This week’s episode of The Acolyte took us back to the planet Brendok to learn the truth about what happened the night Osha and Mae’s lives changed forever. In doing so, it brought with it even more mysteries shrouded in darkness – not just about all the characters at play during these events, but about the very nature of the powers at play. It was a fine line for Series architect Leslye Headland to balance, both in what it communicates to the audience and in how it connects to the wider audience Star Wars saga.
“Choice”, the penultimate episode of The Acolytewent back in time to the night the Witch Clan was burned. It revealed that the reason the four Jedi—Sol, Indara, Torbin, and Kelnacca—were stationed on the world was not because they knew about the clan, but because Brendok himself was the site of a “convergence” in the Force. The phrase was first used in Star Wars when Qui-Gon Jinn described his discovery of Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. In The Acolyte Brendok’s vergence is explained to the audience (by Indara, to her padawan Torbin) as a “concentration of Force energy”, powerful enough to be able to manifest life itself. But unlike The Phantom Menacewhere Qui-Gon describes Anakin himself as a vergence, in The Acolytethe vergence formed around a nebulous location on Brendok, rather than an individual being…or, as we already knew, the mysterious power that helped give birth to Osha and Mae in the first place.
“It was very important to me, to Dave Filoni (Lucasfilm’s chief creative officer) and to Pablo Hidalgo (creator of the Lucasfilm writers group), that Osha and Mae were not a vergence. The girls themselves are not a vergence in the Force,” Headland recently explained in an interview. In-depth interview with Nerdist“However they got here… the act of creating them was going to have to be amplified, so we decided that the vergence was on Brendok and would remain a mystery. That way, if we returned there in future tellings of the story, we could discover a little more about what was really there. It was important that this type of vergence be natural and not from a human or alien.”
It was this clear differentiation for Headland that also played a role in what became a broader conversation around The Acolyte earlier in the seasonwhen the third episode—another flashback of Brendok—teased the nature of Osha and Mae’s conception as being almost related The Jedi Chosen One prophecy revealed how Anakin was born. “The girls are guinea pigs. They are patient zero for this kind of power. It didn’t work perfectly. Therefore, the girls alone can never be as powerful as Anakin,” Headland explained. “Their full potential together has not been explored yet. They have been separated for too long. It’s like when you do an experiment and it’s the first time. They may not be the first, but one of the first experiments with this particular use of power.”
“So the twins are weaker than Anakin, for sure. They’re not going to be the measure of what ultimately becomes the Chosen One. They’re never going to be what they are, because in my mind, Aniseya couldn’t do much,” Headland continued. “She’s not powerful enough to create one person. The twins split, Aniseya’s power split, and so a lot of her philosophy is about the power of both. That they have to stay together.”
But at Headland, The Acolyte They also further differentiated Osha and Mae’s circumstances by combining several spiritual approaches in their creation: the amplification of this “vergence,” the Force itself, and a distinct type of magic, something we’ve already seen in Star Wars across cultures like the The Nightsisters of Dathomir“The Nightsisters are all magic. With my witches, it’s a bit of a hybrid. They’re really interested in the Force and they call it by a different name. They’re trying to cultivate their sensitivity to it without having to be trained by the Jedi,” Headland added. “(The witches)… they use not only physical vergence on the planet, but also the eclipse. These powerful movements of celestial bodies and everything under the earth, that kind of thing, what’s meant to be expressed here is that they draw their power from nature, magic and the Force. So we never say, ‘They use magic like the Nightsisters. They use the Force even though they’re not Jedi.’”
“For me, it was more interesting to show a group of people, a group of witches, who had abilities that the Jedi couldn’t identify. The Jedi weren’t like, ‘Oh, well, that’s magic. Oh, well, that’s the Force,’” Headland concludes. “That’s one of the reasons they’re so unsettled by what they’re seeing. It’s so unpredictable, and it’s hard for them to sort things out and report back to the Council.”
Visit Nerdist to learn more about Headland’s thoughts on The Acolytethe penultimate episode, as well as previews of what to expect in the finale — and more, whether the series should return for an as-yet-unconfirmed second season.
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