Entry 06 · Star Wars Ultimate Re-Watch · The Acolyte

Teach / Corrupt

2024 · Disney+ Series · S1 E6 · 33 min · Qimir carries this whole episode on his cortosis-armored back

This is the Qimir show now. He bathed. He philosophized. He introduced cortosis to live-action Star Wars. Meanwhile, Bazil is somewhere on the ship being annoying and nobody stopped him. Six episodes in and the show is still more interested in explaining the Jedi than it is in building out the dark side. Which is a shame, because everything Qimir touches is gold.

The Take

Let’s just say it plainly: Qimir is one of the best-written characters Star Wars has produced in years. The way this episode frames his relationship to the Force — not as a villain twirling in darkness, but as someone who genuinely sees the Jedi’s moral framework as a threat worth resisting — is doing more interesting work than most of the saga bothers to attempt. His defense of the dark side as “semantics” shouldn’t land as well as it does. But it does. He’s tapping into the full Force, the Jedi have marked him for death, and you kind of get it. That’s a hard needle to thread, and the writers nailed it.

The island prisoner setup is genuinely clever — a location only accessible at low tide is a cool constraint for a “nowhere to run” scenario. But then you sit with it for a second and start asking questions. What if Qimir needs to leave urgently? Does he have a boat? Does he Force-jump over the water? The show doesn’t care and honestly, fine, neither do I that much. What I do care about is that Sol is still running the “pretend Mae is Osha” play, which is either deeply delusional or deeply calculated, and the episode isn’t in a hurry to tell us which. His hug in this episode — knowing what we know — is genuinely unsettling.

The cortosis reveal is the other thing this episode gets completely right. Lightsaber-resistant material, introduced in live-action, with a cool visual payoff in the whip too. If you came up on Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, that name hits different. It’s exactly the kind of deep-cut lore integration that Star Wars does well when it’s not overthinking it. Mae factory-resetting PIP is cold though. Just cold.

🧠 Qimir mentioned he was a Jedi “a very long time ago.” This show is set roughly 100 years before the prequel era. If Plagueis has been his master, and Plagueis’s whole thing is cheating death and extending life — is Qimir actually much older than he looks? Is that the secret backstory we never got to unpack? Because if so, that’s a thread worth pulling hard.

One More Thing

Osha watching Qimir bathe. Is this the most overtly sexual scene in Star Wars history? Asking sincerely.
Bazil is hiding from Sol too, apparently. Why? What is this creature’s agenda? Nobody knows. The show doesn’t know either.
The Jedi ship has a PIP Droid Port. Sol allegedly didn’t know what a PIP droid was earlier in the season. Sure.
Didn’t Mae swear she’d turn herself in and do the right thing? That was… two episodes ago? What happened to that arc?
The Bazil fight scene is genuinely silly. Not in a fun way. In a “who approved this” way.
At least Vernestra is out there giving the fallen Jedi a proper burial. Someone on this show has their head on straight.
Mae going under the mask at the end is creepy in the right way. One of the stronger visual closes of the season.
Need to replay Jedi Knight II now. Thanks, cortosis.

Gut Check

6/10. Qimir is doing the heavy lifting and could carry a whole show on his own — but The Acolyte keeps cutting away to explain the Jedi instead of leaning into the darkness it promised. Any continuation lives or dies on giving Qimir and Osha the space to actually go somewhere. Next up: Entry 07, and we’re getting close to the end of the line for this one.