Maybe The Acolyte is another silly Star Wars origin story

Star Wars and its fans have long held an obsession with explaining all the little details of its universe and connecting every story back to the one we know. Initially, it seemed that The Acolyte’s High Republic setting might have saved us from the series’ need for connections, but I’m no longer so sure. In fact, I’m getting worried that The Acolyte might just be an elaborate origin story for the Force choke.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 4, as well as wild, reckless speculation about the rest of the season.]

Let’s start out with the evidence The Acolyte has given us so far. The fourth episode ended by bringing the show’s main mystery to the foreground, handing us a massive cliffhanger where the Jedi are confronted by Mae’s masked Master and he Force pushes the whole lot of them off their feet. But while the Master’s identity is the show’s big riddle, the question Mae can’t stop asking is how she’s supposed to kill someone without a weapon.

But why Force choke, out of the dozens of ways to kill someone with the Force that are possible or that we’ve seen on screen before? Because Force choking is a singular technique in the Star Wars canon, an act of such clear malice and personalized cruelty that no other Force move could possibly match. To take the infinite energy, strength, and possibility of the Force and channel it exclusively into the slow death of one singular person, all the while proving their power over that person by holding them in place, is a kind of intimate killing that instantly communicates hatred and brutality. This obviously makes it perfect for Mae’s particular quest for vengeance.

Now, you may scoff and say that an instantly iconic and evocative device like Force choke really doesn’t need to be backed up by the story of two twins from the High Republic. Or that an origin story for this move accomplishes nothing and actually maybe takes away from how cool it is to begin with. And you’d be right. It would be tremendously stupid and I hope it doesn’t actually happen.

But consider the kind of connections Star Wars has spent the last decade making. We didn’t just get to watch a random Han Solo adventure in Solo; we had to watch the one where he got his blaster, met Chewbacca, met Lando, and made the Kessel run — which for some reason was all one adventure. Rey wasn’t just a new, powerful hero who happened to be in the right place at the right time to meet the original trilogy’s heroes; she’s inexplicably Palpatine’s granddaughter by way of a genetically imperfect clone of Palpatine himself, and then she decides she’s a Skywalker at the end of the trilogy.

Every new character has to be friends with or related to someone whose Wookieepedia entry you’ve read before. Din Djarin can’t just be the Mandalorian, a powerful bounty hunter who happened to stumble into the middle of a conspiracy around Grogu; he’s gotta be friends with Ahsoka and meet Luke, and maybe even be at the center of Palpatine’s cloning to begin with.

Star Wars is getting perilously low on lore. That includes those passing mentions of events that characters in the story know well but remain mysterious to us, and also those ideas that only one character in the series mentions and the rest of our understanding has to be sketched out and inferred around that. Instead, it’s all being replaced by canonical on-screen explanations of how something came to be.

Of course, this isn’t a new problem to Star Wars, and it didn’t start with Disney’s entries. Star Wars has always loved the little nuggets of world-building and sci-fi jargon, and the series itself has almost always worked to undermine their mystique. After all, George Lucas himself gave Darth Vader an origin story and showed us the Clone Wars that Ben Kenobi only hinted at. But when Lucas did this, he did it with the same flair he brought to the original trilogy — for better and worse. In the process of explaining things in the prequels he also introduced extremely cool and bizarre stuff that expanded what we thought of as Star Wars, like General Grievous, with his organic organs and robot body, or double-sided lightsabers; on the other hand, he added midi-chlorians.

And perhaps more importantly, he did all this with the expectation of three movies, not half a dozen spinoff television shows, a theme park, an interactive hotel, or any other aspects of the eternal expansion that franchises seem to necessitate now. In that always-growing version of Star Wars that Disney has created, every proper noun needs an explanation and a backstory, and a mystery is only as good as the movie or TV show you can build around it.

So, fuck it. Maybe The Acolyte will just be a Force choke origin story.