Destiny, the third and latest episode of The Acolyte has certainly got the fandom talking, delivering an episode that takes us into the relatively recent past and explaining the schism that exists between twins Mae and Osha and how the Jedi are involved. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly Leslye Headland explains why she chose the route that she did, one rooted in the vines of The Clone Wars.
While Mae intentionally failed the Jedi test to see if she could be taken away and trained by the Order, Osha decided she wanted to leave and become a Jedi. Afraid of losing her sister, Mae then either (intentionally or accidentally) appeared to cause a fire that then burned down the entire coven. Mae later seemed to plummet to her death — although she clearly survived — while Osha was rescued by Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae), who brought her back to Coruscant to begin both her training and her new life.
The episode answered many questions, including why Mae is out to kill the four Jedi that came to Brendok and set off the chain of events that took her sister and took the lives of the rest of the coven. And posing those questions before the answer is why creator Leslye Headland chose to not lead the series with the characters’ backstory. “I did always think if you were going to tell the origin story of these two characters, it would be a lot more interesting to dip in a later episode as opposed to starting with it,” Headland tells Entertainment Weekly.
“It just felt more dynamic and more interesting,” she continues. “As the writer’s room and I developed the overall arc for season 1, we started to get really influenced by Rashomon, and the themes of the show started to rise to the top of duality, seeing things from different points of view. So it made sense to me that when you did go back in time, there are a lot of different ways to interpret an event that happened.”
As for why that origin story takes place within a female witchcraft community, Headland says she took inspiration from the Nightsisters of Dathormir seen on another Star Wars series. “I was very inspired by the Nightsisters storyline and the Ventress storyline on The Clone Wars when I was a budding writer,” says Headland. “So when I got the chance to make a show set in the Star Wars universe, it felt like, ‘Well, of course I’m going to do my version of witches. I just am going to shoot my shot.’”
But The Acolyte journey into witchdom is not a mere extension of what we have already seen on other Star Wars shows, as Osha and Mae’s background perfectly fits in with the women they have become. “As the characters developed, it made a lot of sense that they would be at the center of a coven,” says Headland. “That the girls would be almost revealed not as children, but as the legacy of what their mother started.”
The latest episode of Making Tracks Reaction Chat dived deep into Destiny, and episode you can listen to below.
Stay tuned for more coverage of Destiny across the weekend here on the site.
