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Perhaps fittingly for a murder mystery where you know the culprit — well, kind of — but not all the details, there’s something that’s not quite adding up about what we’ve found out about the backstory of Mae in the Star Wars prequel The Acolyte three episodes into the series. Join us as we fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories based on episodes two and three.

Spoiler warning! Stop reading now if you haven’t watched the third episode of The Acolyte, and want to remain mercifully unaware of the big reveals!

The third episode of the series certainly seems to explain everything about what happened 16 years ago on the planet Brendok to separate Mae and Osha, and bring Osha to the Jedi, believing that her sister was dead. On the face of what is shown, it’s easily understandable why Sol and the other Jedi would believe that Mae had died in the temple, even. Except… is there more to the story than meets the eye on first glance?

Maybe I’m just suspicious, but… it feels like something happened in the unaccounted-for time between Osha collapsing inside the burning temple and waking up onboard the Jedi ship, right…? I have two reasons to believe this: firstly, Sol wasn’t entirely convincing when he told her that the Jedi had searched for her sister and failed to find her, and secondly… surely what we saw in this episode isn’t enough to have led to Jedi Master Torbin essentially committing suicide in the previous episode after telling the adult Mae that he’d been expecting her…? (Not least of all because, if everything was as it seemed in the third episode, why would Torbin have been expecting Mae, when he would have believed her dead?)

There is, I suspect, some level of conspiracy between the Jedi who visited Brendok and the temple… although what that conspiracy actually is, and how far-spread the conspiracy might reach, remain tantalizingly unanswered for now. There are, after all, five more episodes of the season to run, and undoubtedly more secrets to be revealed in each of them.

New episodes of The Acolyte airs weekly every Tuesday on Disney+ through July 16.

The only place where Rebels and the Empire get along. Meet Cameron Monaghan, Freddie Prinze Jr., Mads Mikkelsen, Paul Bettany, and so many more Star Wars guests and comic creators at New York Comic Con October 17-20, 2024. Limited Thursday NYCC 2024 tickets are still on sale.