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The Acolyte’s first season made Star Wars’ dark past feel like a bright future

The Acolyte’s season one finale tapped into the same energy that made Star Wars: Visions magical.

That became abundantly clear as The Acolyte introduced Jedi Masters Sol (Lee Jung-jae), Yord (Charlie Barnett), and Venestra (Rebecca Henderson) as avatars of the High Republic era — a point in Star Wars history when the Order was much more part of the dominant power structure. The Acolyte ’s exploration of how a lack of oversight gave rise to deceit within the Jedi Order made its story feel like a nuanced (if unevenly paced) deepening of the Star Wars franchise’s larger ideas about how absolute power can corrupt those with the best intentions. But as often as The Acolyte ’s characters murdered and manipulated one another, what was fascinating about the show’s depiction of the Force wasn’t the idea that the Dark side was rising as its Light counterpart dimmed, but rather that neither the Jedi nor the Sith could comprehend the magnitude of what Mother Anisaya accomplished in creating her daughters.

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