The Acolyte Cancellation Deepens Franchise’s Greatest Mystery

In the first season of The Acolyte, we get only the barest glimpse of Darth Plagueis. In the show’s final episode, he was literally creeping and peeping around the planet where Qimir recruited Osha as his apprentice, and he watched the two take off.

We never found out why he was there or what his whole deal was, and now that the show has been canceled, it sounds like we never will.

Long before The Acolyte came out, Darth Plagueis was mentioned by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. As Palpatine tells a rapt Anakin Skywalker, Plagueis was a powerful Sith who had mastered a Force art that could allow him to live forever.

Ironically enough, this didn’t keep Palpatine from killing the man in his sleep (a fact he omits while talking to Anakin Skywalker) and taking his place as the head Sith in charge.

Previously, we found out more about this mysterious Sith in the book Star Wars: Darth Plagueis, but after Disney bought the franchise, that book and everything else in the Expanded Universe was removed from canon status.

Since then, we’ve only learned a few things about him, including that he is an alien Muun and helped his apprentice Palpatine become Senator of Naboo.

And we also know that he wanted to create a Force dyad with Palpatine and had no idea that his apprentice would kill him, though, in a final irony, Palpatine used the forbidden Force techniques of Plagueis to survive by hopping into a clone body.

The Acolyte may have only given us the barest glimpse of Darth Plagueis, but it sounds like showrunner Leslye Headland had some big plans for the character.

In a previous interview, before he was even revealed in the show, she confirmed that she knew how the story of Plagueis in the High Republic era would connect to him eventually training Palpatine. In her words, that particular tale would be “pretty complicated and messy.”

After The Acolyte season 1 finale aired, Headland expounded on some of what she wanted to do with Darth Plagueis, including that she didn’t want audiences to think “he’s been pulling the strings the whole time.’”

In fact, she wanted his presence to make us look at Osha and Qimir and realize “these two are doomed in some way” because “there can only be two.” In that sense, the presence of this legendary Sith in the finale turns what might have otherwise been a triumphant moment into “a bittersweet tragedy.”

Reading between the lines here, it sounds like future seasons of The Acolyte would have done some cool things with Darth Plagueis: because Qimir was also obsessed with Force dyads, it sounds like Plagueis was studying him from afar to learn more for himself.

Plagueis would try and fail to create such a dyad with Palpatine decades later, so this might have been a time he wanted to learn as much as possible for himself. It sounds like he might have eventually killed both Qimir and Osha, either in an attempt to master this power for himself or just to clear the board of other Dark Side users.

To be perfectly honest, future seasons of The Acolyte would have been worth watching if they had focused less on a weird mystery and more on the machinations of Darth Plagueis.

Now that the show has been canceled, though, we won’t get more of his tale, and who knows when–or if–we’ll see this savvy Sith onscreen again. As it turns out, Disney is a bit like the Jedi because the tragedy of Darth Plagueis is not one they will ever tell us.