The Star Wars franchise is perhaps best known for its rather Manichean outlook on good and evil as expressed through the ‘Dark (evil) Side’ and ‘Light (good) Side’ of the Force (similar to 气, qi, or breath/spirit in Daoism) expressed through the Jedi, a type of warrior-monk. While the films did not go into a great deal of depth, presumably due to their limited runtime, the streaming series which have proliferated on Disney+ have filled in a number of diegetic gaps, allowing for greater nuance. One of the more recent, The Acolyte (Disney+, 2024), casts the Jedi and their Dark Side antagonists the Sith, in far more shades of moral grey. For those unfamiliar with the series, The Acolyte takes place during the Old Republic, long before the events of the prequel trilogy. It follows Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a former Jedi-in-training who left and who is originally from a Force-using tradition (a ‘coven’ of ‘witches’) other than the officially sanctioned Jedi Order. That coven, made up of primarily non-white women, was (spoiler, sorry) inadvertently killed through a combination of multiple Jedi errors and a fire set by Osha’s ‘twin’ Mae (Stenberg).[i] One of the Jedi, Sol (Lee Jung-Jae), took Osha on as his padawan (student) and had developed an immediate rapport with her before they had even spoken. This led to a fixation on taking her away from her family to become his student and (again, spoiler, sorry) he kills Osha and Mae’s mother, erroneously believing that she was a threat to the children. Believing Mae dead, Osha leaves the planet and is eventually found again by the Jedi after Mae assassinates one of the other Jedi involved in all of this as an assignment from her master, a Dark Lord of the Sith (Manny Jacinto) alternately referred to as Qimir when pretending to be a petty criminal working for the Sith lord and ‘The Stranger’ after his Sith Lord identity is revealed (1.5).[ii]
The series brings up a number of points which increases the ambiguity of the Jedi in their function as what is essentially a blend of law enforcement and religious order over which the civilian Republic government has seemingly limited oversight. Though the films make it seem as though being chosen as a Jedi is a positive, as this series illustrates– and, to some extent, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+, 2021) does as well– Force-sensitive children are taken away from their families at an extremely young age and not allowed to ever see them again. They are then inculcated into this pseudo-religious order, embracing their beliefs and culture. While the Jedi belief system seems to be an amalgam of non-Western religions which are then made manifest through the Force and many governments have or have had sponsored (sometimes obligatory) programmes for children who are considered gifted in some way (e.g., Fetterman, 1987 on Soviet programmes)[iii] the Jedi schools that seem to be a key part of the institution is most similar to North American and Australian ‘residential schools’ in which Indigenous children were taken from their families and communities in order to forcibly assimilate them into white/European society (Nogrady, 2019). These schools tended to be run by a local Christian church of some denomination. The residential schools, in addition to being sites of physical, emotional and sexual abuse perpetrated against the students, also were a part of what is now considered an attempted cultural genocide. While different countries have had different responses with regard to an attempt at reckoning (e.g., Waxman, 2022 on residential school in the US, which also gets into the nuances of how the experience changed over decades) such schools are now considered to have been problematic at best.
This association with residential schools is then coupled with the association with law enforcement. In both cases, authorities from the socioculturally dominant group cause harm to subalterns with the power granted to them by the governmental authority. While this certainly resonates with contemporary perspectives on law enforcement and disproportionate brutality against BIPOC people (Iheme, 2020) it also relates to Christian’s (2001) postcolonial detective, in whom
…, the colonizer and the colonized collide, the oppressor and resistor struggle for space. The detective has the power to oppress given by western police methods and the detective’s place within society, often on the police force, but also the power to resist oppression, given by filiation, by education and by access to power (Christian, 2001: 11).
Both of these issues are (or can be) linked, of course; that the deaths of the coven and (spoiler again, sorry) Mae ultimately having her memory (consensually) erased and Osha joining the Sith are blamed on Sol (‘one flawed man’) by the Jedi council member Vernestra (Rebecca Henderson) when it is clearly shown throughout the text as being a systemic problem can also be read as how police brutality in particular is positioned (Haider-Markel and Joslyn, 2017). Osha and Mae, as ex-Jedi padawan (student) and Sith padawan respectively, can also be read as illustrating this tension and negotiation between coloniser and colonised. Sol is shown to struggle between his emotional connection with Osha (emotion being stigmatised by Jedi as being ‘dark’, arguably ‘barbarous’) and his perceived duty to take children away from danger (as Sol/the Jedi believe Osha and Mae to be because they are being trained by an alternate, clearly Indigenous-coded Force tradition). That Sol is played by a Korean actor can also reinforce this tension, Korea having been repeatedly colonised and occupied during its history.
Thus the series questions and critiques the Jedi as law enforcement/religious order, though does not fall into a complete reversal of tropes. While it is heavily implied that the Stranger was betrayed by Vernestra (a large lightsabre scar on his back plus a brief conversation between then via a communication device) which led to his leaving the Jedi to become a Sith, because his background is left quite vague it is unclear where in the moral grey of coloniser/colonised or oppressor/oppressed he resides.[iv] Even so, the series illustrates the benefits of television/streaming with regard to worldbuilding and characterisation as well as the potential for critique brought in by multiethnic casting. Though the series was not renewed and the continuing fates of the characters are unclear– particularly as it takes place a century before the original trilogy and associated streaming series– The Acolyte does illustrate the ways in which examining the diegetic past can also express and critique the physical contemporary for academics, viewers and students alike.
Dr Melissa Beattie is a recovering Classicist who was awarded a PhD in Theatre, Film and TV Studies from Aberystwyth University where she studied Torchwood and national identity through fan/audience research as well as textual analysis. She has published and presented several papers relating to transnational television, audience research and/or national identity. She is suddenly an independent scholar. She has worked at universities in the US, Korea, Pakistan, Armenia, Ethiopia and for a brief time in Cambodia. She can be contacted at tritogeneia@aol.com.
FOOTNOTES
[i] The exact relationship between Osha and Mae was hinted at in the series– i.e., that they are the same person but split, rather than being twins– but because the series was not renewed exactly what this entails remains unclear.
[ii] The character shifting from petty criminal to pseudo-monastic character can, admittedly, be read as an intertext with Jacinto’s character Jason Mendoza from The Good Place (NBC, 2016-2020).
[iii] I am anecdotally aware of programmes in the Cold War-era US which offered to educate gifted students but have not found academic studies on the subject.
[iv] The Stranger’s costume does not have sleeves, which one can perhaps read as a visual pun on the Second Amendment of the US Constitution (the right to bear/bare arms); militia groups opposed to the US government as well as many citizens who are against governmental gun control often base their opposition upon that amendment.
REFERENCES
Christian E (2001) Introducing the post-colonial detective: Putting marginality to work. In Christian E (ed.), The Post-Colonial Detective. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 1-16.
Fetterman D (1987) Gifted and talented education in the Soviet Union. Gifted Education International 4: 180-186.
Haider-Markel D P and Joslyn M R (2017) Bad apples? Attributions for police treatment of African Americans. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 17(1): 358–378.
Iheme W C (2020) Systemic racism, police brutality of Black people, and the use of violence in quelling peaceful protests in America. The Age of Human Rights Journal 15: 224-262.
Nogrady B (2019) Trauma of Australia’s Indigenous “Stolen Generations” is still affecting children today. Nature570(7762): 423–24.
Waxman O B (2022) The history of Native American boarding schools is even more complicated than a new report reveals. Time (17 May).
https://time.com/6177069/american-indian-boarding-schools-history/#:~:text=Between%201819%20and%201969%2C%20the,investigation%20of%20this%20issue%20continues. (accessed 8/9/24).
