Last night’s episode of The Acolyte was fairly dull, right up until the last 40 seconds or so where we meet Mae’s master in a big way. We saw glimpses of this fight in the trailer, and it’s just the apparent start of the fight, so it raises a lot of questions. Namely about who they are.
This has always been a weird situation since Mae has never actually seen this person’s face. She calls him a “he” but I mean, they could have a Vader-esque voice system in that helmet, so who knows.
The apparent Sith is insanely powerful. First, we see them float down behind Osha from the air. Then they flick her into next week with two fingers. Then they unleash a blast that blows through a dozen Jedi. And they’re only getting started.
The obvious question is: who is this? But this mystery is suffering from what I’m calling “Scooby Doo Syndrome.”
That’s based on the idea that in any given episode of Scooby Doo you often meet exactly one character outside of the team. So like a groundskeeper that works at a haunted carnival turns out to be the ghoul under the mask at the end because like, who else was it going to be? Fred?
Now, that’s sort of the case with The Acolyte. Based on the characters in the show, and the timeline which is well divorced from some sort of Skywalker-era known character reveal, I only see two options:
Qimir – This one makes the most sense in the context of the episode. He’s played as goofy comic relief by Good Place actor Manny Jacinto, and yet we know essentially nothing about him, why he’s helping Mae, why he serves “the master” other than “he owes him,” which we learned today. But the timing of the events of this week is suspect.
Why would the master be stalking Mae and the Wookie when he wasn’t with the other two? Why would the Wookie be killed essentially minutes after Mae left Qimir hanging and she said she would turn herself over to him? It stands to reason that if Qimir is the master, he instantly got himself out of the trap, donned his outfit (he’s carrying a pretty big pack in the jungle), raced over there, killed the Wookie and is now facing the Jedi head on, perhaps abandoning Mae in the process since she vocally betrayed him.
It would certainly be odd to have goofball Qimir turn hardened super-Sith, but I’m sure Jacinto has it in him to drop that personality and shift into something far more scary, however odd that turn might be.
Mother Aniseya – This was my main theory before this week, that like Mae, Aniseya survived the fire and is now training her daughter in secret to kill the Jedi that caused the entire massacre at the coven. Why would Qimir, for instance, care about killing those four specific Jedi?
We saw Aniseya “dead” in the fire, but it was a fleeting glimpse and we got no confirmation she wasn’t just unconscious. We know Aniseya is extremely powerful in the force, whatever she may call it, and it would help explain why Mae has been trained without lightsabers and is tasked with odd demands like killing a Jedi while unarmed. Albeit this theory gets a bit wobblily now that we know the master has a lightsaber of their own and seems very clearly Sith.
I just…don’t see who else could be under that helmet if they’re going for a surprise reveal? I guess maybe one of the council Jedi, but that would make less sense than the other two.
We’ll see. It seems a bit like a limited-in-scope mystery, and I hope it’s not dragged out until the final episode or anything.
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