TL;DR – Another flashback episode that I didn’t think we needed to have, yet it grew on me as time went on.  

Disclosure – I paid for the Disney+ service that viewed this series.

The Acolyte Review –

In the last episode with Teach/Corrupt, I championed how this series was able to keep up the momentum of its narrative after the shocking events of Night. Then I opened up this episode, and the dreaded sixteen years earlier appeared on screen. I had wondered if we would ever come back to Destiny and see what happened from the Jedi’s perspective, but I didn’t think that it would take up a whole episode.  

So, to set the scene, 16 years before the events of our time, the Jedi Sol (Lee Jung-Jae), Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), and Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo) were on a mission to the planet Brendok. It should be lifeless after a hyperspace explosion, but it is full of life, and the Jedi want to know why. Could this be a great convergence point for The Force, or is something else at play? However, as Sol explores the northlands, he finds a young Mae (Leah Brady) and Osha (Lauren Brady) playing under a tree that looks like nothing else on the planet, and history is made from there. Now, from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.

While I was frustrated by another whole episode set in the past, where there are shows like Star Trek Prodigy that can thrive by having multiple timelines working and shifting at the same time. However, this episode grew on me as we went along because, more than anything, it was a character episode. Kogonada has this way of bringing out these subtle yet powerful emotive moments, which was on full show in After Yang, and we see that again today. That still does mean that a lot of this episode is just about watching the same events from the Jedi’s perspective, but I think there ended up being enough there.

Moreso, what I liked about this reflection is that the more we explore it, the less black and white about ‘its X fault it all happened’ the show becomes. Mae was not this monster that destroyed the coven. She was a scared girl who thought burning her sister’s journal would keep her here, and things got out of control. Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva) didn’t want to see her daughter leave them. Torbin acts brashly because of a combination of his experiences, and he is still reeling from the manipulation of Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith). Years of hate and prejudice combined so that instead of talking it out, people over-escalated. Though, as far as we know of the witches, only Aniseya died here, depending on how Indara cut the connection.

There was this sadness because you can feel that maybe one person had waited before acting and had not acted out of instinct, and then calmer heads would have prevailed. But in all that, I am glad that we actually got to spend some time with Indara to discover what sort of Jedi she was. She was the calm, measured, and reasonable Jedi that I think we all wished Jedi would be, but time has shown that is not the case. You know why Torbin was haunted by what happened, why Kelnacca went into solitude, and why Sol will always, for better and worse, be defined by that day. If nothing else, I am glad that we got our fighting Wookie Jedi that was denied to us earlier in the season.  

In the end, do we recommend The Acolyte – Choice? Look, I understand if this episode won’t appear in your re-watches of this show. Or if you want to go back and edit the two flashbacks together into one story. The direction and characters were enough for me, but I think many would have preferred to jump right into the finale.    

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen The Acolyte yet ?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of The Acolyte
Directed by – Kogonada
Written by – Charmaine DeGraté, Jasmyne Flournoy & Jasmyne Flournoy
Created by – Lesley Headland
Based On – Star Wars by George Lucas
Production/Distribution Companies – Lucasfilm, Shoot to Midnight, Disney Pictures & Disney+
Starring –Lee Jung-Jae, Jodie Turner-Smith, Margarita Levieva, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, Lauren Brady, Leah Brady & Carrie-Anne Moss with Amy Tsang, Saskia Allen, Abigail Thorn, Deborah Rosan, Tabitha Alege & Barbara Fadden