The First 'The Acolyte' Controversy Is Absurd, Even For 'Star Wars ...

The Acolyte

Disney

The Acolyte has received both its first trailer and release date, as the new Star Wars project will arrive rather soon on June 4, 2024. The trailer showed off what essentially seems to be a Sith serial killer, hunting down Jedi in an effort to fix an imbalance of power between force users. And there may be some amount of revenge in there too for all we know.

Naturally, controversy has erupted from the trailer, and perhaps not what you were thinking. While I’m sure there are “woke” accusations somewhere out there about its Asian and black leads, that’s not what is being discussed the most. Rather, that would be the idea that the show it “retconning” existing Star Wars lore by having the Sith in this time period.

This is based on a specific prequel quote from Ki-Adi-Mundi, member of the Jedi Council, in which he declared that it was “impossible” that the Sith were attacking as he says “the Sith have been extinct for a millennium.”

The idea here is that The Acolyte is breaking canon by inserting Sith into the High Republic era which instead started several hundred years ago and ended about 80 years before Order 66. The Acolyte specifically is 100 years before The Phantom Menace.

This is, of course, totally absurd for a number of reasons.

Just because the Sith were not around en masse like in the Old Republic days, does not mean they did not exist and were hiding in the shadows. Which is apparently exactly what is happening in The Acolyte. Then, this quote is being given by a guy who did not know there was an entire Sith conspiracy happening under the Council’s nose. This is quite literally the entire plot of the prequels. If the guy didn’t know Palpatine was a Sith lord, why should we trust his so-called knowledge of the status of the Sith for the last thousand years? More generally, a single guy’s opinion on something is not a fact. A stated opinion is not canon. This seems like extremely basic stuff.

The Acolyte is actually poised to bring some old stuff back into canon, as its showrunner has promised that there will be some EU/Legends content that will make it into the show, adopting it the way we’ve seen with many other things brought forward from that era. While some things will likely never arrive (sorry Mara Jade), we’ll see what The Acolyte has in store for us.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.