‘The Acolyte’ dares to tease it’s bringing back one of the ‘Star Wars’ sequel trilogy’s most divisive developments

The Acolyte is a breath of fresh air amid the familiarity of what’s on offer elsewhere on the Star Wars TV buffet table. While Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, and much of the time The Mandalorian trade turns pressing our nostalgia buttons, The Acolyte is coloring in an era of Star Wars lore we’ve never seen portrayed on screen before: the High Republic.

What’s more, tonally, it’s a huge break with tradition, too. The Jedi are portrayed as even more ineffectual and pig-headed than in the prequel, and there’s a slow-burn pace to the series that gives it a mystery thriller flavor. While not absolutely everything works about the show, and it’s not quite Andor 2.0, showrunner Leslye Headland and her team should be commended for carving out their own corner of the galaxy.

And yet, it’s just possible that The Acolyte is daring to connect with established Disney canon in a subtle but major way. Sorry, sequel trilogy haters — somehow, a piece of lore you thought we left behind in The Rise of Skywalker might just be returning.

Are Mae and Osha a Force Dyad in The Acolyte?

The Acolyte‘s dark and action-packed opening scene introduces us to a Sith apprentice (Amandla Stenberg) so powerful that she’s able to best and kill a Jedi Master (Carrie-Anne Moss’ Indara) in battle. When we later meet engineer Mae (also Stenberg), like the Jedi themselves, we assume she is said Sith apprentice, even if she’s giving off much more “peppy protagonist” energy all of a sudden.

By the end of the episode, however, the truth has come out. The real killer is Mae’s twin sister, Osha, who was believed to have been killed before Mae went off to train as a Jedi Padawan. Apparently, it seems she survived and was taken under the wing of an unknown Sith lord. From what we’ve seen so far, we can perceive that both Mae and Osha possess a similar level of Force ability, acting as a mirror to each other. Almost as if they are “two that are one,” as a certain emo bucket-head once said…

Is it possible that Mae and Osha are a Dyad in the Force, just like Rey and Kylo Ren? Certainly, there are many signs suggesting just that. We know that a Force Dyad requires two connected souls, one of whom is on the Light Side and one of whom is on the Dark Side. This is why the Sith’s attempts to engineer a Dyad — this is why they created their Rule of Two in the first place — failed. Because the Dyad must be perfectly balanced.

Some may use the fact that Rey and Kylo are said to be the first Force Dyad for centuries as proof that Mae and Osha can’t be one, but it’s worth pointing out that Palpatine had no idea that his granddaughter and his apprentice were a Dyad, so it’s clearly something that is hard to discern for even someone of Palpatine’s power. It took Kylo telling her for Rey to realize it herself. It’s entirely possible that Mae and Osha could secretly be a Dyad without actually being aware that they are.

Headland has spoken about how she wants to create ties to all kinds of other Star Wars media in The Acolyte, so this sequel trilogy callback could easily remain possible subtext or graduate to full-blown text as the season draws on. Let’s just hope that the show gets the chance to tell a complete story before it is brought to a close (Disney’s getting more trigger-happy than Grand Moff Tarkin these days).