‘The Acolyte’ Episodes 1 and 2 Recap: The More ‘Star Wars’ Changes, the More It Stays the Same

Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi walk into a cantina on Tatooine, looking for passage to Alderaan. Din Djarin walks into a cantina on the ice planet Pagodon, looking for a Mythrol man with a price on his head. Cassian Andor walks into a cantina—OK, a combination cantina and brothel—on Morlana One, looking for his long-lost sister.

A man (or a woman) walks into a bar: This is the setup for numerous jokes. It’s also the setup for numerous Star Wars stories—including the latest, The Acolyte, which launched with a two-part premiere on Tuesday. In the first scene of the first episode, “Lost/Found,” which was written and directed by series creator Leslye Headland, presumed Sith acolyte Mae Aniseya (Amandla Stenberg) walks into a cantina on Ueda, looking for Master Indara, one of four Jedi she’s trying to kill.

The structure of this opening is one way in which The Acolyte feels familiar, but it’s far from the only traditional Star Wars signifier on display. Consider the pan down to Ueda after the introductory text and the wipes and irises in and out to transition between scenes. And the music by Michael Abels, which hews closer to the orchestral template John Williams established for the franchise than, say, the synthy scores Ludwig Goransson and Nicholas Britell wrote for The Mandalorian and Andor, respectively. And the master-and-apprentice hook at the heart of the story. And the cute droid sidekick. And the fact that a character says, “I have a bad feeling about this” (and, moments later, references a trap). And, of course, the Jedi presence, the Sith threat, and the sight of a whole lot of lightsabers. (Mae’s question on Ueda, “Where’s your Jedi?,” is an efficient way to convey that we’re a long way away from Order 66: Jedi are plentiful and easy to find.) The Acolyte’s writers room included someone who hadn’t seen Star Wars, but Andor it is not. The Acolyte was created by a self-professed fan of the franchise, and it shows.

That a Star Wars series looks and sounds like Star Wars is notable only because The Acolyte does deviate from the franchise’s formula in a few significant respects. Most obviously, the series breaks out of the box of the Skywalker saga, which has confined most Star Wars storytelling to a span of less than 70 years (with an emphasis on the first half of that period). By virtue of its setting, it can be a little less constrained in its scope, and perhaps slightly less self-referential, than the previous series that have graced and/or darkened Disney+. It’s also the most diverse Star Wars release yet, in terms of the talent both behind and in front of the camera.

Let’s not exaggerate how far from home base the narrative of this series strays: This is still, in essence, a prequel to the prequels. (Early in the first episode, a Jedi master and apprentice board a Trade Federation ship and encounter a couple of cagey Neimoidians—though they don’t have to take on any droidekas.) Plus, Star Wars technology, design, and fashion advance only so much in the century between The Acolyte and The Phantom Menace. But if The Acolyte’s concept isn’t quite as temporally audacious as James Mangold and Beau Willimon’s movie about the dawn of the Jedi, it’s still a step off the beaten path—and thus an important proof of concept for scripted, on-screen Star Wars.

The Acolyte’s spot on the Star Wars timeline—roughly as far removed from the Nihil conflict documented in Lucasfilm’s ongoing The High Republic publishing bonanza as it is from George Lucas’s prequels—also makes it the first live-action Star Wars project that doesn’t take place during or immediately preceding or following a, well, war. This is peacetime Star Wars, albeit with some menacing presentiments. Which isn’t to say that there’s no fighting. Given how long Star Wars has cribbed from Akira Kurosawa and samurai films—The Acolyte is no exception—it’s well past time for Star Wars to meet martial arts in earnest. (With all due respect to Ray Park’s wushu/kung fu choreography for Darth Maul.)

That meeting occurs soon after Mae meets Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss). The scant footage featuring Moss in The Acolyte’s trailer fueled speculation that her character wouldn’t live long, and she sure doesn’t. Moss spent weeks training for her “Trinity with a lightsaber” fight scene, but her role wraps up in a few minutes, barring flashbacks later in the eight-episode season.

The lightsaber itself doesn’t play a very prominent part in the duel; this is “Force fu” in action, and it’s overdue. If anything, it’s surprising that more Force users don’t fight this way. True power, perhaps, is not needing a lightsaber, whether because you can defuse standoffs nonviolently—a Jedi’s goal—or because your mastery of the Force is such that your saber becomes an optional accessory (like Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi, Emperor Palpatine in the original trilogy, or, on the light side, Luke in The Last Jedi). When Anakin Skywalker disarms Obi-Wan in a flashback training scene in Obi-Wan Kenobi, he thinks that ends the fight: “Your weapon’s gone. It’s over.” But Kenobi doesn’t need a laser sword to best his impetuous pupil. As Vader—himself a technological terror—later warns the Imperial brass, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” Maybe it also pays not to be too proud of an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

Also, fighting sans sabers looks cool.

Mae seems to be using the “2x Throwing Knives” cheat from GoldenEye 007, but the Mae-Indara duel comes down to tactics and surprise, not superior weaponry. “Is the dark side stronger?” Luke asks Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. A little too quickly, Yoda insists it’s not. Regardless of its strength, though, the dark side definitely plays dirty. The Jedi generally don’t, and the Sith (like the Nihil) have no compunctions about exploiting the light siders’ compassion. Mae bests Indara by forcing the Jedi to save the bartender’s life, thereby forfeiting her own. Granted, Indara certainly seems strong enough to use Force stasis on two knives at once, but she appears blindsided by Mae’s underhanded, no-holds-barred approach. Maybe that’s because she hasn’t been tested by a foe such as this. The Jedi who aren’t old enough to remember the Nihil—like Master Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson), the 100-something-year-old Mirialan who was a young Jedi during that earlier High Republic crisis—are sweet summer children, unprepared to face the Sith they believe to be extinct.

Before the combat began, Mae was full of fighting words, including a catchphrase that makes her sound like Tommy Pham after a play at the plate: Attack me with all your strength. When the battle ends, she doesn’t gloat or linger over her victim’s body; could that be a hint of conflict flitting across her face? (That she takes pity on the bartender for the sake of his cute, Muppet-looking kid suggests that, yes, there is still good in her.) Rather than claim Indara’s Jedi weapon as a trophy, à la General Grievous, she leaves the hilt where it lies. As she sees it, she’s just dispensing justice. Plus, her next challenge, it seems, requires killing without a weapon.

After Indara’s demise, The Acolyte introduces us to the yin to Mae’s yang, her twin sister, Osha. (Not that one.) At first, the show indulges in misdirection: Like the Jedi (save for Osha’s former master, Sol), we don’t know that there is another Aniseya, so it seems as if Osha really might be the murderer. Osha, we soon learn, is a “meknek”—if you want to sci-fi-ify a word, just alter its spelling—who handles the perilous repairs we’re used to seeing droids do. She works for the Corporate Sector, which is “about as far away from Coruscant as you can get”—shades of Luke’s line about Tatooine when his call to adventure comes. But she has a phobia of fire (which seems like a liability in her line of work), and we soon find out why, thanks to some clutch exposition delivered very conveniently by Jedi knight Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett). Don’t you just love it when a character who already knows another character nonetheless recounts the latter’s whole history to her while we listen along?

Osha is a former Padawan who left the order six years ago. We don’t know why, exactly, but Osha explains that it was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done” and “my decision, no one else’s.” (Ahsoka Tano could relate.) She barely got into the order to begin with: She was accepted, with some reservations, after her mothers, sister (or so she thinks), and village perished in a fire on her homeworld of Brendok a decade before her Padawan departure. (That explains the fire phobia.) What with the grief she felt because of the attachments she’d formed by the typically too-old-for-entry age of 8, she had a tough time as a trainee. She seems to be doing a good deal better away from the order. One wonders how Anakin—who became a Padawan under similar circumstances—would have done had he been free to tinker with droids on his own instead of being saddled with the weight of bringing balance to the Force.

There seems to be some history between Osha and Yord, though the nature of their former relationship isn’t completely clear. (If there’s one thing The High Republic has proved, it’s that Padawans often fool around before they get serious about their Jedi vows—and that Anakin isn’t alone in forming, um, attachments after being knighted.) Whatever went on between them, the by-the-book, regulations-citing Yord—who’s rocking the Killmonger cut, as is every video game character these days—does his duty and takes Osha into custody after the bartender IDs her as the murderer.

The next step is transporting her to Coruscant on a prison ship—and if The Mandalorian taught us anything, it’s that prison ships are easily escaped. Osha doesn’t participate in the prison break—she has faith in the Jedi, even after her arrest—but the Force seems to be with her. Although the other prisoners, including the one she frees from an Alien-esque-parasite-induced stupor, steal the escape pods (that’s what Osha gets for doing a good deed), she survives the ship’s uncontrolled reentry and crash landing on the frigid planet Carlac. Who needs pilots? (Especially when the pilot’s seat is on fire and you’re afraid of flames.)

Osha’s moral code clearly aligns with the Jedi’s, whether as an artifact of her training or because she’s always been the “good twin,” a requisite component of the evil twin trope. (Osha’s sister is believed to have started the fateful fire.) But she doesn’t seem to have retained much of her training: She’s unable to Force pull her Pip droid a few feet, and when the second escape pod is stolen, she utters a very un-Jedi-like scream of frustration. Maybe she’s just rusty, but her sister’s skills seem to have far surpassed her own.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Jedi are kind of complacent and arrogant, a theme of not only the prequels, but also much of the High Republic storytelling set a century earlier. Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) fails to recognize a warning from the mouths of younglings when a kid in his crèche, in response to a 101-level prompt about sensing the Force, follows everyday answers like “life” and “balance” with “I see fire. It grows larger. It consumes anything that tries to stop it.” (That kid either has a high midi-chlorian count or is a Sith acolyte in waiting—or possibly both.) Yord and Sol initially dismiss the idea that Mae might be alive. (Sol says he saw her die, but, hey, Darth Maul and Asajj Ventress were also supposed to be dead.) Only later do they accept that she “must have survived somehow.” (Somehow, Mae returned!) Yord also confidently declares that “no one could have survived” the crash on Carlac and attributes signs of activity to scavengers. At the Temple, Master Sol likens the Force to “a great ocean,” and these Jedi are out of their depth.

(Also, let’s be real: Those High Republic–era cloaks, later abandoned for brown, cream, and tan, are kinda dorky, befitting an order whose members, in the High Republic books and comics, constantly spout sincere but corny slogans like “We are all the Republic!” and “For light and life!” No wonder Yord strips down to flash his physique.)

Master Vernestra, who needlessly but relatably waves her hand to open the door to Sol’s classroom with the Force (just like you, me, and Ewan McGregor), reluctantly lets Sol spearhead the murder investigation. The Jedi are supposed to serve the Force, but as in the prequels, they’re tightly intertwined with the Republic, and Vernestra knows that the circumstances of Indara’s death present an optics problem. “If it were to become public that a former Jedi killed one of our own …” she starts, and Sol finishes: “… our political enemies could use it against us.”

Sol is driven less by political calculations than by concern for his former student, whose exit from the order he blames partly on himself. On Carlac, the two have a tender reunion—after Sol saves Osha from a would-be fatal fall—followed by a shipboard heart-to-heart catch-up convo. Also along for the ride are Yord and Sol’s current Padawan, the Theelin-human hybrid named Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen), who looks a little like Aladdin Sane. Jeckie questions Sol’s affection for Osha—he even has a holo of her—but Sol, who doesn’t deal in absolutes, explains that attachment sometimes serves a purpose, observing, “Our memories are lessons.”

At the end of the first episode, Osha’s memories surface—or maybe what she sees is akin to telepathy, a dyad, or a vision. In this nebulous state, she’s transported back to Brendok and regresses to the age she and Mae were when disaster struck. Facing each other, the sisters recite a rhyme remembered from childhood:

You are with me, I am with you
Always one, but born as two
As above sits the stars and below lies the sea
I give you you, and you give me me

It would sound sweet if it weren’t so unsettling. Any sign of sisterly rapprochement evaporates when Mae’s eyes turn dark and she declares, “I will kill them all.” Osha, not for the first time in the episode, wakes up panting from the disturbing dream.

If she could see it, the episode’s last shot would disturb her more. In this abrupt kicker, Mae glimpses an armored, helmeted figure who ignites a red lightsaber. “The Jedi live in a dream,” the Sith says via voice-over. “A dream they believe everyone shares. If you attack a Jedi with a weapon, you will fail. Steel or laser are no threat to them. But an acolyte—an acolyte kills without a weapon. An acolyte kills the dream.”

In Star Wars lore, a Sith “acolyte” is usually an apprentice to an apprentice—a sort of assistant to the regional Sith lord, a junior disciple who exists beyond the binary of the Rule of Two. The saber seems to mark this cipher as someone more senior than an acolyte—a master Mae reports to. But is it the master, or the apprentice? And if it’s not the master, who might be? Palpatine’s predecessor, the likely long-lived Darth Plagueis? Plagueis’s predecessor, Darth Tenebrous? Or is this some heretofore unsuspected Sith offshoot?

Unsurprisingly, the slightly shorter second episode (“Revenge/Justice,” also directed by Headland but cowritten by Jason Micallef and Charmaine DeGraté) answers none of these questions. Having received a hot tip about a sighting of a hooded intruder at the Jedi Temple on Olega, the quartet travels to the building, which Mae infiltrated only to be thwarted in her attempt to cross off another name from her Arya Stark–style revenge list. This time, her target is Master Torbin, who’s been meditatin’ and levitatin’ for 10-plus years, in an apparently fruitless attempt to cleanse a guilty conscience.

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Not only has Torbin taken a vow of silence, but he’s surrounded himself with an unbreachable Force barrier. Mae can’t kick, punch, or knife her way past it, so instead, she visits an accomplice named Qimir (Manny Jacinto), whom the official Star Wars site describes as “a former smuggler who now makes his living as a trader, procuring unusual things and enjoying a life of leisure.” In this case, Qimir has “replaced” the local apothecary, and the unusual thing he procures is a poison called bunta, which is used for hunting back on Brendok. The “life of leisure” part may be true—Qimir tied one on while waiting for Mae—but there’s more to Qimir than meets the eye, judging by his rhetoric and references to an unnamed master. “The Jedi justify their galactic dominance in the name of peace,” he says, going on to invoke the first line of the Code of the Sith: “Peace is a lie.” Yeah, this fella’s no simple smuggler.

Nor is Qimir wrong about Torbin when he tells Mae, “Like every Jedi, he only thinks he’s found peace. What he really needs is something only you can give him: absolution.” When Mae returns to the Temple—in another indication of Jedi overconfidence, security isn’t tight—she proffers the poison to a more talkative Torbin. “Confess your crime to the Jedi Council,” she says, “or receive the forgiveness you seek.” Torbin opts to exit like Socrates, so the crime must be pretty bad. “Forgive me,” he says, one eye blinded by an old slash wound that left a scar. “We thought we were doing the right thing.”

After Torbin joins Indara in becoming one with the Force—if that’s the fate of Jedi who may have behaved badly—she has two more monks to take down: a Wookiee named Kelnacca on the Outer Rim forest planet of Khofar and Sol himself. The four have something in common: They were the Jedi stationed on Brendok when most of Mae’s family died. Mae was blamed for the fire, while Sol was hailed for helping save Osha. But Mae has her own side of the story, which is where The Acolyte’s Rashomon roots come in.

We haven’t heard her version yet, but she does get a crack at killing Sol before the episode ends. He easily pickpockets more of her knives, which is just as well; she has to kill him or Kelnacca without a weapon to please her master anyway, and no one wants to fight a Wookiee hand to hand. In the isolated square, there are no civilians to distract Sol with, and he backs her into a corner as Yord, Osha, and Jeckie converge on their position. “You have misunderstood the Jedi arts,” Sol says. “Your master has failed you.” He asks who trained her and starts to probe her brain, much as Yord reflexively poked around in the mind of the Neimoidian captain. (At the peak of their power, the Jedi are accustomed to getting their way.) He does obtain an answer of sorts: Even Mae doesn’t know who her master is. (Nor did she know that Osha was alive.) Sorry, Sol, but most mysteries aren’t solved in a two-part premiere.

Just as the Jedi cordon closes in, Mae disturbs the sand on the ground as if it’s a smoke bomb and vanishes in the resulting cloud. (Sometimes you just have to hate sand.) As she hijacks a speeder, Osha appears, and Mae meets her eyes. Osha freezes and then squeezes off two shots, both of which go wide. Judging by her pained expression, the misses might not be an accident. The Jedi detectives temporarily give up the pursuit: Sol and Co. are recalled to Coruscant to confer with the Council, and Mae sets her sights on Kelnacca, who’s living off the grid in a grounded ship.

Despite the initial case of mistaken twins, The Acolyte isn’t a whodunit. Nor is it a howdunit, like Columbo, Poker Face, and Elsbeth. It’s a whydunit, revolving for now around a central unknown: Why is Mae assassinating the Jedi who were based on Brendok at the time of the fire? Based on Master Torbin’s willing swig of poison, Mae must have a point—and the Jedi’s sins must be worse than the order’s standard cradle-robbing recruitment process.

Other questions flow from there. How did Mae survive the fire? What does the tattoo on her forehead (which her mother also bore) signify? Is Qimir an acolyte too? What other secrets of the Sith could come to light? And does that creepy rhyme—always one, but born as two—presage an alliance between the sisters? Although they’re on opposite sides at the start, as suggested by the episode titles, their underlying motivations are similar: “You want revenge,” Sol says to Osha. “Look what revenge has done to your sister.”

Mae is warned away from her mission as well. “You do not want to go down this road,” Indara told Mae. “This is a fight that you will not win.” Indara was overconfident, too: That fight went Mae’s way. But maybe Mae will lose in the long run if Indara was referring to a figurative road, like Yoda’s dark path. Before the finale, Mae’s eyes could be opened to the lies of the Sith. And maybe Osha’s faith in the Jedi, and in Sol, will weaken or crumble.

One wonders where this season (and the two or more subsequent seasons that Headland hopes to have in store) is headed. “At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi,” Darth Maul remarked in Episode I, which would seem to suggest that the Sith won’t reveal themselves in The Acolyte. Yet sending a dark sider to hunt and kill Jedi doesn’t seem like a wise strategy if the Sith are trying to keep a low profile. Not that this era’s Jedi are any better attuned to evidence of their future fall than their prequel counterparts will be.

Whatever its endgame, The Acolyte’s largely compelling cast, fresh fighting style, and engaging mystery make for a promising premiere, if not quite the shake-up of the franchise formula that the buzz about the setting and creative team potentially portended. If there’s a surprise so far, it’s that the series feels fairly conventional, which makes the reactionary prejudging and review-bombing by the usual toxic subset of Star Wars gatekeepers seem—if this is even possible—even more misguided than usual. You can take Star Wars out of its traditional time frame, but it’s mostly still the Star Wars we’re used to, with all the nostalgia, excitement, and, sometimes, overfamiliarity that entails.

I’ll leave you with a few brief, bullet-point connections to preexisting High Republic canon. I don’t know that this will be a weekly feature of the recaps because, frankly, the links between The Acolyte and the voluminous High Republic corpus are pretty thin thus far. Which is slightly disappointing if, like me, you spent at least as much time on High Republic reading and research to train for recapping The Acolyte as Carrie Anne-Moss spent training for her fight scene. (Not that I’m bitter about it.) The High Republic period spans from roughly 500 to 100 years before the original trilogy, so The Acolyte is set to mark its conclusion. Thus, there’s not much more resemblance between The Acolyte’s setting and the High Republic of centuries earlier than there is between the former and the prequel era. That makes sense both chronologically and practically—Lucasfilm won’t saddle its prospective streaming audience with extensive High Republic homework, however engaging—but it means that most of the callbacks and crossovers aren’t items non-readers need to know. Nonetheless:

• A recent High Republic comic run, Shadows of Starlight, laid the groundwork for The Acolyte’s wuxia-inspired combat by canonizing a Force-infused, lightsaber-less fighting style called “Shon-Ju,” which was first mentioned in a now-decanonized Clone Wars comic from 2010. In the panels below, Jedi Grand Master Pra-Tre Veter demonstrates the technique. It doesn’t keep him out of enemy hands, but at least he has his hands free when he’s captured.

• The vow Torbin takes is called the Barash Vow, introduced in the canon comic miniseries The Blade. It’s an oath of penitence that demands that a Jedi disengage from any activity except communing with the Force. Obi-Wan practiced the Barash Vow lifestyle on Tatooine, though I guess he still found time to clock in for carcass cutting.
• Sol’s description of the Force as an ocean echoes the conception of the energy field espoused by an earlier High Republic master, Elzar Mann. (Some Jedi experience the Force as a song; others, as a set of interlocking gears; others, as a tree with innumerable branches and roots; and so on.) Mann, an unconventional but brilliant Jedi, sometimes centered himself by picturing the Force’s currents or floating in the actual ocean, but at other times, he felt like he might drown in its depths.
• Vernestra, the former Padawan of Mann’s best bud, Jedi Council member Stellan Gios, is mentioned in many a High Republic work, most notably the 2021 middle-grade/YA novels A Test of Courage and Out of the Shadows. (The High Republic is sprawling and intricately interconnected, so if you don’t read or listen to everything, you’ll sometimes feel a little lost. For completists, the effort pays off.) She’s an aromantic and asexual Padawan prodigy who made knight at 15 and wields a purple lightsaber that can be converted into a lightwhip. The disillusionment and losses she suffered during the Nihil conflict caused her to become a wayseeker who charts her own path independent of the Council, but by the time of The Acolyte, she’s rejoined the Jedi hierarchy and ascended to a leadership position in the order.
• That starfighter Yord flies to the Federation ship is the coolest piece of tech to come out of The High Republic: the one- or two-person Jedi Vector. This is an elegant fighter for a more civilized age: a sleek, high-speed, delicate craft designed to be used exclusively by Jedi, who often fly it in a Force-assisted formation called a “drift.” It’s highly maneuverable but hard to control without Force-assisted reflexes, and its weapons can’t be used unless the pilot places a lightsaber on an activation panel, which forces its pilots to deeply consider any lethal action and prevents non-Jedi from firing. Also: When the weapons are active, the ship’s interior lights up in the color of the flyer’s blade. Groovy.