Star Wars The Acolyte

Cafe Society
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241

My thoughts are, it’s not that it’s physically hard to kill someone using just the Force alone, it’s that it’s mentally hard to do so. Using the Force in a specific way requires an act of will, you have to choose to kill the person. But even a lightsaber is still a physical object, and it’s possible to kill someone by accident, or in a brief fit of rage. A moment of confusion in a big fight, and “Ooops! Didn’t mean to do that…”, and someone is dead.

But we saw how long it took to Force Choke Sol. She had a long, long time to decide if she really wanted to do that.

242

I feel like I should call up my family (which includes many kids who are huge Star Wars fans), and say “Ummm, this one gets really dark…”

(I can just hear the youngest one: “Cool, it’s got twins, like Parent Trap, and they… oh… wait… but in the end the good guys’ll win, and… wait, WHAT? MMMMMOM!!!”)

243

I feel like Osha was just going to say “I’m crushing your head!!”…but got carried away.

244

Now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, here are my thoughts on the show overall: It had some high points:
-Sol
-Qimir
-Light Saber choreography
-In broad strokes, the setup for the plot/mystery

But too much else was a muddled mess. I found it impossible to figure out people’s motivations, and many of the “revelations” were underwhelming.

As an example, at a climactic emotional moment, Osha demands that Sol confess to killing her mother. And he does. But then instead of saying “things were so confused, she was turning into a shadow monster, I thought I was protecting you, I’m so sorry” he starts going on and on about the vergence and how they were one person not two and how he as trying to protect her. Or something. Which just highlights how unsatisfying so much of the story is, due to lack of context. What is a vergence? What would finding one mean? Does anyone ever go back to Brendock and keep looking for it? Why would the “truth” about Osha and Mae coming out matter?

Similarly, why is this coverup so important? Why does Vernestra think that “a jedi master went rogue and killed a bunch of people” is a more palatable cover story than “a mysterious baddie killed a bunch of people”?

And why couldn’t Mae go with Osha and Qimir at the end? And how would they “use her” to find them? Did she know where Qimir’s planet is? If so, couldn’t he just mindwipe that? Also, mindwiping? Since when?

(Note, by the way, that for all of the above, I’m not really asking anyone to answer them. I’m sure answers can be thought of. I’m just saying that I didn’t think the answers were provided in a particularly satisfying way in what we actually saw on screen.)

And while it’s certainly possible to come up with a plausible explanation for how a seemingly stone fortress could catch fire, it’s an odd choice to include that in the rashomon part of the story. The first time we see that, we see it from Osha’s perspective, in which she think she seems Mae start a fire, and then later on everything is burned. It’s just inviting us to assume that in fact something else is what really happened. Just seems like a careless and unsatisfying mislead.

Overall, I give it a D+. That said, I liked the good parts enough I’ll probably watch a season 2 if there is one.

245

I agree with all your points, but they didn’t bother me as much, so I give it a B-.

246

It’s a term that was originally used by Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace, to describe Anakin, who was, according to Anakin’s mother Shmi, born despite the fact that there was no father (in other words, effectively, a “virgin birth”). There was no further definition of it given in that movie, but the assumption I had back then was that it meant (more or less) a concentration of the Force.

247

I figure a Vergence is kind of like a meeting point of Ley Lines or similar.

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If it helps, showrunner Leslye Headland has said that she was inspired by Knights of the Old Republic (which is considered a classic in the Star Wars video game universe), and mindwiping plays a big role in that storyline. And KotOR takes place before the events of the show.

They both take place in the extended universe, though maybe not quite the same continuity. But it’s not an unheard of ability in the full Star Wars lore.

ETA: to be clear, according to Wookiepedia, Knights of the Old Republic takes place almost 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin. The Acolyte takes place about 160 years before that battle.

249

Hell, I don’t understand Sol. He meets this little girl twice and becomes so obsessed with her and with ripping her away from her home and family that he recklessly starts a chain of events that leads to the death of everyone she loves - for which he feels absolutely zero regrets - and then, a few years later, when she drops out of Jedi training, he’s just, “Buh-bye, now! Have a good life!” Nothing about him makes sense.

250

I believe he was reckless in an effort to get both of them, so he could prove there was a vergence. Once Mae was gone, that plan failed, but he could still help Osha, despite the fact that she was “too old” to be trained as a Jedi.

WRT the coverup, I suspect the value of blaming Sol is that Sol is dead. If you blame Darth Mendoza, people will keep asking questions.

251

That’s possible. If so, the show did a very poor job showing us why this “vergence” was important or dangerous, and what its implications were. Based purely on what we saw, Vernestra was telling the truth: Sol was a crazy person who got a whole bunch of people killed for no reason.

252

Did we ever find out what the witch mom was doing when she turned into a smoke monster and was turning Mae into smoke? Or the significance of creating the twins?

Also “I was going to let Osha go” sounds like a crazy lie you hear drunks say before they go to jail.

Sure you were.

253

Sol: “Jecki!!”
Stranger: “was that it’s name?”
Sol: “she was a child!”
Stranger: “…you brought her”

This has to be my favorite lines in any Star Wars property. You brought a child on a mission that you felt required at least half a dozen full Jedi, what did you think would happen?

254

What an absolute mess of a season/series. There’s so much to like here (truly epic and amazing lightsaber battles, a decent attempt at making a series feel like Star Wars, a pretty good villain), yet soo much to dislike (terrible dialogue, irrational behavior from too many characters, god-awful pacing).

Sol started out as an interesting character played by an adequate actor. But nothing he did or said in the last episode made any sense whatsoever. He spent 5 minutes of screen time just screaming “MAE!!!” What the hell was that?!

Mae/Osha is an interesting character idea. But they spent so much time with the witches, setting up the coven as this big plot driver, and then…they all just fell over, never to be seen again. Maybe they’ll show up in Season 2 (if there is one), but it was a missed opportunity to not make it culminate into something for this season’s finale. Let’s see a 3-way battle between Sol, Jacinto and a witch or two.

That tracking badger was the worst red herring ever. They followed him tracking Mae throughout the spaceship, and he didn’t do a single thing. He disabled the ship, and gave no reason whatsoever. Was it an attempt to distract the viewer from something? I dunno - it just seemed pointless.

Ugh.

255

He disabled the ship until he could tell Sol that it was Mae, who then stunned her. It made perfect sense to me.

256

Sol knew it was Mae since she had been restrained - he had a whole conversation with her about how he “knew you and Osha were not twins”.

During the chase, the badger disabled the ship, said something that wasn’t subtitled, Sol didn’t even acknowledge anything, and the ship landed. Badger didn’t serve any purpose at all.

257

You are confused, she was not restrained until after Sol stunned her. When Bazil disabled the ship he still thought it was Osha, which is why he expected her to be the one to fix the ship since Osha was a mechanic.

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I haven’t said anything that contradicts this.

Now I’m confused. Bazil literally doesn’t appear the rest of the series after he disables the ship.

259

You can see him standing behind Sol after he stuns Mae. The sequence of events is Sol takes Mae into the ship thinking it’s Osha, Bazil smells her out and disables the ship, Mae comes back into the cockpit, Sol stuns her after Bazil lets him know its not Osha, She wakes up restrained. It made perfect sense.

260

I’m talking about the events of episode 8, when Mae escapes from her restraints, hops into the escape pod, Sol chases her through the planet rings, and Bazil disables the ship. Sol stuns her in episode 7.

(And a self-correction: Bazil appears briefly later in episode 8 to show the young Jedi knights where Mae is.)