* The planet Brendok, sixteen years ago.
* Osha and Mae are eight years old and Mae is apparently already a psychopath who torments animals with the Force.
* They also dress identically and have the same identical haircut they do in the present day. Why would their parents do this.
* I'm pretty sure that the little girls playing them are just similar-looking rather than identical, even though the adult versions are both played by Amandla Stenberg.
* Why would the casting director do this.
* Mae has followed Osha outside the fortress walls of their city. Osha has run away because she's scared of undergoing some ceremony called "the Ascension."
* One of their two dead lesbian moms, Koril, who might be a Zabrak, comes to retrieve them. Little do any of them realize that a young Squid Game is spying on them from behind a tree!
* Back in town we meet the second dead lesbian mom, whose name is Whatever. The two moms worriedly discuss a group of Jedi visiting the planet and remark that the twins are not normal children. That explains why neither of them changed their hairstyle for twenty years.
* Later, at Witch School, Mother Whatever teaches that the Force is a Thread woven through all of existence and people who call it "the Force" are big stupids.
* Osha confesses that she doesn't want to do the Ascension and become a witch. Mother Whatever tells her that she's too young to know what she wants. "The galaxy is not a place that welcomes women like us." I guess the Republic hasn't overturned Proposition 8 yet.
* Later, as they prepare for the Ascension, Osha complains that Mae is always up in her business. She wonders what's out there in the galaxy but Mae is like there's nothing out there for us, we're the same person and you have no identity or desires of your own, you only exist as an extension of my ego.
* That night, the coven gathers around a giant vagina I mean chasm in the ground. "We were hunted, persecuted, forced into hiding, all because some would consider our power dark. Unnatural," Mother Whatever says directly into the camera, addressing the audience. They were on the brink of extinction until the birth of the twins, the only children on the planet.
* Osha and Mae approach the vagasm, their facial structures looking nothing close to identical.
* The witches enact some voodo magic, chanting "The power of one, the power of two, the power of many!"
* Osha's full name is "Verosha" apparently. Mae's is "Mae-ho" ("my hoe," really?).
* Mae swears her devotion to the coven, with Osha reluctantly doing the same. Before the latter can be baptized with black magic, however, a witch runs in and announces that the Jedi are coming. Mother Whatever orders the witches to hide the children.
* Trinity, Squid Game, Tobin Bell, and the Wookiee Kelnacca walk in. Trinity says they were unaware that the planet was inhabited. Mother Whatever is like "you ignorant slut."
* Hiding among the crowd, Osha is wowed by the Jedi's bathrobes and lightsabers.
* Trinity accuses the witches of training children in the ways of the Force against Republic law. Mother Koril insists there are no children on Brendok but Trinity calls for them to come out and Osha does, followed by Mae.
* Trinity asks where their father is. "They have no father."
* Squid Game notices a marking of golden concentric circles on Mae's forehead that appeared after her Ascension. He claims it wasn't there when he was spying on the children earlier that morning, which understandably creeps out the witches. In response, Squid Game pulls out his lightsaber, but instead of doing anything untoward he offers it to Osha, telling her he thinks she would make a good Jedi. He asks if she would like her Force affinity to be tested.
* Osha is excited for the opportunity but Mother Whatever seizes Tobin Bell's mind in the Force, making his eyes fill with tar for some reason, and demands that the Jedi leave. But Osha begs to take the test and Mother Whatever relents, allowing the twins to visit the Jedi camp tomorrow and be tested.
* After the Jedi leave, the witches call a coven council where they debate murdering the Jedi. Mother Koril calls them "a bunch of deranged monks." We find out that Mother Koril carried the twins in her womb but Mother Whatever "created" them, whatever that means. Against Mother Koril's wishes, Mother Whatever says that the twins must be tested because Osha is old enough to know what she wants, which is the opposite of what she said to Osha earlier. Character development!
* The next day, Mother Whatever coaches the twins, telling them to answer all the Jedi's questions incorrectly so they don't take the girls away. Mae says the Jedi are bad, Osha insists they're good. "It's not about good or bad," says Mother Whatever. "It's about POWER, and who's allowed to use it."
* The Jedi take a blood sample from Osha, presumably to get her midichlorian count. They do the test the Jedi Council did to Anakin in The Phantom Menace where he had to identify the images shown a screen he couldn't see. Osha gets all the answers wrong but Squid Game sees through her ruse. He tells her to have the courage to decide what she wants, and she decides she wants to be a Jedi and leave the planet to meet all the other Jedi children.
* The witches are pissed at Osha, but she says that she wants to see the galaxy, not stay here and be a witch, which causes Mae to physically attack her because she's a psychopath.
* Mae steals Osha's coloring book and says she will kill her to stop her from leaving. She locks Osha in her room and sets fire to Osha's coloring book, which ignites the hallway outside Osha's room.
* Osha takes out her sonic screwdriver and uses it to open a child-sized aperture that's built into the wall of her room for some reason. She crawls through a tunnel and arrives at what I guess is the coven's, like, giant power generator or something? Mae is there, and both twins are like "What have you done???" Anyway then the thing explodes.
* Squid Game runs in just in time to see Mae fall off a catwalk into a bottomless pit. Osha starts to fall as well but Squid Game saves her. They run out of the building, passing the dead bodies of all the witches piled up together. So clearly they didn't all die in the fire lol.
* Osha wakes up on the Jedi's ship, headed for Coruscant and her new life as a Jedi, which she will eventually fail at.
* Disney+ inserted a 90-second ad break here, then the show came back for a five-second scene of Mae alone on the planet saying "Osha," then it cut to credits. What a cliffhanger!
* This is the episode that was rumored to crack open Star Wars lore like an egg and smear its runny yolk all over the unkempt beards of fans across the globe. "They're doing away with the Chosen One prophecy! Anakin is no longer the only person conceived by the Force! The Jedi are white colonizers who oppress other cultures! They're wrong about the way the Force works too!" I was pretty excited to see what kind of continuity bomb this episode dropped, so it was a huge disappointment when it never came.
* So let's take a moment to anal-ize the major complaints that have been levied against this series so far.
1) FIRE IN SPACE
We covered this briefly when it came up in the first episode, but there's no way around it: The Acolyte shows a fire burning in the airless vacuum of space.
What's this? Scientific inaccuracy? In Star Wars????
"Okay," you say, "but those first two aren't really fires in space; they're explosions in space. The starship is venting atmosphere or a flammable gas or fluid. That's what's burning, and once it's burned up the fire will go out. The one in The Acolyte just looks like a campfire!" It doesn't look great, I'll give you that, but none of these Disney+ Star Wars shows looks especially great. I can promise you that George Lucas wasn't thinking about how to realistically portray space physics when making those movies. If scientific accuracy is so important (in this explicitly science-fantasy not science-fiction universe), why not just assume there's a gas line rupture or something feeding the fire in The Acolyte? It's not like there was any on-screen confirmation that that was what was happening in any of the movies.
"Also Han and Leia aren't walking around in vacuum, they're inside a space slug." The space slug's mouth is open to space, and they didn't know it was a space slug when they went walking around inside it, which implies that if they really had been walking on the surface of the asteroid, exposed to vacuum, they would have been fine just wearing those little oxygen masks.
Also in every movie the medium-less vacuum of space somehow conducts the sounds of starship engines and weaponsfire. There was actually a science-friendly explanation for this in the Expanded Universe, but they threw that out.
2b) NO WHITE PEOPLE IN THE MAIN CAST
I find this a strange complaint coming from the same sort of people who'll often pooh-pooh the idea of representation in media, saying something like "You don't need to look like someone to relate to them," an idea I don't necessarily disagree with. So why are white men complaining that none of the main characters in The Acolyte is a white man? If the characters suck, surely they wouldn't suck any less if they were white. Well, I see two options. For some, the issue isn't the omission of white characters, it's the deliberate omission of white characters as an ideological choice by the showrunner to push some kind of message. And the only two white people of any importance so far got killed! Everyone just wants to be a victim, I guess. As a straight white male myself, I find it an embarrassment to my people that anyone would give a shit about this.
The second option is that a lot of the people complaining about this are just racist.
3) FAT JEDI
Fat Jedi guarding the temple in the second episode! How can there be fat Jedi? Jedi have to be physically fit and mentally disciplined. Remember when Yoda had Luke doing backflips and handstands and running around a swamp in The Empire Strikes Back? How is this fatass supposed to do that?
Well, for starters, Luke didn't get the typical Jedi training regimen. Yoda gave him the crash course version, and Luke needed to be in shape because Yoda wasn't training him to be a typical Jedi; he was turning Luke into a weapon to defeat Darth Vader and the Emperor. So 100+ years before the movies, when the Jedi were at the height of their numbers and power, maybe they eased up a little on the Presidential Physical Fitness Award requirements.
Or, if you think the Jedi would never be so lax (obviously you're ignoring the sad case of poor Coleman Trebor), maybe this dude just isn't a very good Jedi. Maybe he was inducted into the order as a baby but his Force potential never really blossomed and he started stealing cookies from the Jedi cafeteria, and now they just use him as a security guard at this tiny satellite temple on a planet no one's ever heard of. That would explain why he's still a Padawan but is played by an actor in his late thirties.
Or we can go the opposite way. Maybe he's so good at using the Force that his weight isn't an issue at all. Maybe he's constantly buoyed by a cushion of Force energy, like the ocean supporting the crushing weight of a whale. Maybe he just levitates up stairs and never gets winded in a fight because his breath comes in time with the heartbeat of the universe.
Hell, maybe he's not even really fat. Maybe he's like the Kingpin, stocky but 300 pounds of solid muscle. Maybe he'll take off his tunic and reveal that he's completely shredded under his robe.
A lot of maybes with this guy. What's his name again?
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Oh, he doesn't have one. He's just some nameless minor character who probably won't even be seen on the show again. I guess his story doesn't matter. Still outrageous that he's fat, though. WOKE.
My problem with this is that Yoda has a handicap based on his physical limitations, when his character should be above that sort of thing. . . . This goes against everything that the Force is about! You see, Yoda was so magical and interesting because you didn't expect this little tiny creature to be a Jedi Master. We all had a preconception that a great warrior would be someone physically strong and intimidating. By making Yoda a little guy, they were illustrating that the Force is something beyond the physical. But by showing Yoda fight with the lightsaber, it ruins all that, because it takes that concept and those rules and throws it in the dumpster.
— Mr. Plinkett
4) THE JEDI STEAL BABIES
They don't. The witches seem to think that they will, but despite Trinity's kind of aggressive insistence that they be allowed to test the twins, the Jedi make it clear repeatedly that it's completely Osha's choice whether or not she wants to come with them and learn the ways of the Force. Eventually Osha's mother even agrees. Well, one of them does.
5) THE JEDI ARE WRONG ABOUT THE FORCE
The witches refer to their religious interpretation of the Force as "the Thread," because it weaves together reality and ties the witches to one another. They say that the Jedi are deluded enough to believe that they can "use" the Force, but they don't really understand it.
Apparently people are outraged about this. How dare they defame the Jedi like that! The Jedi are our heroes. Do they really expect us to just buy into all this nonsense and accept that these oppressed homosexual women are so awesome and correct about everything and the Jedi suck?
Well, probably not, I would think. The witches are some weirdo cult who have personal and practical reasons to dislike and mistrust the Jedi. A group of weirdos saying the Jedi are bad is not the same as the writer inserting their personal opinion into the story and definitively stating that the Jedi are objectively bad. This isn't a Karen Traviss situation where all the characters share the same viewpoint, including those for whom having that belief makes no sense. Osha, the ostensible hero of this show, even says point blank: "The Jedi are good."
I guess people are also upset about the "Thread" thing and think this is meant to retcon everything we know about the Force and give a big middle finger to George Lucas and his movies. Well, first of all, the way the witches talk about the Thread doesn't even sound all that different from how the Jedi describe the Force.
Secondly, this is far from the first time that Star Wars has introduced a new organization of Force-users whose beliefs differ from those of the Jedi. The Fallanassi, another all-female religious order, called the Force "the White Current." It was called "the Potentium" by the heretical Jedi sect of Zonama Sekot. The Sorcerers of Rhand believed in ultimate entropy, a power even greater than the Force that they called "the Dark."
This is just basic worldbuilding. Why wouldn't there be alternative schools of belief about the Force? It doesn't mean that the Jedi are wrong, it just means that the galaxy is a big, philosophically diverse place.
6) LESBIAN SPACE WITCHES CUCK ANAKIN SKYWALKER
The big rumor for episode three was that Osha and Mae would be revealed to have been conceived by the Force as a "dyad" of Chosen Ones a century before Anakin, fundamentally altering the Jedi prophecy from the prequels by introducing a cyclical lineage of messiahs and eliminating Anakin Skywalker's singular specialness. To be honest I was really looking forward to this twist, not because I thought it would be particularly well done or interesting, but because I think turning Darth Vader from a guy who turned against evil out of love for his son to a prophesied messiah acting out a preordained destiny was one of the biggest narrative blunders George Lucas came up with. But it didn't happen.
All we found out is that the twins have no father, and that Mother Whatever did something to cause Mother Koril to conceive without one. We don't know what she did; presumably that will be revealed later, and it will probably be like some arcane pagan ritual or something. But it doesn't matter, because the fact that she did anything at all already disproves the Chosen Ones theory. Nobody did anything to directly cause Shmi Skywalker to conceive Anakin without a father. The Force conceived Anakin through the midichlorians, because he was the Chosen One. Mother Whatever ain't the Force.
* In conclusion, this episode wasn't the unprecedented continuity bomb we were promised, but it really wasn't anything special either. This show seems incapable of maintaining any sense of mystery or tension for very long. We're made to think that Osha is the killer, then we immediately find out it's really her twin sister. The Jedi are suspicious of her, then they immediately start to trust her. She gets blamed for Torbin's death, but don't worry, here's Haircut to vouch for her. What happened to Osha's family sixteen years ago? Squid Game tells us right away. Is he telling the truth? Wait till next episode and we can see with our own eyes that he was. Something still seems amiss, though, will we find out what it is? Probably sooner than later.
* 6.5/10, I guess?
* Also I can't believe that was Margarita Levieva playing Mother Koril. What are the odds that she was really the one who killed off the coven and has been pulling the strings as Mae's faceless master all along?
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