The Acolyte is Disney’s most controversial Star Wars project since The Rise of Skywalker. Even before its debut episode, Leslye Headland’s sci-fi murder mystery had been review-bombed and dissected by viewers across social media and YouTube, and now with each new episode comes a fresh new batch of controversies. Episode 4 is no exception.
Watching the response to The Acolyte — which has so far been a relatively entertaining, if not all too riveting, crime drama in the Star Wars galaxy — has felt like watching the population’s media literacy decline in real time. In an episodic series that purposely keeps many of its cards close to its chest so as to not spoil its central mystery, viewers have been furious over almost every question that has yet to be answered.
“The twins being conceived using the Force breaks Star Wars lore and ruins Anakin’s story!” How’s about we hold up for a minute there and wait to see how that mystery from episode 3 plays out in this eight-episode series?
“Mae couldn’t have killed the entire coven with a fire that small!” Well, it’s pretty clear from the framing of the episode that there’s more to that story than has been revealed so far, and Mae’s disdain for the Jedi — which is literally the show’s central focus — stems from events that have yet to be fully explained.
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The latest nit-picking controversy revolves around a character no one really cared about up until this point — the throwaway prequel Jedi with an unreasonably large head, Ki-Adi-Mindu. Apparently, his reappearance in The Acolyte cements the series’ mishandling of Star Wars and further tarnishes the legacy that George Lucas built. In reality, it’s yet another non-troversy fueled by YouTube rage-baiters and Star Wars fans who have forgotten George Lucas’ penchant for retconning and lore-changing.
Why Ki-Adi-Mundi’s line in The Acolyte episode 4 isn’t necessarily a plot hole
In The Acolyte episode 4, Ki-Adi-Mundi makes a surprise appearance. In his brief cameo, the Jedi discusses Mae, with Sol informing him that the sister has a Master whose identity she doesn’t know.
“An apprentice who doesn’t know their Master? It’s absurd,” Ki-Adi-Mundi replies. Star Wars fans have suggested that this contradicts a line in The Phantom Menace, in which Ki-Adi-Mundi responds to rumors of the reappearance of the Sith, saying: “Impossible. The Sith have been extinct for a millennia.” Angry viewers have suggested that Mundi knowing about the Sith in The Acolyte means that his line in The Phantom Menace now makes no sense, and that this means the Sith’s return was known way closer to the events of Episode I.
Now, let’s address this apparent plot hole that The Acolyte has created. Another Jedi replies to Sol’s description of Mae and her Master, suggesting that the duo could be part of a “splinter order.” There’s no mention of Sith here — a splinter order could well mean a Jedi splinter group consisting of rogue Jedi, something which has been briefly touched upon in Star Wars canon previously.
In The Acolyte, the Jedi have yet to mention that they know the Sith have returned, and we still don’t know what happens to the band of Jedi who encounter the unnamed Sith Master at the end of episode 4. Sure, The Acolyte could undo the prequels’ assertion that the Jedi believed the Sith had been extinct for one thousand years — but the show hasn’t retconned this piece of lore yet. This is an episodic show, so if viewers are left asking questions about the wider implications of what happened at the end of an episode — that’s kind of the whole point.
Star Wars is full of canon changes
Even if this is an oversight on Headland and her writers’ behalf, under George Lucas’ watch, Star Wars was stacked with contrivances and plot holes that its creators sometimes willfully overlooked in favor of better serving the story they’re telling. If we’re going to judge Star Wars based on plot holes so harshly, then hoo-boy — there is an awful lot of Star Wars media that needs to be reassessed.
In Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Leia recounts a memory of her mother, Padme, calling her “very beautiful, kind, but sad.” In Revenge of the Sith, Padme dies during childbirth, so Leia would never have met her.
In A New Hope, Obi-Wan doesn’t remember R2-D2 despite spending the entirety of the prequels together, and he also forgets C-3PO.
In Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan mentions that he trained as a Jedi under Yoda, when the prequels depict him as only training under Qui-Gon Jinn.
Speaking of Obi-Wan, his role as Luke Skywalker’s hermit protector also raises plenty more questions than it answers. If he’s trying to observe and take care of Luke in secret, then why does he only change his first name to “Ben” and retain “Kenobi?” Also, why on Earth would he keep wearing the Jedi robes if he wanted to remain undetected, and if the Empire was looking to track down the remaining Jedi after Order 66?
Plot hole apologists will write this off as Obi-Wan being old and forgetful, though the same could be said of Ki-Adi-Mundi. Maybe by the time of The Phantom Menace, Mae simply slipped his mind when he said that the Sith were extinct, the same way that Obi-Wan forgot the droid he fought alongside in a war, or misremembered Yoda being his Master, or forgot to change his last name from “Kenobi” and take off his big Jedi costume before going into hiding from Anakin Skywalker on Anakin Skywalker’s home planet.
George Lucas, the king of retconning
Even if Ki-Adi-Mundi’s appearance is another Star Wars plot hole — who cares? George Lucas certainly wouldn’t have. Here’s a man who, when responding to criticism of the Millenium Falcon “drifting” with its movement, replied: “In my world, there’s air in outer space. When I want it.”
Lucas retconned and plot-holed with the best of them, making changes to his own lore to serve the current story he was telling. And not all of these changes worked — even if Leslye Headland has made Ki-Adi-Mundi the second-most forgetful Jedi in the galaxy (after Kenobi), this pales in comparison to having Padme lose the will to live during childbirth, abruptly killing her off at the end of Revenge of the Sith, then sending Obi-Wan to drop Luke off in the worst hiding place in the galaxy.
Star Wars is a huge franchise set across multiple film series, TV shows, comic books, novels, video games, and more, all of which are created by different people with different visions. Even when Star Wars was largely just six movies and a bunch of Expanded Universe novels, we had multiple head-scratching plot holes and retcons. Those whose chief complaint with Disney Star Wars is that it changes things about the Star Wars they know are going to keep being disappointed — even George Lucas couldn’t keep track of it.
