The first three episodes of The Acolyte served as the first act of this story, getting us acquainted with the characters and the situation and essentially catching us up to where we have roughly the same amount of key info about what's going on as Mae and Osha do. With this week's Episode 4, the plot is getting started in earnest as every major character races to the same place: the planet Khofar, where the Jedi Kelnacca has been living reclusively since the Jedi incursion to the witch coven on Brendok went so badly.

Warning: The following contains major spoilers for Episode 4 of Star Wars: The Acolyte. If you've not caught up, you may want to stop reading now.

On the one side of the race you have the Jedi and Osha, and on the other you have Mae and Qimir. Qimir, whose circumstance remains murky, has apparently personally scouted the place and found Kelnacca, and now he's helping Mae navigate the dangers from the jungle and Kelnacca's own traps that are littered about.

But Mae is having a bit of a crisis. Her secret master, whose face Mae has never seen, will kill her unless she carries out her mission as described: she must defeat one of her Jedi targets without a weapon. Mae weighs her options and decides her best chance at survival is to abandon the hunt, and her master, and try to team up with Osha. So she traps Qimir, and runs off.

Mae arrives just before Jedi do, and she calls out to Kelnacca when she enters, but he doesn't respond because he's dead, with a huge lightsaber wound in his chest. Since Mae didn't do it, the culprit becomes clear very quickly: Mae's master is here, and ready to throw down. The master comes up behind the Jedi outside the house, and has a brief stare-down with Osha before casually tossing her aside with the Force, and then doing the same to the Jedi as the episode ends.

This is a fairly packed episode of TV. On top of what I just described, we got our first appearance on The Acolyte by a movie character, and several really interesting Easter eggs to break down. Let's dig in.

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Ki-Adi-Mundi

We'd been teased that a familiar Jedi would appear, and it turned out to be the cone-headed Ki-Adi-Mundi, who apparently sat on the Jedi Council for more than a century. Oddly enough, there's no precedent in Star Wars lore for a character of his species, a Cerean, living that long, so it feels kinda random, but maybe we'll have a reason for it by the end of the season.

Mirialan Jedi

There's a green Jedi on The Acolyte called Vernestra who's a member of the mirialan species. The first major mirialan characters we spent time with were Luminara Unduli and her apprentice Barriss Offee on the Clone Wars show--Luminara was also killed during the Order 66 sequence at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Since then, the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic has a very heavy mirialan presence on the Republic side--you can create a mirialan player character, and other mirialan folks show up pretty much all the time in the Jedi and the government across the game's massive story.

And here's another completely random fun fact: Vernestra is played by Rebecca Henderson, who's married to series creator Leslye Headland.

Different Jedi robes

For most of the series thus far, Jedi on The Acolyte wear the normal robes that we're familiar with from the movies. But Yord had a scene in the premiere episode where he was sporting a very different (and much cooler) style of robe, and in the Jedi temple scenes in this week's episode we see a number of other Jedi wearing this alternative style--it's a very 1970s, retro futuristic space wizard kind of cut, intentionally calling back to some of the more creative Jedi robes described in the recent High Republic books and seen in the comics, not to mention evoking the look of some of the more creative Jedi outfits from the old Expanded Universe stories from this era, including the video games. It's nice that they added this variety--the normal Jedi robes are pretty boring after nearly 50 years.

The Jedi wanna talk things over first

One of the Jedi Order's traditional big weaknesses is they have no sense of urgency--they'd rather wait for a threat to fully emerge than be proactive, and when one actually does pop up, they have to talk about it forever before they can decide what to do about it. In this episode, Master Sol wants to head directly to Khofar to help Kelnacca, but instead he's recalled to the temple on Coruscant to discuss the overall situation with the bosses in an in-person meeting that absolutely could have been done on holo. The result: Kelnacca is killed because they didn't get there on time. Nice work, boss.

It's the classic Jedi problem, especially in the Old Republic era. Take Revan, for example, from Knights of the Old Republic--whose armor seems to have partially inspired Mae's look. Years before the events of that game, when Revan was a regular Jedi, the Mandalorians invaded the Republic just for the sake of it--they wanted the biggest, most awesome fight ever, and they tried to provoke the Jedi into action by massacring billions of cathar people and nearly driving that species to extinction. But the Jedi were so hung up on the details they didn't respond quickly--they didn't understand why the Mandalorians were doing what they were doing, and so they were scared of handling it wrong. So Revan defied his masters and joined the Republic military with a group of like-minded Jedi, fighting against and eventually defeating the Mandalorians while the Jedi establishment watched, causing a major schism that would eventually lead to a Jedi Civil War.

These Jedi don't seem to have it together any more than those folks did.

Master Holden

Before we move on from this scene, one more bit: This Jedi standing next to Ki-Adi-Mundi in this shot is Master Holden, and she's played by Indra Ove--who also played a First Order officer in The Rise of Skywalker.

Pip spraying the furry guy

There's a strange scene in the middle of this episode where a furry mechanic guy shows a strange interest in Pip, Osha's little droid pal. Pip, apparently put off by the staring, sprays the space ferret in the face for no reason. Well, no in-universe reason--this is a nod to the proud Star Wars tradition of droids doing random bits of slapstick comedy to entertain any small children who might be watching.

Those giant tree bugs

As the Jedi explore Khofar, they encounter strange, large growths of some kind on the trees everywhere. It turns out these growths are large, predatory bugs. While I don't think we've ever met these critters specifically before now, these are at minimum a nod to why Kelnacca, a wookiee, would find a place like Khofar to make a good home. It's not just because stuff like those bugs are a natural defense against intruders--the forests of Khofar seem to be just as inhospitable and full of weird threats as Kelnacca's home planet of Kashyyyk is. For a wookiee, Khofar is very homey.