The latest Star Wars series, The Acolyte, has finally premiered its first two episodes on Disney+, but it’s a little bit different from the other Star Wars shows in some major ways. Let’s start with the biggest: It’s set a century or so before any of the movies, so there aren’t any familiar characters here, nor are there any direct story connections to the rest of the franchise–so far, anyway. And so while most of the previous series have tripped all over themselves to make references to the films, The Acolyte doesn’t operate that way. There’s just not much that can be referenced, and the show is better for not being full of forced and unnecessary plot connections.
That said, it’s not as though The Acolyte is totally devoid of Easter eggs or other clues for how this story fits in the franchise’s big picture. And we did get one pretty enormous clue–something that could bring us into the main-franchise thread. Let’s dive into what we saw in the first two episodes of The Acolyte.
Warning: The rest of this article will discuss some major spoilers from the first two episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte.
1. Practical sets and film grain
Some of the aesthetic issues that have popped up with the live-action Star Wars series come from the fact that they’re all shot digitally, and most were shot on CGI soundstages. The result has been a bunch of Star Wars shows that don’t really match the aesthetic of the films much at all. But The Acolyte is able to avoid that issue to some degree by using more traditional sets, like Andor did, and by cranking up the film-grain filter to ape the look of something shot on film and help mask the use of background CGI. It doesn’t quite get us all the way to that $250 million movie look, but we’ll allow it since The Acolyte likely didn’t cost anywhere near $250 million to make–and it looks more like Star Wars than most of these shows have.
2. Trade Federation
When we first meet Osha, she’s working freelance as a zero-g technician on a Trade Federation capital ship, complete with a bridge crew of Nemoidians. The Trade Federation was a key entity in the prequel movies and the Clone Wars show, but they’re included here for a more pointed parallel: Jedi arrive and visit the ship, and the Nemoidians react much the same way they do when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon show up at the beginning of The Phantom Menace: with annoyance and frustration.
3. The droid buddy
Ever since Luke Skywalker flew around the galaxy with R2-D2 in The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars stories have been full of protagonist characters who have a droid BFF that speaks in beeps and boops. It’s just part of the fabric of the franchise at this point. Osha’s phone-sized pal Pip serves in that role here, as basically a sentient multi-tool with an attitude. Which reminds us a little bit of a certain video game…
4. Jedi: Fallen Order echoes
Osha’s introductory scenes, where she works a blue collar job for a little bit before some Force users show up looking for her, is very similar to the story of Cal Kestis, the player-character in Jedi: Fallen Order and its sequel. In that game, though, Cal works in a shipyard until some Imperial Inquisitors pop up hunting for former Jedi, and all throughout the game he’s got a little droid pal named BD-1, who’s basically a sentient multi-tool with an attitude. And both Cal and Osha trained under the Jedi when they were younger–they’re like funhouse mirror images of each other, kinda.
5. Mae’s master is a Sith
During this period of time, the Jedi are the only major faction of Force-users in the galaxy–aside from them, there’s only various small, clandestine groups around, like the Nightsisters of Dathomir and, of course, the Sith, who are in their “rule of two” period. So it was theoretically possible that Mae’s secret sinister master was another unaligned person, but we know that’s not the case because of one little exchange between Mae and her pal Qimir, who’s helping her on her mission.
Qimir: “The Jedi justify their galactic dominance in the name of peace, and peace…”
Mae: “…is a lie, I know.”
This is a big deal, because “peace is a lie” is the opening line of the Sith Code. So it seems that Mae is one of the Two.
The shot seen above, by the way, is also a visual reference to when Rey visits Luke at the end of The Force Awakens.
6. Floating meditation
One of the Jedi that Mae is hunting is called Torbin, and he’s been frozen in floating meditation for a decade, impervious to outside physical influence. We’ve seen Jedi levitate themselves while in a trance like this in recent movies–Luke does it in The Last Jedi, as does Rey in The Rise of Skywalker. But this bit of Star Wars iconography originated in the 1990s in the old Expanded Universe of books and comics. The first instance when it was described was in the novel The Courtship of Princess Leia in 1994, and it was first seen in an issue of the Dark Empire comics in 1995.
7. Joonas Suotamo
The Wookie Jedi Kelnacca is played by a familiar actor: Joonas Suotamo, who took over the role of Chewbacce from Peter Mayhew in the modern era of the franchise.
8. Scroobius Pip
At the very end of the second episode, we see a couple scavengers messing around near where Kelnacca has been hanging out on Khofar. One of them is the English spoken-word poet and hip hop artist Scroobius Pip (real name David Meads) making a cameo appearance.
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