The Acolyte Episode 3: Major Star Wars Easter Eggs And Story Connections
The third episode of Star Wars: The Acolyte was certainly a doozy. After the two-episode premiere a week ago, The Acolyte returns with a flashback episode–here, we learn about the circumstances that led to Osha training with the Jedi and Mae coming under the tutelage of a Sith. And, uh, it was quite illuminating.
Warning: This article will be absolutely full of spoilers for Episode 3 of The Acolyte on Disney+.
This episode takes us back many years to when Mae and Osha were children on the planet Brendok, being raised by an unknown group of Force witches away from the reach of the Jedi and the Republic. Or so they thought.
Mae and Osha, just children, are on the cusp of the coven’s traditional coming-of-age ritual that will establish the girls as witches themselve. But all is not well–Osha isn’t sure she wants to embrace this future without exploring some other possibilities, while Mae is excited to fulfill her predestined role and is very annoyed that Osha won’t just go with it.
When the ceremony arrives, Mae enthusiastically accepts her place as a witch, but the ceremony is interrupted during Osha’s turn–a group of Jedi have popped in, and they’ve got their eyes on the twins. They have no beef with the witches, they say, but they aren’t keen on allowing children to be trained in the Force unregulated, even though these folks aren’t a part of the Republic. They want to test Mae and Osha’s aptitude with the Force, and take them away if they pass.
Mae and Osha are instructed to fail the test on purpose, but Master Sol tricks her by saying her wrong answer was actually correct. Osha protests, accidentally revealing she gave the wrong answer on purpose. This only makes things even more abrasive between the twins.
And then their world explodes. Suddenly, the coven is on fire, the whole town falling apart around them. While the circumstances that caused the fire aren’t shown, Mae takes credit for it, blaming it on Osha’s choice to go with the Jedi–the truth about the fire will likely be revealed later on. And then Mae falls, leading Osha to think she’s dead for the next couple decades. Osha goes to Coruscant with Master Sol to train to be a Jedi, and Mae ends up with a Sith whose true identity she still doesn’t know.
And while we still have many questions, that certainly made for an entertaining hour of TV, and it’s got some interesting little Easter eggs and story teases for what may come next. Let’s dig in.
Spice creams
Near the beginning of the episode, Mae and Osha want some kind of treat called “spice creams.” While that does rhyme with “ice cream,” this particular treat is not a frozen desert–instead, it’s a cream-filled sandwich cookie that you can find the recipe for in The Official Black Spire Outpost Cookbook. Though the first time this food item was referenced was actually in a supplement for Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game in the 1990s, and they were first seen in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO.
The witch coven
This episode was careful to not give any background details that might help us identify conclusively what group the witches came from. But in the Star Wars franchise, an all-female group of Force-users usually signifies folks from Dathomir–One such group, the Nightsisters, have been major players in the Clone Wars, Rebels, and Ahsoka series.
But even if they are from Dathomir, they’re probably a group we don’t know. Mother Aniseya at one point described their philosophy as such: “All living things connected by a thread woven through all of existence. The thread is not a power you wield. Pull the thread, it changes everything.” This is the sort of metaphor that the various Force groups love to come up with, but it’s not one I’m familiar with. But there are many clans of witches from Dathomir, so it wouldn’t be too weird for them to make up a new one, and the “mother” title is common with the Dathomiri clans. That said, there’s actually one indication that they might be from somewhere else.
Mother Coral is Iridonian
There are two types of zabrak in the galaxy. There’s the kind from Dathomir, which we’ve seen with Darth Maul and Asajj Ventress. And there’s the kind from Iridiona, which don’t get the same sort of onscreen attention. Since Mother Coral is a female zabrak with horns, that makes her Iridonian, rather than Dathomiri, and thus this coven could be from somewhere else.
Mae and Osha’s immaculate conception
The biggest story development on The Acolyte so far is the reveal that Mae and Osha were somehow created by Mother Aniseya using the Force, and carried to term by Mother Coral. This creates a rather surprising parallel between Mae/Osha and Anakin Skywalker, and with Sith involvement in events, it’s tough not to imagine that there’s some kind of connection here. We don’t know what it is yet, but I discussed that topic at length here.
Unique lightsaber designs
During this episode, we got close-up looks at lightsabers belonging to Master Sol and Padawan Torbin, and each of their hilts had interesting and unique designs that were pretty different from the live-action blades we’re most familiar with. This reflects one of the key parts of Jedi training: they design and build their lightsabers themselves.
Osha gets the same Force test they did on Anakin
Just in case you weren’t sold on the Anakin parallels for Mae and Osha: Master Sol tests them by making them guess what object he’s looking at on his little tablet on a stick. It’s the exact same test given to Anakin when he visits the Jedi Council for the first time in The Phantom Menace–and Mae and Osha are just slightly younger than Anakin was at that time.
Mae burned down their home…from certain point of view?
Near the end of the episode with their home on fire, Mae takes Osha’s Jedi book and burns it outside Osha’s door, and then moments later the door itself erupts in flames–implying, but not showing, that Mae was responsible for the fire that would seemingly lead to the deaths of every coven member. Osha has spent the time since believing that Mae was responsible for the disaster.
But something is missing here–we aren’t given a real reason why Mae would have done something like that to her own people, nor is there reason to believe she even could, and we never see Mae do anything worse than setting the book on fire. The idea that the book fire would somehow manage to kill all those Force witches by accident is silly, and so it’s likely that the mysterious Sith was already involved somehow by that point. While Qimir is the hot candidate because of his reference to the Sith Code last week, it could be that the secret master is one of the witches.
In either case, this is clearly one of those classic Star Wars “from a certain point of view” scenarios for Osha–there’s an intentional gap in the story here, and there’s gotta be a reveal coming.
