For their part, the daughters are divided on how strongly to adhere to the ways of their mothers and the other witches, the only people they’ve ever known. This is an interesting dynamic given what we know of the twins’ future selves. Mae, the villain, isn’t the rebel; she’s the mama’s girl, the true believer, the religious conservative. Osha rebels not out of wildness, but out of self-knowledge; she knows she belongs out in the galaxy somewhere, not cooped up where the only other child she’s ever seen is her twin sister.
All this takes on an extra dimension when the four Jedi whom Mae will later hunt show up planetside, in search of rumored children receiving illicit Force training. (The witches call the Force “the Thread” and distrust the Jedi as lunatic monks or something to that effect.) On one hand, our instinct is to regard the interlopers as colonizers, imposing a foreign religion and luring children away from their heritage. On the other, our instinct is to regard the witches as puritans or cultists, restricting an intellectually and emotionally restless child to the ways that suit them, not her.
So which instinct should prevail? Are we right to recoil at the way Koril infantilizes Osha as incapable of knowing her own heart, forcing a belief system and future upon her that she doesn’t want? Or is she the lesser of two evils, when the alternative is a lifetime of service to a holy order that’s perfectly comfortable luring children away from their families for life?
Of course, there’s the added wrinkle of the long-running fannish debate about the nature and degree of the Jedi’s benevolence as rulers and space cops. Some of it is trolling, and some of it is intellectually overburdening what is essentially a children’s property, but some of it is a sincere attempt by fans of the setting to follow certain threads about Jedi teachings and practices to their logical endpoints. Whatever the case, many viewers will be bringing their preexisting feelings about the Force-wielding warrior-monks with them.
In story terms, the debate gets cut short by Mae, who goes berserk and tries to burn Osha to death rather than allow her to voluntarily leave the sisterhood. Mae’s repeated cries of “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?” at the nonconformist Osha will ring ugly in the ears of a lot of people who received similar treatment from their own families for whatever reason. However you feel about the Jedi, only one side here is trying to burn heretics at the stake.
I reviewed the interesting third episode of The Acolyte for Decider.
Tags: decider, Star Wars, the acolyte, TV, TV reviews