Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte has ruffled quite some feathers in the Star Wars fandom, which is apparently what it set out to do. Apart from the canon-breaking plot of the show, which flies in the face of everything that was established by fifty years of canon, the show set out to muddy the waters when it comes to how the audiences have seen the Jedi and the Sith so far.
Speaking to StarWars.com when the first teaser of the show was released, Headland revealed the idea that she wanted to play in The Acolyte, and how it was an inversion of what fans have seen in the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy, with the Empire/ First Order in power and the Jedi on the back foot.
Leslye Headland wanted to focus on what went wrong with the Jedi Order
The Acolyte is set about a hundred years before the fall of the Jedi Order at the hands of Sheev Palpatine and his newly minted Sith Apprentice, Darth Vader. The show, as Leslye Headland says, wanted to look at where it all went wrong, putting The Sith in the position of the underdog, and having the Jedi as the overarching figure in the story. Speaking to StarWars.com, she said:
What went wrong? And if the bad guys are actually the underdog, it just seemed like a cool reversal.
The idea was to put the Sith in the same position that we find the Jedi at the beginning of A New Hope, in hiding, exiled, and considered to be extinct (never mind all the survivors that popped up later). However, the simple fact that there exists a Sith at that point in the timeline is canon-breaking, given that Ki-Adi Mundi categorically pointed out in The Phantom Menace that there were no reported Siths in the past millennium.
The Acolyte has introduced a slew of inconsistencies throughout its story so far
The Acolyte has a few more episodes to go, which means a lot of mysteries that need to be unraveled will do so in the coming episodes. However, certain things are introduced by the show that have massive repercussions for the canon of Star Wars.
To begin with, the fact that there exists a Sith, who has come out in the open to meet with Jedi Masters, who could possibly report the existence of such Sith back to the Jedi Order. Further, the show has introduced Cortosis as a viable material to be used against lightsabers, which would change the way the canon looks at the weapons as the principal melee combat equipment for the Jedi.
Further, the existence of other interpretations of the Force makes it seem like the Jedi were more interested in establishing a galactic hegemony rather than keeping the peace, which paints the Jedi-Sith duality as more of a spectrum, with other interpretations of the Force being just another peg, which is against something that flies in the face of canon and established lore.
The Acolyte can be streamed on Disney +
