Now six episodes deep into the first season of Star Wars: The Acolyte, we’re getting close to the end now, with only two more to go. I’m not sure it feels like we’re actually that close to wrapping up this story, but that’s because we probably aren’t, really–they’ll want the main thread to keep going into Season 2, which makes sense. The Acolyte was not cheap.
In the meantime, though, we’re finally close to some answers. But we got basically nothing this week–like Episode 4 two weeks ago, this feels like the first half of an episode that was split in two. It’s full of promises of new info, but you’ll have to wait another week to hear them. It’s frustrating, but there’s still plenty of material to mull over here, and what we did get this week has sparked some questions I hadn’t expected to come up.
Warning: The rest of this article will be filled with spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte through Episode 6.
In this episode, we got three parallel stories. The main one is Qimir’s attempt to seduce Osha to the dark side of the Force at his familiar-but-mysterious remote base–there are major The Last Jedi vibes happening with this thread, but we’ll go into more detail about that later.
Beyond that we’ve also got Master Sol and Mae on Sol’s ship, with Mae pretending to be Osha–there’s a lot of wheel-spinning in this part of the episode, and it’s mostly not relevant. But every time Lee Jung-jae, who plays Sol, is on screen, The Acolyte is so riveting. There’s a shot near the start of the episode that’s just a 30-second close-up on Lee’s face while he brings under control his intense emotional response to the deaths of his friends. It’s a powerful, and exceptionally human moment, and one that tells us more about who Sol is than anything we’ve previously seen. Is Lee Jung-jae giving the best live-action Star Wars performance ever? I think he might just be.
And lastly, we’ve got the new adventures of Master Vernestra, the high-ranking Jedi who sent Sol and his team on the disastrous mission to Khofar. She is informed of Sol’s garbled distress signal and decides to personally try to deal with it by flying to Khofar herself to figure out what happened. They just miss Sol, who decides to fly somewhere with Mae after he realizes she was pretending to be Osha.
Just when it feels like things are getting started, though, with Sol sitting down with a rerstrained Mae to tell her the story of what happened to her coven all those years before, the episode ends. But there’s still a lot to consider. So let’s do that.
Qimir and Osha are doing a reverse-The Last Jedi
Our resident Sith, Qimir, has set up his home base in a place that looks exactly like Ahch-To, the ocean planet that Luke Skywalker was hiding out on during The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. I don’t know if this is literally Ahch-To or just a place that looks like it, but for now it’s the thematic parallels that matter more. Specifically, that this whole sequence with Qimir and Osha, in which Qimir is doing his best pitch to try to get her to become his new acolyte, is a reversal of Luke Skywalker’s interactions with Rey in The Last Jedi. In the film, Rey shows up unsolicited, asking to be trained, and Luke resists–on this show, Qimir brings Osha here against her will, and Osha resists Qimir’s attempts to convice her to train.
While the thematic reasons for using this location are pretty obvious, I’m not sure there’s any plot significance to it. Even if this is actually Ahch-To, it’s a planet that’s been lost to the galaxy–this is not a high-traffic area, and Qimir might have been the last person to live there before Luke moved in a century and change later.
The deposits of cortosis ore could be a clue about the true identity of this planet, though, since there are a few different planets where it’s been found, both in the current
Qimir paraphrases Tyler Durden from Fight Club
As part of his seduction attempt on Osha, Qimir expresses a familiar sentiment: “When you lose everything, that’s when you’re finally free.” It’s not a quote, but it’s certainly a paraphrase of a line that Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, had dropped in Fight Club–“It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.” This is not really a new philosophical idea, of course, but the similarity in phrasing and framing is amusingly uncanny.
Master Vernestra’s personal stake
Vernestra, a mirialan who has appeared as a supporting character in the High Republic novels, had seemed like a fairly standard Jedi boss character, but this week she stepped out of the Jedi temple and decided to get involved. But it doesn’t seem to be just because Master Sol’s situation is dire and Vernestra sent him on that mission. She’s got some personal reason for doing so.
Vernestra’s increased involvement is significant, because this is a character from the High Republic books and comics. Those books have no plot connection to The Acolyte, because they’re set more than a century earlier, when Vernestra was a fresh new Jedi, but the use of a character like that as more than just a cameo feels like it could be significant. Also, if Qimir had been her student, her advanced age would provide a pretty large window of time for that to have happened. And with this show sort of establishing that Jedi frequently live much longer than they should, it’s probably safe to assume that Qimir is much older than he looks.
Especially when we take into account her lightwhip, which she briefly uses near the end of this episode, which is a potential clue about the next item.
Was Vernestra Qimir’s master?
We get a good look at some gnarly curved scars on Qimir’s back this week, with Qimir implying he’d been betrayed by an authority figure at some point in his past. He also said that he had trained to be a Jedi “a really long time ago.” Between the sight of Qimir’s scars and that lightwhip, it’s natural to infer both that Vernestra was his master or friend when he was in the Jedi Order, and that the scars on his back look like they could have come from her lightwhip — and maybe she was the one who trained him in the dark side, too. But that seems too easy, and I’m not sure Vernestra’s characterization in the books or the show support this idea. Vernestra could be a massive red herring–lightwhips were popular among the Nightsisters of Dathomir, for example, so even though Mae and Osha’s coven was its own separate group, it wouldn’t be that shocking if, say, Mother Koril or Mother Aniseya had one.
Whatever’s going on with his scars, I’m expcting a classic Star Wars “from a certain point of view” thing to happen here.
Using the Force to sense the past
Vernestra and her pals visit the site of the battle between Qimir and the Jedi, and theyr’e able to broadly sense what happened there seemingly just by looking at it. But the truth is more like they’re reading the emotional aura of the scene. A battle like that is fueled by powerful emotion, and those emotions leave a sort of residual imprint in the Force that the Jedi are able to sense.
Qimir wants the Power of Two
Osha asks Qimir why he brought her to his home, and he tells her that he wants “the Power of Two.” On the one hand, this may be just a Sith thing, what with their “rule of two” restricting their numbers–this could be Qimir saying he wants to carry on the current tradition of the Sith. But “the power of two” was part of the Coven’s chant during Mae and Osha’s ceremony. “The power of one. The power of two. The power of many.” We don’t know what any of that means yet, however, but “the power of two” is very specific phrasing.
Qimir’s helmet is a sensory deprivation device
A Jedi Master having trainees do stuff without the aid of their physical senses is a concept that goes all the way back to the first Star Wars movie when Obi-Wan taught Luke Skywalker to detect the Force that way. Qimir takes that idea all the way with his cortosis helmet, which blocks his vision and hearing–making the Force itself his primary means of sensing the universe during battle. Combined with his very controlled demeanor this week, this helmet makes Qimir seem far more balanced and in tune with the Force than the Jedi are. It’s not too difficult to see the theoretical appeal of that for Osha after all she’s been through.