The Acolyte Recap: Inapt Pupils

It makes sense that The Acolyte’s antonymic two-word title convention would return this week, for an episode that once again splits up the twin sisters Mae and Osha, placing them in two very different situations. In “Teach/Corrupt,” Mae is disguised as Osha and angling to get closer to Sol on his ship, while her sister is stuck with Qimir on a forbidding island on an unknown planet. And while I could stroke my chin, stare thoughtfully at the ceiling, and ask about who’s really being taught and who’s really being corrupted, I actually don’t think this is an open question.

Qimir is doing his level best to corrupt Osha. And he’s doing a pretty good job, damn him.

After the thrilling action of last week’s “Night,” this week’s episode plays much calmer and quieter, effectively resetting the scene before the season’s final two episodes. I really enjoyed the extended lightsaber battles in “Night,” which I watched three times. But I think “Teach/Corrupt” may be slightly better overall, if only because for the first time on this show, we know more about the two main characters than their respective hosts do. We’ve spent enough time with Osha now to be able to think along with her as she tries to assess the pitches Qimir is making. As for Mae, well, she’s still an enigma, but at least we can understand the layers of meaning behind everything she says to Sol.

The scenes between Sol and Mae have a subtle tension, because it seems from the start that he might know which sister he actually retrieved from Khofar. If he does, the big question is when both of them will drop their respective charades.

Initially, Sol shows Mae that he trusts her (or at least that he trusts Osha) by letting her take the wheel of the ship and by being open with her about his plan to come clean to the Jedi High Council about everything. But this latter admission may just be bait, given that Mae quickly starts asking questions about what “everything” means.

Unable to completely tamp down her disdain for the Jedi, Mae makes casually insulting observations during her time with Sol. She suggests that he makes mistakes because he gets blinded sometimes by what he wants to be true; and later, putting herself in Osha’s shoes, she says that the Jedi push Padawans to lose a lot of themselves during training. Whether Sol knows all along that he’s talking to Mae or whether he figures it out because she won’t just stop beefing about the Jedi, he finally has enough and stuns her with a blaster. A Jedi Knight can only abide so much slander.

Elsewhere in the galaxy, Qimir is playing his own variation on the “let me earn your trust by trusting you first” gambit. He lets Osha roam freely, saying she’s even allowed to hop on his ship and leave anytime … if she’s willing to swim through choppy ocean waters, that is. If she’d rather wait for the tide to turn, perhaps they can get to know each other a little.

Osha’s long chat with Qimir is absorbing in its own way — but only to a point. As has been the case throughout The Acolyte, the show’s creator, Leslye Headland, and her writers want to suggest a rich backstory for their characters without revealing yet what it all entails. Qimir admits to Osha that he was trained by the Jedi a really long time ago, and he bears scars on his back that seem to mark a time when someone “threw me away.” But what exactly happened? Was it a Jedi who hurt him? Qimir won’t confirm. All of these questions are set aside for some future episode … I hope.

For now, the meat of this conversation has Qimir trying to recontextualize Osha’s experiences with the Jedi, to get her to see them in a new way. In her version of her life story, she trained for a while with the Jedi and loved it, until she sensed a weakness in herself and walked away. In his version, the Jedi convinced her that something was wrong with her, because they could tell she was strongly connected to a deeper, truer version of the Force: the dark side. Qimir wants Osha to ignore the Jedi’s “semantics” and live freely, as someone who lets her hurt and anger fuel her.

As I said earlier, Qimir is fairly persuasive here — and not just because he’s handsome, charismatic, and reassuringly calm. Even when Osha grabs his lightsaber while he’s bathing naked in the ocean, he slyly pokes fun at a Jedi code that would consider it dishonorable for her to kill him when he’s at his most vulnerable. Why is it okay, he asks, to kill an enemy in the heat of battle and not in a quieter moment a few hours later? His logic is insidious.

It’s not especially reassuring, either, that what we see of the Jedi Order in this episode makes them look so petty. Back on Coruscant, Vernestra is still stressing about an impending senatorial review of the whole Jedi concept when she gets the news that Sol’s crew on Khofar has been wiped out. She rushes to investigate and quickly dismisses the prevailing theory that Umbramoths were responsible for the killing, because she can see the lightsaber wounds. One of her aides wonders if Master Sol might have turned evil. Vernestra doesn’t have much to say about this idea. She probably doesn’t believe it, but still … Even briefly entertaining Sol as a suspect doesn’t say much for the loyalty and competency of the Jedi.

“Teach/Corrupt” ends on a couple of good teases. On Sol’s ship, he tells the now-subdued Mae that he’s been waiting 16 years to talk to her. My assumption — given that next week’s episode is directed by Kogonada, who helmed the flashback episode “Destiny” — is that we’re about to find out what really happened on Brendok when the sisters were kids.

As for Osha, after resisting every invitation from Qimir to try out some of his cool Sith gear, she finds herself drawn to his cortosis helmet, which he describes as part defensive armor, part disruptive weapon, and part sensory-deprivation bubble — the kind of thing we’ve seen Jedi use in other Star Wars stories to help them eliminate distractions and connect to the Force. When he’s out of the room, Osha can’t help herself. She puts on the helmet. She breathes heavy and deep, sounding disturbingly like Darth Vader.

It’s corruptin’ time!

Force Ghosts

• The Acolyte creative team must have guessed that the whole internet would be thirsting after Manny Jacinto after his smoldering performance in “Night,” because they wasted no time this week in having him strip off his clothes and get all wet.

• Pip lives! It turns out that I did in fact see Bazil clutching a crucial piece of Pip at the end of last week’s episode. (Could the director and editors and cast have made Bazil’s Pip-rescue clearer, visually? Yes, they could have.) Bazil plugs Pip into a port on the ship, and then the droid uses the ship’s systems to help attack Mae. Mae responds by doing a hard reset on Pip — by pushing two buttons at once, just like you might do with a cell phone — but I have to believe that the little guy’s personality is still hardwired in there somewhere.

• In an Inverse interview with Headland after “Night,” she said something that surprised me a little — but just a little. Apparently, the original plan was to hold back the “Qimir is Mae’s master” reveal until season two. In fact, Qimir (dubbed “the Stranger” by the writers) wasn’t going to appear much at all this season. I’m glad they decided to put the character (and actor!) into play quicker, though I wish they’d kept following those instincts and gotten all of the major characters and their respective backstories into the mix earlier. There are only two episodes left in season one, yet it feels like the show is still in prologue mode. It’s a promising prologue, I’ll grant you. But we haven’t really gotten to the story yet.