“The Acolyte” finally reveals his true villain in a stunning episode

Last night we got a full flashback episode of The Acolyte, a retelling of the events of episode 3 that saw Osha being recruited by the Jedi while her jealous sister started a fire that ended up killing everyone in the cove, including her parents.

Well, it turns out that things didn’t quite turn out that way, as it has been vividly seen so far, but the way This unfolding was still extremely impressively orchestrated, painting Sol as a noble…evil.

At first, I wondered if the idea was that the whole Episode 3’s story was bogus with the Jedi going rogue and full attacking the base and slaughtering everyone and literally wiping Osa out to forget about it. That didn’t happen either, but the truth was still deeply disturbing.

• From the beginning, Sol just gets “power doses” that Osha is meant to be his padawan and wants to leave the coven.
• Sol considers the coven “dangerous” due to its non-traditional use of violence, but in reality he sees nothing to indicate the girls are in any real danger. She thinks Osha is in trouble because she apparently refused her sister’s mark, but she really has no idea how this society works, and in episode 3, we saw that they have a tough but loving set of parents. And even then Mother Aniseya it was i’ll let her become a jedi in the end.
• Padawan Torbin acts entirely selfishly, as soon as he realizes the rare nature of the split-consciousness twins, he immediately rushes to steal them to get a ticket back to Coruscant.
• Sol, intent on stopping him, does the opposite, invading the base next to him. This results in a fight where Sol kills Aniseya’s mother as she uses magic she doesn’t understand. Mother Koril, understandably enraged, uses magic along with the rest of the orc to obtain Kelnacca. Master Indara frees him from it using the force. Some say it killed the entire Coven, but I think it’s more likely that it hit them and the fire killed them while they were unconscious. I’m still not sure what happened to Mother Koril. There are implications that she or the other witches are still in Kelnacca’s head, given that he draws the spiral on the walls of his house.

• The fire is revealed to be a complete and total accident. Mae didn’t set the fire on purpose, which we didn’t see in episode 3, she was just trying to burn Osha’s Jedi doodles. But it got out of control very quickly, and the instrument wasn’t there to turn it off because…they were fighting the invading Jedi.
• Then at one point Sol is literally given the choice between saving Mei and Osa, and she chooses Osa as the one she thinks is the “good guy” and leaves Mei to possibly die.
• He never tells Osa this, and instead simplifies the story by erasing any Jedi misdeeds. Mei lit a fire, everyone died. I’ve seen some people question why Mae said she wanted to know everything when she was present for everything, including seeing her mother killed. But I think people are missing the point that she didn’t know the Jedi had never told Osa anything like that and just blamed her for the fire. That’s why she was so confused when she was reunited with Osha.
• The only one mostly on the right here is Master Indara, who reacted appropriately, telling Sol that he was letting emotions cloud his judgment, understanding that the girls were strong but abiding by the Council’s decision to leave them alone. . If they had just listened to her and left, none of this would have happened.

I’m getting a lot of Qui-Gon parallels here from the prequels where he believed he was doing the right thing and “saved” Anakin’s miracle power and trained him even though he was very old. But what Sol did here is worse. Anakin, at least, lived as a to the letter the slave and his mother were desperate for him to leave. Anakin naturally became the most dangerous Sith alive, but his turn was ultimately his choice and the result of continued corruption, even if Qui-Gon initially set events in motion. Again, I really think what Sol did here was worse, especially since, you know, it involved slaughtering dozens of innocent people to end up “saving” a girl who didn’t even need to be saved.

I’ve stopped “messing” with The Acolyte as the last three episodes have established that this show is doing something truly impressive in the Star Wars universe, whatever stupid feuds arise with toxic fans in any given week. But with one more episode to go, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to demand a season 2, I’m just not sure it’s going to get. But I hope it does, as this is the most interesting look at the Jedi and the force we’ve had in the entire current era.

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