Spoilers follow for Star Wars: The Acolyte’s season finale! As the eighth and final episode of Star Wars: The Acolyte‘s first season comes to a close, it wasn’t without its tragedy, and death. Star Wars fans are no stranger to surprising deaths in the franchise, even its first batch of episodes, but The Acolyte season finale took it to another level. As Mae, Osha, Qimir, and Sol all converge on Brendok, the planet where Mae and Osha were born, the Jedi master confirms that he killed their mother Aniseya, and he pays for it with his life.
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The scenes on Brendok, like so many moments in The Acolyte, are purposefully bifurcated. Sol and Qimir fighting in a courtyard on one hand, while Mae confronts Osha in another. With the sisters together, Mae tells Osha the truth about what the Jedi did on their home planet and what Sol did to their mother. “He’s the reason you have negative emotions,” Mae reveals to her sister.
After a tussle, Mae returns to the courtyard to help Qimir, who has been bested by Sol. Mae takes his lightsaber from him and tosses it away, leaving it in the perfect spot to be picked up by…who else, Osha, who overhears Sol confess to killing their mother. He laments that he never told her the truth because he wanted her to have the life she always dream of, but his explanation is interrupted as Osha begins to force choke him. Sol falls to his knees as he gasps for air.
Most importantly in this moment however Osha is also holding Sol’s lightsaber, and the Kyber crystal inside it begins to change as he dies. When Osha activates it in a rage, the blue color of the crystal shifts and it reveals itself to now be a red blade. Osha is now fully on the dark side as killing Sol caused the Kyber crystal to bleed, giving it a red blade.
Lest you think that Sol’s death is some kind of misdirect or a surprise that didn’t actually stick, his ending becomes even more tragic. Throughout the episode, Master Vernestra Rwoh is doing her best to deflect any kind of investigation by the senate into the Jedi and what has happened over the past few days/weeks. Even though she properly disposes of Master Sol’s body, burning it on a floating pyre, she makes him the scapegoat for everything in the series.
Vernestra Rwoh not only reveals to the senate what happened with Aniseya’s coven and how it was kept secret, but makes the claim that Sol killed his three accomplices to maintain the cover story when it threatened to become public. As we know, that’s not true, Mae is the one that killed the three Jedi, while Osha herself killed Sol, though Rwoh goes on to claim that he took his own life. In any event, Sol met a tragic end in Star Wars: The Acolyte‘s season finale, and he also got thrown under the bus for everything that happened.
Set during The High Republic, Star Wars: The Acolyte delivers an investigation into a mysterious string of crimes, which pits a Jedi master against his former apprentice in a race to uncover the truth. The more that the pair learn about the situation, the darker their journey becomes, as they confront things that darker than either of them could have imagined.
The series stars Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, and Carrie-Anne Moss. Star Wars: The Acolyte season 1 is now streaming on Disney+.
