Warning: Full spoilers follow for The Acolyte Episode 5, “Night.”
It’s in fashion to diss on Star Wars these days, and while the mostly dull The Acolyte has certainly not helped the franchise in this regard, the show suddenly came to life with this week’s episode, “Night,” which amid a host of action ponders the dominance of the Jedi, and whether or not the good the Jedi intend to do can sometimes cause the evil that they wind up fighting. We’ll see if that upward trend in quality continues with the remaining three episodes of the season, but regardless, this week also proved that there’s one thing The Acolyte cannot do, and that’s save most of its Jedi characters from coming across as lame cannon fodder.
It’s not a new Star Wars problem to be sure, but as the franchise has evolved, removing the mystery of the Jedi has also hobbled the power of the legendary warriors from a storytelling and dramatic standpoint. Not everyone can be Luke Skywalker, after all.
“Night,” with its systematic, Camp Crystal Lake-like killing of every Jedi Red Shirt who had shown up in the previous week’s segment, actually seemed to go out of its way to prove that fans everywhere were right when they predicted last week that these guys were dead meat. And that doesn’t even include a couple of the regular cast members who also got taken out here. But those background Jedi who were along for the ride? It was almost like a presence we’ve not felt since… at least Attack of the Clones.
Face it: We all knew that Unnamed Jedi #1-5 were goners the minute they shipped out in Episode 4, “Day,” with Lee Jung-jae’s Master Sol. At the end of that episode, the villainous Dark Force user known as the Master emerged, with Sol and his loyal Jedi companions Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett), Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen), and their five Red Shirts (Brown Cloaks?) all powering up their lightsabers, ready to do battle.
And battle they did, with each going down in order, with the exception of Sol. We don’t know exactly how Jedi #1 bought the (moisture) farm, as he’s already lying in the jungle dead as the episode starts. Jedi #2, a Kel Dor like Plo Koon from the Prequel era, gets the Master’s saber right in the back. Moments later, Jedi #3 is sliced across his belly, Jedi #4 is impaled by the Master’s lightsaber, and then for a finishing move, the Master Force-pulls Jedi #5 onto his blade while it’s still sticking out of #4’s back, before swinging for what is presumably a double decapitation just off-screen! Shortly thereafter, he triple-impales the Padawan Jecki and breaks Yord’s neck, killing them both as well.
In fact, Yord’s and Jecki’s deaths are the two surprises of the episode, not only because they’re main characters but also because the killings happen basically mid-season. At least Jecki put in a real fight, mixing it up with the Master in a way that none of the more seasoned Jedi, with the exception of Sol, seemed capable of doing. That’s because she’s played by Dafne Keen, who we expect to be a good fighter, of course, unlike those Red Shirts who were always destined to die. (Yord, somehow, isn’t even given any really good hero moments before his demise.)
But let’s not forget the Jedi who have been murdered in past episodes either, including the incredibly under-served Carrie-Anne Moss as Master Indara and the very disappointing treatment of Joonas Suotamo’s Kelnacca, the first live-action Wookiee Jedi we’ve ever encountered who was given the task of… fixing stuff, because that’s all Wookiees can do, don’t you know? He died off-camera, and never even got to use his lightsaber onscreen. Indeed, of this group, only Dean-Charles Chapman’s Master Torbin met an interesting fate, embracing suicide in order to atone for his apparent past misdeeds. A shame, then, that the story so quickly moved on from this moment.
So what’s the big deal? Our heroes have to suffer defeat in order for the greater threat they’re facing to be fully formed. The Master has to take down some opponents, win a few fights, mark a few notches on his belt in order to make his eventual ass-kicking by the good guys that much more triumphant and, hence, satisfying for us, the viewers. Some Jedi were harmed during the making of this show, basically.
But that’s the problem with depicting the Jedi Knights when they were in their full bloom, safeguarding (or trying to, at least) the greater galaxy at large. When Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke about the Jedi of yore, who you might recall were, for over a thousand generations, the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic, the Order sounded so awesome, so mysterious, and so legendary. The mysticism of the Jedi Order combined with the few scraps of knowledge we had about them – they fought in something called the Clone Wars!? – to create a mythic era that was always going to be hard to satisfyingly realize onscreen.
George Lucas had long promised to tell the story of young Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker, and he finally did with the Prequels. This, inevitably, was when the mystery surrounding the Jedi began to be chipped away at. And as beloved as the Prequels may be to some, it seems safe to say that it was something of a letdown, say, seeing the Jedi Council meeting in what feels like the conference room of a Radisson, or watching Mace Windu and Yoda continuously fuck everything up, blind to what’s happening right beneath their Force-sensitive noses, or even realizing that the Jedi apparently have just been wearing the same uniform for decades upon decades. From the galactic consequences of the Jedi’s screw-ups to the “oh, O.K.” design choices Lucas often made, the reality of seeing the Jedi Order in its prime was nowhere near as interesting as the legend of the Jedi.
Yes, it was cool that Samuel L. Jackson got a special purple lightsaber, and hey, seeing all the aliens and different types of Jedi Knights and Masters on the Council was intriguing. But not many of them really popped in that trilogy beyond Ewan McGregor’s take on Obi-Wan, Hayden Christensen’s Anakin, and maybeeee the digitally jumping Yoda, depending on your mileage for such things. By the time an army of Jedi went to battle in the second film, Attack of the Clones – the type of scene fans had long dreamed of, seeing hundreds of Force users wielding their powers and lightsabers in unison against a common enemy – it was quite a letdown as most of the anonymous group of extras were mowed down by a droid army. Let’s call it The Acolyte 1.0.
Which brings us back to “Night,” where just like in Attack of the Clones, a bunch of no-name, good-for-nothing Jedi Knights all went out like they had just beamed down to some alien planet with Captain Kirk. We knew those guys were going to get exactly what they did, and maybe that’s OK from a storytelling perspective. But it doesn’t do much for the Jedi’s legacy, that’s for sure.
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
