Just because you can grab an audience with a name like Star Wars doesn’t mean you can keep their attention. With its third episode, The Acolyte introduces a theme so big and so important—religion—that if the show doesn’t take it seriously in the coming episodes, it may lose mine.
Episode 3 spends most of its time giving us the backstory of Brendok, the homeworld of twin sisters Mae and Osha. Here, we get to see a society of women—the equivalent of witches—who are experts on the Force. Mae and Osha are the only children in their tribe, and when Jedi Masters Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Sol (Lee Jung-jae), Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), and Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo) arrive to test the kids for potential Jedi knighthood, we learn that they have no father. They were conceived through some secret use of the Force, and their mothers don’t want the Jedi to find out the details.
This secret is a massive development for the show, and not simply because Star Wars fans will connect this birth and Mae & Osha’s psychokinetic link to Rey and Kylo Ren’s coupling decades later, referred to as a “Dyad” in the Force by Emperor Palpatine. No, fandom-centric speculation is not what matters to me. I’m the fan that’s looking at where George Lucas found his inspiration for the Force itself, and why this challenges the real-world ancient philosophies upon which the entirety of Star Wars is based.
See, the Force was inspired specifically by Mo Pai Nei Kung, an ancient energy manipulation method that involves balancing the Yin and Yang (“soft” and “hard,” aka Light and Dark) energies within the practitioner’s body to influence the external world. A man named John Chang was well known to create different kinesis effects, such as burning paper by hovering his hand over it (see the VHS videos uploaded to YouTube).
It doesn’t matter if you train Nei Kung (I teach it), it doesn’t matter if you believe in “chi” (aka “qi”). If you’re invested in Star Wars, you’re invested in a narrative universe that references real-world philosophies and modalities, especially Eastern ones, that are senior to and related to many ideas in Western fables, fairy tales and religious parables. It doesn’t take an academic to see how Star Wars previously referenced the Immaculate Conception for Anakin Skywalker’s birth without a father in Attack of the Clones. Now, The Acolyte is connecting the chi-inspired Force to Mae and Osha’s unique birth, and further frames the method of achieving a “miracle” as what can be perceived as witchcraft.
As someone who has a profound amount of interest in and respect for all religious paths, I find this creative choice incredibly compelling. Science fiction (we shouldn’t forget that that’s what Star Wars is) is the genre to challenge old ideas and catalyze us to look at things from a new perspective. Whether it’s framing ancient energy manipulation practices as the Force, or the concept of spontaneous birth that is found in several religions from Christianity to Hinduism, The Acolyte is raising its profile by using fiction to re-examine these beliefs.
I truly hope future episodes can handle the weight of these subjects with increasing grace and maturity. My fear is that the wisdom required to do so is quite rare, and that the series may chicken out of bold conclusions in favor of the easy way out for Star Wars writing: either lightsaber battles or a space chase. Although, neither of those would be too bad…
