The Acolyte reopens a Star Wars debate: Are the Jedi kidnapping kids into a cult?

polygon.com:

When the first trailer for Lucasfilm’s latest Star Wars series, The Acolyte, dropped back in March, the group email for my Star Wars: Edge of the Empire role-playing game immediately blew up. The tongue-in-cheek question on our minds was whether someone at Lucasfilm had been secretly monitoring our latest story arc: Our game is set during the Old Republic era and The Acolyte is a High Republic-era story, but otherwise, everything we knew about the new series seemed entirely compatible with the original story our game master had whipped up, about a Jedi kidnapping dozens of Force-sensitive children for training, and quietly advising the local Commerce Guild outpost on ways to violently suppress the local uprising that resulted.

From what we knew about The Acolyte back then, it just seemed like a funny coincidence that the show’s teaser and the arc we were about to conclude were so in sync. We assumed once the series aired and its storyline was clearer, it’d be a lot more obvious that the Jedi were meant to be the heroes in The Acolyte, and any seeming morally gray areas would be cleared up.

But episode 3 of The Acolyte doesn’t make anything clearer. If anything, it muddies the already pretty murky waters around the ways the Jedi acquire kids for training, and how they treat those kids once they have them. The episode deliberately obfuscates a lot of important detail about what happened on the planet Brendok, clearly with some form of reveal to come, possibly even exonerating the Jedi from, for instance, murdering everyone in Mae and Osha’s witch coven. But what it does show us about Jedi recruitment tactics sure doesn’t paint them in a positive light.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Acolyte season 1, episode 3.]

Consider the events of this episode in the most generous light possible, from the presumed Jedi perspective. At this point in the Star Wars timeline, they’re a significant power in the galaxy, essentially space cops out to protect the Republic, prevent the