Now that we’ve established that Osha and the Stranger are equally vapid characterizations, let’s work our way through the inanity that unfolds between them in this episode. The Stranger strips naked and invites Osha to skinny dip with him. The camera awkwardly ogles his muscles as he blathers on in a forced monotone about his anti-Jedi ideology. We see a shot of two wrinkly-skinned alien love birds cuddling, just before he suggests she shouldn’t hold it against him that he murdered her friends because they were jerks to her anyway. Are we meant to believe he’s…seducing her?!
Where the hell did this come from? This has got to be the most bizarre injection of romance into a TV show ever. These two have little to no chemistry. The intimate moments between them near the end of the episode seem to be meant to create sexual tension but instead further confuse the story, if that’s at all possible. Is it really just an Acolyte he’s looking for?
It seems the idea here is that the Stranger represents the temptation of the dark side, or in more biblical terms, the temptation of Satan. Ooh that sexy devil, with his freaky armor that kind of makes him look like an S&M Xenomorph. How could Osha resist? None of this works because the sexual tension feels forced, characters are flat, and the dialogue is even flatter. “If you keep me here, Sol comes to you. He’s found me before. His strength in the Force is very powerful.” Yikes. How is Amandla Stenberg meant to make lines like this sound natural?
As faulty as the Osha/Stranger stuff in this episode is, there are a couple of highlights worth noting. The island locale looks ravishing and picturesque, and shooting at real locations like this is absolutely refreshing in an era when many outdoor scenes are shot in a soundstage with artificial sunlight and a painted-in environments, or with lots of help from the Volume. It’s long made the Star Wars universe look and feel a lot smaller and less cinematic, so it’s nice to see The Acolyte follow in Andor‘s footsteps, at least for a little while.
A surprisingly effective moment in the episode is the final scene, in which Osha dons the Stranger’s S&M helmet. Seriously, the editing and framing here have real cinematic value, and in just seconds the scene delivers the point of the story more poignantly and evocatively than everything that came before it. The absence of music and the sound of her exhaling just before the credits roll is actually quite chilling.
The Mae half of the episode fares a little better, but not by much. The crux here is that Mae is masquerading as Osha on Sol’s ship, and while the show doesn’t fully capitalize on the suspense built into the scenario, the question of whether or not Sol will see through her scheme does loom and adds a measure of intrigue.