The Acolyte Recap: The Seizin’ of the Witch

Back in episode three of this season of The Acolyte, we paid our first visit to the planet of Brendok, 16 years ago, to witness the moment when the young twins Mae and Osha were separated, with each believing the other to be dead. But it was pretty clear by the end of that episode that we still hadn’t heard the whole story. For one thing, a lot of what we’d been previously told about what went down that day — about how the Jedi slaughtered Mae and Osha’s mothers, and how Mae burned down the mountaintop fortress where their coven dwelled — happened off-screen, raising questions about whether some key details were still missing. Also: Most episodes of The Acolyte are titled with two opposing words, while episode three is just called “Destiny.”

A few weeks ago, I half-jokingly suggested that the companion episode to “Destiny” might be called “Happenstance.” Honestly, that wouldn’t have been a bad title. The other half of the Mae/Osha origin story arrives this week; and while “Destiny” was told largely from the perspective of the girls and their mothers, Aniseya and Koril, this episode (titled “Choice”) gives us the Jedi point of view. What do they see? In short: a series of mistakes and misjudgments. The Jedi and Aniseya’s order of Force Witches end up making an awful mess. To put it in Star Wars–speak: Poodoo happens.

The title “Choice” is apt too, because none of those blunders are accidents necessarily. From the moment Sol first spots Osha, playing around with the Force under a bunta tree with Mae (as seen in the opening scene of “Destiny”), he’s convinced she should be his padawan. Even though Indara wants to keep this mission simple — just looking to find the source of the possible Force energy “vergence” that the Jedi have detected and report back to the Council — Sol keeps wandering off to watch Osha. He climbs the fortress walls and observes in the shadows as the girls bicker in front of their moms and go through their Ascension ceremony. Sol just won’t let Indara handle this situation alone, by the book. He fervently believes he has to rescue this kid.

As for the coven, as soon as they discover the Jedi sniffing around, they start targeting their opponents’ vulnerabilities. When Indara leads her party inside the fortress for a formal introduction and a request to test the twins’ Force sensitivity, Aniseya immediately sizes up Indara’s padawan Torbin as a weak link. The young man is resentful at being stuck on some nowhere planet rather than being where the action is on Coruscant. And so in a nifty scene, Aniseya enters Torbin’s mind and toys with his resentments and insecurities, eventually bringing him to his knees, as a show of strength the Jedi can’t ignore.

This, folks, is some Dark Side stuff. It seems that, much like the Sith master Qimir, these Force Witches don’t mind tugging on the parts of what they call “the Thread” that are tied directly to anger and fear. We see this again later in the episode, when Koril tells Mae that if she wants to stop Osha from leaving with the Jedi, she’ll have to “get mad.” Koril sets Mae on a path of rage, which ultimately leads to the coven’s destruction.

There were times during “Choice” where I felt like I was finally watching an Acolyte episode that would rise above the level of “pretty okay, for the most part.” That whole sequence of Aniseya psychically breaking Torbin is well staged by the director Kogonada (who also directed “Destiny”) and well played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Dean-Charles Chapman, who deliver a spooky and spare little psychodrama in just a couple of minutes of screen time. A later lightsaber battle — which I’ll return to in a moment — is properly kinetic. It also helps that this episode doesn’t center the kids, which makes it feel less stiff than its predecessor. Instead, we mostly stick with the Jedi, as they explore what to them is an exotic world fraught with danger.

But a few issues hold this episode back. After a while, all the gap-filling it’s designed to do makes it feel like the writers are working off a checklist rather than telling their own story. This chapter has some gaps of its own too — primarily involving what we’re not seeing back on Coruscant, where the Jedi Council is presumably weighing Indara’s reports about Osha and Mae’s “high M-Counts” and identical “symbionts” and the possibility that the girls are actually the same artificially created consciousness housed in two bodies (!). Also, the implication at the end of last week’s episode was that we’d be hearing Sol’s version of what happened on Brendok; but there are more than a few scenes here that he couldn’t have witnessed firsthand.

Still, the central conflict and the nuanced way it’s depicted are prime examples of what The Acolyte has done best this season. This has been a show largely about how zealotry can interfere with reason and compassion, which is plainly evident in the cascading disasters that end the Jedi’s and the witches’ time on Brendok.

Aniseya struggles to balance her obligation to her coven and her desire to see Osha be happy, and she ultimately chooses motherhood, to her fellow sisters’ dismay. When Aniseya then tries to avoid violent conflict with the Jedi by dissipating into a black smoke (while Mae begins to dissipate as well), it startles Sol, who stabs blindly with his lightsaber and accidentally (?) kills the witch. Koril then dissipates while the coven possesses Kelnacca, manipulating the Wookiee into attacking his fellow Jedi. Later, Sol races deeper into the burning fortress to rescue the twins, but his powers fail him — or perhaps his biases affect him — and he chooses to save Osha at Mae’s expense.

These are a complicated series of actions and reactions, not easily reduced to one side being “right” and the other being “wrong.” Yet what does Sol say to Osha when she wakes up on the Jedi spaceship and asks what happened? He echoes a cover story that Indara comes up with and says, curtly, “Mae started a fire.” Cue the closing credits.

Recruiting followers to a cause requires simple, persuasive stories. But it’s easy to lose those disciples once they inevitably find out how hazy the truth actually is. Or, as Aniseya warns Sol: “Someday those noble intentions you have will destroy every Jedi in the galaxy.”

Force Ghosts

• How responsible is Indara for everything terrible that goes down on Brendok? She could be seen as a thoughtful, tempering influence on Sol, a Jedi so eager to have a padawan (just like Qimir is!) that he skips past the part where he learns to help students grow on their own. “Do not confuse what Osha wants with what you want,” Indara says to Sol, urging him not to put their whole mission at risk because of a sudden whim. But at the same time … are we sure Indara actually told the Jedi Council what they discovered on Brendok? Could she maybe have shut down Sol’s Osha crusade on her own? Could she be just another exhausted Jedi bureaucrat, less concerned with doing the right thing than avoiding extra paperwork?