Always two, there are. “Star Wars” fans were treated to many things throughout Episode 8 of “The Acolyte,” but among them were two character cameos of legendary figures in “Star Wars” lore showing up in the Disney+ series’ season finale. The final shot of the season settles just above the very recognizable ears and wispy white hairs of Yoda, long-lived enough to have seen the Republic at its height before its fall. But “The Acolyte” achieves balance in the (cameo) force by tucking in a true IYKYK glimpse of a legendary dark lord, too.
“Plagueis was always in the finale, in every version,” creator Leslye Headland told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. Darth Plagueis the Wise is a Sith Lord referenced most notably in “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” as part of Palpatine’s (Ian Mcdiarmid) pitch to Anakin (Hayden Christensen) to join the dark side — he was, in fact, Palpatine’s old master.
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In “The Acolyte,” he appears about 12 minutes into Episode 8 (also titled “The Acolyte”) as a sinister figure lurking among the rocks while Osha (Amandla Stenberg) and The Stranger (Manny Jacinto) head off to find her sister Mae (also Amandla Stenberg) who is trying to kill her former master Sol (Lee Jung-jae). But Plagueis’ presence echoes throughout the wider “Star Wars” mythology and its Expanded Universe of novels, comic books, and video game tie-ins. James Luceno’s 2012 novel “Darth Plagueis” concerned his ruthless quest to achieve immortality.
Headland said she’d been waiting many years for Darth Plagueis to show up in “Star Wars” proper; and she did, in fact, get to be the change she wanted to see in the world. But finessing Plagueis’ appearance in “The Acolyte” turned out to be as tricky to nail down as tracking a Sith.
“There was a version where he was the button of the finale [instead of Yoda],” Headland said. But having the sinister figure be the last thing that we see never felt quite right. “You want to feel Osha’s triumph. You want to feel her joining forces with The Stranger. Plagueis stepped on [that moment].”
Choosing to center character-focused emotional beats is always an admirable impulse. But it’s equally impressive that Headland decided to find a beat earlier in the episode where Plagueis’ spying wouldn’t distract from the catharsis of Osha’s ending, instead of a post-credits mic drop of the kind fellow series “The Mandalorian” has been fond of. “I was OK with having the cameo come so early if it meant I could wrap up these characters in a way that their final shot was not a, ‘And he’s been pulling the strings the whole time’ feeling,” Headland said.
Plagueis peers at Osha and The Stranger as their ship heads off the Unknown Planet — which, although they look similar, wasn’t shot on the same Irish island as “The Last Jedi” shot Luke’s (Mark Hamill) hideaway on Ahch-To, according to Headland. “The Acolyte” shot in Madeira. The gruesome alien, mostly cloaked in shadow except for his burning orange eyes, needed to have an impact both for Wookieepedia editors and the uninitiated alike. If you don’t know who he is, he’s simply a sinister presence that promises The Stranger hasn’t been completely forthcoming with Osha and that more forces are arrayed against her than she realizes. But if you do know? Well, his appearance gives the season’s ending a big hit of dramatic irony.
“Even though [Osha and The Stranger] are standing there, sort of looking out at the sunset, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t. We know there can only be two. We know Plagueis is there. We know that these two are doomed in some way. So to me it’s a bittersweet tragedy, this foreboding ending. But that’s because I know about the Sith lineage and all these other things, whereas I think a different subset of the audience can be like, ‘They’re married!’” Headland said.
It will take more “Star Wars” stories set in the High Republic period for us to learn to what extent Osha and The Stranger influence, mitigate, and/or contribute to Plagueis’ rise. But Headland and her creative team wanted to infuse him with a sense of “graceful horror” and make it clear, even at a glance, that this is a monster who wants things.
“Obviously the species has been determined, if not by [Star Wars] canon, then by Legends and definitely by head-canon for everybody. So when we were designing him and talking about his appearance, it was a lot of ‘Crimson Peak,’ of Guillermo del Toro,” Headland said. But it was important, in the figure’s physicality and also the blocking of the shot, to create the sense that Plagueis and the Sith aren’t the armor-clad, visually imposing, powerhouse villains we sometimes associate with the Sith.
“They’re not running the First Order. They’re not running the Empire. They’re not the Chancellor of the Senate. They’re hiding out,” Headland said. “The Sith [in this time] are fighting for survival.” And as “The Acolyte” makes abundantly clear, when you’re fighting for survival, then there’s no such thing as a fair fight.
“The Acolyte” is now available on Disney+. You can listen to the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast on all audio platforms.
