Star Wars and its fans have long been obsessed with explaining every little detail of its universe and connecting every story to the one we know. At first, it seemed as if The AcolyteThe High Republic setting might have saved us from the series needing connections, but I’m not so sure anymore. In fact, I’m worried that The Acolyte could simply be an elaborate origin story for the Power Strangler.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 4, as well as wild, reckless speculation about the rest of the season.]
Let’s start with the evidence The Acolyte has offered us so far. The fourth episode ended by bringing the main mystery of the series to the forefront, giving us a huge cliffhanger where the Jedi face Mae’s masked master and the Force knocks them all off their feet. But while the identity of the master is the great mystery of the series, Mae is constantly wondering how she is supposed to kill someone without a weapon.
But why choose choking with the Force, of the dozens of ways to kill someone with the Force that exist or that we’ve seen on screen before? Because choking with the Force is a unique technique in the Star Wars canon, an act of such blatant malice and personal cruelty that no other Force trick could match it. Taking the infinite energy, power, and possibilities of the Force and channeling it solely into the slow death of a single person, while simultaneously proving your power over that person by pinning them down, is a type of intimate killing that immediately conveys hatred and brutality. This obviously makes it perfect for Mae’s particular quest for revenge.
Now you may scoff and say that an instantly iconic and impressive move like the Force Choke really doesn’t need to be backed up by the story of two twins from the High Republic. Or that an origin story for this move doesn’t add anything and might even detract from how cool it is to begin with. And you’d be right. It would be incredibly stupid and I hope it doesn’t actually happen.
But consider the connections Star Wars has made over the last decade. We have not only a random Han Solo adventure in Solo; we got to watch the episode where he gets his blaster, meets Chewbacca and Lando, and does the Kessel Run – which was all one big adventure for some reason. Not only was Rey a new, powerful hero who happened to be in the right place at the right time to meet the heroes of the original trilogy; she’s inexplicably Palpatine’s granddaughter through a genetically imperfect clone of Palpatine himself, and then she decides at the end of the trilogy that she’s a Skywalker.
Each new character must be friends or related to someone whose Wookieepedia entry you’ve already read. Din Djarin can’t just be the Mandalorian, a powerful bounty hunter who accidentally got caught up in a conspiracy involving Grogu; he has to be friends with Ahsoka and get to know Luke and maybe even be the focus of Palpatine’s cloning.
Star Wars is losing a lot of lore at an alarming rate. This includes passing mentions of events that the story’s characters know well but remain a mystery to us, ideas that only one character in the series mentions and the rest of our understanding has to be sketched out and deduced from that. Instead, all of that is replaced by canonical on-screen explanations of how something came to be.
Of course, this isn’t a new problem with Star Wars, and it didn’t start with Disney’s contributions. Star Wars has always loved the little gems of world-building and sci-fi jargon, and the series itself has almost always worked to undermine their mystique. After all, George Lucas himself gave Darth Vader an origin story and showed us the Clone Wars that Ben Kenobi only hinted at. But when Lucas did this, he did it with the same flair he brought to the original trilogy – for better or for worse. While he explained things in the prequels, he also introduced extremely cool and bizarre things that expanded on what we thought of as Star Wars, like General Grievous with his organic organs and robot body, or his double-sided lightsabers; on the other hand, he added midi-chlorians.
And perhaps more importantly, he did all this with the expectation of producing three movies, not half a dozen spin-off television series, a theme park, an interactive hotel, or other aspects of the perpetual expansion that franchises seem to require today. In this ever-expanding version of Star Wars that Disney has created, every proper noun needs an explanation and a backstory, and a mystery is only as good as the movie or television series you can build around it.
So, screw it. Maybe The Acolyte will just be an origin story of the Power Strangler.