It’s been just over a year and a half since The Acolyte premiered on Disney+, and it remains the only Star Wars TV series to be “officially” cancelled by Lucasfilm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The intention was for the show to explore the High Republic Era, the period of this Galaxy Far, Far Away’s history set before the events of The Phantom Menace.<\/p>\n
Lucasfilm launched several books and comics from that time\u00a0to mixed success. However, had Season 2 happened, The Acolyte was supposed\u00a0to finally tell the story of Darth Plagueis, the Sith Lord who eventually becomes Emperor Palpatine’s master.<\/p>\n
The iconic villain was teased in the finale, with Qimir\/The Stranger seemingly his apprentice before a young Sheev Palpatine entered the mix.<\/p>\n
The HoloFiles<\/a>\u00a0(via SFFGazette.com<\/a>) has revealed some new\u00a0excerpts from next month’s\u00a0 The Art of The Acolyte by Kristin Baver, confirming that The Stranger’s helmet was deliberately designed with the sequel trilogy’s Knights of Ren, and Kylo Ren, in mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n “The slight frill at the back of the helmet \u2013 a design element that dates back to the franchise\u2019s samurai influence and notably first seen in Vader\u2019s design \u2013 hints at a link between the Stranger and the Star Wars sequel trilogy\u2019s masked antagonist Kylo Ren, an idea storytellers took from the design,” creature artist Nick Tyrel explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n The site also shared some expanded comments from The Acolyte showrunner\u00a0Leslye Headland, who suggested that “Ren” could be part of Qimir’s name.<\/p>\n “It felt like it foreshadowed a possible connection to the Knights of Ren with the Kylo Ren shape we landed on,”\u00a0she noted. “We just started to go in that direction. It was in the design of the character, as well as knowing that we were going to introduce Darth Plagueis, who has to end up with Palpatine as his apprentice.”<\/p>\n “Following the Rule of Two \u2013 a precept that limited the Sith to just two at any given time, a master and an apprentice \u2013 one way to keep it going is if the Stranger is the first Knight of Ren, part of a Sith-adjacent culture that we know eventually survives.”<\/p>\n “And since we never name him,”\u00a0Headland added, “you don\u2019t know: Does he have a first name and then his last name is Ren? Is he the original Ren? It\u2019s a good way to nod to it without having to give away too much information.”<\/p>\n Star Wars has established that there can only be one Sith master and one Sith apprentice at any one time. Piecing together what’s said here with previous reports, it seems likely that Qimir wasn’t\u00a0Plagueis’ apprentice, and that the villain was keeping an eye on this Dark Side Force user who, with\u00a0Osha by his side, forms the Knights of Ren. That or The Stranger betrayed his Master by breaking away from him.<\/p>\n It’s unfortunate that these are gaps fans have to fill in themselves, but that’s become a staple of the Disney-owned Lucasfilm (Palpatine’s return, for example, was only detailed in a novelisation of The Rise of Skywalker).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s been just over a year and a half since The Acolyte premiered on Disney+, and it remains…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,2591,23793,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-397583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-star-wars","11":"tag-the-acolyte","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}