The Acolyte Season Finale: Huge Plot Holes, Burning Questions, And The Biggest Easter Egg Ever

The Acolyte is, for me, the most frustrating piece of live-action Star Wars since Rogue One. From start to finish, I've enjoyed the experience of watching this series, and like that film, it works in a moment-to-moment way, with interesting characters, a strong atmosphere, and great action scenes, but it gets lost in its own bigger picture. The storytelling structure on The Acolyte has been bizarre and left numerous plot holes, and this finale now leaves us with no real answers about what actually happened at Brendok with the witch coven. The story has barely moved since the season began, even--The Acolyte has been setting the stage for something, but we never found out what it was. Let's hope they make Season 2.Warning: This article contains every spoiler from the season finale of Star Wars: The Acolyte. If you don't want that, you should probably bail now.Things kick off this week with Qimir and Osha back on the planet of islands that probably isn't Achc-To. Osha is still wearing Qimir's cortosis helmet, and something is happening to her while she's in it. Qimir has to do some kind of Force nonsense to save her. Osha says she saw a vision of Mae killing Sol. She was actually seeing herself, it turns out, but it's a weird scene--the clear implication was that the helmet was hurting her, but that simply isn't discussed. Inspired by a vision, they leave for Brendok. While Darth Plagueis looks on from a cave, for some reason--this feels like a new plot hole, since this is the only reference to Plagueis, direct or indirect, in the entire series thus far. More on this later.Master Sol also heads to Brendok with Mae. But Mae escapes via an escape craft. There's a fun little space chase that ends when the little furry guy, Bazil, sabotages Sol's ship for reasons that are also never discussed. But ultimately everybody makes it to the ground, and we get two parallel battles: Sol vs. Qimir, and Mae vs. Osha. Both of these fights are awesome, and everyone ends up in the courtyard where Sol killed Mother Aniseya. Sol and Osha have an emotional confrontation, and then Osha kills Sol by strangling him through the Force--making her a suitable acolyte for Qimir, having killed a Jedi without a weapon.Meanwhile, Jedi Vernestra and her large group of reinforcements are closing in. Mae and Osha flee into the woods, following the path Mae says she took after the coven burned down 16 years earlier. Qimir catches up to them. Osha agrees to be trained, and Mae agrees to be memory wiped to keep them safe from the Jedi. Osha and Qimir leave, and Mae is found by the Jedi.Vernestra, then, closes the book on the whole thing by lying about it. She pretty clearly is able to glean the whole story from the emotional imprint of the scene, and she reports that Sol was the bad guy and he killed himself out of guilt. It's a clear political maneuver--claiming Sol as the baddie is for the benefit of Republic senators like Rayencourt, since it would mean that the threat was a known quantity that's already been dealt with, and not a much greater and scarier concern.At the same time, however, Vernestra absolutely knows Qimir--she senses him when she arrives on Brendok, and may have been his Jedi teacher years before. The season ends with her meeting with Yoda after having called him in near the beginning of the episode from wherever he'd been meditating or whatever. Presumably, she's telling him the real story--they really don't need this Sith business messing up their whole thing, so they'll keep it secret.In the end, Season 1 of The Acolyte reminds me of Westworld. That HBO series always had a decent story, but was constantly undermining itself with unnecessary tricks--using needlessly complicated narrative structures to create plot twists for the audience that the story doesn't actually warrant when you look at the details. In other words, it gets in its own way as often as possible. So even while I enjoyed most of it, I don't think The Acolyte really adds up to anything right now.Fortunately, as Osha notes in this episode, the future isn't fixed. Season 2 could bring the necessary course corrections. In the meantime, the finale episode has left us with some big plot holes and big questions, and the cameos by Yoda and Darth Plagueis are the biggest Easter eggs in Star Wars TV since CGI Luke Skywalker popped up in The Mandalorian. Let's discuss what there is to discuss. Where is Mother Koril?We're meant to infer the deaths of most of the members of the witch coven as happening when Master Indara frees Kelnacca from their mind control, but Mother Koril is a special case. She is never shown to have died, and she has a special connection to Mae and Osha because Koril carried them in her womb--she's as much their mother as Aniseya was--the dark and volatile counterpart to Aniseya's calm. The lack of any info about her fate is hilarious--Koril was supposed to be important to this story. But it seems she got bumped. And I have a guess as to how. Darth Plagueis the CreeperAbout 10 minutes into the finale episode, when Osha and Qimir decide to head to Brendok, we get a brief shot of a raggedy old alien guy in a cave looking on--this is, without a doubt, Darth Plagueis, future master of Emperor Palpatine. And, now, master of Qimir, apparently. Given the complete lack of any acknowledgement of this person's presence at any point, it feels like a late stage fan service insert.Now, despite two flashback episodes about the end of the witch coven, they left out a huge part of the story: how Mae ended up training with a Sith. Even now we have no details about Mae's story between when she fell off that catwalk as a child and when she showed up to kill Indara in the series premiere 16 years later. That entire time gap is a blank for us.I previously suspected that Mother Koril could have set Mae down that path, and could even have been the secret Sith who trained Qimir, and the fact that she's the only significant member of the coven who wasn't shown dead last week only made that likelier. But instead of any news about Koril whatsoever, we got this shot of Plagueis. Had Koril been revealed as the secret Sith lord, that would have immediately filled in so many plot gaps--but using Plagueis, who has not been a character on this show as far as we are aware, only creates new ones. The tragedy of Master SolSol is another casualty of the flashback plot holes, in a way, because the series doesn't grapple specifically with the actual thing that happened--it only deals with it in a flat, "Sol killed Aniseya and the context is irrelevant" sort of way. Which ignores the intensity of the sequence--Aniseya essentially goaded the Jedi, first by possessing Torbin and then by very suddenly turning herself and Mae into some kind of black goop right next to Sol. The situation was impossible to parse, and we still don't have any idea at all what the coven's deal was or why Aniseya created the twins. No one ever asks or tries to find out those things, and so we certainly don't know the answers.And Sol dies because of it. He lets Osha do it, really, because of the guilt he felt over it. It might even be possible that he finished himself off to keep Osha from falling, which would be interesting--the cadence of the audio changed for the last few seconds of the choke. But the whole situation rings hollow because we don't fully understand what happened with the coven or why/how the Sith have been lurking around. The Jedi and their cover-upsWhen George Lucas was making The Phantom Menace, he essentially re-cyled plot points from the original films and justified it by saying: "It's like poetry, so they rhyme." The Acolyte does this sort of thing within itself a few times with the big 16-year time gap, most notably perhaps with Indara crafting a false story about what happened with the coven, and then again with Vernestra making up a fake story about Sol and Mae/Osha in the present. Hopefully, Vern's meeting with Yoda at the end of the episode is a sign that she's going to at least tell him the real truth--keep things quiet while still trying to deal with the problem. At least we can hope.That sort of denialism would have made it easier for the Jedi to believe the Sith didn't exist a century later when Darth Maul showed--Yoda and co. don't really handle that situation any better than they do this one. And with the threat of government oversight, we're seeing why they thought denialism was the right path, because Senator Rayencourt is laying the groundwork for the argument that the Jedi are hungry for power. And it's not hard to buy into that rhetoric when they cover stuff up like this. What is Vernestra's connection with Qimir?I'd previously speculated that Vernestra was Qimir's Jedi master back in the day, and that his scars came from her lightwhip, and they have a moment in this episode where they recognized each other through the Force--there's clearly something there. The episode didn't go into any detail, though, so there's not much to glean. Lightsaber bleedingDuring her final confrontation with Sol, Osha clutches his lightsaber so hard that she bleeds into the casing, turning the crystal red in very dramatic fashion to parallel her potential fall to the dark side of the Force. While it's the first time we've seen this in live-action, lightsaber bleeding isn't new--we saw the fallen Jedi Degan Gera bleed a lightsaber during a similarly dramatic scene in the video game Jedi: Survivor. But the idea actually originated from a 2017 comic about Darth Vader's Sith training. What is Bazil's problem?While Sol is chasing Mae through space, the little rodent sabotages Sol's ship and prevents him from catching up to her. No explanation is asked for or given--the incident is never addressed at all. This character has been awful.