In The Acolyte, the Jedi really were just cops all along

In its eight-episode first season, The Acolyte repeatedly hinted that it would continue Star Wars’ habit of complicating the Jedi’s legacy. Though often presented as avatars for the pure, Light side of the Force, Jedi have always been more complicated than that. The Acolyte suggested it was going to explore that complication, and while its insistence on obfuscation delayed the reveal, the show promised a dramatic story about the Jedi’s mysterious actions on the planet Brendok. Instead, we just got a cop show.

[Ed. note: This analysis of The Acolyte includes season 1 end spoilers.]

Series creator Leslye Headland and her team worked hard to hide their true game, playing out the events on Brendok across two episodes to unfurl the full conspiracy: When the Jedi learn about a witch coven hiding on Brendok, Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) becomes deeply concerned, without much evidence provided to viewers, that the two children present in the coven are in grave danger.

A confrontation breaks out. Sol kills Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith). Mind-controlled Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo) nearly kills Padawan Tobin (Dean-Charles Chapman). Jedi team leader Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) kills the rest of the witches by breaking their mind-control connection with Kelnacca. Meanwhile, Mae (Leah Brady) locks her sister-not-sister Osha (Lauren Brady) in a cell and sets the whole stone mountain on fire, seemingly intending to kill Osha rather than letting her leave with the Jedi. (In spite of the season’s spirit of Rashomon-ing, this appears to be true even in Mae’s version of events.) Indara tells Sol and the rest of the Jedi to tell the Jedi Council “Mae burned down the witches’ fortress and everyone was lost,” which becomes the official narrative of events.

That’s an anticlimactic reveal for the season’s big mystery, which had repeatedly hinted at much larger Jedi misdoings, considering Sol’s tremendous guilt and secrecy and some heavy insinuations from adult Mae and her Master Qimir (Manny Jacinto). The show sets up some sort of dark secret, but the reality is mild — Sol acted too hastily under bad intel, but out of fear of the witches presenting some real danger to the children. Granted, The Acolyte makes no effort to explain why he would see this as a danger worthy of murder.

Sol’s murder of the girls’ mother is the central reveal — it’s the source of Sol’s guilt and Mae’s anger. So by the end of the finale, it’s not a surprise that Jedi Master Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) pins the whole crisis on Sol, who she characterizes as a good man who made a bad choice. This is where The Acolyte has more in common with modern cop fiction than with previous Star Wars stories. The show as constructed suggests Sol’s actions were heinous but justified, and that the Jedi are a flawed but necessary tool of violence and power, a group of people who mean well, but make mistakes. This is a common landing place for modern cop fiction, which is attempting to grapple with widespread understandings of police violence and malpractice, while still working within the established trappings of the genre.

The Jedi in The Acolyte all appear to have noble intentions, but through various human (or Wookiee) vulnerabilities and decisions, their presence on Brendok results in the death of almost everyone there. While the show hints throughout the season that this was the case, the big reveal takes the easy way out. The Jedi did not intentionally cause the destruction — the much more interesting choice The Acolyte repeatedly hinted at throughout its first half — but their actions (along with those of the coven) accidentally led to it.

So The Acolyte, like much modern cop fiction, tries to have it both ways. The Jedi are not exemplary people, and they cross the line, leading to death and destruction, the show tells us… while emphasizing that there are worse forces out there, and we need line-crossers to stand against them. That’s a boring, easy way out of a difficult discussion. Sol doubles down on the righteousness of his decision, with no room for the narrative to have some distance about his actions. He calls killing Mother Aniseya “the right thing to do” because she created Osha (Amandla Stenberg) and Mae (also Amandla Stenberg) via a vergence, but at no point does the show even attempt to explain why that’s a threatening or dire problem, or what about Sol’s decision makes sense. But he believes it, and believes the Jedi Order would stand with him if they knew the truth.

Lest you think the show is depicting a bad man justifying his bad actions, he isn’t alone. We even get the Star Wars version of a “bad apples” speech, complete with Vernestra — an established hero in Star Wars lore — organizing another cover-up to the Council, telling them “We wholly condemn the actions of Master Sol” and “A rogue Jedi named Sol killed his accomplices to maintain the cover story.”

“While this is a terrible tragedy,” she says. “It was the work of one flawed man.”

Headland and The Acolyte team want their ideas — about the Jedi, the Sith, the witch coven, even the very nature of good and evil — to be complicated. But much as in modern cop shows, they don’t provide room or context for this story to breathe, or for its lessons to feel earned. They want to depict all parties involved in the events on Brendok as compromised, asking the viewers to make up their own minds about who’s really to blame — but without the information necessary to actually do that.

Ultimately, that means The Acolyte doesn’t have much to add to the Jedi discourse. If it’s just saying that they’re bad, we knew that. If it’s that they’re cops, we knew that, too. If it’s that there are bad actors in policing forces… that’s well-established as well.

Consider how the sequel trilogy handles Kylo Ren’s relationship with Luke Skywalker. The Last Jedi ultimately reveals Luke’s mishandling of Kylo as a pupil through a similar Rashomon-ing of perspectives, but it comes after the audience has spent plenty of time with Kylo, viewing the world and his relationship to the Jedi Order from his perspective. When the reveal finally happens, it transforms our understanding of Luke, but it also naturally builds off our understanding of Kylo and what he’s been through.

In The Acolyte, we have no such perspective for Mae or Qimir, because of the show’s focus on the allure of “mystery.” If, instead of hiding what Mae and Qimir knew for the first six episodes of the show, The Acolyte balanced their perspectives with Sol and Osha’s, the intended message would have been much clearer and more effective. Instead, it’s a poorly planted twist that falls flat. Ultimately, all The Acolyte can really muster is that the Jedi can be bad sometimes, but the Sith are far more dangerous.

Clearly the team behind The Acolyte wants to say something more about the Jedi, building off the complications to their legacy — complications that first appear in George Lucas’ prequels, where the Jedi’s hubris and stagnancy lead to their destruction via a fascist uprising. The Last Jedi showed us how complicated even our best Jedi heroes could be. But forget what it wanted to say — what did The Acolyte actually say about the Jedi? The closest answer I can see is “No matter how much the Jedi mess up, their actions are justified because the alternatives are too terrifying.” That’s a tedious, empty message in police television, and it’s just as tedious and empty in the world of Star Wars.