How do you follow a glorious lightsaber battle?
Ideally, you say, “That’s a wrap,” roll credits, and go dark for a few years, minimum. The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith had the good sense to end 5–10 minutes after their respective climactic lightsaber duels did. Sure, they tied up a few loose ends after the last limbs were severed, but their brief denouements didn’t last long enough to kill viewers’ buzz. For all their flaws, each one went out on a high note (or the high ground).
The Acolyte learned a lot from the prequels, including how to take combat in some wizard directions that on-screen Star Wars hadn’t previously seen. But it hasn’t mastered those movies’ timing. The placement of last week’s set-piece-stacked fifth episode precluded a hilt-drop moment along prequel lines: The violence of the season highlight was showstopping, but because three episodes remained, the show couldn’t stop. Not completely, at least, although the series sometimes feels like it comes to a halt in this episode, which provides extra fodder for speculation but squanders some of the season’s momentum with two weeks to go.
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Much of Episode 6 is little but a tease—of Sol’s confession, of Osha’s vision, of Vernestra’s discovery, and, in a knowing act of abject cruelty to the internet, of Manny Jacinto’s bare butt. It’s one-third of a very strong installment—naturally, the part featuring Jacinto’s sexy, insouciant Sith—saddled with an idiot B plot and a snooze of a C plot that turn stretches of the episode into an exercise in implausibly, blatantly, and frustratingly stringing the audience along. Despite some intriguing allusions to lore, a clever callback to past pupil-master colloquies, and at least one legitimate laugh (which seems almost out of place in this mostly somber series), it’s all setup—and thus, something of a setback. TV viewers are often too quick to dismiss episodes as “filler,” but friends, that’s largely what this was. Hey, they can’t all be extra-long lightsaber battles.
Episode 6, written by Leslye Headland and Jocelyn Bioh and directed by Hanelle M. Culpepper, starts like Episode 5: with an unconscious Osha coming to and sitting up. That’s essentially where the similarities end; there’s no fighting this week, unless you count Osha wrestling with temptation or Bazil stomping on Mae’s foot. “Teach/Corrupt”—yes, with Mae and Osha separated and their roles reversed, we’re back to the naming convention of the first two episodes—picks up soon after the Jedi massacre on Khofar. Sol, accompanied by Mae, who’s masquerading as Osha, is trying to notify Coruscant about his team’s demise; Osha finds herself at the island base of the Stranger, a.k.a. Qimir, who starts full-frontal seducing her to the dark side; and Vernestra is attempting to fend off a Senate inquiry into Mae’s murders while investigating the fate of Sol’s non-Council-or-Senate-sanctioned expedition. Let’s dispense first with the latter two plotlines, about which there’s only so much to say.
The fundamental problem with “Teach/Corrupt” is that there’s nothing stopping Sol or the Stranger from informing Mae and Osha, respectively, of the deep, dark Jedi secret we’ve been waiting several weeks to learn. In universe, in fact, the time seems ripe for that reveal. But the broadcast schedule—and the series’ insistence on slicing up episodes in the most maximally cliff-hanger-y way—demands that they not do so yet, which forces The Acolyte’s creators to construct a series of story obstacles so contrived as to be almost meta.
It’s a stretch that Sol doesn’t notice that Mae isn’t his former Padawan (although he helpfully reminds us that he couldn’t tell that Qimir was a secret Sith, either). Bazil, whose physical senses divine what Sol’s Force senses don’t, takes his sweet time telling Sol that his companion is an imposter. Sol’s ship suffers a communications disruption (which in this instance does not mean invasion), which requires a system restart—for all intents and purposes, a literal stall for time. Just as Sol is about to report the Stranger’s attack (“There is a much larger threat than we anticipated”), the comms cut out. Just as he’s about to come clean to Osha (“You can tell me”), the comms come back on. Rinse and repeat until Sol tells her she’s going to listen, only for the episode to end.
Nor do we learn much more about Mae’s motivations, although they seem to shift by the episode anyway. However, there are a few aspects of this dalliance to pay attention to, aside from Lee Jung-jae’s usual gravitas. “I’ve had 16 years to think about what I would say to you if I ever got the opportunity,” Sol says to Mae, suggesting that he’s been lying to Osha and Vernestra about believing all along that Mae was dead. And Sol’s black gloves, which he wasn’t wearing back on Brendok—could his hands have been burned there in an incriminating way, and if so, might he soon be caught red-handed?—lend him a suitably sinister air. On a lighter note, Bazil brings Pip back to life, but Mae (kind of tragically, I guess, even though this scene is played for laughs) factory resets him, leading to the legitimately amusing sight of the droid sporting red eyes (à la C-3PO in Episode IX) as if he’s entered his Sith era.
That’s more than there is to recommend the Vernestra diversion, though I liked the fleeting look at decapitated corpses. Given that we know what went down on Khofar, I could’ve done without watching her and her Sith-saber-fodder recruits try to piece together the events of last week’s episode. (Granted, this assignment seems dangerous, but if Vernestra is perpetrating a cover-up, wouldn’t she want to take this trip alone? Maybe she just assumes the second batch of redshirts won’t last any longer than the first.) Between the not so compelling performances and the lack of suspense, let’s just say I’m not eager for a Force-sleuthing spinoff starring Vernestra and Mog, her Oxfordian sidekick. (Kudos on the non-Jedi-sounding name, though! His parents must’ve been Final Fantasy fans.)
The only purposes this distraction seems to serve are (a) including a rare Easter egg for the High Republic readers in the house about Vernestra’s past hyperspace visions, (b) setting the stage for a future confrontation between Vernestra and the Stranger, and, relatedly, (c) introducing Vernestra’s light whip, which looks suspiciously like it could have produced the whiplike scar on the Stranger’s back. Hmm! (Many umbramoths died to bring us this information, even though they were just chilling in their natural habitat before the Jedi dropped in and decimated them.) More on Vernestra and the Stranger in a moment.
At last, we arrive at the main event: quality time between Osha and the Stranger on the latter’s island hideout on an “unknown planet”—which, probably on purpose, looks like Luke Skywalker’s refuge on Ahch-To in The Last Jedi, complete with cute elephant birds in place of porgs and thala-sirens. In The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson turned around the Yoda–young Luke meet-cute on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back; in Jedi, Luke was the master, even more reluctant to train Rey than Yoda had been to train him. Here, the Stranger’s got a stew going, as Yoda did on Dagobah, and he hikes to gather provisions, as Luke did on Ahch-To. (Sadly, no animals are milked.) Those aren’t the only callbacks to classic Star Wars scenes; inside his kintsugi’d helmet, the Stranger tells Osha, “It’s just you and the Force, and what you bring with you,” echoing Yoda’s “Only what you take with you” from Empire. Then there’s the Stranger’s “Your anger betrays your thoughts,” an allusion to (and inversion of) any number of earlier lines.
In this latest remix of the training sequence from Empire, we see a dark side spin on those events—arguably for the first time on-screen. The closest we’ve come to this kind of arrangement is the scene in which then-Chancellor Palpatine tells Anakin about the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise (let’s put a pin in Plagueis for a second), but Palpy’s concern and affection are feigned. The Stranger seems more sincere than manipulative in his desire to help Osha find her way back to the Force—this time on her terms, not the Jedi’s. “Special relationship, isn’t it?” he asks. “Master and pupil?”
Pretty special, yes: How many pupils have their first substantive exchange with a would-be master while the master is skinny-dipping? And how many masters look like that? “If you’re not gonna join me, I’d like to put my clothes back on,” the Stranger says after Osha grasps his saber (tee-hee), at which point I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in horniness and were suddenly silenced. The way the water covers the Stranger from the shoulders down, coupled with Culpepper’s cuts as the director assiduously steers clear of the first nude scene in Star Wars … well, that’s the tragedy, not that tale about Plagueis. (As Obi-Wan once said, “I fear something terrible has happened.”) Why would the Stranger insist on clothing himself when, a little later on, he tells Osha, “When you lose everything, that’s when you’re finally free”?
Disney knows what it’s doing: It must be saving the explicit Stranger content for OnlyFans. Too bad Disney+ doesn’t play by HBO rules. Give the people what they want!
One can see how liberating the Stranger’s philosophy and desire for “freedom to wield my power the way I like” must sound to Osha (who’s dressed a little like Rey on Ahch-To). The Jedi were reluctant to admit her and had difficulty training her, ostensibly because of the loss she’d suffered. Years later, they had her arrested and put on a prison ship. “I could never accept death as a true Jedi should,” Osha lamented in Episode 4, adding, “I couldn’t accept what I’d lost.” Now, the Stranger is saying she should draw on that pain and attachment. What the Jedi described as a weakness, he’s reframing as a strength.
The Stranger and Osha have something in common: They’re both castoffs and rejects from the Jedi. Of course, that could just be what he wants her to think, but he has the massive scar to support his story. Perhaps you can’t trust the Sith … but in this story, you can’t trust the Jedi, either. And who’s to say the Stranger is a Sith? Although he’s conceded that the Jedi would call him that, he hasn’t applied that label to himself.
Jacinto plays all of this perfectly; you’d never know his character had just flicked Osha aside with a wave of his hand and callously slaughtered several people. He’s a casual killer—unarmed and disarming, and alternately menacing and personable, truthful and duplicitous. At first, Osha looks like she can’t decide whether to kill him or ask him to help her demonstrate “the power of two” on the nearby bed.
Speaking of which: “The power of two” is what the Stranger says he wants. (Sound familiar?) That could be a reference to the Rule of Two, the long-standing Sith policy of maintaining secrecy and preserving the potency of the dark side by restricting the Sith Lord count to two at a time—a master and an apprentice. But it might also refer to that policy’s antecedent, the Doctrine of the Dyad, a long-standing, fruitless attempt by Sith masters and apprentices to form Force bonds that would make them more powerful.
Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious tried to develop a dyad, as did Darth Sidious and Darth Vader. But they were all of them deceived, because the dyad was destined to be Ben Solo and Rey. Kylo’s commonalities with the Stranger continue to accumulate: the musical motif (which repeats in this week’s credits), the helmet (which, unlike Kylo, the Stranger can fix himself), the Force healing, the glimpse of chiseled chest and upper abs. Could the Stranger become the original Ren? Or is he just another misguided, aspiring Sith? Might Mae and Osha be a dyad after all? Would the two sisters, who both consider knifing their teachers/corrupters this week, be better off with the traditional “good” guy or “bad” guy, or neither? And what about the witches?
Whoever Osha’s mysterious frenemy is, he does drop another hint about his backstory. The Stranger, sounding like Obi-Wan in Episode IV, says that he was a Jedi “a long time ago … a really long time ago.” Yet he appears to be no older than Manny Jacinto.
This certainly sounds like Darth Plagueis’s handiwork; using the dark side, a “pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural,” Palpatine’s master could “keep the ones he cared about from dying.” (Remember how the Stranger healed Osha?) Could Vernestra, who’s more than a century old herself, have violently expelled Qimir from the order? And could Plagueis have taken him on as an apprentice before rejecting him, too? Or are the Stranger and Plagueis one and the same? (In the 2008 Legends book Darth Plagueis, the Sith lord mines a vein of cortosis on Bal’demnic, a planet that sounds like it could pass for the one we saw this week—and we saw such a vein this week.)
These questions, Jacinto’s performance, and the on-location beauty of the unidentified planet help paper over other problems. Problems like awkward editing, which rips us away from scenes just when they start to get good. Problems like awkward dialogue. (“His strength in the Force is very powerful,” Osha says.) Problems like pacing, which makes many of these episodes end abruptly; cliff-hangers like this don’t so much heighten my anticipation for the next episode as make me feel unfulfilled by the one I just watched. I’m not normally one to advocate for even shorter seasons, but some of these installments might have been better off combined (or binged).
Judging by the ending of this episode—and by next week’s director, Kogonada, who also helmed Episode 3—Episode 7 will likely take us back to Brendok in the past. Hopefully not for a full-length flashback, which would back-burner Osha’s burgeoning bond until the last episode of the season, but for long enough to expose Sol’s actions and set up a satisfying—if not final—finale. If this week was a post-lightsaber lull, next week could be buildup to a conclusion that makes the wait worthwhile. “It’s time to make things right,” Sol muses. “It’s time for me to face the High Council. To tell them everything.” It’s also time to tell us.
