The Acolyte’s best mystery is about how to kill a Jedi, not about who did it

The acolyte, Disney Plus’ latest entry into the Star Wars universe, is a murder mystery. At least, that’s what we’ve come to understand through its marketing. But now that we’re two episodes into the season, a very different puzzle has become the lightest point in the show for me.

It’s an irresistible Star Wars-esque question, but more importantly, it’s a perfect framework for exactly the kind of action that was briefly and excitingly at the heart of the Star Wars franchise.

(Ed. remark: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The acolyte.)

How do you kill a Jedi without using a weapon?

This is the challenge presented to Mae, our former apprentice, by her master, who looks like a Sith and croaks like a Sith, but hasn’t had much time to embrace his alliances or philosophy until now. As the final lesson in her training, Mae must kill at least one Jedi without using a weapon, to kill “the dream.” What dream? The dream that all Jedi live in, apparently “a dream that they think everyone shares.”

According to Mae’s master: ‘An acolyte kills without a weapon; an acolyte kills the dream.”

What does that mean?

It means everyone is kung fu fighting, baby.

The acolyteThe unarmed hand-to-hand combat stood out from the moment the trailers dropped. There is very little in live-action Star Wars like this: the gravitational cool of lightsabers is too great to escape. Jedi and Sith fight with swords; everyone knows this. Smugglers and soldiers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that shoot lasers. Even Donnie Yen’s enigmatic Force follower, but definitely not Jedi Chirrut fights with a stick. Blame the action figure market with accessories, I guess.

Despite having its origins in the samurai film, Star Wars has very few references to the immortal trope of a fighter who refuses to draw his sword. But in The acolyte, this is how every Mae versus Jedi battle begins, because a Jedi does not rely on an unarmed enemy. In these first two episodes, Mae’s clashes with Carrie-Anne Moss’ Master Indara and Lee Jung-jae’s Master Sol are hyper-fast, riveting battles for dominance, as we see Mae’s desperation contrasted with an unbreakable Jedi cool. We get those wild superhero moments when Mae wants to steal a lightsaber in the middle of battle and is faced with an impossibly fast turn from a supernaturally endowed body. It’s the blow-for-blow, arm’s length, movement-and-counter tension of a great hand-to-hand martial arts sequence.

Mae’s quest to kill a Jedi without a weapon returns Star Wars to the realm of Fight Scene Cinema that the franchise developed during the production of the prequel films, but has rarely, if ever, been matched in live action since. But it also gives The acolyte his best mystery. Not a whodunit, but a How do you do that?

Sol and his allies are certainly solving a murder mystery—we’ve seen that a million times—but here Mae is banging her head on a koan handed to her by a murder Buddhist, and I’m just waiting for the moment when she realizes that maybe the answer is not literal.