The mystery continues to grow Acolyte.
There are already plenty of questions piling up, including twin shenanigans, a secret Sith Lord, and what really happened on Brendok, but episode six, “Teach/Corrupt,” raises a new one: Who was Kimir/The Stranger’s (Manny Jacinto) Jedi Master?
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During their first (and, let’s be honest, very sexy) showdown after the bloody Battle of Kofar, the Stranger tells Osha (Amandla Stenberg) that he was once a Jedi, but the Order, he says, abandoned him — just as Osha had — including his old Jedi Master, who abandoned him, leaving him with a nasty scar on his back.
So who exactly is this Master? There’s only one answer: Vernestra Luwo (Rebecca Henderson).
When discussing the Stranger’s wounds, Osha says it looks like the Stranger was stabbed in the back, but in reality, it looks like he was whipped. Guess who’s swinging the lightsaber whip in the next scene? None other than Vernestra.
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It’s only a brief glimpse of her defeating Ambramos in Kofal, but it’s enough to suggest a connection between Vernestra’s weapon and the Stranger’s scar — it can’t be just a coincidence that both story elements are introduced in the same episode.
Acolyte So far, all of the show’s big twists have been pretty obvious, and that’s by design. Creator Leslye Headland told Entertainment Weekly about the Stranger plot twist: “I think a good plot twist is not hiding everything from the audience and then hurling it at you like, ‘Hey, here’s something you didn’t see! I managed to hide it so you didn’t see it!’ I think a good plot twist is predicting what’s going to happen, and then when it does happen, it plays out without any pathos or sentimentality.”
As for the fact that Vernestra is the Stranger’s old master, the lightsaber whip and distinctive scars are sure hints at that. But that’s not all. She’s been keeping things top secret about how she and Sol (Lee Jung-jae) are dealing with the new Sith threat. Not only is she overseeing the operation herself, but she doesn’t seem to have told anyone else that she sent Sol to Cofar, much less why she did so. Plus, Henderson plays her concern as if Vernestra already knows about the situation.
Like the emotional baggage Sol still carries about Blendok, Vernestra has some of her own, and learning more about their past may reveal the true limitations of the Jedi Order.
Acolyte Now streaming on Disney+. New Episodes air every Tuesday at 9pm ET.
