers Jasmyne Flournoy and Eileen Shim, can occasionally slide into didacticism — “This isn’t about good or bad, this is about power, and who is allowed to use it” declaims Aniseya thuddingly at one point — that’s probably fair in a franchise governed by Yoda’s Yogi Berra-isms.
Far more impressive than any of the witches’ philosophizing is the multilayered nature of the conflict itself. It reminds me a bit of both Shōgun and The Wicker Man, which play similar head games with insider-outsider culture clashes. I’m much more interested in everyone involved now than I was before the episode started, that’s for sure. I could have done without the singing and the interpretive dance, but I’ll take a genuinely provocative question about orthodoxy and hegemony, absolutely. Turner-Smith works wonders with a concisely drawn character, and director Konogada creates moments of real majesty here and there as well. This Thread is pulling the show in the right direction.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
