The story of Star Wars’ dark side has long been defined by temptation—a temptation to power, a temptation to save people no matter the cost, a temptation for forces to influence, and corrupt, even the most careful practitioner. But this week’s episode of The Acolyte provides an opportunity to show that temptation in new light, as we begin to lift the lid on the myriad layers of its newly-revealed Sith.
“Teach/Corrupt” offers a moment for the disparate parties of The Acolyte to breathe after the slaughter on Khofar last week—and either begin to acknowledge the horrors that took place, as we see Sol briefly begin to emotionally wrangle with them, or as we see with Vernestra Rwoh on Coruscant, realize that things are far worse than they could’ve ever anticipated. But much of the episode’s time is spent with the most interesting dichotomy on the show now, leveraged by last week’s twin-switcheroo: Osha waking up in a start to find herself in the den of the enemy.
Thankfully, The Acolyte doesn’t spend too much playing with the audience knowing Osha and Mae have swapped places and the characters believing otherwise. Sol, with a little help from Bazil, manages to suss out Mae’s deception relatively sharpish, setting the stage for an intriguing dramatic tension that acts as a compelling mirror to the events on the mysterious, cortosis-laden planet Osha and the Stranger are on. It’s with Osha and the Stranger we spend the most time with across the three plots in “Teach/Corrupt,” but they all reflect on the lesson that the Stranger slowly but surely begins to teach Osha—for all the bravado she displays, turning his lightsaber against him, declaring that she could never fall from the Jedi, even if that’s a past she’s left behind, the Stranger offers Osha a chance for knowledge that the Jedi have time and time proven they’re more than willing to keep away from her, and so many others.
It’s something we see throughout this episode elsewhere: Sol unwilling to get help when he realizes he has Mae with him, rather than Osha; Vernestra and her hushed crew of Jedi sent to investigate and recover on Khofar in secret (fleeing as she is from a very intriguing meeting we only see briefly, where she discusses with a senator the potential threat of the Jedi facing exterior review by the Republic). But the Jedi and their waning grip on control in all its forms, of their knowledge, of their emotions, of their independence in the galactic state, is constantly presented to us here an opportunity for antagonist and protagonist alike to find truths that would otherwise forever be held out of reach.
The Stranger’s pitch to Osha, then, is the pitch he made last week. He is just someone who seeks freedom from the controls imposed on the Jedi and their view of the Force, to find a truth in it that is otherwise obscured: a power of two, as he calls it, an intriguing echo to both the Sith rule of two, and the power of the Brendok witches that created Osha and Mae in the first place. It’s a path to the dark side we’ve seen laid out by other Sith in Star Wars, of course—Palpatine’s whole pitch to Anakin was to find knowledge of a power to save people from death; Kylo Ren’s open hand to Rey was the promise that together they could discover the true nature of her past—but The Acolyte layers in a temptation of desire, and seduction, that we rarely see the dark side explicitly framed in, over the more overt manipulation and strong arming.
The Stranger is presented to us here not as the stalking shadow of last week’s battle, an unyielding, unpredictable force of nature, but vulnerable, even sensuous: we and Osha alike are invited to see him bare himself as he relaxes in the waters of this unknown world, to see the vulnerability of his physical form, as well as the attraction of it. It’s not just that Manny Jacinto is an attractive man with very large, Jedi-neck-snapping arms, but the freedom with which his body is presented to us—to see the scars of his past wrought all over it for him, the lack of defense he has emerging naked from his swim towards Osha, as she brandishes his own lightsaber at him—invites both audience and Osha to consider what he has to say in new light. It’s very telling that the conversation that occurs when Osha confronts the Stranger on the beach, as he rises from the waters to slowly, casually dress himself in a loose fitting, but revealing shirt, is about the idea of reciprocating emotion and feeling. When Osha puts to him that he is evil for killing Yord and Jecki, the Stranger simply he says he stopped them before they could kill him, and when she counters that he hurt people that she loved, he turns it again, asking why she is so intent on feeling for people who, due to their controlling ideology, would never love her back in the same way she does.
Later on, as Osha watches the Stranger repair his mask—which he describes again as another tool of freedom, not just balancing the scales with a Jedi lightsaber, but an object of sensory deprivation that allows its wearer to truly connect to the force uninhibited—desire again is raised as an emotion connected to what the Jedi would consider the dark, alongside the emotions we always see associated as such, anger, hate, fear. There is an intimacy to Amandla Stenberg and Jacinto’s interplay, as he begins to coax her towards these feelings she’s already been having—this idea the Jedi are keeping something from her, that there is something alluring about not just the Stranger, but his vision of the Force—that is electric, not just for the potential of their connection, but because the Sith and their seductive ways have rarely been framed through the emotion of desire in a sexual or romantic sense like this. We’ve seen it in fits and starts—the awkward clumsiness of Rey asking Kylo Ren to put a shirt on when their dyad connection manifests in The Last Jedi, the way Asaaj Ventress leveraged her sensuality as the tool of a Sith assassin—but putting Osha and the Stranger together in this way, and having her learn his perspective through this frisson of desire, romantically or otherwise, offers a twist on this potential path to the dark side that is quite unlike anything we’ve seen Star Wars present on screen before.
However the Stranger’s seduction (ideologically, sensually, or otherwise) will play out, there’s clearly some effect, when “Truth/Corrupt” climaxes on Osha staring down his cortosis mask, before putting it on and opening herself to the Force. It’s a moment of freedom, enveloping darkness as we cut inside the helmet to see her perspective, fascinatingly contrasted with how Sol and Vernestra’s arcs this episode climax. The former, having stunned Mae and restrained her, bracing to potentially finally reveal what happened on Brendok—and the latter and her team racing off to try and keep Sol’s investigation under wraps, even contemplating the potential to frame him as a Jedi gone rogue to cover the real nature of whatever, as Vernestra puts it, is there to tip the scales. But in Star Wars’ ever-cycling tale of light and darkness, where will that truth push The Acolyte’s remaining players remains to be seen.
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