Early on in The Acolyte‘s final episode, a couple of seconds completely comes out of nowhere to hit you like a ton of bricks. It’s not a moment of high drama, or a particularly shocking reveal about the story we’re watching unfold. If anything, it’s seemingly almost entirely disconnected from everything else in the finale. And yet, it’s a moment that potentially has huge ramifications for current Star Wars continuity.
In the opening act of “The Acolyte,” The Acolyte‘s eighth and final episode of the season, Osha decides to make a tenuous alliance with the mysterious dark sider known only as the Stranger. Having been given a vision in the Force of her twin, Mae, seemingly about to kill Osha’s former Jedi Master Sol, she and the Stranger prepare to take off from their secluded island environment. Flying away in the Stranger’s vessel, we don’t follow the duo. Instead, The Acolyte draws back to the shadows of a nearby cave, watching the ship fly off… as a wrinkled, spindly hand emerges from the shadows, and then a face.
The face of an alien being who certainly looks like it could be one of the most infamous villains in Star Wars history, never before seen in live-action: Darth Plagueis the Wise.
Is It Actually Darth Plagueis?
Turns out, if it looks like a Darth Plagueis, it probably is. Although the episode itself never explicitly identifies the figure as Plagueis—beyond the being’s red, Sith-like eyes, and the elongated face associated with the Muun, Plagueis’ species—it’s not like Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland has been cagey about having ideas about the character, should the series continue. But the showrunner has now explicitly confirmed that the figure is indeed meant to be Plagueis. “Plagueis was always in the finale, in every version,” the showrunner told IndieWire in a new interview. “I was OK with having the cameo come so early if it meant I could wrap up these characters in a way that [Osha and the Stranger’s] final shot was not a, ‘And he’s been pulling the strings the whole time.’”
What We Actually Know About Darth Plagueis in Star Wars Canon
First infamously mentioned in Revenge of the Sith when Chancellor Palpatine regales Anakin Skywalker with the “Tragedy” of the ancient Sith Lord—and his purported power to cheat death itself, until his own apprentice killed him—little is actually explicitly known about Plagueis’ history in the rebooted Star Wars continuity. He was the master of Palpatine, having recruited the young Naboo at some undisclosed point prior to the events of The Phantom Menace, and the two worked to further Plagueis’ plans to unlock the secrets to immortality itself. Plagueis and Palpatine focused on multiple avenues: scientific research, attempting to directly influence the midi-chlorians inherent in all living beings to manipulate the living Force, the practice of the Force ability of transference, letting someone supplant another living vessel with their own consciousness, and an attempt to utilize his apprentice in creating a dyad in the Force itself, the Force-bond that preceded even the ancient Sith belief in the Rule of Two.
Plagueis also supported Palpatine in his rise to power as the senator for his homeworld and the Chommell sector, joining the Republic Senate in the year 52BBY (around 80 years after his appearance in The Acolyte), training his student in the ways of politics as much as he did the dark side of the Force. However, their alliance was not to last. As Palpatine eventually tells Anakin in the Tragedy of Plagueis the Wise, he was betrayed and killed by his apprentice in his sleep, unable to respond quick enough to utilize the dark arts he had dedicated his life to to cheat death.
Much more of Plagueis’ apprenticeship of Palpatine was covered in former Expanded Universe continuity, most notably in the 2012 James Luceno novel Darth Plagueis. That book also briefly explores Plagueis’ his own apprenticeship to his master Darth Tenebrous—a Bith who remains largely unexplored in current continuity, outside of brief allusions to the character in reference material—and his eventual assassination of Tenebrous on the planet Bal’demnic, the site of rich deposits of cortosis, the powerful but rare material that is capable of potent, lightsaber-shorting energy dissipation. An interesting point to note, given The Acolyte‘s own on-screen debut of the ore!
What Darth Plagueis Could Mean for The Acolyte‘s Future
Although future seasons of The Acolyte have yet to be confirmed by Lucasfilm, again it’s clear that showrunner Leslye Headland has always had plans to explore the character of Plagueis further, recently telling Nerdist, “If I continue to get to tell this story, I know how I would like [Plagueis’ rise] to play out. And I would say I think it’s pretty complicated and messy.” Given his eventual close ties to Palpatine—a figure that still continues to dominate generations of Star Wars storytelling across multiple eras of its timeline after his return in The Rise of Skywalker—any exploration of the Sith Lord who eventually gives rise to Palpatine’s power is going to have wide-reaching contextual ramifications for much of the Skywalker Saga as we know it.
There is, however, specific interest in tying Plagueis directly into The Acolyte‘s central narrative around Osha and her twin sister Mae. Given his aforementioned exploration of attempting to form his own powerful dyad in the Force with Palpatine, the fact that Plagueis is now in the orbit of Osha as she begins training with the Stranger—and her twin birth being aided by a similar vergence in the Force, a nexus of energy that split Osha and Mae as two parts of the same, powerful whole—there’s little doubt that someone like Plagueis wouldn’t be interested in seeing her explore her powers and use of the dark side. And then there’s the whole “Rule of Two” deal. We know already that Plagueis goes on to inherit the mantle of a Sith Lord, and take Palpatine as his apprentice, while neither Osha nor the Stranger have explicitly taken on such a mantle themselves yet. Four, of course, is a larger number than two.
“Even though [Osha and the Stranger] are standing there, sort of looking out at the sunset, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t. We know there can only be two,” Headland added in her interview with Indiewire. “We know Plagueis is there. We know that these two are doomed in some way. So to me it’s a bittersweet tragedy, this foreboding ending.” Suffice to say, should The Acolyte continue, Plagueis will remain a vital part of its dark side mysteries, until their inevitable, bittersweet end.
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