This Review contains full spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte Season 1, episode 7
Damn it, Acolyte, why do you have to be so messy?
In theory, this episode’s approach was simple: show the events of this season’s earlier flashback episode from the Jedi’s perspective (plus a bit more of Mae’s side of things) rather than Osha’s, thus fully explaining exactly what occurred that left all the witches dead.
In a broad sense it did just that, with some strong touches along the way. But this episode also left a lot of those events feeling needlessly complicated or convoluted, with some strange moments that still feel unexplained – and not in a “that’s a cool plot thread for later” way. Instead it feels like the audience is being asked to do too much of the heavy lifting for it all to make sense.
The Jedi’s Goals and Intentions
The explanation of what exactly the Jedi’s goals were was, mostly, pretty satisfying and the best part of the episode. It gave these events a lot more weight as we came to learn that Indara was the one trying to avoid conflict. Ultimately she was trying to not interfere and leave Osha and Mae with the witches. And on the flipside, it was compelling to find out that Sol had become rather obsessed with trying to take the girls, convincing himself they were in danger in order to justify his intentions. The fact that he felt a connection to Osha but not Mae was effective and harshly underlined when, as the broken bridge was collapsing beneath them, he made the split second choice – hey, that’s what the episode was called! – to use the Force to only hold up Osha’s side and save her, sending Mae to her death (except she somehow survived, of course).
The Unfortunate Torbin
In the midst of all this though was stupid, dumb ass Torbin, who went all in on helping Sol not for interesting, complex reasons, but because he was just superduper homesick. Seriously, what a lame Jedi. Sure, he started out feeling this was an unimportant, boring mission, but then it actually turned out to be pretty freaking interesting, what with the witches and the rarity of a Vergence in the Force. Yet he still was just whining about missing Coruscant. You suck, Torbin.
Aniseya’s Death and the Witches
Aniseya’s death felt like it skipped over necessary beats. As is often the case with The Acolyte, the big picture idea is solid – Sol thinks Aniseya is doing something that may harm Mae and so instinctively cuts Aniseya down with his lightsaber. But we’re left wondering what Aniseya was actually going to do when she pulled that whole turning into black mist trick and began to float towards Mae, which got Sol panicking in the first place. With her dying breath she tells Sol she was going to let Osha leave. Okay, great, but she could have let him know that before everything escalated. And was she just going to float over to Mae to say “Calm down, how can I help?” What was supposed to happen, from Aniseya’s perspective?
Other Good Material
An odd aspect here was the sequence where we saw exactly what happened when Mother Aniseya possessed Torbin and how she used his wish to go home to manipulate him. It created a nice parallel to Qimir’s approach with Osha to have her take such a literally seductive tone with him. But nothing ever came of this interaction except to show us the witches could possess others, essentially just set up for Kelnacca being taken over later in the episode, which could have been done just as easily in the moment when Kelnacca attacked the others. You can go down a rabbit hole and speculate that Aniseya wanted Torbin to be so determined to leave that he’d help incite violence, because perhaps she had some darker big picture plan in mind. But I truly don’t think that’s the case and, if it were, it would undermine everything we saw about Aniseya as the one more willing to put her feelings aside and let Osha go compared to Koril.
The Frustration and Disappointment
Worse, the reveal of how all the other witches died felt so anticlimactic. Indara used her Force powers to break the hold the witches had over Kelnacca and that… just caused them all to drop dead?? These witches had some pretty crappy Force powers, apparently, if that was how it works for them. And it was poorly conveyed, too. It wasn’t even clear they were supposed to be dead, rather than passed out, when their connection to Kelnacca was first broken, until we see their corpses later.
Conclusion
Still, this episode helped bring more overall perspective to the Jedi during this era. In the big picture, The Acolyte has shown the danger of their rigid approach and why it’s understandable some would push back against them. But this episode helped explain what happened with Osha and Mae was more about Sol (and stupid Torbin) going on a misguided quest rather than anything the Jedi at large masterminded or condoned. Not only did Indara and Kelnacca never agree to Sol’s plan, but we learn that when they were told the situation, the Jedi Council had decided the twins should be left alone.