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Flashback Takes the Wheel in The Acolyte’s “Destiny”
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Star Wars: The Acolyte
Flashback Takes the Wheel in The Acolyte’s “Destiny”
A full episode flashback, to get us all up to speed about that fire…
By Emmet Asher-Perrin
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Published on June 12, 2024
Image: Disney+
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Image: Disney+
The power of one, the power of two, the power of many…
Recap
Osha (Lauren Brady) is hiding under a beautiful willow as a child on the planet Brendok, when Mae (Leah Brady) comes to find her. They are both about to complete the “Ascension” ceremony of their people. Mae is excited, but Osha is not, and resents being forced to do everything the same as Mae. They are found by Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva), who reprimands them for going outside the walls; she worries they will be found. Hidden behind a tree, Sol sees the girls. The girls are brought back to the safety of a fortress where their coven resides, and are greeted by Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), who wants them to attend their lessons later. Aniseya talks with Koril, who believes she’s too lenient with the girls, as they are not ordinary children.
At their lessons, Aniseya teaches the girls about the Force, though their people do not call it that—they think of it as a thread that weaves the universe together. The girls bicker during the lesson, prompting Aniseya to do a demonstration against them, but only Mae fights back, earning praise. Later on, the girls are still fighting about their future, but Aniseya has them hold hands to remind them of their bond. She wants them to stay in the coven to keep them safe. As the girls get their hair done for the ceremony, they argue agains, with Osha desperate to have Mae understand that she doesn’t want to share everything with her sister, that they are different people. At the Ascension ceremony, the girls are brought forward and asked to vow their lives in service of the coven, to protect its way from this day forward. Mae makes her vow, but before Osha’s can be complete, word arrives that there are Jedi at their fortress.
The girls hide behind the women of the coven as Indara, Sol, Torbin and Kalnecca appear. Indara claims that they believed this world to be uninhabited, and that they were concerned to find that the women here seem to be training children. Osha reveals herself to the Jedi by peeking out from behind the women and Sol calls to her, showing her his lightsaber and asking if she’d like to become a Jedi. Aniseya takes over Torbin’s body and commands the Jedi to leave, but Osha wants to take the Jedi test. Aniseya agrees, and Sol insists that it must be both girls. Later, the coven argues about what to do, because they know that if the girls pass the test, they will be taken away to become Jedi. Aniseya instructs both girls to lie on their test, but Osha doesn’t want to, prompting the girls to fight again.
They bring the girls to the Jedi camp the next morning. Mae takes her test and lies, as she’s instructed, but Sol is ready for Osha. He keeps telling her that she’s getting answers right, to prompt her to admit she knows it’s wrong because she’s lying. He asks her what she truly wants, and also tells her about his own recruitment, and that the Jedi Temple is full of other children like her—she will no longer be alone. Osha passes the test, and Mae is furious with her for it. The coven knows they’ll have to decide what to do about this, if they want to fight the Jedi to keep her. Aniseya talks to Osha, who tells her mother that she’s certain she wants to be a Jedi. She promises to take her daughter’s desires into account as she talks with the other witches.
Osha packs to leave, and Mae comes in, adamant that she won’t allow it. She steals Osha’s notebook and sets it on fire outside her door. Osha goes to a ventilation shaft in the wall to escape as the fire suddenly blooms and rages out of control. She escapes into a back corridors and finds the fortress falling apart around her. Sol finds her and Mae, and attempts to save them both, but Mae falls into a chasm. Sol grabs hold of Osha and speeds her out of the fortress, past all the bodies of her dead coven, Aniseya included. Osha wakes on a Jedi ship and Sol tells her what happened. He promises that she will train to become a Jedi as his Padawan, and that she will never feel like this again.
Commentary
Can someone tell me why we seem to be moving into the realm of entire flashback episodes, rather than seeding flashback throughout a story? Because it’s one of my least favorite things. It’s bad for momentum! Also, you’ve just introduced us to all these characters and then you immediately take half of them away from us for a whole week. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff going on here, but it’s weird to just have the whole backstory dumped in one go, without so much as a lead-up scene.
There are two primary things at war here, it seems: bad governance and bad parenting. Do I absolutely love that we now have confirmation of lesbians being able to make themselves kids if they’re Force-wielders? Oh, I do. I love it so much. This is my favorite thing. Between this and the recent reveal of Mystique being Nightcrawler’s dad in the X-Men comics, it’s been a big win for queer sci-fi families of late.
A lot of information is being omitted here, which is realistic and frustrating at the same time, so I’ll be making assumptions in a few places. But one of my favorite aspects to this episode is watching characters make choices that are right and wrong at once. It’s understandable that this coven is protective of itself because according to what we’re seeing here, the Jedi are proprietary over the Force within the boundaries of the Republic.
This is bananas, but does explain a few things that have long been assumed, namely that the conceit that certain species are less Force-attuned—as evidenced by fewer of them being Jedi—is probably bullshit. Oh, Wookiees don’t become Jedi that regularly? Mandalorians don’t either? That’s totally because they’re less connected to the Force and not at all because their people are hiding the kids away every time the recruitment office shows up. Incredible how the Jedi just accept that, rather than question why so many cultures aren’t too keen to have their kids taken away. And I feel the need to point out that this is common occurrence here—between the Jedi, the Sith and the First Order, child-theft is kind of a given in this universe.
A piece of the deeper conflict here is bound up in bad parenting choices, however—namely the insistence of framing Osha and Mae as halves of a whole rather than separate people. The coven’s understanding of the Force unfortunately plays into that, as the belief of interconnectivity reinforces the idea that the twins should not want to be separate. Psychologically, however, you’re really not supposed to do that to children, particularly not to identical twins: Much study has been put into the relationships between twins, and while closeness is a constant factor, the difficulty in asserting one’s individuality can become stressful for the child. Osha is blatantly unhappy with this part of her life and desperately yearns to be her own person. So we’ve got a deep conflict running through the center of this tragedy—the struggle between the unified whole and the individual.
But what’s great about this struggle is that we’re seeing it flipped from its usual status; in Star Wars, the Sith are framed as selfish opportunists, while the Jedi are harmonious connectors. With Osha and Mae we’re seeing the reverse: Mae’s desire to jealously guard the connection with her sister contains whispers of the dark side. Her desire for that unity (with her sister and the coven) and pain at losing it has put her on a path of murder and rage. I hope they keep playing with this because discussions around the Force can become aggravatingly binary in terms of what is good and evil. Being more flexible in their definitions pulls the Force further away from a more Christian-aligned morality.
Sol continues to be a gorgeous character in every respect, but particularly in his tenderness and in his mistakes. Certain Jedi are far more “parent forward” in the way they train Padawans, and his desire to train Osha the moment he sees her is fully paternal, but I want to understand it better: Is this impulse new for him? Has he ever trained anyone before, or wanted to?
But he is also busy making parenting mistakes, right from the jump. His instinct to comfort Osha on waking has him assuring her that he’ll take her on as his Padawan (which he shouldn’t be able to guarantee), and then swearing that she’ll never feel this way again. Buddy, you absolutely cannot promise that. And as a Jedi, you shouldn’t even want to—it is antithetical to how your whole philosophical deal works!
Too bad. Dad-mode too strong. This will not come back to haunt them both at all, and definitely hasn’t already.
There’s plenty of good parenting in this episode too, which deserves acknowledgement as well, of course. Aniseya may be pushing those girls harder than they need right now, but she believes in their autonomy, loves them openly and fiercely, and acknowledges the importance of change in their growth. She still hopes that her lessons will convince Osha to agree with her, but the point that our desires often shift throughout our lives is an important one to internalize. And, of course, Osha cannot know that she’s asking to trade her family for an organization that isn’t truly much more allowing for the individuality she craves.
Importantly, too, we know Mae didn’t set that entire place on fire: It spread much too quickly; we never see the key moment it begins to fan out from her perspective; and the coven deaths were curiously unexplained. So something else happened, and we’re in the dark so far as to how it transpired.
Spanners and Sabers
Image: Disney+
Mother Koril is a Zabrak, the same species as Darth Maul. I don’t think that a female Zabrak has ever been shown with the cranial horns, though? So that’s pretty cool.
Kelnacca’s topknot action is sending me. It’s so much harder to maintain that as a choice if you’re covered in fur.
There’s an argument here about whether or not Brendok is a part of the Republic, so… did they annex it? Is it just close enough to the border that they figured it was no big deal? Are they outside of their jurisdiction with a purpose? Indara said they thought the world was uninhabited, which could be a lie, but if not, why did they come here?
Next week! Back with the crew, I assume! [end-mark]
The post Flashback Takes the Wheel in <i>The Acolyte’</i>s “Destiny” appeared first on Reactor.
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