This evening saw the debut of the third episode of Lucasfilm’s live-action series Star Wars: The Acolyte on Disney+. Below are my recap and review of this installment.
The Acolyte episode 3 (entitled simply “Destiny”) is, in its entirety, a flashback to 16 years prior to the events of the other two chapters we’ve seen so far. It begins on the planet Brendok (newly introduced in this series), where much younger versions of the two Force-sensitive sisters Osha and Mae (now played by real-life twin children Leah and Laura Brady) demonstrate their individual tendencies toward light-and-dark sides by the way they interact with blue butterfly-like creatures under a “Bunta” tree (not to be confused with the “Boonta Eve” holiday celebrated on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace). Returning to their village, Osha and Mae are chastised by their female parents, who we quickly learn belong to a coven of Force witches that– as far as I can tell, though one of them appears to be Zabrak– are otherwise unconnected to the Dathomirian Nightsisters we’ve seen in The Clone Wars, Ahsoka, and other Star Wars media. It seems that the twins are not permitted to leave their home, which looks like a large fortress built atop a volcano. There’s also a Jedi presence on the planet, and we see a 16-years-younger Sol (Lee Jung-jae) peering from behind a tree at the young would-be witches.
As we learn more about the coven, we discover that Mae and Osha are set to undergo a ceremony called the “Ascension” that will evidently make them full-fledged members of the group, though the latter of the two twins is hesitant about the whole process… feeling the “call to adventure” from the outside galaxy that we’ve seen in so many heroes of stories past, much like Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film. There’s a training sequence where one of their parents, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith from The Last Ship and Queen & Slim) tells the girls about the Force, which the coven calls a Thread, though they manipulate it in similar ways to the Jedi– there’s no recognizably green Nightsister “magick” on display here. The show also establishes a large reactor core at the center of the fortress that the other parent, Mother Koril (The Lincoln Lawyer’s Margarita Levieva) seems concerned about for some reason. Then we learn more about what Ascension means for this coven, right before they begin to follow through with the ceremony itself. This is one of the most effective moments in the episode, and it’s interrupted by the four Jedi that we know Mae is hunting in the future– Sol, Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo, who played Chewbacca in recent Star Wars movies like Solo and The Rise of Skywalker), and Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman). Here we start to get the feeling that the witches just want to be left alone, but the Jedi insist on butting in to take away their only children for training.
Mother Aniseya is eventually convinced to allow the Jedi to test Osha and Mae for Force-sensitivity, but not before she puts Torbin in a temporary black-eyed trance as a threat. After a meeting among the coven’s advisors, Aniseya and Koril decide to have their two daughters deliberately fail the Jedi’s tests, though it’s clear that Osha wishes to be honest and succeed. They travel out to where the Jedi’s ship is parked, and Mae takes the test first while Osha interacts with Kelnacca outside. Then when it’s Osha’s turn, Sol catches on that she’s actively trying to fail the test (which is right out of The Phantom Menace’s memorable Jedi Council meeting) at her mother’s insistence and urges her to tell the truth about wanting to become a Jedi. Back at the fortress, Mae tells their mothers what Osha did, and Koril is upset about it but Aniseya essentially tells Osha that it’s her decision what she wants to do with her life. Later, Osha prepares to leave but Mae storms into her room, steals her journal (in which she has drawn the Jedi Order’s insignia) and burns it outside the room. There’s some confusion in the ensuing panic, but we in the audience know that somehow the rest of the fortress begins to catch fire as well. Osha escapes through a service vent and finds her way to the reactor core, where she is reunited with Mae, who appears to plummet to her death in a tragic accident involving a collapsing walkway, though Sol has arrived in time to catch Osha before she does the same.
On the Jedi ship, Osha is informed that the entire coven has perished in the flames, but Sol promises her a better future as a Jedi. Then we cut back to the Bunta tree one last time to reveal that Mae survived her fall (which of course we already knew, based on previous episodes). To me, this was immediately the best installment of The Acolyte so far, helped along by highlighting a story that feels very different from much of what we’ve seen in Star Wars before, and yet fits perfectly into the ever-expanding mythology of A Galaxy Far, Far Away. There’s admittedly some questionable (though forgivable, of course) acting from the two young stars, but that quibble is offset by the wonderful, emotionally and atmospherically packed direction courtesy of Korean filmmaker Kogonada (best known for the 2017 drama Columbus) and the performances of the other actors. And as informative as this chapter is about Mae and Osha’s backstory, I have a feeling there are more gaps to fill in about the circumstances surrounding the fire, especially considering that showrunner Leslye Headland has dropped allusions to Rashomon in some of her interviews about this series. This show also has the advantage of being the first live-action content to really confront head-on the inherent flaws of the Jedi Order and its various tenets, after those failings were hinted at in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and The Last Jedi. Anyway, I was entranced through the roughly 40-minute runtime of this week’s episode, and I would absolutely love to see more world-building like this in Star Wars on a regular basis– after all, as we’ve seen in ancillary material like books and comics for decades, there’s more than one way to commune with the Force.
The first three episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now available to stream, exclusively via Disney+.