The Acolyte’s best mystery is about how to murder a Jedi, not who did
The Acolyte, Disney Plus’ latest contribution to the Star Wars universe, is a murder mystery. At least, that’s what we’ve been given to understand by its marketing. But now that we’re two episodes into the season, an entirely different puzzle has become the brightest spot in the show to me.
It’s an irresistibly Star Wars-y question, but more importantly, it’s a perfect frame for exactly the kind of action cred that was briefly, thrillingly, core to the Star Wars franchise.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.]
How do you kill a Jedi without using a weapon?
This is the challenge posed to Mae, our erstwhile apprentice, by her master, who looks like a Sith and quacks like a Sith, but as yet has not had much time to espouse his alliances or philosophy. As the final lesson in her training, Mae has to kill at least one Jedi without using a weapon, in order to kill “the dream.” What dream? The dream that all Jedi live in, apparently, “a dream they believe everyone shares.”
According to Mae’s master, “An acolyte kills without a weapon; an acolyte kills the dream.”
It means everybody’s kung fu fighting, baby.
The Acolyte’s unarmed, hand-to-hand combat stuck out from the moment its trailers dropped. There’s very little anywhere in live-action Star Wars like it — the gravitational coolness of lightsabers is too much to escape. Jedi and Sith fight with swords; everybody knows this. Smugglers and soldiers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that shoot lasers. Even Donnie Yen’s enigmatic Force adherent-but-definitely-not-Jedi Chirrut fights with a stick. Blame the market for action figures with accessories, I suppose.
For all that Star Wars is rooted in samurai film, it has precious few callbacks to the immortal trope of a fighter who refuses to draw his blade. But in The Acolyte, that’s how every Mae-versus-Jedi fight begins, because a Jedi won’t draw on an unarmed foe. In these first two episodes, Mae’s clashes with
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