(courtesy IMP Awards)
If religious dogma and legalistic ideology prove anything, it’s that a good many people like their beliefs neatly binary and plainly explained. They also want to believe, to an almost amusingly delusional degree, that the institutions charged with keeping those beliefs sustained and upheld are perfect and beyond approach. It’s a nice idea, but as the final three episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte makes glaringly and accusingly clear, such a perfectly reassuring belief system requires wholly flawless to make it real, and people, even the Jedi, are as imperfect as the next person. Just how imperfect, and how vastly the reality of Jedi life differs from the projected wishful idealism makes it unsettling presence felt in episode seven, “Choice” where the events on the planet Brendok, which saw the Night Sisters all die, and Osha and Mae (Amandla Stenberg) split up (one to the Jedi, the other to the Dark Side of the Force), are told from a wholly different angle. So different in fact, that what was first presented as Sol (Lee Jung-jae) saving the day as events spiralled out of his well-intentioned control, is really the story of one person’s overreach and the catastrophically tragic consequences that follow.
———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- What actually transpires is that, against the wishes of Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Sol, with the help of a whining “take me back to Coruscant” Padawan Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), decides he must save Osha and Mae even though, as Indara assures him, they don’t really need saving at all. Sure, the Jedi get distinctly uncomfortable with any expression of the Force they don’t control – Jedi GOOD, Sith and Night Sisters BAD; while that might be roughly the case, it lacks the nuance needed for the Republic’s supposed “good guys” to truly have their hearts in the right place – and the Night Sisters are weird, but they are loved and, most importantly, for the Jedi at least, the Jedi Council has said a firm “NO” to taking the girls away from their family. But Sol goes ahead anyway, and well, we all know what the end result is – fire, death, blood and destruction, and life journeys altered and destinies ripped fully and brokenly asunder. By devoting an entire episode to the backstory, we gain a fuller appreciation of how great the sins of Sol, Torbin, and by association, Indara and Kelnacca (Joonas Suoamo) are and why it is Mae, and later Osha when she finds out the full truth, are so angry at them. Far from being perfect bastions of goodness and light, the Jedi are flawed a.f., and honestly, you can begin to understand how it is that the Republic, which staked much of its moral authority on the supposed goodness and virtue of the Jedi, comes to be hollowed and fall to the Empire just a century or so later.
But if you think that the revelation of the truth ———- SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!! ———- which comes courtesy of Mae swapping positions with Osha so that the former is with Sol and the latter with Sith Lord Qimir (Manny Jacinto who absolutely knocks his performance well and truly out of the park) will set the Jedi onto a path of transparency think again. Rather than coming clean to the Senate which, in the form of Jedi-sceptic Senator Rayencourt (David Harewood) is asking if the Jedi are as squeaky clean as they make themselves out to be, the senior member of the Jedi in charge of the murders of Torbin, Indara and Kelnacca, Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) doubles down on all the duplicity and cover-ups. Not only has she not told the Senate that the investigation into these deaths is underway – she tells the Senator she doesn’t have to if the outcomes are only internal but he counters that how can she possibly know that until the investigations are in train – but when she does find out the truth, the revelation of which leaves Sol dead, Osha throwing in her lot with Qimir and Mae wiped of all the memories to keep her safe, she fabricates another web of lies. That well-quoted axiom, “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive”, drawn from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, seems to have been coined just for Rowh, and while she likely believes she is doing the right thing, like Sol, she will likely find that her deception comes back to wholly damn her and the Order to which she belongs.
While The Acolyte is likely not the strongest Star Wars series to emerge, what it does so is beautifully flesh out how raw humanity, no matter how earnestly lived out or expressed, can often undercut and corrupt the very ideals it claims to champion. While A New Hope and all the films that followed presented the Jedi as the unalloyed moral good to the Empire’s uncompromising bad, The Acolyte attempts to reset the story and explain, as part of the High Republic stream of storytelling which tells how the Republic came to fall and the Empire rise, how something supposedly so good could become so broken and morally compromised. The truth of the matter, like so much in this broken world of ours, is that the Jedi were never as good or virtuous as the PR material made them out to be – they couldn’t be; no one is – and that by believing their own glowing press, they became blind to the rot within. Just how damagingly corrosive that rot is is on full harrowing display in The Acolyte which is, in many ways, quintessential Star Wars but with the blinkers off and a 21st century embrace of the truths and frailties of humanity very much in place. It’s clever, morally sophisticated storytelling that acknowledges that though we all seek to reach for the stars, the Jedi possibly most of all, that we often end up falling into a sh*t-filled trench instead all while telling ourselves we are soaring into the galaxy and that we deserve to be there. It’s a lovely piece of self-talking but it leaves us blind to reality, and as the Jedi discover in The Acolyte, this can have tragically repercussive consequences from which there is no real coming back.
The Acolyte streams on Disney+