The opening crawl of Revenge of the Sith is one of the most fascinating in all of Star Wars. Its immediate cry of war sets a new status quo—one not really seen on screen at that point, only covered in comics with further exploration down to come with the likes of Clone Wars. But it’s the sentences that come after in that opening paragraph that are the real salvo. A crumbling Republic, already? Heroes, on both sides of a conflict forever presented to us as Good versus Bad, Light versus Dark? Evil everywhere?
Of course, there were layers already to this we’d see as Revenge of the Sith progressed—the evil everywhere manifested as Palpatine’s machinations of both sides of the Clone War to bring about that titular revenge. The heroes on both sides would take future stories to really explore, soldiers and leaders in a war that so few really grasped how futile their heroism ultimately was, as pieces on a chessboard. But the inherent complication that comes with pitting people against each other, all the causes they believe in, and the choices they make in that conflict, has always been a tough push and pull at the very heart of what Star Wars is. The series is a fantasy, filled with resplendent heroes of a light everlasting, their foe an ultimate evil: a maniacal, cackling specter on a quest to become an immortal embodiment of despair itself. That’s not complicated. There’s a side to be on, and a side to not be on.
And yet, Star Wars is also ultimately about people, and people are fascinating and imperfect. Heroes can make bad decisions, can be blinded by ideals and make choices that spin wildly out of their intended outcomes. They can fall to darkness, so sure in what they’re doing as the right thing. Bad people can break out of unjust systems, or provide some amount of tragic justification for horrifying actions. Some of the people that have fallen furthest, can be pulled back into the light and find redemption. For a clear cut as Star Wars often is—a fairy tale in space, with clear definitions of who is right and just, and who is wrong and villainous—it is often at its very best playing in its complicated shades, and speaking to the human imperfection at the core of its grand, sci-fi setting. It is in that complicated shade—or rather, the potential for it, driven by myriad other emotions—that The Acolyte thrusts us into this week with “Choice,” the episode that finally lays bare the mystery driving its heroes and villains alike: what really happened that night 16 years ago on Brendok?
“Choice,” the penultimate episode of The Acolyte‘s debut season, is a fascinating sister episode to its bold flashbacks back in episode three, “Destiny”. If that episode played with a Rashomon influence to provide us a singular, biased perspective on the events that saw Mae and Osha split apart and the Brendok witch coven burned in flame—trusting us to not have the full picture yet, but to recognize that what was laid in front of us was an imperfect perspective—”Choice” finds great strength in not just the context it provides those same events, but a strength in broadening the perspectives we see that context through. No longer confined to the naïve perspective of a child yearning to find her own way outside what is asked of her, the tragedy that plays out on this quiet forest world casts light and shadows across all of its involved parties. What were once clear savior figures in the Jedi become compromised people in their own ways, pushed and pulled by emotional circumstance, their perceived duties, and the inherent flaw of a galactic organization whose bigger picture often blinds what its members need to be in a given moment. What was once the selfish fury of a sister, becomes a choice impacted by the hurts and fears of a whole family. What was in one turn a tragic accident, in another becomes a series of regrets and misunderstandings that explode into one another, bringing a dread inevitability with them.
As familiar beats and scenes replay with this broadened context—constantly reminding us as the audience that these are all imperfect perspectives of the events unfolding—”Choice” doesn’t just make the events of Mae and Osha’s childhoods clearer to us, it muddies these events in fascinatingly complicated ways. By the end of the episode, we have an understanding of what happened in this one night on Brendok: initially rebuffed but ultimately compromised with, a quartet of Jedi tested two young girls from a coven of witches for their capacity to wield the Force. One of those Jedi, a young master named Sol, connected with the yearning of one of those girls, Osha, to leave her home and become a Jedi rather than a witch—a connection that pulls him to make a desperate case that it is his and his fellow Jedi’s duties to liberate these two children from their home. Fear and judgment on both sides leads to anger and conflict, as Jedi and witches alike turn on each other in self defense, leaving many dead. Sol is left among the ruins of a burning coven to make one final choice: sacrifice one child to save the one he has formed attachment to. A choice among many choices of the night that is ultimately covered up, to the surviving Osha and to the wider Jedi Order alike, leaving just those four Jedi—Sol, Indara, her padawan Torbin, and the Wookiee Kelnacca—burdened by the truth for the next 16 years. But it is in those moments of choice, in these fears, these angers, these misjudgments by both the Jedi and the Brendok witches, that the episode sings, bringing a textural messiness to this ostensibly clarified understanding.
That in and of itself is a fascinating parallel to the earlier flashbacks we saw in “Destiny”—that paradoxically in learning more of the context around the events that unfolded there, we’re left with even more complications and questions of uncertainty. But if “Destiny” raised questions of the logistics of these events, “Choice” is a sister episode that raises questions of the motivations and desires of every character involved in those events. This is especially important, because the episode further fractures its perspectives beyond being either the view of the four Jedi on this world or the Brendok coven at large, and into individual perspectives all with their own desires, needs, and moral views. Among the Jedi, we see Sol depicted as a rare master with more than a hint of desire: a yearning need to find himself a padawan, driven by his belief in duty and his desire to mentor someone. We have Torbin, himself a young padawan learner, bristling at the thought of being dumped on a remote world away from the comforts of his Temple home on Coruscant—”home,” a deliberate word he uses, one that feels strange to come out of a Jedi’s mouth—to do busy work in the field, yearning to go back to what he knows. Indara and Kelnacca are arguably the two who are presented in the best of lights for much of the episode, but even they are compromised by the actions of others: Kelnacca literally, when he is possessed by the Force abilities of Mother Koril to be used as a weapon against Sol and Torbin when they attempt to take Osha and Mae by force, and Indara more ethically when it is ultimately her decision, driven out of a desire to protect both Sol and Osha alike, to cover up the events of the night.
The same can be said of the coven, who, while not as directly drilled down on here as the individual Jedi are, are still presented as a mix of conflicting perspectives, driven by likewise similar human feelings. At the heart of it all are the differing perspectives of mothers (in the sense of both the mantle as the coven’s leadership, and as the parents of Osha and Mae) Aniseya and Koril, who both react in different ways to the perceived threat the Jedi represent in testing their daughters. This episode frames a lot of the coven’s ideas in darkness—in some ways because we see them from Sol’s perspective, strangers with strange powers who potentially threaten two children to amplify that power, in others because we see that power explicitly used in aggressive defense in both Aniseya and Koril’s mental manipulations of Torbin and Kelnacca. But even then, both Aniseya and Koril’s different perspectives blur that darkness, not necessarily framing the coven as explicitly villainous. Aniseya begins her interactions with the Jedi on a hostile front, penetrating Torbin’s mind the first time they come knocking, but she also ultimately advocates against much of her own sisterhood to make the choice to let the Jedi take Osha, granting her daughter’s desire to forge her own path out of love. Koril, meanwhile, retains that aggressive stance throughout the episode, and is the one who rallies her fellow witches to arms when Sol and Torbin arrive a second time, telling Mae to get angry, and use that anger to defend her family—an anger that ultimately results in Mae inadvertently burning her whole home down. It’s Koril that sets the stage for a battle, but it’s Sol and Torbin who really start it in igniting their lightsabers—especially as Sol immediately plunges his into the chest of Aniseya, an almost instinctual response to her use of the Force, one that is never made clear to either the characters or the audience in its intent. All we are left with is her dying words to Sol before all hell breaks loose: she was giving him what he wanted, letting Osha leave with him, and she is repaid with his judgment, and his fear, resulting in her death, and the seeming deaths of almost every other witch in the coven, after Koril seemingly uses their combined power to overwhelm and possess Kelnacca.
Yet that is not necessarily the most heinous choice Sol makes by the episode’s end. It’s the most understandable one—a tense situation, a use of the Force he doesn’t understand right in front of him, a snap decision to respond to aggression with overwhelming aggression in turn, in the hopes it diffuses the situation entirely. But as we said, darkness exists in all these characters and their humanity, and it is his second choice that sets the stage for The Acolyte‘s compelling emotional stakes heading into its finale. After the twinfold chaos of the fire breaking out and the battle between the Jedi, the witches, and the possessed Kelnacca, it’s revealed to us at last that when Sol came across Mae and Osha on a crumbling bridge, it was he who was keeping it up with the Force: and when he couldn’t keep it up any more, he decided to let Mae fall to her seeming death, and save the child he desired to forge into the student he always wanted. No one is left untouched by darkness by end of “Choice,” but in a lot of ways that darkness was already there when we first met all of these characters, just manifested in different ways—selfishness, desire, attachment, hubris. All human feelings that clash and intermingle to make the horrors of these events unfold in the way they do.
It is in this emotionally complicated, clear-yet-unclear moment that the stage is set for The Acolyte‘s finale, one brimming with as much potential as it is mired (and made most interesting) in all this uncertainty. Will it be a grand clash of Good and Evil, as Star Wars so broadly often is? Can it be, amid the layers and complexities of the revelations of what actually happened on Brendok, if that truth is in turn revealed to the likes of Osha and Mae? How will the Stranger, or the Jedi Order at large, factor into this deeply personal conflict? Even now with the truth revealed to the audience, there is only really one thing made clear: there are heroes, on both sides. But evil—the capacity for it, even in this enlightened age of the High Republic—is everywhere.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
