The Acolyte’s silliest moment is a sign of Star Wars’ larger problems

The AcolyteThe third episode of raised a lot more questions than it answered. Like: what’s going on with this cult of power, how were Mae and Osha born, why are the Jedi even here, why is the dialogue so bad, and what actually happened in that fire? But the most important question of all is: how the hell did all those rocks catch fire?

Of course, Star Wars is a series full of deep and complex lore, so here are our best attempts to explain exactly how a mountain caught fire The Acolyte.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 3.]

Before we get into the explanations, it is important that we first go through the event in question a little. The fire in the mountain on Brendok is the triggering incident for everything else that happens in The Acolyte. This is what separates Mae and Osha, and what gives them both their diametrically opposed views of the Jedi. So when we got the flashback in Episode 3, it initially seemed like a complex event, full of childhood misunderstandings and a lack of perspective. Perhaps Osha saw it as Mae setting the fire, while Mae saw it as some sort of Jedi accident that led to her hatred.

Unfortunately, none of this actually happens in the episode. Instead, we see Little Mae clearly and emotionlessly tell her that she’d rather kill her sister herself than see her go, and then set the entire mountain temple on fire. While the events leading up to the fire are a pretty extreme letdown — even if the show could just be using this inexplicable child-murdering plot as a smokescreen for a later surprise — somehow it’s the fire itself that seems the silliest. Mae takes Osha’s sketchbook, shines a lamp on its pages, and then throws it into the stone hallway… which immediately catches fire as if it were made of dry wood. This is where we have to meet the show far more than halfway.

Theory 1: The alternative material theory

Perhaps what looked like stone inside the mountain was actually a different material? While most of the temple we see on Brendok is The AcolyteThe third episode appears to be carved directly into the mountain. Perhaps the coven actually coated the inner tunnels of their home with an extremely flammable non-stone material.

This is the dumbest and most evasive theory out there, but it’s also a bit of an old-fashioned Star Wars explanation. Just like setting fires in space or TIE fighters screeching, it’s something silly and fun that defies all explanations from Earthly science, and that’s fine. Of course, this would be a bit easier to stomach if The Acolyte took itself a little less seriously, and if the fire didn’t leave so many of those involved with guilt, regret, revenge, or just plain death. Stupid problems are wonderfully solved with stupid answers, but tragedies deserve something more thoughtful.

Theory 2: The hidden perpetrator theory

This theory revolves around the idea that what we saw in Episode 3 was only part of the story. Sure, Mae made a childish, hasty claim that she wanted to kill her sister, but her sketchbook fire should have simply fizzled out if another perpetrator hadn’t used the Force to spread the flames.

The most likely outcome of such a theory would be that someone from Mae and Osha’s coven started the fire to get the girls out and blame the Jedi. The culprit here would likely be the Zabrak witch, who seemed to have a bit of a power struggle with the twins’ mother. Perhaps she is stronger and more dangerous than she appeared and simply decided that destroying the coven’s home and separating Mae and Osha was the only way forward for the witches. She could even be the dark figure who trains Mae in the future and tasks her with killing the Jedi who visited Brendok.

An even more intriguing version of this theory, however, is that all this destruction was caused by the Jedi from the start. Mae was mostly innocent, despite her horrific announcement that she would murder the only other child she had ever known, and was instead tricked and then left to die by a group of Jedi desperate to get their hands on a promising new recruit. That would be truly shocking. Not entirely out of keeping with the dark sides lurking around the Jedi in the Star Wars canon (like Do do they get all these young recruits?), but still braver and more interesting than almost anything we’ve seen from them on screen.

Making the Jedi the true villains of the Brendok Fire would be a significant indictment of the Jedi of the High Republic, an example of them making themselves the judge, jury, and executioner of this extremist outsider cult. Just because they decided the cult was in the wrong, they massacred everyone present and attempted to steal both children, but when even that proved too difficult, they simply took one and left the other to die.

Despite the show’s silly attempts at misdirection and often frustratingly wooden dialogue or character-like language, this reveal would be truly exciting. A truly bold stance on a certain era of Jedi history that, in at least some sectors of the galaxy, was much darker than we ever imagined possible.

Theory 3: Disney’s Star Wars Theory

The third theory is the simplest of all: The Acolyte is simply a deeply unserious show that wants to say something new about the Jedi, the Force, or the Star Wars universe in general, but is too concerned with externals to get the details right — both in terms of storytelling and lore. This theory posits that there’s no more to the events than what we saw on screen: Mae started a fire to kill her sister; it got bigger than she thought, and had far-reaching consequences that she blames the Jedi for while shirking her own role in it. According to this theory, even if the Jedi got a few things wrong, it would still pay off, as most of them would have been heroic in the end and everything would have basically stayed where it started.

On paper, this theory would be a major disappointment. In practice, however, it feels exactly like what we should expect from most modern Star Wars stories. These projects rarely have the courage to really shake up the franchise and introduce something truly shocking, but always end up returning the status quo or simply pushing forward events whose outcome we already know.

Star Wars is stuck in an era of stagnation. Expecting something fun, interesting or daring out of a very silly looking fire, even if it is set in a completely new era, is probably a bit more than we should expect from the series at this point. Instead, it’s hard not to imagine The AcolyteThe greatest moment so far is nothing more than a rock that inexplicably caught fire because the plot demanded it.