Lightsabres in the Woods

I guess there were revelations and dramatic occurrences in last night's Acolyte but it felt oddly like it was just treading water for thirty minutes.

Maybe if the reveal of Qimir as Mae's master hadn't been so obvious as to be predicted by everyone on the planet. It's not just that it was obvious. I was reminded of Amazon Prime's recent adaptation of Fallout in which characters introduced in the first couple episodes end up being revealed to have important roles in the last few episodes. It's like these shows can hire only a certain number of actors and halfway through they have to shuffle everyone around in order to complete the story.

In case you were wondering, I'm still pretty confident in my theory that adult Mae is Osha's subconscious Force projection. The show made it seem like Mae switched costumes with an unconscious Osha in order to get close to Sol. I'd say it's more like the Mae identity took over Osha's body.

By the way, my favourite send up of the old costume switch trope was on an episode of Farscape, twenty-four years ago, on an arc called "Liars, Guns, and Money". Crichton and Aeryn (the characters on whom James Gunn modelled his version of Star Lord and Gamora) knock out two armoured guards and drag them into a side corridor. They nod at each other and the scene cuts away. It comes back to find Crichton's only gotten a few bits of armour off one of them and is telling Aeryn, "Er, now we take off all our clothes."

One might point out that Han and Luke did the costume switch in A New Hope, though it was obvious they put the stormtrooper on over their regular clothes instead of fulling swapping. Isn't it funny that the mind automatically assumes it's reasonable for Mae to have stripped both herself and Osha naked then dressed both herself and Osha's unconscious body? That's how hack fiction trains us. That's why Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is so good, because it plays with these conditioned anticipations. I'm actually giving Acolyte a lot of credit by predicting it's doing a subversion.

From the way Sol asked, "Where is your sister?" instead of "Where's Mae?" there's at least an indication that Sol already knows it's the Mae identity in control now. The idea of it being a split personality might also explain why Qimir didn't kill Mae when he had the chance.

I find it really strange that anyone would find the Jedi to be the less sympathetic faction here. Qimir saying he has to murder everyone because the Jedi have a rule against people using the Force who aren't Jedi is the kind of leap of logic that makes him a pretty unremarkably psychotic villain.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.