Disney Plus\u2019 latest Star Wars show, The Acolyte, asks: How do you kill Jedi without a weapon? And this latest Sith (maybe) plot is the best mystery in the show.<\/b>
\nThe Acolyte, Disney Plus\u2019 latest contribution to the Star Wars universe, is a murder mystery. At least, that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been given to understand by its marketing. But now that we\u2019re two episodes into the season, an entirely different puzzle has become the brightest spot in the show to me.
It\u2019s an irresistibly Star Wars-y question, but more importantly, it\u2019s a perfect frame for exactly the kind of action cred that was briefly, thrillingly, core to the Star Wars franchise.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.]
How do you kill a Jedi without using a weapon?
This is the challenge posed to Mae, our erstwhile apprentice, by her master, who looks like a Sith and quacks like a Sith, but as yet has not had much time to espouse his alliances or philosophy. As the final lesson in her training, Mae has to kill at least one Jedi without using a weapon, in order to kill \u201cthe dream.\u201d What dream? The dream that all Jedi live in, apparently, \u201ca dream they believe everyone shares.\u201d
According to Mae\u2019s master, \u201cAn acolyte kills without a weapon; an acolyte kills the dream.\u201d What does that mean?
It means everybody\u2019s kung fu fighting, baby.
The Acolyte\u2019s unarmed, hand-to-hand combat stuck out from the moment its trailers dropped. There\u2019s very little anywhere in live-action Star Wars like it \u2014 the gravitational coolness of lightsabers is too much to escape. Jedi and Sith fight with swords; everybody knows this. Smugglers and soldiers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that shoot lasers. Even Donnie Yen\u2019s enigmatic Force adherent-but-definitely-not-Jedi Chirrut fights with a stick. Blame the market for action figures with accessories, I suppose.
For all that Star Wars is rooted in samurai film, it has precious few callbacks to the immortal trope of a fighter who refuses to draw his blade. But in The Acolyte, that\u2019s how every Mae-versus-Jedi fight begins, because a Jedi won\u2019t draw on an unarmed foe. In these first two episodes, Mae\u2019s clashes with Carrie-Anne Moss\u2019 Master Indara and Lee Jung-jae\u2019s Master Sol are hyper-quick, riveting battles for dominance, where we get to see Mae\u2019s desperation contrasted with an unbreakable Jedi cool. We get those wild superhero moments when Mae reaches to steal a lightsaber mid-combat and is met with an impossibly quick twist of a supernaturally endowed body. It\u2019s the blow-for-blow, arm\u2019s length, move-and-counter suspense of a great hand-to-hand martial arts sequence.
Mae\u2019s quest to kill a Jedi without a weapon returns Star Wars to the realm of Fight Scene Cinema that the franchise developed during production on the prequel films, but that has rarely, if ever, been equaled in live action since. But it also gives The Acolyte its best mystery. Not a whodunit, but a How Do You Do It?
Sol and his allies are solving a murder mystery, sure \u2014 we\u2019ve seen that a million times \u2014 but Mae is out here beating her head against a koan handed to her by a Murder Buddhist, and I\u2019m just waiting for the moment when she realizes that maybe the answer isn\u2019t literal.<\/p>\n