How old was Darth Plagueis during ‘The Acolyte?’

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for The Acolyte season 1 finale.

Do you know how old Darth Plagueis was during the events of The Acolyte? I thought not. It’s not, after all, a story the Jedi would tell you.

The story of the new Star Wars show takes place 100 years before The Phantom Menace in the High Republic era. This was when the evil emperor Sheev Palpatine wasn’t even born yet, but whether the same could be said of Darth Plagueis the Wise, his master, is another matter.

The Acolyte finale may have obliged all our theories by giving us a blink-and-you-miss-it Darth Plagueis cameo. As speculated earlier, it seems the Sith Lord behind Qimir’s training is none other than the infamous Plagueis, whose tales of woe inspire Palpatine to sway Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side more than a century later. But even glimpsing that scarred face has led fans to ask a simple, yet very crucial question: How old was Plagueis during the events of this story?

When was Darth Plagueis born and how old is he in The Acolyte?

If my hunch about the future of The Acolyte serves me well, the showrunners will be tying Darth Plagueis and his story to the theory revolving around Anakin Skywalker’s birth. If Osha and Mae were created via the Force thanks to a vergence manipulated by the witches of Brendok, then Plagueis is going to uncover this mystery and use it to conduct his Great Experiment.

But assuming that the mysterious person hiding in that cave in The Acolyte finale is indeed Plagueis, one will begin to wonder just where he came from and how old he is. Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of canon sources detailing Plagueis’ life. We know he was around in 130 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), which is almost precisely when The Acolyte takes place. He also was killed by Palpatine sometime around 32 BBY, just before the power-hungry senator began his bid to gain power in the Republic.

That’s as much as we can hope to glean from the canon before The Acolyte returns with another season. But if you approach the Legends timeline, you can get a rough estimate of how old Plagueis should be by this time.

According to the book Star Wars: Darth Plagueis written by James Luceno and published in 2012, Plagueis was born sometime between 147 and 120 BBY after Darth Tenebrous arranged for his birth in order to engineer a suitably strong apprentice. That means he should be a young Muun male by the time The Acolyte takes place, yet that brief cameo hardly gave us that impression.

At the very least, this live-action Plagueis must be in his middle years, but since the average Muun lifespan is above 100 years, there’s basically no telling how old he is unless confirmed by one of the loremasters at Lucasfilm.