The Acolyte’s silly rock fire in episode 3 is a perfect symbol for its bigger problems
The Acolyte’s third episode brought up a whole lot more questions than it answered. For instance: What’s up with that Force Cult, how were Mae and Osha born, why are the Jedi here to begin with, why is the dialogue so bad, and what actually happened in that fire? But the most important question of all is: How in the hell did all that stone catch on fire?
Of course, Star Wars is a series full of deep and complex lore, so here are our best attempts to explain exactly how a mountain caught on fire in The Acolyte.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 3.]
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Before we get into explanations, it’s important that we go over the event in question a little bit first. The fire in the mountain on Brendok is the inciting incident for everything else that happens in The Acolyte. It’s what separates Mae and Osha, and what gives both of them their diametrically opposed views on the Jedi. So when we got the flashback in episode 3, it initially seemed like it might be a complex event, rife with childhood misunderstandings and missed perspective. Maybe from what Osha saw it seemed like Mae created the fire, while Mae saw that it was some kind of Jedi accident, leading to her hatred.
Unfortunately, none of this is what actually happens in the episode. Instead, we see kid Mae clearly and emotionlessly say that she would rather kill her sister herself than see her leave, then set the entire mountain temple on fire. While the events that led up to the fire are a pretty extreme disappointment — even if the show could just be using this inexplicable child murderer plot as a smokescreen for a later surprise — it’s still somehow the fire itself that seems silliest. Mae takes Osha’s sketchbook, lights up its pages using a lamp, and then throws it into the stone hallway… which promptly ignites like it’s made of dry wood. Here’s where we have to meet the show way more than halfway.
Perhaps what looked like stone inside the mountain was actually a
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