The Acolyte is hinging its whole story on vergences, of all things
No one has ever accused Star Wars lore of being clean or simple. But even in its mess of post-Disney canon and oft-ignored Legends, there are still pockets of absolute silliness that are allowed to play important roles in the story. And now the latest episode of The Acolyte has let two of those things take center stage: vergences and midi-chlorians.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for episode 7 of The Acolyte.]
Just about every Star Wars fan from the ardent book-reader to the most casual movie watcher is familiar on some level with midi-chlorians. First infamously mentioned by Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, they’re a physical, living measurement of Force sensitivity that can be measured with a simple Jedi blood test.
It’s a bit of the lore that’s been ridiculed and rejected by fans since 1999, and with pretty good reason. It’s disappointing to hear the mystery and magic of the Force reduced to a question of simple genetics. In fact, midi-chlorians have been so roundly chastised, that when The Acolyte chooses to bring them up for plot purposes, its writers refuse to even use their full name, instead employing the ridiculous sounding, “M-count,” for short. Despite all that though, vergences, this episode’s other plot-important bit of lore, are even more ridiculous than the oft-mocked Force-giving lifeforms.
Vergences were also introduced in The Phantom Menace, also by Qui-Gon during a conversation with Mace Windu. He didn’t expand on them much at the time, but since that movie we’ve learned that vergences are normally places with an unusually high concentration of the Force. They’re more descriptively known as nexus points for the Force, and canonically include things like the cave on Dagobah where Luke confronts Vader. Another example is the mirror cave that Rey visits on Ahch-To. But that’s not all vergences are, and this is where thing start to get ridiculous.
Based on the different ways it’s been used in canon, vergences can be almost anything. On
Read more on polygon.com
