This story contains major spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.
Of all the possible things The Acolyte could have referenced in its premiere episodes, Scream was probably not on anyone’s radar. The opening sequence of Disney+’s latest Star Wars streaming series begins not with a massive ship crawling through space, but with a cloaked figure named Mae (Amandla Stenberg) strolling along on an idyllic planet and stopping to ask a villager one simple question: “Where’s your Jedi?” She enters a cantina, finds the local Jedi—Master Indara, played by Carrie-Anne Moss—drinking with some patrons, and declares, “I’m here to kill you.” What unfolds thereafter is a decidedly intimate and exceedingly well-staged martial arts battle wherein the young assassin follows through on her promise, taking down a proficient, lightsaber-wielding Jedi with a couple of ordinary knives.
Whether the parallel is intentional or not, Wes Craven’s meta-slasher film introduced a character played by Drew Barrymore in its opening scene and then killed her off within moments, as a way of shocking the audience and establishing the stakes of what’s to come. The same thing happens here—Master Indara isn’t just a Jedi, she’s a Jedi played by Trinity from The Matrix, a sci-fi icon, who gets dispatched in similarly surprising fashion. We think we know the beats of what a Star Wars story should be, and yet The Acolyte is here to upend those expectations.
Even The Acolyte’s premise bucks a trend. Post-The Rise of Skywalker, most of the Disney+ Star Wars series have set their stories in the gaps between established events. The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka all take place after the events of 1983’s Return of the Jedi; Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi fall between Revenge of the Sith and Rogue One. As exciting as these shows can be, they’ve all been narratively dependent on some aspect of the so-called Skywalker saga, and every glimpse we’ve gotten of unexplored reaches of the galaxy far, far away has been bracketed by some cameo whose significance required casual viewers to read a deep-dive explainer about the lore of various animated series.
In its first two episodes, both of which hit Disney+ this week, The Acolyte does not suffer the same fate. It’s set a century before Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, in an age known as the High Republic era. So far, there’s nary a Skywalker to be found; the Jedi we do see are at the apex of their power, a formidable peacekeeping force of monastic warriors stationed around the galaxy. (The question “Where’s your Jedi?” implies that in this era, every neighborhood has one.)
The High Republic era has been depicted before, in tie-in novels, comics and audiobooks, but this is the first time we’ve seen it in live action; that in itself makes The Acolyte feel new. But there are also signs that the series, created by Russian Doll showrunner Leslye Headland, intends to raise questions about whether the Jedi are maintaining galactic peace in a way that does more harm than good; in the first episode, two high-ranking Jedi confer about Indara’s murder and immediately agree to keep it a secret, so that the Jedi Order’s “political enemies” can’t use the news of a rogue Force user against them.
This unflattering portrayal of the Jedi has already triggered sputtering outrage on the part of a certain kind of strict-constructionist Star Wars fan; it follows directly on from 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in which a aging, disillusioned Luke Skywalker suggests that “if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy. Hubris.” (Among other things, the Jedi Order trained two of their greatest enemies, Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, and in the prequels no one has the mind-power to realize that Chancellor Palpatine is Darth Sidious until he’s already built the clone army that ends up assassinating all but a few of them.)
Like most Star Wars stories, this one has a rhyme to it: Mae has a twin sister named Osha (also played by Stenberg) who trained under the Jedi before leaving the Order, an echo of Lucas’ original trilogy, in which the statement There is another… was a reveal that upended the plot. That familial relationship at the story’s heart is how you know you’re watching Star Wars, even when the show questions time-honored ideas about the Jedi’s heroism; it uses otherworldly backdrops to foreground the characters' personal journeys.
Those backdrops are pretty impressive, too—the village in the first episode feels more vibrant and alive than most of the Volume-rendered environments of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Each planet has its own distinctive look and tone, and you never feel like you’re just looking at a palette-swapped Tatooine. These worlds feel genuinely unexplored and deeply exciting. And while The Acolyte isn’t making sweeping statements about the nature of life under fascist rule the way Andor does, it’s clearly interested in using the format of the space-fantasy adventure to explore ideas about power and who is and isn’t allowed to wield it.
Throughout its first two episodes, The Acolyte feels like the Star Wars show that many fans have yearned for since Disney took over Lucasfilm: something entirely unlike what’s existed previously. The shape of it may look familiar; at the end of the day, it’s still a Star Wars show, and Headland clearly has a superfan’s eagerness to bring out all the toys, from probe droids to Neimoidians to Wookiees, not to mention a mysterious Sith Lord type with a red lightsaber. But we’ve never seen the saga's central conflict between the forces of darkness and light from this point of view. What’s old is new again; The Acolyte brings the promise of new possibilities to the franchise for the first time in a long, long while.