STAR WARS WOW: THE ACOLYTE 101-102 is PHANTOM MENACE'S PHANTOM MENACE

New droids, new fight ideas and more sad Jedi in Disney+'s new Star Wars series.

Star Wars’ bold new experiment The Acolyte, a series set 100 years before the Skywalker Saga, with a whole new set of characters, just dropped its first two episodes.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, one of the intriguing things about the Star Wars universe is the way each story becomes a building block that the next stories build on not just in terms of story but genre and tone. The Acolyte has been described as a murder mystery, with someone hunting Jedi. Two episodes in it’s pretty clear what it’s drawing on, as well as a couple pretty big questions.

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Uh-Oh: It’s Twins.

The Acolyte may say it’s a whole new saga, but within the first episode we discover that at its heart are a pair of Force-sensitive twins, Osha and Mae. As in the original saga, they were separated—though at an older age than Luke and Leia.

But this time one got trained by the Jedi and one got trained by some kind of evil Force user. So rather than something totally new, we’ve got a new riff on an old concept, a very Star Wars thing to do.

Speaking of which…

Do the Jedi Have to Suck?