[COLUMN] The Acolyte is a Study of Star Wars' Dueling Dualities | by Darren Mooney 

Note: With Skeleton Crew premiering today, it seemed like a good opportunity to look back at The Acolyte. Note that this piece contains major spoilers for the show, which watches much better as a binge than it does weekly. Which maybe explains why it took me so long to return to it.

“Always two there are, no more, no less,” explains Master Yoda (Frank Oz) of the Sith in The Phantom Menace. “A master and an apprentice.”

Yoda is outlining the piece of Star Wars lore known as “the Rule of Two”, as it applies directly to the Sith. It also more broadly describes the larger philosophy of Star Wars, a franchise largely built around dichotomies: master or apprentice, Jedi or Sith, rebel or imperial, light or dark, good or evil. There are exceptions; many of the best characters in the franchise – such as Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) – challenge such neat delineations. However, this is part of the structure of Star Wars.

Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte is very strongly engaged with this idea of duality. It is built into the show’s foundation. The Acolyte is a story about two twins: Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg). Many of the individual episodes are titled with opposing-but-related concepts: the first is “Lost / Found”, the second is “Revenge / Justice” and the sixth is “Teach / Corrupt.” However, the convention extends beyond individual episodes. Four of the remaining five episodes are literally twinned. (The season finale is simply “The Acolyte”, twinning the show’s title.)

The eight-episode season is neatly bisected by the fourth episode “Day” and the fifth episode “Night.” Even beyond the mirrored titles, these episodes are clearly intended to be seen as interlinked. Both are directed by Alex Garcia Lopez and credit Kor Adana as a writer. Similarly, the third episode “Destiny” is obviously twinned with the penultimate episode, “Choice.” Both are directed by video essayist and filmmaker Kogonada and share a writing credit from Jasmyne Flournoy.

These two sets of twinned episodes are clearly designed to be of a piece with one another. “Day” and “Night” follow a doomed Jedi excursion to the remote planet Khofar, with the bulk of “Night” given over to the disastrous ambush and battle that ensues between the team and a Sith known only as “the Stranger” (Manny Jacinto). Even in a highly-serialized season that could be described as “an eight-episode movie”, these two middle episodes are clearly a mid-season two-parter.

In contrast, “Destiny” and “Choice” are separated across the season, although they are clearly positioned to echo one another. Because the season premiered with the simultaneous release of both “Lost / Found” and “Revenge / Justice”, “Destiny” was the second block of The Acolyte to be released. “Choice” was then the second-to-last episode of The Acolyte to be released, which gives the season an interesting structure in a medium that can often feel like amorphous “content soup.”

“Destiny” and “Choice” are both flashback episodes. They both portray the same event – the separation of Osha and Mae – from two very different perspectives. In this sense, they feel of a piece with the various flashbacks of the key confrontation between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Ben Solo (Adam Driver) in The Last Jedi. They are both obvious invocations of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a clever acknowledgment of Kurosawa's influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars.

More than that, these conflicting flashbacks tie into one of the core themes of the larger Star Wars canon. In Return of the Jedi, Luke confronts his own master, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), after discovering that Darth Vader (David Prowse, James Earl Jones) is really his father. Obi-Wan had previously told Luke that his father died during the Clone Wars, and Luke feels justifiably betrayed that this secret was kept from him. “Why didn't you tell me?” Luke demands.

Obi-Wan argues that Luke’s father has become so warped by hate that he is functionally a different person. “So, what I told you was true,” Obi-Wan doubles down, “from a certain point of view.” In one of the more interesting and mature ideas articulated in Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan explains the concept of relativism to Luke, rejecting the binary of “true” and “false”, explaining, “Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

This idea is literally woven into the fabric of The Acolyte. Osha and Mae were conceived and raised by a coven of witches led by Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) on Brendok. The witches worship the Force, the same abstract construct as the Jedi. However, they describe it as “the Thread” and do not divide it into “light” and “dark.” Despite some fan outrage, The Acolyte never argues that the witches are right and the Jedi are wrong. Instead, The Acolyte suggests that they are each a blind man describing an elephant.

It is worth pausing to acknowledge that The Acolyte works much better taken as a whole than it does as a collection of individual episodes. That two-episode season premiere does not feel that much different from the season premieres of The Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi or Ahsoka. The Acolyte only really distinguishes itself from the other (non-Andor) Star Wars streaming shows when viewed as a complete object.

(Although I don’t like talking in the first person in these pieces, I’ll acknowledge: I was lukewarm on the two episodes that were previewed to press for the purpose of reviewing the show, and so it took me quite a while to circle back around to watch the rest of show – particularly given the tendency of streaming franchise shows to implode as they reach an ending. Had the whole season been provided for review, as The Penguin or The Last of Us were, I would have been much more enthusiastic. It was impossible to see what Headland was doing based on the press material provided.)

Headland attracted a certain amount of ire from traditionalist Star Wars fans for some of her creative choices. Setting aside the racist and misogynist criticisms acknowledged by actors like Stenberg and Turner-Smith, it’s strange to argue that The Acolyte was particularly transgressive or subversive. It is clearly extrapolated from the core themes of the larger Star Wars franchise, that memetic conversation between Luke and Obi-Wan and what Lucas himself attempted with the prequels.

Indeed, The Acolyte is part of a larger nostalgic invocation of the prequels, an attempt to engage with the legacy of those three movies and expand the franchise’s nostalgia beyond the original trilogy. Indeed, as the show progresses, the parallels become much more apparent. In particular, the character of Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) is very clearly designed to evoke Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) from The Phantom Menace: the wiser older guy who looks like he should be the hero of this story but really isn’t.

The story of Osha and Mae is very clearly meant to call to mind the tale of Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen), the boy who would become Darth Vader. Like Anakin, Osha and Mae are conceived by way of an immaculate conception. Like Anakin, Osha and Mae are extremely sensitive to the Force, possessing very high “m-counts.” Like Anakin, Osha and Mae are taken from their backwater world and separated from their mothers by a Jedi who is against the advice of the Jedi Council who believe they are too old to train.

The Phantom Menace is a mess of a film and none of its thematic points cohere as clearly as they should. However, there is something compelling in its central tragedy. Qui-Gon Jinn is recognizable as the archetype who should be the hero of this sort of narrative, an unconventional-but-authoritative rogue who makes reckless decisions for what he believes to be the greater good. However, the twist is that those choices have shocking and disastrous consequences despite – or perhaps because of – the moral certainty he felt in making them.

The prequels are a grand tragedy about the hubris of the Jedi. They are a deconstruction of the mythology of the Jedi and the Republic, a rejection of the sort of nostalgia that paints such figures as heroes and legends. Released against the backdrop of the War on Terror and the march to the War in Iraq, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were stories about the collapse of a society that was so certain of its righteousness that it never questioned its decisions. Revenge of the Sith even prompted a right-wing outrage campaign.

Lucas insists Star Wars was explicitly about Vietnam, but admitted the prequels had a timely resonance. “When I wrote Star Wars, Iraq didn’t exist,” Lucas explained at Cannes in 2005. However, he added, “The parallels between Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable. I didn’t think it was going to get quite this close - I hope this doesn’t become true in our country. Maybe the film will wake people to see how easily a democracy can be subverted.” As many observers covering Revenge of the Sith pointed out, George W. Bush framed the world in his own dichotomy: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The Acolyte takes Lucas’ ideas and renders them more coherently. Sol acts in a manner similar to Qui-Gon Jinn, but the narrative makes his hubris clearer. Qui-Gon Jinn dies at the end of The Phantom Menace, before he can be confronted by the result of his choice to separate Anakin from his mother (Pernilla August). In contrast, much of The Acolyte is about Sol dealing with the consequences of his actions on Brendok, confronting his own responsibility for everything that followed.

More than that, for the first time in live action Star Wars, a Sith is allowed to articulate an argument for the validity of their own existence. Asked what he wants, the Stranger replies, “Freedom. The freedom to wield my power the way I like – without having to answer to Jedi like you.” Explaining why he has to resort to violence, he states, “I don’t make the rules. The Jedi do. And the Jedi say I can’t exist. They see my face, they all die.” That is the most simple binary of all: us or them.

The Stranger is forced into this position – forced to kill or be killed – by the rigid dichotomy of the Jedi worldview. This is hardly the moral complexity and sophistication of Andor, but it is an attempt to engage with the ideas that Lucas injected into Star Wars towards the end of his tenure. In Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) warns Anakin that “only a Sith deals in absolutes”, but it’s the moral order that the Jedi impose upon the universe that creates such absolutes in the first place.

In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker tasks his young student Rey (Daisy Ridley) with connecting with the Force. He asks her what she feels. “Life,” she begins. She then continues, “Death and decay, that feeds new life. Warmth. Cold. Peace. Violence.” Luke presses her, “And between it all?” Rey answers, “Balance.” This is a holistic view of the Force, one that rejects simple binaries by understanding the universe as a tapestry of interconnected ideas rather than a contest between polar opposites.

At its best, The Acolyte captures the way in which this delineation of the universe into contrasting and antagonistic sides inevitably leads to tragedy. This is the story of Osha and Mae, who are repeatedly described as “always one, but born as two.” The Acolyte suggests that the twins are a single soul torn in half, inevitably pulled asunder by a universe that is hostile to anything that exists outside a neatly defined binary.

It feels fitting that The Acolyte closes with a shot of Yoda. He was correct. In the world of Star Wars, as defined by the Jedi, there are always two. However, when those twin forces are defined in opposition to one another, The Acolyte suggests that balance is impossible.