Mae the Acolyte must kill a Jedi without using a weapon – but how?

The AcolyteDisney Plus’ latest addition to the Star Wars universe is a crime thriller. At least that’s what the marketing told us. But now that we’re two episodes into the season, a completely different mystery has become the show’s bright spot for me.

It’s a compelling Star Wars question, but more importantly, it provides the perfect setting for exactly the kind of action that, for a brief time, was the exciting core of the Star Wars franchise.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.]

Image: Lucasfilm

How do you kill a Jedi without using a weapon?

This is the challenge set to Mae, our former apprentice, by her master, who looks like a Sith and croaks like a Sith, but hasn’t had much time to represent his covenants or philosophy. As the final lesson of her training, Mae must kill at least one Jedi without using a weapon, in order to destroy “the dream.” What dream? The dream that all Jedi seem to live in, “a dream they believe they all share.”

Mae’s master said, “An acolyte kills without a weapon; an acolyte kills the dream.”

What does that mean?

It means everyone does kung fu fighting, baby.

The AcolyteThe unarmed hand-to-hand combat was striking from the very first moment. There is hardly anything comparable in the live-action Star Wars films – the attraction of lightsabers is too strong to resist. Jedi and Sith fight with swords; everyone knows that. Smugglers and soldiers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that fire lasers. Even Donnie Yen’s enigmatic Force follower, who is definitely not a Jedi, Chirrut fights with a stick. I guess the blame lies with the action figure accessories market.

Although Star Wars is rooted in samurai films, there are few references to the immortal motif of a fighter refusing to draw his sword. But in The Acolytethis is how every fight between Mae and Jedi begins, because a Jedi will not turn against an unarmed enemy. In these first two episodes, Mae’s clashes with Carrie-Anne Moss’s master Indara and Lee Jung-jae’s master Sol are hyper-fast, gripping battles for supremacy in which we experience Mae’s desperation contrasted with an unflappable Jedi cool. We experience those wild superhero moments when Mae reaches for a lightsaber to steal it in the middle of the fight and is answered with an incredibly fast turn of a preternaturally gifted body. It’s the punch-for-punch, arm-length, move-and-counter tension of a great hand-to-hand martial arts sequence.

Mae’s mission to kill a Jedi without a weapon brings Star Wars back to the realm of fight scene cinema that the franchise pioneered during the production of the prequel films, but which has rarely, if ever, been achieved in live action since. But there are also The Acolyte his best mystery. Not a crime thriller, but a “How do you do that?”

Sol and his allies solve a murder case, sure – we’ve seen that a million times before – but Mae is out here battling a koan given to her by a murderous Buddhist, and I’m just waiting for the moment when she realizes that Perhaps The answer is not to be taken literally.