‘The Acolyte’ Episode 6 Recap: Teacher’s Pet

Score another one for the little-guys department. In this week’s episode of The Acolyte, we get introduced to some adorable little elephant bird creatures on the shore of the unknown planet — helpfully labeled UNKNOWN PLANET by the show — where the rogue Dark Side user Qimir has taken the kidnapped ex-Jedi trainee Osha. They don’t play any kind of role in the story, not even in a minor way like they eat someone’s lightsaber crystal or something. They’re just there, being cute little guys. As a big cute little guy fan, I’m all for this.

I’m also a pretty big fan of what is, to my knowledge, the first canonical on-screen depiction of a Star Wars character getting an eyeful of another Star Wars character’s exposed junk. When Osha tracks down her captor, she watches him skinny dip in a little ocean pool. It’s then that he begins putting kind of a whammy on her, mentally, but I don’t think it’s due to attraction; as he himself points out, she clearly had romantic intentions towards the Jedi padawan Jecki, whom he’d murdered the day before and who moreover was a woman. But any attempt by a Star Wars show to steam things up, for the audience if not the characters, deserves a tip of the flight helmet.

Back on the little guy front, the anthropomorphic squirrel tracker guy Bazil comes through in a big way, though depending on how much faith you’d like to have in the Jedi’s abilities you might prefer he hadn’t had to. Jedi Master Sol spends most of the episode apparently completely snowed by Qimir’s switcheroo, swapping out his acolyte Mae for Sol’s ex-padawan Osha. Even after he has a heart-to-heart with her in which she tells him it’s easy for people to just believe what they want, and even after he makes a point of the good care she’s taking of the Pip droid whose memory she just erased, it’s not until Bazil tips him off that he hits her with a stun gun. Props to the rodent-man for clearing up this sitcom nonsense.

Osha wakes up handcuffed, at which point Master Sol promises to finally tell her what really happened the night the Jedi took her sister and her mother’s compound burned down. If you think we’re actually getting this information at the time he promises to deliver it, though, you haven’t been watching The Acolyte, a show which seems intent on stringing this mystery out well past the point of “please just sit down and talk for thirty freaking seconds and clear this up.”

Back on Unknown Planet, Qimir relies on Osha’s Jedi-trained reluctance to kill an unarmed man to do a little light reprogramming, or deprogramming from his vantage point. He explains the nature of the Dark Side of the Force to her as though she’s never heard of it before, which is an unnecessary thing to do in a Star Wars show even from an audience perspective. He tells her the Jedi discarded her because they saw her negative emotions were too strong, which doesn’t jibe with her insistence that she quit. This is when she admits she failed rather than walked away, but whatever the case, I would at some point like at least one thing the show tells us about Osha’s life to be true. Getting the carpet yanked out from under you over and over has diminishing returns.

The episode ends admirably oddly, with Osha putting on Qimir’s helmet — it’s made from cortosis, a metal that both shorts out lightsabers and has a sensory-deprivation effect so that your only remaining sense is the Force itself, provided you can tap into it. We see her put the helmet on through her eyes, watching the world go black except a little sliver of dim light. We hear her breathe, and the credits begin to roll over the sound effect, not Star Wars-y music as has been the case…well, literally every other time I’ve watched anything Star Wars. 

I’m impressed by this willingness to break the mold, also reflected in the decision to let actor Manny Jacinto flex his full sex appeal as Qimir. Obviously, I’m impressed by all the cute little guys. But I’d be more impressed if I felt these innovations came in service of material that provided any of it with a compelling context. Evil twins, mistaken identity, “What happened?” “I’ll tell you everything” episode after episode…there’s not much to go on there.

And the dialogue is a real problem. Not overall — overall it’s perfectly fine, and consonant with the Star Wars conversational style. It’s just that when it shoots for Star Wars profundity, it sounds like less like Yoda or Obi-Wan and more like something Dr. Phil told Bhad Bhabie in her “cash me ousside” days. “When you lose everything, that’s when you’re finally free.” Oh brother. “I don’t trust you.” “Nor should you, but you should learn to trust yourself.” Oh brother!

There’s one more thing to note before we tune in next week: Sol believes his team was set up on Khofar, deliberately sent to someone who was waiting for them. I don’t think this came across at all last episode, during which it seemed Qimir is simply a much better and more ruthless fighter than the Jedi he fought. There aren’t a whole lot of people who could have betrayed him, given the secrecy of the mission; Master Vernestra dispatched him and insists on leading the rescue team, so she seems like a leading candidate. On the other hand, her investigation into the crime scene appears legit enough, given that the show sees fit to allow us access to her extrasensory Force perception and hear the sounds of the battle. Could someone with a cool purple lightsaber whip be evil? We’ll see, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.