‘The Acolyte’ Showrunner Leslye Headland Says She Knows How the Series Connects to Darth Plagueis
Leslye Headland has a plan.
Much like how she drew on her love of the “Star Wars” Expanded Universe in setting up her reveal of who the Sith Lord is on “The Acolyte,” the showrunner of the Disney+ series says she knows exactly how the events of her show connect with Darth Plagueis and Palpatine (a.k.a. Darth Sidious), the Sith Lords who will be active decades later.
In an interview published July 10, Nerdist asked Headland, “I’ve been waiting many years for Darth Plagueis to show up. Do you know how the whole story of the galaxy far, far away, from ‘The Acolyte‘ to him training Palpatine, connects?”
Headland said, “Yes, I do. If I continue to get to tell this story, I know how I would like that to play out. And I would say I think it’s pretty complicated and messy.”
Well now.
For those upset that the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy apparently did not have a master plan for its arc from the beginning, it sure sounds like Headland does have one here.
“The Acolyte” was intended to tell one complete story in its first season (as a second has not been officially greenlit), but there are certainly many ways that the show could continue. Headland has indicated her particular interest in exploring the Sith, and their ideology. With the revelation that Manny Jacinto‘s wily traveling companion Qimir is the Sith Lord on the show — spawning fan obsession and thirst over Jacinto and this series in a way few recent “Star Wars” shows have — there’s a huge opportunity to do just that in the future.
Headland has indicated she’s a fan of James Luceno’s 2012 novel “Darth Plagueis,” widely considered by fans to be one of the finest pieces of Expanded Universe literature ever published. The book shows how Plagueis, a Muun Sith Lord, first encountered the young Naboo nobleman Sheev Palpatine (a Force-sensitive psycho who murdered his whole family and turned his Lizzie Borden self into a calculating Sith Lord under Plagueis’s tutelage). It also established that, though the Sith believe in the Rule of Two — that there should only be a master and an apprentice at any one time — they often take on “acolytes,” apprentice wannabes, either to use against their master at a later stage or to possibly supplant a less-than-accomplished apprentice.
In the course of the novel, Plagueis, who’s killed his own master Darth Tenebrous, wheels and deals to lay the groundwork for “the coming wars” in the galaxy and eventual Sith rule with the Galactic Empire. But he also discovers that his master, Tenebrous, had recruited an acolyte (a self-styled Sith named Darth Venamis) to try to replace Plagueis. Plagueis and Venamis have a showdown, and Plagueis obviously defeats the pretender.
There is quite a bit of evidence that Headland likes Luceno’s novel: At one point in Episode 5 of “The Acolyte,” Qimir is posed quite a bit like Palpatine on the book cover. It’s also been suggested that the watery planet where Qimir is mining cortosis (the ore he fashions his armor out of that causes lightsabers to deflect and short-circuit) fits the description of the planet Baldemnic from that very book — a watery planet where Plagueis and his master mined cortosis.
So, with that in mind, is Qimir Tenebrous himself? “Plagueis” established that Tenebrous was a Bith, the egg-headed race that plays in the Mos Eisley cantina band in “A New Hope” — though it must be said that seems awfully goofy as a bit of lore to retain, that one of those weird little aliens would be the Sith Lord pulling the strings as, say, Qimir’s master. Or even as an apprentice that Qimir himself would recruit. It’s not even definitive in the new canon Disney instituted for “Star Wars” upon the company’s takeover that Plagueis has to be a Muun, the gaunt, slender-faced aliens behind the Intergalactic Banking Clan in the prequel movies.
Could Qimir be an acolyte, simply a Sith wannabe, who another Lord, like Tenebrous, is using to do his bidding from afar? And maybe Qimir, in his own right, is trying to recruit Mae and Osha to be his own acolyte to defeat his master. That would mean that Qimir is just a gateway to more Sith the show has yet to reveal to us.
None of the lore that we know about Tenebrous may have survived Disney’s reboot of the canon, and that’s fair. Disney had every right to reset the canon as it wished when it acquired “Star Wars” in the first place. But it’s interesting that certain things seem to have bubbled through into Headland’s vision. In the background of a shot where Qimir is shirtless in the water in Episode 6, there’s a Sith-looking ship that appears to be a predecessor of Darth Maul’s own Scimitar, which he flies to Tatooine to assault the Jedi in “The Phantom Menace.” The old lore says that Tenebrous designed the Scimitar himself. His profession was, in fact, that of a starship designer — if you think about it, having a starship designer Sith Lord in Tenebrous, then a banker in Plagueis, then a politician in Palpatine was the perfect succession to bring about the Empire.
So it’s possible there’s still a Darth Tenebrous pulling the strings on Qimir. Unless we all agree that having him be a Bith Sith Lord is dumb, and perhaps Qimir himself is Tenebrous. Coming from the Latin “tenebrae” for “shadows,” Qimir is certainly a shadowy individual. And, like we’re to believe with Tenebrous and Plagueis, Qimir seems obsessed with the intermingling of the Force and life itself: Using the Force to keep people from dying is a Dark Side power Plagueis was keen to discover, and Qimir seems fascinated by how it appears the coven of Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) used the Force to create Mae and Osha from scratch.
Because of that very obsession, is it that Qimir Plagueis himself? Nothing says Plagueis still has to be a Muun either. And his suggestion that he was a Jedi “a very long time ago” could mean he’s already used the Dark Side to extend his life and maintain his youthful appearance.
Either way, there is enough raw material here to show that Headland is serious about establishing a meaningful connection between Qimir and the events in the century to come with Plagueis and Palpatine working to bring about the Empire. Let’s hope she gets a chance to connect the dots.
