STAR WARS WOW: THE ACOLYTE 104
My name is Jason Mendoza. Prepare to die.
We’re halfway through The Acolyte, and it’s time for some twists: The formal introduction of our villain; a change of heart in Mae; and the slow reawakening of Osha’s powers.
It’s also the point I’m getting less and less certain where this speeder is headed.
Let’s get into it.
Ooh before we do: For Pride Month I’ve knocked 30% off my Substack. Articles like this would normally be for subscribers only. So if you like what you’re reading…
Now here we go. And ALERT: SPOILERS ABOUND!
DARTH MENDOZA
The Acolyte ends with the not-so-sudden appearance of Mae’s master, who having just murdered Jedi Master Kelnacca is now going to take on a dozen Jedi.
He shows up wearing a mask. Which, sure, resonates with Star Wars lore (although since this takes place 100 years before Phantom Menace isn’t this the lore?). But where Anakin had to wear his mask to breathe—
—Yikes, Obi-Wan, try to soften the blow—
—and Kylo just wanted to be like his Grampa, this guy what, doesn’t want you to know who he is?
We all pretty much know it’s this guy, don’t we?
I mean, it’s probably not, right? Because that’s so obvious.
But he’s always around, he somehow is able to track a bunch of Jedi that really don’t want to be found, sometimes through super dangerous terrain, despite having no apparent abilities and acting like Gollum.
And as soon as Mae ties him up and heads to Kelnacca to turn herself in, oh, guess what, the master appears and kills him. It’s definitely him.
Also, can we talk about why his mask has teeth?
Like, do they serve some kind of purpose? Is “intense chewing” a heretofore forgotten Sith power? Or are they just here to signify, Oh, he crazy. Which I can understand, because this is so not scary.
Honestly, I have never spent more time distracted by a person’s hair. Get a trim, for God’s sake.
But it just seems a little EXTRA. A little WE NEED TO TELEGRAPH, THIS GUY IS A LOT. It’s very movie serial killer meets the Joker.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks cool. But the teeth, my dude. The teeth.
JEDI MASTER KELNACCA IS THE ACOLYTE’S DARTH MAUL, AND HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING
Over the course of the Star Wars saga, we’ve only had contact with one Wookie, really, Han’s life-partner/work-wife Chewbacca.
And if you surveyed fans, who is your favorite Star Wars character, I am going to bet that an awful lot of them are going to vote Chewbacca. (Actually someone did this some years ago, and Chewbacca came in 6th, ahead of both Vader and Obi-Wan, and only 3 percentage points from the top picks of Princess Leia/Yoda.)
Wookies are just cool. They’re like Bigfoot but with genius IQs and soulful. They only speak in their own tongue, and not because they can’t speak Galactic Basic, or whatever the Star Wars name for English is, but because Fuck you, really. They got Native pride.
Wookies are enormously cool, and yet we still don’t know much about them, because George Lucas thought it would be too scary to take us to a whole planet of them and made a Care Bear planet instead. And yes, I know, the Ewoks are supposedly cannibals, they’re much cooler than Care Bears. But did you see them eat a single person in Return of the Jedi? I did not.
Wookies are enormously cool, we still don’t know much about them, and The Acolyte actually made one a Jedi? That is the coolest of the cool. Yes, sir, please, sir, more, sir.
And instead, they kill him off-screen. Off-screen. You know who gets killed off-screen? Punks. Nobodies. This guy.
What, you think he lived through Revenge of the Sith? Please, my dude. He got got. And they had to keep it off-screen because they knew people would turn it into memes of rejoicing.
Jedi Master Kelnacca was a great idea. There was so much there to explore. And they just dropped him like a punk.
Look what you did, Star Wars. You made him sad.
I’M SO TIRED OF THE JEDI BEING ***HOLES
Io9, which has been doing sterling Acolyte coverage, had a great piece two weeks ago about Yond Fandar, the uptight pretty-boy Jedi who we all love to hate. James Whitbrook’s take is that he is pretty much the textbook Jedi at this point—rigid, cold, all about the appearances—and yet he’s also kind of delightful, because the show is constantly winking at just how uptight he is.
I definitely see the winking, and there is something funny about how ridiculous Yond is. But doesn’t everyone else seem like kind of an asshole too? This is the glory days of the Jedi, and yet most of them seem to be bullies who demand things and love a cover up.
Case in point this week was Vernestra Rwoh, who shows up in the middle of what seems like a Jedi Council meeting-ish; it’s actually not the High Council, but some lower level group of functionaries
Also, tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this guy—
—this guy from Phantom Menace?
That’s Ki-Adi-Mundi, who has apparently worked his way up from Jedi apparatchik in a control room in Acolyte to Jedi High Council member 100 years later, and STILL didn’t see the Sith coming. I wonder what happened to him.
Oh, wait.
So anyway, pre-dead Ki and his friends debate what to do about the Mae/Osha situation. And they’re honestly all pretty terrible—that same all business, fearful vibe we get from Yond. It’s literally impossible to believe these people ever have dinner together, or a drink.
And then Vernestra arrives and basically says Shut up, here’s what you’re going to do, and we’re not going to tell anyone because it would be a scandal.
The show isn’t defending her. No doubt she and everyone else here is going to get what’s coming to them.
But at this point it just feels so been there, done that. Oh, a bad Jedi? Really? Tell me more.
For anyone who’s read the High Republic books, which take place 100 years earlier than this, Rebecca Henderson and Leslye Headland’s take on Vernestra is also baffling. She’s a little intense in the series, but never rude in the way she is here. She’s actually kind of delightful.
Even Sol ends up once again being kind of gross. He only approaches Osha because he’s convinced Vernestra that he can use her to get to Mae. When they meet, Osha thinks maybe she’s being allowed back into the order. And the look on her face is so hopeful. And then she gets it: “You need me to get to Mae.” And she accepts it, but it’s pretty shitty.
THE FINAL LESSON
As they journey to Kelnacca’s home, Mae confides to Definitely Not a Sith, Just Handy to Have Around that killing a Jedi without a weapon is actually not a test, but her “final lesson.”
He says, ‘Your final lesson is one you teach yourself. You will kill a Jedi without a weapon. Attacking a defenseless person without a weapon goes against everything the Jedi stand for.’
How do you kill someone like that? Unarmed. It’s not a test. It’s impossible.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Is the idea that in facing a Jedi without a weapon and seeing them trying to kill her, she’s going to learn what hypocrites they are?
Except instead of focusing on that, her whole thing is once again about how impossible a job that is. Which is odd.
It’s also less and less clear to me what exactly her relationship with Sith-in-Mask is. She calls him her master, and he’s clearly been teaching her stuff. But she also says she’s made a deal with him and that killing the Jedi are part of that. But given the fact that she wants those Jedi dead, it doesn’t seem like that should be his part of the deal. And yet she says if she doesn’t kill them he’ll kill her, so I guess it is? But then what is the thing she gets out of all this?
With Darth Maul, Count Dooku, and Anakin, it was all pretty clear. Service for revenge. Service for power. Service for strength to overcome anything.
What is Mae getting for her service? And why does Osha being alive change that?
IS THIS A STORY ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?
I don’t want to see Jesus in a pancake—although sometimes I swear there’s something there.
But watching this episode I do have to say I was feeling a lot of familiar vibes. We’ve got quasi-religious figures who did something bad that involved children and their parents. We’ve got the then-cover up of whatever that was, plus now many years later a whole new cover up of what’s going on. “The High Council?” Vernestra asks when it’s suggested they should tell their superiors about what’s going on. “The High Council would be obliged to tell the Senate. A scandal like this would inspire fear and mistrust.”
That language of scandal and the mistrust it might engender is straight out of the Catholic Church child abuse playbook. It’s out of a lot of other playbooks, too, but it’s definitely prominent in the Church.
From my earliest days in the Jesuits, there were always some of us identifying with the Jedi. We didn’t have their powers—or did we?
But there was that same idea of a religious life lived in common, with an emphasis on serving others. There was also often an insistence on sending us out in pairs. The Jedi were sort the ideal version of us, all of our aspirations plus the Force.
Watching The Acolyte it seems like the interpretive flow, if you will, has reversed. Rather than Star Wars informing the Church, the story of the Church is being used to inform Star Wars.
I’m not opposed to that, but I can’t say that it’s making it any easier to watch.
I’ll be back next week!
I'm wondering when Yoda is going to make an appearance. He's only 800 years old at this time. He's in the twilight of his life, but he's got 100 years left where is he?