'The Acolyte' Episode 5 Deep Dive
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Welcome to Yada Yada. This season on Yada Yada Island. When we were new, they spoiled me. They even gave me a phone. But then, it's like I didn't exist. Don't take Yada Yada from your wireless carrier. Now with Metro, get that new customer feeling again and again. Introducing Metro Flex. Free 5G phones when you join, same deals as new customers when you stay. Only at Metro by T-Mobile.

Just bring your number and ID and sign up for an eligible plan. After 12 months, trade in and get our best deals on select devices. This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. It's that time of year, so spread more joy with The Home Depot's giant holiday decor. Go big this holiday season with larger-than-life decor that really hits home. Be like my wife. She'll just go to Home Depot to see what they got cooking. She's always ready to plan for the holidays. Maybe that's a tree.

You can put together in a few clicks like the grand Duchess. That sounds great. Or a huge eight foot towering Santa with posable arms that a flame effect lantern that might be in front of my house or an eight and a half foot towering reindeer with illuminated flashing bells. That's the holiday spirit at the home Depot shop in store online. Now at home depot.com. Hello. You really didn't know it was me.

Not even deep down. Hello, welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson and joining me, stepping over the fallen bodies of our colleagues that we're not going to bother to transport off the planet with us, it's Mallory Rubin. Hi, Mal.

And let you read my thoughts? No, no, no. Hello. We are here on the newish House of R.P. to talk to you. I think we can retire it. Great. It's done. It's done. Hello. You got the last one. We're here on the absolutely ancient, decrepit-

House of War feed. To talk to you today about, guess what? As old and weary as our bones and souls. Pretty good episode of television. Episode five of the Acolyte. Night. That's one. You get five. No! You get five. You didn't tell me that before we started. I don't know what I've chosen to use. Do I get five more after now? Okay, you can have five more. All right. Yeah. Use them wisely.

Oh, man. Program reminders. Yeah. Over on the Ring of Verse, the Midnight Boys, pew, pew. Pew, pew. They're covering House of the Dragon. Yes. They're covering Acolyte. And they're covering The Boys. That's right. So you get them twice a week. What a joy. What a delight.

Fabulous. Oh, are you saying that if you use a different word in the same cadence, it doesn't count? Okay. Fascinating. Over here, of course. Yeah. You get us three times a week.

You get us... Yeah, four this week if you came to our live show. Absolutely. You get us on Thursdays for the Acolyte Deep Dive. You get us on Sundays, the minute. The moment. House of the Dragon ends, give or take a minute or two. Just an instant, being a second, just a moment, being an iota. Um...

On YouTube, on Spotify, you can watch Talk of the Thrones. You can watch any of this. We're all on video. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. But you can watch Talk of the Thrones on Sunday and then the House of R, of course, deep dive of House of the Dragon, which is clocking in around over three hours. You think we can get under three for this next one? Nope. Okay.

So that's what's happening elsewhere. Yeah. There's a lot that's going on. How can folks keep track of that, Mallory Rubin? Thanks for asking. Here's what I would recommend. Follow the pods. Great. Follow the pod, House of R, Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and follow the new Ringerverse YouTube channel. Hit subscribe. Hit follow. Hit like. Give us the five stars. And then you've got your phone in your hand. You got your computer at your fingertips. Send us emails. Hobbitsanddragons at gmail.com.

I'm going to hit you with a spoiler warning, which is everything in all of Star Wars ever. Mm-hmm.

except anything beyond Acolyte Episode 5. Everything up through Acolyte Episode 5 that has ever happened in Star Wars is on the table. But on the spoiler front, I just want to say that to take you behind the curtain, Mallory and I were backstage at the live show when this episode dropped. We had not received screeners, so we hadn't watched it. Jomie comes up. He's like, Joanna, the internet's going wild for this episode of The Acolyte. And I, like, burning with curiosity, have to know. I opened up hobbitsanddragons.gmail.com just to see what was going on. Yeah.

dozens of emails already, like the episode hadn't even quite ended, about Manny Jacinto's arms. Genuinely, the bad babies were...

horny for this episode of Star Wars. And who can blame them? Who can blame them? Who can blame them? Speaking of Talk of Thrones and live shows and all of that, we're not done with the live shows. No. We did Talk of Thrones. Yeah. You'll be able to watch that live show? I think so. Okay. Yeah. Great. I believe so. Wonderful. In mere days. In mere days. But more importantly...

Maybe. Ringerverse, the whole fam. The crew. Is going to be back at the El Rey on July 17th. That's right. At 8 p.m. That's the day after the Acolyte finale. So we'll have that to talk about. It'll be like a week before Deadpool. We'll be well into Hot D season two. It's just, you know, the boys. It's hot nerd summer, man. The Midnight Boys will be there. House of R will be there. If you want to go to the ringer.com slash events. Yeah. Get those tickets. Get those tickets. Come hang out with us. We had a great time this past week.

Love a great time in July. Oh my God, the show was amazing. It was fun! Thank you to everyone who came out. I heard there was cosplay. I didn't see it. I still need to be tagged in those photos. My goodness. Tag me in your cosplay photos, please. Okay. Today, quick facts. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Episode's called Night as we expected it might be. Yes. And I'm...

still really wish that day and night had been condensed into one yeah all killer no filler episode this is one of my questions for you because on the one hand i agree i think if this had been the mid-season point the conclusion of this episode it just would have been a state of like bliss and euphoria but if day had been present in night it's just not as good as an episode

Possibly, but I think the highs of this episode might have just sort of like... Would have carried it. Yeah. Like, made us be more gentle on some of the lows of the day episode. You potentially move the flashback episode. You combine day and night. Take out maybe those Jedi Temple planning chats. Of course. Yeah. Just like Kofar day into Kofar night. We are at the three or four episode mark of the season.

Nothing but possibility ahead. Cooking with gas. Nothing but possibility and arm-rippling tendons ahead. This episode was written by Corey Donna, who co-wrote Day as well, and Cameron Squires, who wrote on WandaVision, a show that we love, and directed by Alex Garcia-Lopez, who also directed Day. And clocking in at 34 minutes, seven more minutes than last week, so that's fun to know. Let's just go right to our opening snapshots.

I'm looking at this figurine, which John moved right before we started, and I'm remembering that I brought that in shortly after my dear friend, who I will allow to remain anonymous for the purposes of this anecdote, gave it to me. We were meeting for dinner, and he said, I have some stuff. Do you mind taking it? I'm moving it with my girlfriend, and I don't want to bring it. It was a bunch of Star Wars merch.

Yeah, that's what I'll happily take it. I love it. I mean, that's wonderful, but also I encourage all of you who are— Bring your merch with you. Yeah, when you're going to go cohabitate. Yeah, share your love and your merch. Yeah, your love, your merch, and your love for things and stories. Speaking of love for things and stories, Mallory, what are your overall thoughts on episode five of The Accolade?

I have four left. I couldn't resist. I have four left. I thought this was a dynamite. I had an absolute blast. I watched this. We got home from a live show. Had to watch my dragon screener. Had to watch this. It was like the wee hours of the morning, but I felt so alive. This was...

fun, riveting, stimulating, compelling thematically, the action. It was the show that I thought we were going to get. And I'm trying... We talked about this a little bit last week. I'm trying to interrogate why I am so hung up on what I thought we were going to get versus what we actually have gotten so far. And last week, I was...

attempting to work through that and talk myself out of it a little bit. And now that we got this episode, I'm really back feeling actually like more frustrated in some ways by episodes three and four because this is what the show was capable of doing the whole time. Like I thought this was sensational. I think that if the show is like this the rest of the way that the season overall will be a success. The tone.

The nature of the action, the physical intimacy and savagery of the combat. Are you clutching your arms in memory of Manny's arms? Of the muscles. The magnetism and charisma on display. The darkness. Yeah. Forget the red shirts. I mean, RIP, but forget the red shirts. Yeah.

Jackie dies in this episode. Yorg dies in this episode. Pip, thank God, Basil is in the process currently of restoring him. Praise the all gods and the new alike. Pip got decapitated. Pip got decapitated and sacrificed. This was the dark and distinct Star Wars from, crucially, the Sith point of view that we were promising and anticipating. And so this felt like not only...

seeing the vision brought to life, but like genuinely a different kind of thing than what we had gotten to watch, not just inside of the series so far, but really like more broadly. And so I loved it. I thought this was sensational. I can't wait to talk about it. And I can't wait to see more like this. I don't know why it took quite so long to get here, but I'm thrilled. But here we are. Yeah. There are a few things that in our, in our beginning of season chat with Leslie Hedlund, there are just like a few little morsels that she dropped that, that

We cut out because she was like – and then later in the season, someone will say, you know, what have you done with your darkness? You know, like, not a ton of spoilers, but she indicated to me that there would be these, like, sithy speeches. We cut that out because I didn't want to, like, you know, spoil anyone who didn't want to know that. But I was just like, I've been waiting. I've been waiting, and I've been saying this on other pods, but I've been waiting for –

The Sith monologues. Yeah. The, you know, the Sith point of view. Delicious. Just absolutely delectable. Scrummy. So good. Manny Jacinto, who we've been, like, praising throughout, we just think he's been phenomenal throughout, is really on another level here. This is an instant Pantheon performance to me. It really is. I was telling someone I know who works in the industry yesterday, I was like,

Do you guys know how high Manny Jacinto's stock just rose within the span of 34 minutes of television? Oh, my God. Yeah. Keep your eye out, please, if your eye wasn't already on him. Okay, so— Portals!

You get as many of those as you want. Thank you. A couple quick emails just here at the top. Our listener Angelica says, please say you're calling this official let's do a parent trap week on House of R. That's a reference, of course, to House of the Dragon where we got a twin swap and we got a twin swap in this very episode. One soul and two bodies? Yeah. Would you say? I would. I would. Lauren says,

wrote in and said, just wanted to write in and shout out the lighting this week on the Acolyte. Despite being largely at night, everything was bright enough to be visible, which was refreshing. We've talked about this a lot on House of the Dragon as well, which is this idea of like, if you're going to set something entirely at night in the dark forest with like lightsabers and the occasional head of your droid to light the way. Yes.

Will we be able to see everything? The answer is yes. And then they took advantage of it in a bunch of different ways. Like when we first see the lightsabers like kick off, it's like inside a copse of trees and you're just seeing like flashes of multicolored lightsabers going. Wonderful. But the amount of times that we got... Like working your light braid in a dark room when you're a kid. Exactly. But the number of times we got...

I'm just going to call him Chimere for the episode. That's why I've decided. Okay, I meant to ask you this before we started. What are we doing? Are we doing Chimere? Are we doing The Stranger? We're not doing The Stranger. Are we doing Manny? Are we doing Just a Dude, Just a Guy Has No Name? No, I think I'm just going to call him Chimere until I hear otherwise. Okay. But you can make your own decision. So you're not compelled by the subtitling him calling him The Stranger? Well, that's what they've been calling him throughout. Since the dream speech. I just think that sounds very...

A little silly to say over and over and over again, the stranger, you know? We could pretend that we're talking about the stranger from Game of Thrones. We could pretend that we're talking about the stranger from Rings of Power. Some of our favorite properties. Maybe it's just a nice... La Trangée from Camus. Is that what you want to talk about?

A favorite of mine, actually. Genuinely. I'm going to stick with Chimera. You can do whatever you want. I'll probably weave in and out of Stranger, Chimera, and Manny. But the number of times that Chimera's red saber was reflected on the grin of the mask. So you just got this like splash of red glow on the various different metals that were involved in the mask. Like you've been chewing sour leaf. Dunkin' eggs. I got you. I got you. Um...

I also want to shout out Zheng Cheng Liu, I think I pronounced that correctly, who did the stunts in this episode, who worked on Shang-Chi, who worked on Mulan, who worked on Bullet Train, all of which have incredible fight sequences. And this is just, I mean, just astonishing. Exquisite. The upshot here is that, you know, similar to watching Carrie Ann Moss fight in episode one, we have Daphne Keene here who has done a lot of stunt work in her short career. I mean, she's an un-

Unbelievable. But like having started so early with Logan, like she's someone who has, you know, a history with this. And then Manny Jacinto is a dancer. And so like, and according to their interviews, did most, even when the helmet's on, did most of the stunts in this episode. The one stretch where he and Sol are like gliding back and forth on the forest floor felt amazing.

Like a dance. And yeah. And then Li Zhengjie, who also has martial arts background. Like, it was just... It was sensational. Incredible. On the, like, we knew...

Manny Jacinto was playing the bad guy front, which we've been on for a very long time. Since the minute the first trailer came out? And actually, I guess before? I don't need us to take a victory lap there because we were certainly not alone in that prediction. But I do want to, I just want to play this clip from Star Wars Celebration last year, which was one of my hints that...

that this is for sure going down. This is Daphne Keene who plays Jackie. Yeah. Charlie Barnett who plays Yord. Yeah. And Manny Jacinto who plays a Sith. Steve, will you play this clip? And I was about to lose it because I couldn't do a backflip and, you know, a kickflip spin with my lightsaber like Manny can. Like Manny. Legitimately. Manny's not a Sith.

Manny's stunt god. Yeah. Like, Manny's the father of stunts. I didn't get to do any, like, super fun stuff. No. No lightsaber, too, so, you know. Anyways, we can't talk about this. This is very forbidden.

It's great stuff. The look on all of their faces when that happened. Absolute sheer terror. And Manny being like, I didn't do much stunts. What are you talking about? Just a guy. I'm just an apothecary. A guy who killed an apothecary. It's fine. Just a guy who knows how to make a potent bunta cocktail. Yeah. And loves a nap, you know? So we'll talk a little bit more about this reveal and sort of like

how it worked despite the fact that many people knew it was coming. Leslie Hedlund talked about this in an Entertainment Weekly interview. But last but not least, in the snapshot section, I just want to say, in honor of horny Star Wars, I just want to say... A favorite of mine, as you know. There are many ways to enjoy Star Wars. And I feel like sometimes the way in which some people...

Mostly, like, women love to enjoy horny Star Wars. Though men have been enjoying horny Star Wars since Leia was in a metal bikini, if not earlier than that. Since they first saw a Sarlacc pit. The way that the Kylo, Rey, Reylo shipping thing emerged from the sequels, I just remember there being a lot of, like,

push back from some corner saying that's not the right way to enjoy Star Wars. I say there's no real wrong way to enjoy Star Wars as long as you're not sort of messing with someone else's good time with Star Wars. And I think horny Star Wars where Leslie Hedlund comes out of the world of like not just enjoying the novels and the movies and the video games like she does, but enjoying fan fiction, having written fan fiction. So the fact that she...

gave us an incredibly horny episode of Star Wars is just a gift. And I would like to thank her personally. A treasure. Thank you. Anyone who is still trying to warm to horny Star Wars, I would just recommend that you Google or go to YouTube and look for a cut of every scene that animated Obi-Wan and Ventress ever shared. Get back to us. Thank you. We'll be waiting for your call. Let's go now to the deep dive. ♪

Okay, we start almost immediately from where we left off. Yes. Ocean's been knocked out for, you know, a minute or so, but, you know. Pip is scared. Pip is scared. Chirping and warbling. Pip. Mallory. Pip. Mallory. I'm going to say it the way John said it. Pip. Aw, Pip. Pip. Some.

Given our shared love of Lost, were you two reminded of the opening of Lost? I'm going to explain this for people who haven't seen the incredible television series Lost. Famously, Lost and its opening moments. And then again, later in the show, we get a pan down on Dr. Jack Shepard on the floor of a jungle. Yep.

an overview look at him while there's a very nice, good boy golden retriever next to him. And so instead of a golden retriever, we've got Pip. But this OSHA, was it not giving Jack Shepard to you? Totally. And like, not the only place where we get Jack. Oh, we'll come back. Because we have more.

More than one. We have to go back. We'll come back. Which we had already gotten previously. Yeah, yeah. So Jack is present in many respects here. Yeah. We start with a dead Jedi. We're out of the gate. We didn't see him go. He might have just like not survived the initial push. But we're already one red shirt down. And something I did love in this Entertainment Weekly piece that Dalton Ross put together with the interviews with like everyone in the cast, including Leslie Adlin as well,

She talks about the reveal. She's like, I knew a lot of people already figured out who Chimera was. She was like, I did hope to fool people with the red shirts thing. And I think she did because we were all like, all those, duh, no duh, all those red shirts are going to die. And then she's like, and Jackie and your two. Yeah. You definitely thought they were there to spare the primary figures. Exactly. And they were not. They were not. It was everyone's pencil. Yeah.

Our first glimpse into the trees of this saber fight. Later we'll hear Yord say, quote, he doesn't follow the rules of combat. There's no method to his movements. It doesn't make sense. And with that in mind, rewatching that sequence and the... Like, we have not, I believe, seen saber fighting like this. Not just...

stabbing one person in the torso and then pulling another person onto the end of that blade. Incredible work. But just the way in which his moves do strike me as quite unpredictable. And then according to, I believe, StarWars.com, he's using a method called Tricada, which is...

If you have a saber and you're fighting, you turn your saber on and off sporadically to catch your opponent off guard. Because if they're going to clash with a saber blade and all of a sudden there's nothing there. There's just air and you're stumbling off your guard. But that's just like a really...

way to fight and it's interesting because both the Jedi and the Sith do not like this method of fighting. The Jedi are like, it's dishonorable and the Sith are like, it's cowardly and our guy Chimera is like, it's effective. So I'm going to use it. Tracks completely like so much of this episode and what we'll hear the stranger and Saul. It's tough. Talk about leaders, the rules. Who's the leader?

Who are the rules for? If you don't follow them, you never have to worry about breaking them. And to position him as somebody who is thinking not just about the Jedi that way, but maybe any sort of faction, any sort of order is very compelling. He wants freedom. Freedom in totality. But this initial glimpse of the fighting, and we're off balance because we start with Osha, who falls. I like that parallel. It's like the same exact thing.

stumble that we got from May last week, right? Plopping down into those red spores. And you're like, is this just supposed to remind us how similar they are? They're falling in the same way. You start to wonder because of that conversation we had last week about night in the forest and like, what are these, what are these spores maybe going to do to you? You're just, you're on edge and, and on your heels right away. And then you watch this fight where, okay, right away,

Death. A stab in the back. A gut slice. And then we get the stab, the force pull to double stack, and then the decapitation slice? Yeah. Which, we're in the first minute of the episode. We've seen the initial dead red shirt. We have just watched...

Chimera kill four Jedi in the span of a moment. Yeah. So we're five down. We understand the skill level and the ability here. And we understand that we are in for something uncommon on the violence front in a Star Wars installment. And it was just like electric. It was an electric way to begin the episode. It reminds me of...

the opening of Infinity War when we see Thanos kill Loki. Like, establishing the threat of a villain. And that comes later, of course, also with Jackie and with Yord and stuff like that. But, like, just right away, we're like, shh.

This is so scary. And we're seeing the shorted out lightsabers. We're seeing the cortosis. The headbutt. Unbelievable. The cortosis and our beloved Ben will be on to talk more about cortosis, which is the substance on the helmet and on the vambrace. But like... The vambrace usage and the helmet were both just so good. But the vambrace is one thing. And the way that like the saber didn't impact the helmet is one thing. But actually...

head-butting the hilt of someone's saber to short it out. Animalistic. Wonderful. Just tremendous. Would you say that we did get the animalistic carnal cut this week? Just not where we thought we would. Just not a House of the Dragon like you wanted. So, yeah. Also, I liked this initial introduction inside this group of trees. We've talked a lot on other Star Wars shows about

How kind of restrained some of the saber fighting has been because of their use of the volume. We talked about this a lot on Obi-Wan. We talked about it a bit on Ahsoka where they don't have a lot of room to move around. There was only like so much space for Maruk's fart plume. Right. Yeah.

When he dissipated into a green cloud of dust everywhere. That's what you're hoping for. Just like the red spores here on Kofar. So, like, I love that we do get this contained fight. And then later we will be roaming all over. We'll be jumping over rocks. We will be doing all sorts of stuff because they're not using the volume on this show. And this is, like, has been a big sticking point where people are like –

This show doesn't look good. It's using the volume. It's not using the volume. We get clear examples of that in this episode. But we start in a contained space, but it feels more natural because of the trees are, like, hemming them in. And so the action's all, like, tight and chaotic, but in this, like, naturally hemmed-in space versus, like, the arbitrary borders that the volume can provide. Yeah, and the way that the space comes into play literally in the next sequence with the –

I can't decide what I want to call him. The stranger sending his blade like a propeller. The boomerang, yeah. After Osha, which is interesting because there are so many moments with both Osha and May in this episode where it is

It's irrefutable and apparent that he is willing and ready to kill them. Right? Which is fascinating to track. Amazing. Yeah. Because it's not, like, we had spent a lot of the first half of the season, okay, is he going to decide? No, you're the better candidate. Yeah, I'm protecting Osha because I actually want to, like, groom her to my side. I need a pupil. I'm about to tell you I need a pupil. You're the better candidate. He takes a happy and slash in her neck, like. Ready to be done with everybody in this forest. Absolutely. Everybody. Yeah. And so, like, we see the blade follow her. And then when Sol comes in and parries and sends it back, it's like.

That trailer shot of the blades slicing the trees and then the like felling, the way they fall and the raw glowing wound on those trunks. It was such a brilliant way to simultaneously show us the confinement process.

Mm-hmm. Right? There's nowhere to go. Yeah. There's nowhere to move, except for, unless you're Chimera, you can, like, vanish and hover in the way that he comes in and out of the various... Luigi jump. The set pieces was obviously just disturbing. You turn and he's gone. You turn and he's there. On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, in both, like, Saul I can forgive because he got kind of, like, knocked, he got his bell rung, he was knocked down on the ground. Jackie was like, let me look for a moment at this scene.

I was like, girl, you do not have time to contemplate anything. Keep your head up. But he was gone. So, yeah. No, I loved that. I wrote in our notes, like, the trunk slide down, like, the top half of Snoke when he meets the business end of Ray Sabre. Exactly.

That's what I was thinking of. It was just, like, Snoke toppling off his throne in the background of the throne room fight. And I was thinking about that Last Jedi fight a lot because I genuinely, you know, I think the Midnight Boy said something similar. Like, I think that's the last time I've been this thrilled by a live-action lightsaber fight. And which is too bad because, like, you know, we were hoping for similar from Obi-Wan. We were hoping for similar from Ahsoka. But I just don't think I have been this, like –

breathlessly captivated by not just the action but the storytelling that's going with the action since The Last Jedi. I think Ben wrote a little bit about this in his column and I was thinking about this a lot watching it and then reflecting on what they were able to achieve. And you know, you remove the previously on, the opening intro, the credits, it's still 27 minutes of story. Like this is a zip-in, right? The podcast about it will be four times as long as the episode itself. And

The characters, because I think you're right, it was the action and the storytelling working in harmony to wow us. That's actually even more impressive when you consider how little time we've spent with the characters and how, I think, uneven that time was to this point. It's...

It's hard to think of fictional characters you're more invested in than Anakin and Obi-Wan by the time you're with them on Mustafar. Oh, for sure. Right? And so you... No. But... And then even in fights that are maybe less successful. Like, I really loved the episode three interaction between them and Obi-Wan.

We had a very long discussion about the flaws in the finale showdown in that series. But even when some of the storytelling logic or mechanics of the fight fell short in that series, the emotion and the depth of our connection to the characters, we are bringing something to that that is difficult to match. We just simply, I mean, we really love, we're like,

very swept up with Sol and Chimera to this point. I'd say we don't have quite the same attachment to any of the other characters on the show. Jackie was like pretty high on the power rankings, actually. I was listening to last week's episode and I was like, Jackie's my favorite. And you're like, you love Jackie. I was like, I do love Jackie. This was an amazing, an amazing showing from Jackie. Oh, yeah. I've enjoyed to this point, but this episode, what we saw from Jackie, it was anguish then. Anguish to lose her. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's impressive because they achieved a lot in a very short span. So all of that happens. I've titled that whole section Rumble in the Jungle Part 1. We will get many more. But I do like the way that we are pacing the fights. It's one ongoing fight, you know. Again, Dalton Ross over at Entertainment Weekly is like, this is the Fury Road. It's just one long fight. It's not quite one long fight. It's broken up. But like...

I love the – like, where we're just, like, we take a breather, then we're back at it, and this person's lightsaber is shorted out, or they're both shorted out, so now they're punching each other. You know, there's just this, like, incredible combination. Because I love a great lightsaber fight. Same. But we love –

Maybe some – we've seen a lot of lightsaber fights. Some variety. It's not just two people, like, parrying and twirling and all of that sort of stuff. You get, like, you know, punching or you've got a blaster in the action or all of that. Multiple punches right to the face was just actually, like –

It's amazing how riveting that was to watch. I agree. And that was something that was intriguing just from the beginning, like the initial May and Dara fight. And so to see that at scale with so many participants and in such... Because that's a moment of intrigue when the series starts. And this is desperation. Yeah. Dire, dire, dire circumstances. To watch...

someone like Saul go from, like, you have the weapon of a Jedi, but you are no Jedi. Mm-hmm. Yes. Or Yord saying, like, he doesn't fight, you know, he doesn't use the rules like he should. So to watch the light-siders go from, like, there's a way to do this and he's not doing this, to matching his chaos, matching his brutality, matching his desperation, and it's just like... Pulled into the dark. Yeah, the Sithiness just infects them quickly in this episode. And that is...

Killing the dream, right? Like that is the mission. We are watching that in real time. Like the, you carry a Jedi weapon, but you are no Jedi. Of course it like pings you.

fabled Star Wars moments like Ahsoka to Vader in Rebels, right? I Am No Jedi, when you kind of have a really iconic signature line like that, but you reposition the framing or the point of view or how it's being deployed. When Ahsoka says it, it's a victory. She has unlocked some level of apotheosis that other people never felt like they could attain. And here, it's meant, of course, as a diminishment from Sol, but that's not how it's

received. Like to Chimera, that's not going to be an insult. That's going to be a compliment because we know what he thinks of the Jedi. Now, maybe there was a time in his history where he held the Jedi in esteem. We'll talk about that. Which is interesting to talk about. But in the episode two speech, the Jedi live in a dream, a dream they believe everyone shares. If you attack a Jedi with a weapon, you will fail. Steel or laser are no threat to them. I mean,

In this episode. These guns, however. But an acolyte. An acolyte kills without a weapon. An acolyte kills the dream. The, like, a moment before that with the head tilt. Oh, my God. The head tilt for that first exchange looking and saying, Master Soul, who are you? You don't remember me? Right. Okay. Before we get there, let me just go back really quickly. I know. We're going to talk about that in a second. I just want to say, I just need us to take a moment.

To go back to Osha. Before we get to that moment, I just want to say, so Osha gets yanked out of the fight, literally yanked out of the fight. And I love this moment when Sol's like civilian to the ship and Yor repeats it. And it's this great efficient storytelling moment of like,

It doesn't seem like some bullshit reason to sort of like take someone out of a fight or whatever. I'm just like, yes, he would be protective. And yes, Yord would be rule following. And he's like, this is what we do. This is the protocol. When there's danger and someone's wearing their civilian whites, you get them to the ship. But I just want to point out, as we continue to track Osha. And he ends further by his like past trauma of feeling like he wasn't able to save Osha.

Yeah. Yeah. For Sol, yes. Absolutely. But I think I want to track... I think they're doing a better job with Osha than they have with May and giving me a character on an arc that I understand. And I think it's worth tracking all the times in which Osha has just been like pushing...

pushed around, pulled around, like so physically flicked away by Chimera at the end of last week's episode and physically pushed away by Saul in this episode. And so sort of when we think about the idea of Osha being someone who might be vulnerable to seduction by the dark side-

And Chimere in his speech we'll get to a little bit later is talking about how he wants freedom. Yes. Then it's worth tracking all the ways in which Osha has felt just sort of like push and pull, you know, all of that around it. Absolutely. I mean, because we are fans of Jack Shepard. Let's just, can we just hear this line, Steve, please? George!

We have to go back. We have to go back. Just wanted to put a little Jack Shepard on the podcast. Basil has been scooped in. Basil's running around sniffing and squeaking in the meantime. I have a lot of gratitude for Basil for multiple reasons at the end of this episode, all of which we'll get to. Do an important work. The penny saving is very important.

To take you behind the curtain of our prep for this episode, I just want to let folks know that there are a lot of Manny Jacinto from The Good Place, Jason Mendoza gifs in our outline today. As many as you want. But the only gif I put in from the episode is the head tilt. Because the head tilt in The Mask is so spooky and iconic and wonderful. It's wild. And it's very like Ghostface and Scream-ish.

Well, you're not a horror person, but trust me when I say it's very ghost-faced. Like, mask acting is an underrated art. And Manny just really crushes it here. This is so sinister. Um, Chimere, he's just like us. He would like to know why Saul is so shitty in The Force and can't recognize him as the same guy he met in episode two. I loved the episode, but I'll have another question about this later. Oh, yeah. A much bigger one later. Yeah.

Maybe we can let Sal off the hook here and say that the Cortosa's helmet is blocking him. But to your point... Perhaps his own repressed trauma. He calls him Master Saul. He does. So when he's like, you don't recognize me? Is he referring to episode two when they met in the apothecary shop? Or is he referring to the fact that he was once a Padawan at the Jedi Academy? So...

This is just delightful stuff for Theory Corner. And this is how the slow burn and delicate peeling of the mystery onion over the course of the season is still working. I was thinking back to the moment that we were quite struck by last week when Kymer said to Mei, that one Jedi Master, what was his name again? Sol? Sol?

And it was just so obvious that there was something behind that. And it was a question of whether it was just about the manipulation and the deal and the mission and the guidance. And now to have this moment, you don't remember me? I sense something familiar. So was he a youngling at the temple? And they would have crossed paths. We see, you know, the series opens with us watching Sol teach, talking about what teaching means to him. So even if there wasn't a direct connection

master Padawan relationship. He could have been in his tutelage at some point, right? Yeah.

Calling him master could – you'd call any master that you encountered at the temple master. Is there any chance, though, that the relationship was more direct? Like either that he was – how many Padawans has – I mean, this is part of our introduction to Sol. I would just really hope he was not Sol's actual Padawan. Same. Okay, I got one more for you then. But someone that he, like, taught.

what if it's someone he took? Yeah, for sure. It doesn't have to be his Padawan, but if he's another kid who he like scooped up out of his home. On one of these away missions. Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. Do you think there's a time, we can talk about this later when we get to the, my mother, my mother. But do you think there's like a coven? I want to talk about that later. Let's save it for later. For sure. Yeah.

I want to address one thing. I love a theory corner, as you know. I love to run wild in a theory corner. I just want to say for people who are like, are they related? I just want to say, Mae Jacinto is of Filipino-Chinese descent and Lee Jung-jae is of Korean descent. And I just do not think that the folks who are making Star Wars now are going to say, it's okay, they're both Asian. They can be related. I don't think that that is what we're going for at all. So I would just encourage people to move away from that one. But...

Some sort of history that goes beyond episode two of this show feels potential. And that is just like really fun. Because just like May is on her course because of some deeply personal resentment of and bitterness toward the Jedi, a specific blame.

Like, what is Chimera's version of that? How did the Jedi fail him? Is it that he was in the order and then he wasn't? He was kicked out? Whatever darkness he felt the pull toward, it was another, like, this kid. And kicked out. Gotta get him out. Kicked out like Osha was kicked out. Yeah. Do you know? Yes. And so, like, yeah, the question I have about that is, like, is this whole mission that May is on, which seems like her personal mission, these four Jedi who personally wounded her,

Is it actually... He's like, I need to kill Sol. Right. Specifically. Or maybe Indara and Sol. I don't think Torben was necessarily on his hit list. Poor Torben. But, like, I want...

this Jedi done. And I want him done in by something that will hurt him more than me just driving a saber through his heart. I want to take his favorite. Take his goodness, take everything. Take Osha. Absolutely. What if the master soul part does make it seem like he was at the temple? But what if it was that they didn't think he...

was worth bringing. Oh, they didn't take him. He's the bae. Yeah, they didn't take him. Absolutely possible as well. I just think that I want to enter one more possibility because I love this and it's very juicy and fun. One more possibility is that Master Soul exists as a sort of this ironic like, oh, Master Soul, like if they don't have a history, if he's just sort of like using the honorific

you know, sarcastically. He's being sarcastic no matter what. Yeah. But, you know, I just want to introduce that as a possibility. I think if you don't remember me as there just about the apothecary showdown, that's weird. Let's see. I think there has to be a deeper history than that. Jackie, Rumble in the Jungle round three is Jackie versus May. Incredible. Wonderful. Electric. Unbelievable. Really, really good. Just raw physicality.

Flying into the action with the double-footed kick. I don't know what the technical term for it is. I'm not a stunt person. That was great. But also just like the way in which, again, we have to ask how four strong is Mae? How four strong is Osha? How four strong are they together?

But to watch Jackie use the force to just, like, push and pull May around. Yeah. To put her into half the cuffs for May, of course, to be fighting all along, but really start fighting when she gets read her rights and she's accused of starting the fire. Yes. And she's like, oh, you're not going to get me for that. Right. I didn't kill my family. Yeah. I killed Indara. I killed Torben. But I didn't do this. You've only seen one perspective for the flashback. Yeah.

She's also using her knives a lot, which is, I mean, she grabbed Kel'Naka's saber, but she's using her knives a lot. And I just feel like it's been too long since we've seen her use those knives. So it's good to see them back in action. Rumble and Jungle round four. Chimera versus soul. Still, again, yet some more. Just fantastic stuff. Let's get to a metaphorical moment in this episode. One of a few. Steve, will you play this clip, please? Show your face and let you read my thoughts.

What master hides his face from his pupil? You tell me. This gave me a chill. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. And you tell me. I thought this was amazing. Oh, yeah, the you tell me was fantastic. Woo!

So on a practical level, we get this bit of lore that the cortosis helmet, which again, Ben will talk about more, blocks his mind from this very specific skill that Sol has, which is not all Jedi can read your mind the way that Sol can. So this very like Magneto wearing a helmet to protect himself from Professor X moment that we have here. That's all true. But this idea of the mask, which we've gotten again and again and again in Star Wars, is

And this idea of, like, Saul masking his true nature from Osha. From himself? From himself. Yeah. From Chimera in the past. Who's to say? Yeah. I want to read this quote from Adam Driver to GQ on Kylo Ren's mask because obviously Kylo is very prevalent in this episode. We'll talk about that a bit more. Oh, yeah.

But Kylo's mask, unlike Vader's, which he needs to survive, and Chimera's, which he needs to headbutt lightsabers and block, you know, psychic Jedi, Kylo's mask serves no function. It's... Vibes only. It's aesthetics. Yeah.

But I've never said to GQ, I remember the initial conversations about having things, quote, skinned and peeling away layers to evolve into other people. And the person Kylo's pretending to be on the outside is not who he is. He's a vulnerable kid who doesn't know where to put his energy. But when he puts his mask on, suddenly he's playing a role.

And all the times we've seen like cracked masks, Twilight of the Apprentice, Obi-Wan, or under a mask, obviously Return of the Jedi, etc. This idea of masking in Star Wars has been something we've been talking about for a long time. This idea of duality and performance is something we've been talking about all season with Chimera. But I just love tracking that.

Once the mask comes off, Chimera, and we heard the start of the episode, obviously he pops on the old Chimera voice and he's like, hello. But then the next line read is his most gravelly Christian male line read. He swings intentionally. And then throughout, he's just sort of modulating all over the place in terms of how scary, how...

you know, irreverent, how it's just an incredible performance. But do I feel like I understand the,

and philosophical at the end when he's like basically reciting Shakespeare to an incapacitated Osha. Do I feel like I understand the heart of Chimere yet? No. Because there's, he's performing for May's benefit, for Osha's benefit, for Sol's benefit. But I am so desperate to get to the core of who this person is. Yeah, absolutely. Under all the masking that he does. That's beautifully laid out. I think too, like,

You can make the mask for the Kylo. Like, this is my persona. This is how I'm ready for the role I'm about to play. You can make the mask for the cortosis practicality of the edge that you will have out in the field. Mm-hmm.

You choose to do the venom teeth for a specific reason. Like, the way that that looks, and it has the kind of, like, rivulets and fractures that are, again, like, very Kylo-coded. And it tells us, like, thematically that pings something about being, like, you're piecing together the life that you want to live, right? Yeah. And if something is broken, you are ready to repair it. And maybe you think that the people who let you down, like, didn't want to give you that chance. I love that. I just think it's perfection. I cannot.

wait to have it in my home and I need these 2025 estimates.

To be wrong. Wrong. But like also the no, no, no, as we try to theorize about what this past history might be and whether it involves them directly or not, like his past history has driven him to this point. That's the case. That's certain. Did you get the sense that maybe it's not just that he knows that this is a threat, that someone could read his mind, that Sol could read his mind, but that this is in fact happened to him before and it went bad. Have you read my mind again?

Maybe this is why I got kicked out of the Jedi. 100%. Right? Absolutely. You saw what was in there. You didn't like it. You told me I couldn't stay. Yeah. So no more. This is my space. Maybe I was one of those pupils in your class who was like, I see fire everywhere, consuming everything. I see fire and blood. I see a spooky grinning mask. And it's not just because I'm watching House of the Dragon.

On the mask front, I want to say that the costume designer told Polygon that the mask, the grin on the mask is inspired by Frank's bunny mask and Donnie Darko, which I love. And Leslie Hudlin told Entertainment Weekly that the helmet's like not that different from the classic Star Wars. We get the little like sort of samurai-esque sort of flip in the back that Vader has, et cetera. But she said the grin is like this smile that lasts too long. Oh.

And was meant to be really unsettling to the Jedi. It's not that they're afraid of him. It's that they find him unsettling. Even his intro when he – this is so killer. Even his intro when he floats down at the end of episode four, we shot that in reverse because we just wanted the audience to be like, what is this?

100%. Yeah, absolutely. So scary. Oh, man. That's just sensational. Absolutely. Deeply disturbing and upsetting. They killed that part of it. They did. Okay, so to go back to... You tell me. Yord saying he gets into your head and he stays there. And Osha says, my mother could do that. Get inside a Jedi's head. I saw it once. And we see it later in this episode when Mei's running and we get the, like, sort of camera shot of him inside of her head. Yeah. Um...

All right. So this is... Okay, here's the question. Is this just here to remind us of something that we've been thinking about a lot, which is in another flashback episode, are we going to see Mother Anisea or another one of the witches take over the mind of another Jedi? Is that just here to remind us that that's something that the witches can do so we are... It's on our minds when we get to another flashback episode. Right. Like, or...

Does this imply a more concrete connection between Chimera and the witches? Was he there that night? Right. Was this part of the deal the witches made to get Mae and Osha? Like, I'll teach you how to slip inside someone's mind if you give me some, a forced dyad, you know? Yeah. Your question before was like, did he, was he the one who scooped Mae up from whatever, you know, cavern that she fell into? And what else might he have been up to there? So here's my question. Yeah. This is all theory fodder, but like,

storytelling wise is it a better story for you if chimer was there and concretely connected to the witches or not he knows a lot about what happened there yeah is it just because he's taking what may told him right as canon or what do you think um i'm open to any number of outcomes here i'm not necessarily attached to him having a direct tie to the coven i mean there are no

No. At the coven. That we saw. That we saw. I guess I would prefer for his...

backstory to be different and for that to then enhance the point, right? That people from different backgrounds and different circumstances, other groups. Their child snatching all over the galaxy. Yeah, whether it's just one boy or one family unit or an entire coven, that anybody who tries to exhibit and display that freedom to live their life their own way would be not just made to feel but actively policed by the Jedi Order and the Republic. Right.

Here's a question I have. Yeah. I have no real evidence for this, but we know that, like, Osha's kicked out of the Jedi Order. Chose to leave it for her own free accord. Sure. No one's decision but hers. We have been speculating that a reason she left or was kicked out was because her Force powers weren't working that well. But what if, as she gets kicked out...

The Jedi have a way of putting like a padlock on your force powers. If you're not going to be trained by us, this is a power you no longer have access to. You're blocked from it. Well, I do think the idea of a block or a control is still... That feels very likely to me. Whether that's the Jedi after she left the Order, that feels more like your powers just wither on the vine if they're not being tended to, like stretch of life. Sure. But, you know, when we... The way that we see...

the stranger flash in to May's face as she's running and he's calling her a coward. Um...

Just the he gets in your head and he stays there, your line. It made me think back to, like, the visions. Even when we hear, you know, the little, the young Mae say Osha's name in this episode, that doesn't appear to be Mae doing that. It kind of does. Does it? More than it's him. He's busy. He's very busy in that moment. Yeah. She's, like, in distress. Yeah.

It's a close-up of her face in distress, and then we hear it through the Force bond. Yeah. If it were coming from him, I feel like— But maybe it's not him, because we still think maybe he has a mast, so maybe there's some larger plan here. I just feel like with three more episodes, and we're going to have an entire episode that's like a flashback to what really happened in Brendock. Yeah.

how much room do we have for like that many more layers of a conspiracy. I still think that could be a stinger. It could be definitely a stinger. Definitely a stinger, but I don't think we're going to get like a big master reveal that's going to be a huge part of the plot in the remainder. If May is the one saying Osha's name there, even still though, like this idea of the visions and the snow and this connection and what you're seeing and when, like,

that that has been from the moment on Brendock, from the moment of parting, from the moment of the fire, that whether it is Chimere or his master or Anisea or Coral or anyone, that there is somebody who is...

and in some way confining what one or both of them has access to and can see. I was much more on board. I was so on board with your theory that Chimera or someone was sending Osha these visions in order to position her somewhere because they need the Force Dyad or they want to groom and train Osha. It's Chimera's willingness to kill May or Osha at any turn in this episode. But that doesn't to me...

makes me feel like the possibility that that was what he was doing before that possibly he's like you fucked up our plan may like when one of the there are a lot of chill inducing moments in this episode but one of them is when he's standing over Jackie and he's like this is a loyal people oh my god you can learn something from her it was let down he's disappointed nagging at its finest yeah he's disappointed he's like I chose you and you're always bad at this when he says you've always been weak how long has he known her

Exactly. What does that mean? It was, you mentioned Thanos earlier. There's a little bit of a like, you know, they're like, I didn't teach you to lie. Like, that's why you're so bad at it aspect of this. Like, okay, at the end of the day, I groomed you, I trained you. I thought you were going to be my heir apparent, my pupil, my acolyte, but you don't have it. And that's part of why I was impersonating this buffoon to really take the measure of who you were. And then in any moment of consequence, when you're able to assess it through a different

a different lens, the lens of your cortosis mask, the lens of your fake apothecary bro, whatever the case may be. Like, you see something true and he doesn't like it. So maybe he's just like, this was my plan, but it's not anymore. I feel like he's over May, but I feel like I was surprised how willing he was to kill OSHA. Yes, same. That was surprising to me. Maybe it's just like, I need a reset. Um,

Oh, man. Jackie, tremendous. Tremendous stuff from Jackie. The, like, feral scream with the knife slice of the leg. Mm-hmm. It reminded me a little bit of when we were doing our Winter Soldier retrospective and talking about part of the many, many, many things that make that movie so thrilling. You're in a superhero story, right? And you're in the...

reach of violence, like that there's just something so grounding and anchoring about that kind of combat. In the Jackie and May stretch here, you just really, really, really feel that. Jackie and May, and Jackie versus Chimere, and then Chimere versus Sol when they both, again, when they both lose their sabers and they're just like punching at each other. But Jackie sort of like jumping in to save and

And Jackie and Sol both trying to save Mae, even though Jackie was just trying to arrest Mae. You know, like, they're both trying to protect her against whatever it is Chimera's up to. Love that Chimera can Luigi jump. Like, that is tremendous. His, like, floating flying jump is so good. Oh, man. And Jackie has her own hops that are just incredible. Yeah, Jackie's got some moves. This was, like, ferocious. The one point where she's spinning the sabers, like...

She looked like fucking General Grievous for a second with four arms. This was an amazing level. And I was thinking back to how we get the, you know, the torment light little combat training sequence at the temple. Very calm, very measured, very like you are learning the formal, officially sanctioned way to engage only if you must. And then you see like Jackie is ready for,

to unleash something ferocious inside of her. And it was just like absolutely incredible to watch. Keep each movement tight yet subtle. Diminish areas of vulnerability. Maximize your defenses without need to strike. The way that...

Saul at one point is just swinging wildly with his saber. It's just the exact opposite of that advice that we heard in last week's episode. It's so good. Saul is very uncomposed throughout the fight in a way that I found incredibly dramatically satisfying because he should be. He should be unraveling. Yeah, so good.

All right. So. Oh, you know what? Little thing in that stretch that was amazing. It reminded me of when we talked about the first poster, the hilt and the smear of blood. Like when we see the Kalnaka's massive hilt has been sliced in half, right? And it's like planted in the ground. In the spores. In the spores. Yeah. And it just looked like this, which it is, this remnant on a battlefield in this like bloody atmosphere.

ash all I could think of and spoiler first trailer spoiler I suppose for people who don't want to know so skip ahead we've already mentioned that we know that Vern is going to show up on Kaffar because we've seen her and her lightsaber whip in the jungle there so just imagine she going to collect all the bodies that they left behind yeah this is the crime scene these are the clues and so Kilnaka's saber in the spores there is like a clue what happened here

Did we get another berserker rage from our Wookiee Jedi? Yeah. Why is the saber here cut in half, you know? Can't wait for the next three episodes. I have to be honest that I do not... I can't say I'm looking forward to just a ton of time with Detective Vern. Did I say I was? I didn't say I was. I just said we're gonna get it. I cannot say I'm looking forward to that. Okay. But it's better than a temple meeting, I guess. The... We get some...

You know, Yord and Osha, the moths from last week's episode, are going to come back into play as we expected that they would. I was hoping that Jackie would use them to save herself, but that is not what happens here. Jackie...

Jackie, incredible move. I really love the elbowing the mask off his face. Like, brutal blows from the elbow to get the mask off his face. Because the saber's not going to... You can't use your saber. So, you have to use your elbow. The mask cracks off. The staging of this is incredible. Because the mask is off and we're like, finally, we're going to see. And we don't see his face yet. And we get the reveal after he has punched three holes...

in my favorite, my new favorite character, Jackie. This was so brutal. So brutal. I've watched this so many times. I believe these are the mechanics of Chimera's weapon. That he has one long blade,

And there's a Shoto blade that's like sort of tucked inside of his long blade. Yeah, he separates the help. He separates it and he pulls it out. And then later he flips it and reconnects them end to end to make it more of like a Maul-esque double saber. But that idea of like a saber hiding inside of another saber is...

Looks really cool. There's some Cal Kestis stuff going on here. It's, like, really incredible. I just loved it. Fantastic stuff. The Jackie death was brutal and shocking. Like, I was not expecting her to die. It was incredibly effective storytelling. The actual physicality of it, harrowing. Thinking, like, seeing Sol's grief and mourning in real time and just, like, the way that, I don't know, it was...

Again, we saw him... Five characters are off the board in the first minute of the episode, but it was...

easy, right? Not in terms of she put up a fight. Like, she actually did really hold her own. But it was without hesitation that he would punch three holes right through the chest of a child. And it was absolutely harrowing. And then I was thinking back to, like, last week. Now we look back at last week's episode and we think, like, we heard Jackie talk about death, right? We heard Jackie say, it's always an honor to get to witness anything or anyone transform into the Force. Is it, Jackie? That's what I liked about it. And then you see the horror of this. Like,

What's an honor in that, in the way that that happened there? So we 100% knew that it was going to be Chimera under that mask. We knew it. And it doesn't matter that we knew it. The reveal is sick as hell. You get it with her body sliding away and the reveal of his face.

Leslie in the interview with Entertainment Weekly says, I think a good twist is not about hiding everything from the audience and then throwing it on them like, hey, this is what you didn't see. We hit it so well that you didn't see this. I think a good twist is telegraphing what's going to happen and then once it does, executing it without an ounce of pity or sentimentality. And that is what we got here. Like, Leslie, first,

From the jump was pretty sure that people would figure out. The clock hit. Yeah. So it's not meant to be a big stunning, what the hell? Right. But the way it's done is just, I think...

Wonderful. I also think the fact that, like, we are ahead of the characters sometimes in other stories is frustrating, but actually really worked here. Oh, yeah. Because it helps to then, like, heighten and amplify the fact that whether, and he'll, he will have a fascinating exchange with May about her not realizing who he was, right? The Jedi can't figure it out. Like,

When part of the mission of the show is that how did we get to Phantom Menace? How did we get to the rise of Palpatine? It actually is important to show us how slow and off and incompetent the Jedi are. So many of the Jedi are. I think that's interesting. I agree, and it is why we got an email to this effect. I didn't put it in the notes today, but we got an email to this effect that...

One of our listeners is like, I actually really wish we had started with knowing exactly what happened on Brendock. And then we're ahead of the characters. And so Osha, knowing what Saul is hiding, knowing what is left to be revealed for Osha, knowing what Mae knows to be true, all of that wouldn't hinder our experience. And holding that as a mystery is actually not helping the story. Similar to us being a step ahead of the characters with Chimera, I just feel like

Yeah. I kind of agree with that. Yeah. I'll withhold, like, my final judgment on the structure until we see the full season. But I'm inclined toward either give us what we need at the beginning or save it. Yeah. Maybe until the end. But the slow drip coffee approach here has been...

Yeah. I would say the two most brutal moments, the two most chilling moments of this episode for me are number one, head tilt in the mask. Number two, was that its name? Unbelievable. Yeah.

The next part of that exchange is, I think, even more upsetting. Of course. It's incredible. When Sol says, she was such a child, and he says, you brought her. This... And he's not wrong. And this, again, is the Sith point of view that we've been talking about, that we've been asking for. Yes. Whenever he says something in this episode, and it happens many times, where he is not wrong... Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's the Sith point of view we've been asking for. Yes. I thought that you brought her here. Like, was that its name is...

It? Harrowing. But there's like the kind of, what is that? Not who is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week, so that's kind of effective. I liked that. That, while I thought it was absolutely harrowing and incredible, I'm like, I have chills watching that. That's more like, this is the villain? This is evil? You brought her here is...

This is what you do. Yeah. That's the knife in the heart of your hero. You train child soldiers. You put her in this position. You endangered those twin girls all those years ago on Brendock. This is what you've been doing over and over again your entire career. Exactly. Like, I thought that not only the performance is exceptional, but the idea. Oh, yeah. To hear that idea conveyed is like, it's an instant honor.

Hall of Fame Star Wars moment to me. I agree. Because it's important. And like you said a few minutes ago, you do have to just sort of, right, you're not wrong. There's this indictment of the core Jedi approach. Yeah. You take the children, you train them, but what are you training them for if you're not even aware of or ready to acknowledge what is out there, what awaits? And like we, at the beginning of the season, I like kind of making us complicit in this too, because at the beginning of the season, we were like,

Sol is such a good guy. Took his Padawan. What a sweet guy. Took his Padawan on the mission. They don't know they're going to confront Chimera here. They don't know that they're going to learn that there's a Sith. But they went to find May to stop Kelnaka's murder. They knew that Jedi were being killed. And they took a kid. Like, that's... I think that this is just... Even in a time of peace at this stretch, which we've talked about a lot at this stretch of galactic history...

By the way, I still don't know how old she's supposed to be because...

because you could say she's just a child about like a young teenager or something like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, she's not like 11, but yeah, she's probably not seasoned in combat enough to be out on the mission. And the question is, are any of them? Despite the fact that she is very good in combat. She is quite good at it. And I like too, like when we try to track this idea of the past and how it is fueling everything that's happening here in this episode. So we had that you tell me moment earlier and it's like,

is this about who Sol is now, the truth he's keeping from Osha, both shared history, et cetera. And then, like, you get to...

you brought her here and you think back to his past again right like was he put in some sort of position of just like a lack of like failing your your duty of care right absolutely is that something that he carries like personal trauma or resentment this is what you do regarding you train child soldiers this is what you've always done and then and i thought equally like scintillating

was Sol's response, which is unvarnished rage. He is... To have his... To have his ideology... It's pulsating off the screen. Just completely questioned. And especially in light of

not only are we like, oh my God, Saul, he's such a good guy. He's such a good master, blah, blah, blah. This is like the whole interaction with Vern where she's like, you're so tenderhearted. You know, you're so calm. You're so good with them. And yeah, to have this completely undermined, sorry, it makes me think of, we've been talking about this a lot on Presumed Innocent where it's just sort of like,

what have you crafted as your identity? My identity is that I am the kind, good, gentle Jedi master who is great with kids and whatever. And it's like, guess what you do with the kids that you train? You put them in this position. A quick revisit of this she's just a child moment because it did – when I read – when I heard that, I thought immediately of you last week in the podcast being like, how old is Jackie? Should we be talking about her having a crush on Osha? What age is she? Is she a child?

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Just go to the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. We did get an email from Liv.

who found an interview that Daphne Keene did with Decider where she says that she loves being asked about Jackie and Osha as a potential crush situation. And she says Jackie does, in fact, find herself experiencing some, quote, magnetism towards Osha. So I say that's canon queer Jedi, and I love that for all of us. Yes.

So as you say, Sol is completely out of control, swinging wildly. And then we get this sort of rhetorical out of control moment. Can we hear this clip, please? What are you? I have no name. But a Jedi like you might call me Sith. Why risk discovery? Well, I did wear a mask. What do you want? Freedom. Freedom.

The freedom to wield my power the way I like without having to answer to Jedi like you. I want a pupil, an acolyte. But this one went back on her deal. She exposed me. So now I have to kill every single last one of you. I don't make the rules. The Jedi do. And the Jedi say I can't exist. They see my face. They all die.

Oh, look at you two. Right back where you started. This is juicy. Juicy. Great stuff. As is our want in general, we love to pour over like every single word of something like this, right, to parse for meaning. So initially when he says, but the Jedi like you might call me Sith, I was like, that means he's not owning his identity as a Sith. What would he call himself then?

Is he his own thing? That's sort of seemingly the implication here. I do want to say that Manny Jacinto, in that Entertainment Weekly interview, when talking about his own character, he says it's very subtle and it's just like this uncomfortableness that people experience, and that's what we want to hone in on for this Sith Lord. So Manny is calling him a Sith Lord. Whether or not that matters, I just wanted to put that on the record. I think the I have no name thing, obviously it does ping very faceless man for us, right? But

It to me could be just as it could be about the Sith part of it, but it could be just as much about his specific identity inside of that. Right. He's like, I'm not Darth Chimera. I'm forging that. Like, I am still on that journey and that path of discovery and like whatever my role is inside of that. That's part of why he's like, I need a pupil. Yeah.

You really didn't know it was me. I picked a pupil. You really didn't know it was me. Well, I did wear a mask. Well, I did wear a mask. It was so funny. The eyebrow tilt. So good. I did wear a mask. Can it possibly be a coincidence that Chimera wants exactly what the witches wanted? Freedom, pupils, acolytes.

I just think that that is, I mean. Yeah. I think, again, it's like maybe that implies some sort of more direct tie. Or maybe it's just like this is what everyone who wields the Force wants. Yeah, it could be an indictment of the Jedi instinct toward control more broadly. Like when we think of some of the stuff we heard from Mother Anisea in Episode 3, some called a Force and claimed to use it. Or then later we were hunted, persecuted, forced into hiding all...

because some would consider our power dark, unnatural. And this question, this speech most, I mean, a lot of the episode gave us the Sith point of view promise, but this most of all,

Oh, for sure. This monologue, this speech, most of all. Like, the idea that the Jedi get to decide who can not just wield the power and how, but who can access it, who has the right to access it. And are you allowed to pass the way that you use it down to another generation? Yeah. Or is it only the Jedi who get to train their child soldiers? Right, exactly. Only the Jedi can conscript and train the children. And then the idea that the rules... I don't make the rules, the Jedi do. Jedi...

Order, structure, rule, law, process, procedure. And like the idea that shows interest in interrogating and critiquing that, the idea that the order, the heart and soul of the order, the spine and bones and tendons of the order, that that's the limitation of

That that's the thing specifically that incites the challenge that undoes them is just so dramatically compelling. The promise of this entire show. It absolutely is. Absolutely is. And then the right back part, like playing on that guilt, like takes you right back, right? You're right back to when you failed her last time. How does he know? Right back where you started. And the fact that he's doing all of this with the hilt of his saber to her head like a pistol. Yeah.

It's just incredible. Maybe she just told him. Maybe he was there. We see him. We do get, again, the view of him in her mind. So he obviously is able to penetrate her mind in a way that, like, any number of ways that he could have access to that account. But again, what is most interesting to me about that because of the Rashomon thing we've been discussing and the nature of the perspective in episode three is, like, if he does just have May's perspective, then he doesn't have the full story either. Well, my...

is episode seven is being directed by Koganada who directed the initial Brendock episode. So this is episode five. I do not think we're going to get a flashback in episode six. I think we're getting it all in episode seven, which... If they're devoting the penultimate episode to revisiting Brendock, they have to crush it. They have to crush it. So what we have right now, and I'm not saying it's going to stay this way, what we have right now is we've got

The Acolytes have switched places. May is with Sol. Osha is with Chimere. Will we get competing stories of what happened there? Will we get a true Rashomon? Are we just going to get this is actually what happened? Or are we going to get May is like, this is what I think happened. And Sol is like, this is what I think happened. And Chimere is like, this is what I think happened, et cetera, et cetera. So Osha will wake up.

It seems that Chimera, unlike Sol, realized who was in front of him. Oh, definitely. 100%. First of all, arm tap, no forehead tap, but also he could just tell. And also just, Sol, we have so many questions and notes. Yes, and I know we're jumping a little out of order, but since we're talking about it, I assume that because Osha and Sol and they're partying, she was like, what was he talking about? What did he mean? Yeah.

And once again, Sol does the Ned Stark promise. Eventually, I'll tell you. So my assumption is that Osha will wake up and be like, can you tell me what you were talking about? Yeah. And Chimera will, and then she will make her decision. But what happens in the episode in between those things is my question. On the other side, I do, we can talk about this more when we get there, but Sol not immediately clocking who that is is like,

very confounding to me. Basil going on the ship... Oh, no, Basil knows. Basil going on the ship and immediately sniffing. I'm like, the jig is going to be up. The jig is going to be up, like, pretty quickly, which I think is necessary. But I don't think it's going to be immediately. And, like, that's...

it's upsetting to me the inconsistency of force use throughout this. Not upsetting, but like it's confusing to me. Master Soul having, again, his bell rung once again and waking up sort of dazed and confused and being taken to the ship. Like, I can understand, maybe in that moment, but if he doesn't realize right away, even without Basil, if he doesn't realize right away that that's not Osha. When did you get that

forehead tattoo or also I can sense you through the force now the only like force explanation especially in this episode where like our attention is being called to somebody saying to him you don't recognize me you can't tell who I am you can't feel it you can't sense it

Even odder. But if they are a dyad, like perhaps they are more difficult to distinguish in the force than other beings would be. That's kind of the only explanation I can wrap my mind around. Let's zoom through a few of these other things that happens here, right? Yord gets his head snapped. Holy shit. But went out like, went out kind of brave. Went out kind of sad, but kind of brave.

The way that Kymer says, oh, this is your master bone chilling.

You trust him even after everything he did to you? And then he says, and then Sol says, his mind is twisted by darkness. And then he says, I've accepted my darkness. What have you done with yours? This was so good. This is the line that Leslie told me earlier that I cut out of the podcast. This was another, like, spine tingle. It's so, like, bars and a half. Like, we've had so many conversations about how unnatural and inhuman it is for the Jedi to stifle their emotions, to ask people to stifle their emotion. And so what do you do when you, like,

tamp down the darkness again and again. We have to remember the exchange in episode two when Sol says, I wanted to save you both. And Osha says, what happened that night wasn't your fault, Sol. I've told you that. And he says, you did. And I have made my peace with what happened on Brendock.

Have you? Certainly not. No. And she says, I know you have. That was a lesson you tried to teach me many times to accept what I'd lost, and I wasn't a very good student. He says, perhaps I wasn't a very good teacher. Right. This goes back to something that Leslie said in that interview that you and I both were really struck by is how personal an exchange that was for her and how it related to her own relationship with her father. But before she talked about that,

She talked about this idea of like the Sith and the Jedi and their relationship to emotion. And she says, you know, the Sith may be wrong. The Jedi may be wrong.

But I think writing a story from the Sith perspective, a character like Sol is the perfect culmination example of the incongruity of avoiding attachment or resisting attachment in order to circumvent suffering, in order to stay away from being seduced by the dark side. And I think this is so evident in JJ's performance. He's a light-sided person. He's a glass of clear water. And there's this drop of food coloring. Let's just say that's dropped in that clear glass of water and that drop is...

is Osha. Sol's starting point is Anakin's ending point. I mean, fascinating to me. But I'm so compelled throughout this series by Sol and Chimera that they have been like absolutely sensational hits for me. And watching them face off was like, it was just stomach clenching and spine tingling. And so that his mind is twisted by darkness. I've accepted my darkness. What have you done with yours? Like in the moment of that exchange, Sol is

Shook. Shaking. He's barely able to choke out the words. His rage is like, he is not able to contain it. And so what a perfect moment to ask him that question. Oh. To make him think about that. Throughout, he's like pressing on bruises. Oh, absolutely. Just like the perfect time, the perfect bruise. And we've like felt that there was something...

lurking there, right? We have, but I feel like we've been more focused on, like, Osha and her inability to reconcile what happened in her past and the potential anger that's waiting to explode in her. This episode, more than any other that we had before, we knew that Sol was not resolved on things, but the anger, the regret, the guilt, yes, the anger that I feel like I saw. Well, this is the Star Wars tale as well. Is that the past? How are these

things build, right? The fear and the anger and the hate. So like that feels, that progression feels right to me. Oh, totally. And I like, you know, we talked about this earlier in the season, but like it calls to mind that rings of power. Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness idea. And so what I still like thinking about with Sol and I'm really eager to discover and understand better over the remaining three episodes is, has he touched the darkness? Did that happen already?

Was Brendock his sometimes-you-cannot-know-until-you-touch-the-darkness moment? And maybe he didn't like what he discovered, and he's been suppressing that and stifling it and afraid of it, afraid of what he knows is inside of him since then? Or is this the moment where he'll touch the darkness? Because it's been burbling to the fore. I feel like it's definitely coming. I feel like what we used to see now is sort of the lid rattling on the boiling pot of water, and it's going to boil over at some point before all is said and done. Because to go back to what Kaimir said in the larger...

proposition of this show, which is that no one can know that the Sith are here. And he said, you call me a Sith. That means Sol can't survive this show.

That means... Devastating. Right? It's devastating. He definitely can't... Or... Or he gets his mind wiped. Or... He goes to the dark side. Yes. That is the, in some ways, most dismaying possibility that we have to come across. I'm actually... That's more painful. I actually kind of love this. Like, what if it's just Sol and Chimera and Osha as, like, dark side baddies? Yeah. I'd be happy to keep your secret if I'm one of you. That sounds really fun. Now, that would be a hell of a season, too. Right? I would watch...

The moths pay off. And I just have one, just one solitary note. I love you. I have one solitary note for Chimera. Yeah. Fit tremendous. The thing he does with his, like, cape-wrapped poncho thing where he, like, throws it as a distraction. So good. Incredible. The arms, we might return to in a second. The, like, you know, the whole, like, jumpsuit fit, incredible. It's great. On the back, there's these crosshash metal detailing. Very easy to stick pip.

Pips, just white bulb head onto that. Asking to have something hooked to it. It looks great. The wave of those thin bars of gleaming silver on the black, very Kylo Ren to me. But I was just like, I would remove that from your costume going forward. I'm sure he probably will. I actually, I mean, I think they hit the moth thing a few too many times for it to be a cool, but I thought it looked cool. I thought it was a cool way to take him out of the action without having like,

Obi-Wan walk away from Anakin and be like, well, I tried, but here we go. Yeah. I was a little mixed on it. You didn't like it? I liked it. I almost wanted more elements of the forest to come into play, like more of that lurking, waiting dark, that rot, which obviously the rot is manifesting in a different form here. It's present. Yeah. He annihilated almost the entire Fellowship with ease. And so, like...

I'm like, you have your saber, you can use the Force and you can fly. He does defeat the Monks. He does, but like... It just takes him a minute. There's a lot of them, but he takes them down. It just takes him a minute. Yeah. Okay. I don't really want to dwell on this May and Osha thing because it just really does not work very well. Easily the weakest part of an otherwise excellent episode. May's flip-flopping continues to be confounding and tough.

And I just, it's too bad. But we do get a twin swap. Yeah.

Uh, Sol's PR team has been working overtime online to justify the fact that Sol just goes with Mei and doesn't recognize that it's Mei and leaves all the bodies there. They're like, oh, he for sure knows. He definitely knows. He said your sister. He didn't say which name or like whatever. He definitely knows. And I'm like... And then he, so he just left Osho with Kyber? Absolutely not. There's no way that Sol knows. Hopefully, again, to your point, hopefully he figures it out very quickly, but...

There's no way he knows. Basil's on the case. Sniffing away. With Pip's head. Sniffing away. Okay. Last thing we get. Dawn is breaking in K'Far, right? It's golden hour. Beautiful. And then we get this moment where Osha on the jungle floor and another Jack Shepard moment as far as I'm concerned. And Chimere force heals her to Kylo Ren's

Like this. Like a little stitching. Or stitch. Did he use a baseball stitch? Yeah. Kylo Ren theme plays as Chimera Force heals her. Good stuff. Some nice theory fodder there. I'm not going to read this whole quote, but I would encourage you to go back and listen to Leslie talking about the word seduced. Seduced to the dark side. And, you know, again...

To the tune of how many emails we got just simply about how hot Manny Jacinto is. That is so intentional that I think she's really responding. She brings up Kylo in that quote when she was talking to us about

and that word seduced to the dark side. And she says, when Kylo says, join me, and then Adam Driver says, please, in that really beautiful, you know, distinctive, intimate way, I feel like it would have ended the movie there, to be quite honest. It felt like the I love you, I know moment to me. He's saying, I can't exist without you, and if you don't come with me, I'm not sure I can do it. So obviously, like,

who, once again, when the moths attack him, swings his saber directly at Osha's neck. So he is not, before that, like, moth moment, is not, like, being delicate with Osha's life. No. Throughout the episode, happy to kill either of them at any point. But in this moment... Yes. And then he says, will you hear this final clip, please, Steve? What extraordinary beings we are. Even in the revelation of our triumph, we see the depth...

of our despair. Beautiful. It made me think, genuinely made me think of Shakespeare, What a Piece of Work is Man. It genuinely made me think of Yoda, Luminous Beings Are We. Oh yeah. Like, this is just this beautiful, tender, dawn is breaking moment.

Manny was asked directly what this quote means and gave, frankly, word salad to Entertainment Weekly and I don't blame him because, like, whatever. So I don't think it's worth reading his answer here. But, like, I am waiting for, like, more of a breakdown of, like, why we ended this episode with, like, such poetry. Time to learn more about his philosophy and his history. Can't wait. Can't believe we only have three episodes left. Can't believe one of them is going to be a flashback. But more Manny.

Should we go now to Lore Corner? Let's do it. Jedi Master Ben Lindbergh. Boom. Ben, you are here today to talk to us about some, is it heavy metal? Not so heavy metal? It's pretty heavy. Yeah.

That's part of why it works so well. We are here to talk about cortosis today. And I always appreciate when lore can be incorporated into something in a way that isn't too heavy-handed or distracting, which I guess is ironic given that I do a dedicated lore segment on the show that isn't subtle at all. But when you're watching a show, it's great if these things can show up in a way where if you know you know, and if you don't know, you won't know what you don't know.

or you won't mind what you're missing. So I thought the Cortosis introduction was one of the many excellent aspects of this week's Acolyte. The episode goes live at 9 Eastern. At 9.13, I get a text from my Star Wars fan friend from high school, Matt, that just says, in all caps, CORTOSIS, I AM LOSING IT!

We were the cool kids in high school, in case you couldn't tell. But if you weren't one of the cool kids in high school, you might not have clocked the cortosis as quickly as Matt. And you might have just thought, oh, this mysterious darksider has a mysterious ability that looks cool. And if that's all you needed to know, then I'm sorry, because I'm here to tell you much more than that. So I love the lore of cortosis because I think it speaks to something universal about storytelling, which is that invulnerability is boring. Right.

Right. So Superman comes along in 1938 by 1943 on the radio and 49 in the comics. Kryptonite appears. And Dorothy Woolfolk, the first female editor at DC who worked on Superman comics in the 40s, said many years later, the problem with Superman was that he was too invulnerable.

So in fiction, whenever you invent something invulnerable, you inevitably have to invent a vulnerability because invulnerability isn't that interesting. It's like, I like to show my flaws from time to time so people don't think he's too perfect. He's not...

interesting, you know? That's what we're always saying over here. Exactly. Classic. So you need conflict to create drama and you need vulnerability to create conflict. So if, for instance, you- This is about you filing 5,000 words at 3 a.m., right? For 10 years of working together? Is that a vulnerability or an invulnerability? I'm not sure. I guess it depends. From a certain point of view. Yeah, from an editor's point of view. My editor's workload, potentially. It's great for traffic, I guess. Time on the page, you know?

Anyway, if you have an energy sword that can cut through anything, eventually someone's going to say, well, what if there were something it couldn't cut through? Eureka. So in gaming parlance, you might say lightsabers were OP, OP.

overpowered and they needed to be nerfed or made weaker. And all you have to do is invent some substance, some vibranium or unobtainium or pretty tough to obtainium that possesses that trait. It's kind of cheap, but it's a tried and true formula. Jedi are essentially superheroes too. So there's a long legacy of force resistant or force disabling or lightsaber resistant creatures.

And it didn't take long after the expanded universe, what we now know as legends, really got going for authors to come up with lightsaber blockers. So Beskar, which was first just called Mandalorian Iron, was introduced in the Tales of the Jedi comics in 1994. Great rebrand. Yeah, I was going to say. Great rebrand. Better name. Yeah. I guess Mandalorian Iron, just the generic brand equivalent of Beskar. That's the brand name.

You pay more for Beskar, but it's the same material. An ancient Sith Lord's tomb surrounded by Mandalorian iron that just can't be cut by lightsabers. The following year, the great game Dark Forces introduced a similar substance called Frick.

P-H-R-I-K, not as great branding. Later, there's another name, Nuranium, not Uranium, but Nuranium. All these metals are just dense and impenetrable. They didn't do anything to the lightsaber except block it. So if you want to not just block a lightsaber, but temporarily disable it, your best bet is Cortosis. So Cortosis comes along May of 1998 in a great book called I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole.

the rare Star Wars novel told from a first-person perspective. It's narrated by a Jedi named Corrin Horn, and there's a scene where he fights a member of the Jensarai, an order of Force users who are separate from the Jedi and the Sith.

A brief reading from iJedi. He's describing a fight scene here. And after the fight, Luke Skywalker asks Corrin, what happened to your blade? Answer, I don't know.

I don't know. I picked it up and hit the button. The blade sprang to life again with no shock and no sputtering. I felt a lot of feedback. Something in the armor shorted it? Cortosis ore, maybe?

So there are just three brief mentions of Cortosis in that book. It's not a major plot point, but you can see how powerful the appeal is. Something that disables lightsabers, whoa, just literal plot armor. Once you've introduced something like that, it's there to stay. So just a few months later, Cortosis makes the leap to one of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn books, Vision of the Future.

So here's a brief scene where Luke and his lovely future wife, Mara Jade, encounter a wall they can't cut through.

There must be cortosis in this rock, he told her. He held his glow rod up to the rock face, the light dancing off tiny sparkles. Mara shook her head. Never heard of it. It's apparently fairly rare, Luke said. This is just to catch all the readers who didn't read iJedi up to, what's this cortosis thing that we invented a few months ago? All I really know. Are you saying that you are sad that Chimera didn't turn to the camera and say cortosis?

Cortosis. Apparently it's pretty rare. Yeah, that's the thing, right? One of the Jedi red shirts isn't like, he must have cortosis in his armor. It's a substance that shorts out lightsabers. You know, that would have been the less subtle way to do it. So Luke says it's apparently fairly rare. All I really know about it is that it shuts down lightsabers. Corrin and I ran into some Force users once who'd made a set of body armor out of woven cortosis fibers. It was quite a surprise.

I'll bet, Mara said. Great dialogue, just natural, you know, how people talk. Genuinely. A memory of her own drifting up. So that's what the slab of rock was Palpatine had between the double walls of his private residence.

Luke lifted an eyebrow. He had cortosis or around his residence. Yeah, somehow Palpatine got cortosis or. But apparently it's pretty rare. Yeah, fairly rare. And around some of his other offices and throne rooms too, I think Mara said. I never knew the proper name for this stuff.

Oh, now we know. So this is like Mandalorian iron? No, it's Beskar. No, it's Cortosis. From what he told me, if you're wondering, how does this stuff work? Here was the Legends explanation. I gather that if your lightsaber has dimetris circuits anywhere in the activation loop, hitting the rock starts a feedback crash running through the system that takes only a fraction of a second to shut the whole thing down. A little something extra to slow down any stray Jedi who might come after him.

him. So it's those pesky Dimetris circuits in the activation loop. So over the years, Cortosis shows up all over in trooper armor, in battle droid armor, sometimes in starship holes. Sometimes it's just called Cortosis, sometimes Cortosis Alloy, Cortosis Weave. It's often associated with Sith or Darksiders because they're sneaky. They need to defend themselves against Jedi and

It comes up in the 2012 Darth Plagueis novel. He and his master, Darth Tenebris, in the tradition of using sinister adjectives as Sith names, Darth Tenebris are mining it as they're plotting to take down the Jedi, which could be relevant to the Acolyte because one or both of those Darths could be connected to this story somehow.

Like a lot of things in the old Legends timeline, the portrayal of cortosis is kind of inconsistent. So one common thread is that it has to be mined and refined. And it's difficult to mine because, again, you can't cut it, which presents a problem when you want to mine it. But a lot of other aspects are inconsistent, like how dangerous and fragile pure unrefined cortosis is, whether it merely blocks the saber or also shorts it out. Does it short it out for a second or for a few minutes? You know, what's the recovery period here? That

varies. Is it effective against everything or just lightsabers, et cetera? So one reason for that inconsistency, I think, is that it often showed up in video games, including the classic KOTOR games that Leslie Hedlund is fond of. And it would have been more work to make lightsabers short out in games,

So sometimes it was just super strong armor that really didn't do anything else. And in accordance with our principle that every invulnerable thing needs a vulnerability, there was also a specific type of kyber crystal that could cut through cortosis. Oh, anti-cortosis. Touché. Yeah. The tables have turned.

I don't know if there's a cortosis that's resistant to the cortosis-resistant Kyber. I'm not sure if they got that far. Anyway, none of that is strictly canon because it's all in the Legends timeline. But no time was wasted in making cortosis canon after the Disney reset. Literally, the first novel of the new canon...

The 2014 Rebels prequel book, A New Dawn, mentions cortosis. And it's been with us in the canon ever since. It's a big plot point in a more recent Zahn-Thrawn book, 2018's Thrawn Alliances, which I think we've talked about before, in which during the Clone Wars, Thrawn explains the material is called cortosis. It's very rare. So we have another of these catching everyone up on what this thing is called. Yeah.

I've heard stories about it, but never seen any. It's rumored to have unusually high energy absorption and transmission coefficients to the point where many energy weapon blasts will be dissipated along the fibers without damaging the fibers themselves. You always have to have that technobabble involved in the cortosis reintroduction.

As far as I know, the implication in this episode that cortosis maybe can block Jedi mind probes, that it doesn't just block lightsabers, but also you can't read your mind or do Jedi mind tricks or implant memories or anything if you have your cortosis helmet on. It's like a Magneto's helmet sort of situation. That's new as far as I know, although there are just so many mentions of this stuff over the years. Yeah.

So like Thrawn said, I've heard stories about it, but never seen any. We had never really seen Cortosis on screen until this episode of the Acolyte. And it's quite possible that these poor Jedi redshirts who got Sith kabobbed had never encountered Cortosis ever either. And maybe that's one reason why they go down without much of a fight.

Great stuff. Incredible. Thank you, Ben. Sif Kabab is wonderful. Almost as good as I parried her hard. I parried her so hard.

Now you can text all your friends. I held my glow stick and I parried her so hard. And what's the refractory period on a life saver that's been shorted out? Text all your friends in all caps about cortosis and impress them with your new family. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Ben. You're the best. Do you love how I use my chimeric force powers to teleport from that side of the table back to this side of the table? Yes. It's great.

Did an umbra moth assist? Let's hit theory corner. Let's do it.

Okay, so friend of the pod, Dave Gonzalez, who's like my main person that I text about Star Wars, when this episode ended, I was like, that fucking ruled. It was so good. And his very first response was like, do you think Chimera is the original Ren? This is the Knights of Ren theory. It rules. It slaps. I love this. Let's just break it down really briefly. The episode title is Night. Night with no K, but Knights of Ren.

The Knights of Ren. Okay. The Kylo Ren leitmotif is used twice, once during fighting, once during force healing. Yeah. A Ren, not the original Ren, from the comics bears more than a passing resemblance to Chimera. This is a visual moment. I'm sorry, even on video, I can't really show it to you, but there's this...

you know, moment from the comics where we see this guy, very muscular guy with a cloak and a helmet and one vambrace and he looks not dissimilar. The timing is quite off for Kymer to be that guy in the comics because we are far away from Ben Solo and his journey into becoming, to taking on the title of Ren. But Ren, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, is a title. Yeah.

So is this the original Ren? I like it. His look is very Knights of Ren. Knights of Ren was a huge missed opportunity in the Star Wars sequel. They look so sick. And we've gotten some lore in the comics. And the comics lore is amazing. It's so good. And the time of the characters is sensational. But it was just like a miss on screen. And I just think that I would love that.

I mean... I love this. I love this way more than, like, Darth Plagueis, Darth Tenebris, like, all the other theories that are flying around. And it fits, obviously, with what you were just saying earlier about this. You know, maybe you're working to create a faction of your own. A splinter faction. Could it be? Could it be? I like it a lot. I think the comics, Knights of Rand Cannon, has been sensational. And to the, like, misfire on screen point, we've talked about this a lot with other Star Wars series, but part of the...

opportunity on offer with a television series is to

rework and revisit something that didn't land elsewhere. Yeah, Force Dyads. And do a better job. Let's just take Force Dyads and Knights of Ren and make it work. I love this for us. We did get an email from Liv. I'm not going to read the whole thing out, Liv. Tremendous email. But she was bringing up Force Dyad. The fact that Kylo Ren's theme is being used during the healing. The idea that, again, we've seen Force healing elsewhere. Little Groggs can Force heal, etc. True baby Groggs. The idea that...

They could use force healing, seem to be connected to their dyad strength. That makes them more powerful force healers. Yeah. Yes. But we had not seen force healing until Grogu and Kylo and Rey. And that was, of course, back-to-back days. Yes.

It really felt like one was warming us up for the other. We got Grogu in grief and then built toward, yeah, well, what a time that was. What a time that was. Remember Rise of Skywalker? Should we go now to wig watch? Yeah, I'm excited for you. Will you wear wigs? I mean, R.I.P. Charlie Vickers' hair and Daphne Keene's hair. I will miss those particular phenomenal eccentric wigs.

We got a lightsaber-assisted haircut here. And this is just a – I know they wanted to do it from the start. They, like, designed all of the wigs around this idea that someone could just slice their hair off. I knew the slicing the hair was coming. Like, I felt like that was coming. With the saber, just seems like something that, like, feels like such a fun idea that in execution, I'm not sure, worked as well as they were hoping. Yeah.

Yeah. That's just where I am with that. Yes. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's been wig watch. But if we get a flashback, here's a question. Mm-hmm. If Chimere is in Brendock, or if we get some other flashback to Chimere at the Jedi Academy or whatever, will he also have flashback bangs? That's an exciting thing to consider. The flashback here has been so astonishing that, I mean, the possibilities are boundless. Truly boundless. Excellent. Can't wait. And...

I guess because we still have the question of, this isn't about hair, but like of why they were on Brendock in the first place. It does seem like they were there for some other reason and then realized the kids were there. So that maybe widens the possibility of like Chimera being there outside of the coven. Is there other Sith activity on the planet, et cetera? Could be. Perhaps. Okay. One final segment. Ready for some more mind magic. One final segment. This is not our usual segment, but.

But we got so many emails about this, I thought we should... Thank you. A truly astounding number of emails about this. I thought we should do a special dedicated, so we didn't spend the whole episode talking about it, thirst trap corner here on House of R. It's necessary. Let's do it. Oh, my. I'm just going to say, if this is not your speed, if you don't like this, now's the time to go. Because after this, there's nothing. So this is the end of the episode. Here we go. Um...

Actually, will you read this email? Because it's directed at me and I feel weird reading it myself. Will you read? Will you read? We got it. It's not one email. This is from multiple people. Multiple people sent versions of this email. Joey, Brian, Pete, Joanna, I have to know. Is Cartoon Mall, your husband, Cartoon Mall, still your choice? Or did Chimera move up your rankings as sexiest Sith? Because whoever decided Chimera needed to reveal his biceps before his face deserves a raise.

Am I abandoning Cartoon Mall? Yeah. I simply don't have enough information. I simply think it's unfair to throw over Animated Mall, who I've spent years with. Lusting after, yeah. For 34 minutes with Primera in all his glory.

It's not even 34 minutes. But what minutes they were. My goodness. Why not both? Why do you have to pick? I will just say, oh, a Sith dyad? Yeah, I'm not making you pick. Okay. This can be a different kind of Sith kebab, to quote Ben. I don't like it. Okay. And then we have... Wow. Can't believe I didn't get a bad baby from, or a dear me from Steve on that one. Or a don't want it. I don't want it. Thank you. Okay. We close now with a smattering of emails. Ah!

We don't have to read all of these. I think you do need to read the first one, though. It's just sensational. All caps from Lizzen. Oh, no. He's hot.

Chimer's been awake since before the breaking of the first silence. Sauron, have you heard of him, Lann? The deceiver, the dark lord whose dominion is torment, would be so proud. Oh my god. Yes, he did unforgivable crimes, but I'm giggling and kicking my feet. This is just... Chimer's been awake since before the breaking of the first silence. It's so good. It's so funny. And I heard it so clearly in Charlie Vickers' voice. Danielle just simply wrote, manage Jacinto's arms, his arms. That was the full email. Yep.

Correct. And then the rest are just variations on a theme. Here's the thing. He looked great. He looked fantastic. And it was worth the wait. It was. It was. Yeah. Wonderful stuff. Worth the wait if we're going to get...

I will just say this. Episode 7, fully prepared for that to be a flashback episode. Yeah. I'm going to need still a decent amount of chimera in that flashback episode somehow. One way or another. Yeah. I don't want an entire stranger-less episode with only three to go. That would be unacceptable. Though I can't wait to learn more about Sol, so. I have really good news for you. Tell me. You have three episodes.

Dave Matthews band acolytes that you have not used. Would you like to use them in a row? I'm proud of myself. I am really proud of you too. Can I bank them for future pods? You can roll over one. Okay. Acolyte. Rules, rules, rules. Now I'm regretting some of the moments of restraint earlier. I know. You could have been acolyting this whole time. All right. Acolyte. There it is.

And one to spare. Do you want to keep that one? I'm rolling over. Okay, you're rolling over the one. So I enter next pod with six. Correct. This has been House of R's Deep Dive on the Ackle Light, episode five. Just inside your head. No, no, no. Had a great time with this episode of television. What a joy. Fantastic. What a treat. We'll be back on Sunday night, the minute-ish House of the Dragon ends.

To talk about episode three of House of the Dragon. Very exciting. Can't wait. And then, you know, the content gauntlet rolls on from there. Thank you. A million thanks to John Richter, who does our video editing. Incredible, incredible stuff from John Richter. Steve Allman.

gathered clips and then gathered them again because of a miscommunication this morning. That was my fault. Thank you, Steve Ullman, our Juno-Runga pal, for always making sure that everything is just so. He's the best. Jomie at dinner on the social. Jomie is also the best. We work with the best. Great team. Mallory Rubin, I love you dearly. And if you were stabbed or beheaded or had your neck snapped, you would take my body. By a hot Sith in the woods, I would take your body with me. Aww.

Yeah, you're welcome. Okay, bye!