The Acolyte’s third episode brought up a whole lot more questions than it answered. For instance: What’s up with that Force Cult, how were Mae and Osha born, why are the Jedi here to begin with, why is the dialogue so bad, and what actually happened in that fire? But the most important question of all is: How in the hell did all that stone catch on fire?
Of course, Star Wars is a series full of deep and complex lore, so here are our best attempts to explain exactly how a mountain caught on fire in The Acolyte.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 3.]
Before we get into explanations, it’s important that we go over the event in question a little bit first. The fire in the mountain on Brendok is the inciting incident for everything else that happens in The Acolyte. It’s what separates Mae and Osha, and what gives both of them their diametrically opposed views on the Jedi. So when we got the flashback in episode 3, it initially seemed like it might be a complex event, rife with childhood misunderstandings and missed perspective. Maybe from what Osha saw it seemed like Mae created the fire, while Mae saw that it was some kind of Jedi accident, leading to her hatred.
Unfortunately, none of this is what actually happens in the episode. Instead, we see kid Mae clearly and emotionlessly say that she would rather kill her sister herself than see her leave, then set the entire mountain temple on fire. While the events that led up to the fire are a pretty extreme disappointment — even if the show could just be using this inexplicable child murderer plot as a smokescreen for a later surprise — it’s still somehow the fire itself that seems silliest. Mae takes Osha’s sketchbook, lights up its pages using a lamp, and then throws it into the stone hallway… which promptly ignites like it’s made of dry wood. Here’s where we have to meet the show way more than halfway.
Theory 1: The alternate-material theory
Perhaps what looked like stone inside the mountain was actually a different material? While most of the temple we see on Brendok in The Acolyte’s third episode appears to be carved straight into the mountain, maybe the coven of witches actually coated the interior tunnels of their home with some extremely flammable, non-rock material.
This is the silliest and most cop-out theory possible, but is also a little bit of an old-school Star Wars explanation too. Just like setting fires in space or the scream of TIE fighters, it’s something silly and fun that defies all explanations of Earthly science, and that’s fine. Of course, this would be a little easier to stomach if The Acolyte were taking itself a little less seriously, and if the fire in question didn’t leave so many of the people involved paralyzed with guilt, full of regret, dead-set on vengeance, or simply dead altogether. Silly problems are great to meet with silly answers, but tragedies deserve something a little more thought-out.
Theory 2: The hidden-culprit theory
This theory revolves around the idea that what we saw in episode 3 was only part of the story. Sure, Mae made a childish, rash assertion that she wanted to kill her sister, but her sketchbook fire should have simply fizzled out, except that another perpetrator used the Force to spread the flames.
The most-likely outcome of a theory like this would be that someone from Mae and Osha’s coven fanned the flames to try to get the girls out and blame the Jedi. The culprit here, probably, would be the Zabrak witch who seemed to be having a bit of a power struggle with the twins’ mom. Perhaps she’s stronger, and more dangerous, then she appeared and simply decided that destroying the coven’s home and splitting up Mae and Osha would be the witches’ only path forward. She could even be the dark figure training Mae in the future and tasking her with killing the Jedi who visited Brendok.
An even more exciting version of this theory, however, is that all this destruction was caused by the Jedi all along. Mae, despite her horrific proclamation that she was going to murder the only other child she’d ever known, was mostly blameless and was instead set up and then left to die by a band of Jedi desperate to get their hands on a promising new recruit. This would be genuinely shocking. Not out of line entirely with the dark edges lurking around the Jedi in Star Wars canon (after all, how do they get all those youngling recruits?), but still more gutsy and interesting than almost anything we’ve seen of them on screen.
Making the Jedi the true villains of the Brendok fire would mark a meaningful indictment of the High Republic Jedi, an example of them determining themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner for this extremist outlier cult. Just because they determined the cult to be wrong, they massacred everyone there and attempted to steal both children, but when even that proved too difficult, they simply took one and left the other to die.
Even in spite of what would be the show’s silly attempt at misdirection, and its often frustratingly wooden dialogue or samey characters, this reveal would be a genuinely exciting one. A real, daring stance on a certain era of Jedi history that, at least in some sectors of the galaxy, was far darker than we had ever thought possible.
Theory 3: The Disney’s Star Wars theory
The third theory is the simplest of all: The Acolyte is simply a deeply unserious show, interested in saying something new about the Jedi, the Force, or the Star Wars universe more broadly, but too concerned with appearances to get the details right — both in terms of storytelling and lore. This theory suggests that there’s no more to the events than we saw on screen: Mae lit a fire in an attempt to kill her sister; it got bigger than she thought and had far-reaching consequences that she blames on the Jedi while shirking her own part in it. With this theory, even if the Jedi did a few things wrong, it would still wash out, with most of them being heroic in the end, leaving everything basically in the same place it started.
On paper, this theory would be a profound disappointment. In practice, however, it just feels like what we should expect from most modern Star Wars stories. These projects rarely have the guts to really shake up the franchise and introduce something truly shocking, instead always bringing the status quo back at the end, or simply pushing toward events we already know the outcome of.
Star Wars is firmly in an era of stagnation. So hoping for something fun, interesting, or daring out of a very silly-looking fire, even if it’s set in a totally new time period, is probably a little more than we should expect from the series at this point. Instead, it’s hard not to imagine that The Acolyte’s biggest moment so far is nothing more than rock that inexplicably caught fire because the plot needed it to.
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