The Acolyte Fixes The Last Jedi’s Biggest Mistake

For this argument about The Acolyte to make much sense, I need to briefly recap Kylo Ren’s whole deal in The Last Jedi. He frequently discusses the need to “let the past die, kill it if you have to” and even implores Rey to forget about “Snoke… Skywalker… the Sith… the Jedi… the rebels” and to join him so they can “rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy.”

When she refuses, though, the Sith simply takes over The First Order and does everything Snoke was doing before Kylo Ren cut him in half.

It’s possible, of course, that Kylo Ren was simply lying and manipulating Rey, but I always found his offer fascinating: while the various Star Wars films and related media portrayed the Sith as unfeeling monsters, the Jedi are presented as bored, myopic authoritarians.

Cranky Luke Skywalker was frankly right about the incompetence of the Jedi Order, and if he had actually seen it through, Kylo Ren’s idea about forgetting the past and introducing a new kind of Force user to the galaxy could have been just the shakeup this tired franchise really needed.

What does all this have to do with The Acolyte? So far, that show’s mysterious villain The Stranger seems to be the closest thing to Kylo Ren’s vision as described in The Last Jedi.

The character acknowledges that Jedi would call him a Sith, but he later reveals that he simply wants to use his Dark Side powers without fear of the Jedi, the galaxy’s top cops who (as the poor Nighsisters discover) will do just about anything to police how other people use The Force.

You may or may not buy the villain’s motivations, but if we take The Stranger at face value, it casts his actions in The Acolyte in a much more sympathetic light.

Rather than being some evil mastermind who wants to orchestrate the fall of the Jedi, he strikes out at his natural predators in self-defense and hopes to expose their hypocrisy to the galaxy. In this way, he rejects both traditional Jedi and Sith values and, in the parlance of our times, embraces “a secret third thing” when it comes to using The Force.

The character seems to most fully embrace Kylo Ren’s wisdom in the fifth episode of The Acolyte when we hear The Stranger ask Sol “I’ve accepted my darkness, what have you done with yours?” Whether it’s his inner darkness or just sheer incompetence, we later find out that Sol’s actions directly or indirectly killed an entire coven of Force witches.

He seemingly has a bigger body count than The Stranger and dies in complete shame at the end of the series, while The Stranger openly embracing his darkness has given him the kind of clarity that always eludes Sol and the other Jedi.

Now, the end of The Acolyte’s first season is clearly setting up more adventures, and it’s possible that The Stranger will become just another petty tyrant like Kylo Ren. Right now, though, he is the closest thing that Star Wars has given us to the fascinating ideas Ren introduced in The Last Jedi.

Let’s just hope that next season doesn’t channel the worst of that film and have the Stranger take his titular acolyte on a trip to a casino planet so they can use the Force for the most important task of all: freeing a bunch of stupid space horsies.