First recruitment tactic: Swim naked. Got it.
Recap
Osha wakes up on an unknown world with her wounds dressed. She finds herself on an island in the middle of a sea and follows Qimir to a tide pool where he strips naked and goes for a swim. She takes his lightsaber, and he asks her how it feels to hold one again. He corrects her stance, talks a bit about the Jedi and why they abandoned her, and asks if he can get dressed again. Osha lets him put on his clothes, and asks about why he’s brought her here, and whether he killed Sol and Mae. He tells her he didn’t and asks about her bond with Sol.
In the meantime, Sol is trying to send a message to the Jedi on Coruscant that his party has been murdered, but his systems keep failing. Bazil puts PIP in his charging dock. Sol tells “Osha” (Mae in disguise) that it’s time for him to come clean to the High Council about what happened all those years ago, but the ship keeps shorting out, so he asks her to go take a look. On Coruscant, Venestra is informed about Sol’s message and decides that a party must be sent to investigate what happened to their team.
Osha insists that Sol will find her here because he’s very powerful in the Force, but Qimir wants her to know that the power is hers. He also tells her that she’s free to leave if she likes. Osha follows him and insists that she can’t be powerful because she left the Jedi, and you lose your connection to the Force if you don’t keep working at it. Qimir tells her this is Jedi dogma. He asks why the Jedi abandoned her, and she insists that she left because she failed and holds Qimir’s lightsaber to his throat. He tells her that losing everything can free a person.
Mae encounters Bazil while enacting repairs, and he tries to fight her and runs away. She finds PIP and resets him, then pursues Bazil around the ship. Eventually she runs into Sol again, who is beating himself up for not knowing who Qimir was when they first encountered him, on Olega. He brings up how Osha takes care of her PIP droid, how she loves him. Mae as Osha tells him that she had to give up a lot of herself to become a Jedi and asks if he’ll tell her what happened on Brendok now. The system powers up, and Sol stuns Mae. He gets a message that the rescue team is on their way, but jumps to hyperspace before they arrive.
Osha asks Qimir about the scar on his back, which looks like someone stabbed him with a lightsaber. She wants to know if his master did this to him. He shows her his helmet—it’s made of Cortosis, the same element that they use for sensory deprivation helmets on younglings, which apparently makes it harder for people to read him and is a bit more resistant to lightsabers. He suggests that she try the helmet on to fully focus herself. Venestra and her team find the slaughtered Jedi; one of her group wonders if Sol is responsible. Venestra doesn’t think so; she believes something has arrived to tip the scales. Mae wakes up bound to a bed on the ship. Sol insists that he won’t hurt her, that he knows who she is, and that he means to finally tell her what happened on Brendok. Alone, Osha puts on Qimir’s helmet.
Commentary
We’re gonna need to have a talk about all these planets with verdant islands that Force-users can just set up camp on all alone for their gorgeous solitude retreats where they may or may not train students. I was expecting porgs and nuns to show up again, only for them to tell us this is “Unknown Planet”? Sure it is. The galaxy has an endless supply of little island ocean worlds. (At least Pabu has a bunch of people on it; Pabu wins.)
So Qimir is now the only Sith to say the quiet part out loud with “The dark side is about sex, actually.” Finally. Someone had to say it if the Jedi are gonna be so weird about attachments. (I maintain that there’s no way that some Jedi don’t have sex occasionally, but they’re real weird about all emotions in general which is why poor Sol is so… *gestures*) It’s a great ploy! Why don’t we try seducing someone to the dark side with a little actual seduction… but obviously do it better than whatever Kylo Ren thought he was doing. I dunno, Darth Maul probably would’ve tried that route if Ezra hadn’t been a teenager at the time, so let Qimir get a shot at it and do it better than everyone else. We deserve this.
But we’ve still got an information gap problem regardless of how enjoyable Qimir’s argument is from a new material standpoint. Because we don’t know much about how he trained Mae, we have to guess at whether or not he’s changing his tactics, and more importantly, why that might be true. Is Osha more powerful than Mae? Is former Jedi repression better for flipping people to the dark side? Does he just like her more? So much of this poor series is happening in a vacuum, it’s getting to the point where I care less about what really happened on Brendok than I do about why the characters are feeling and behaving the way they do. Can we sink in with any of that, please?
It’s not just a need for the show to be meatier that prompts my interest in this. Qimir’s desire for “the Power of Two” gets much wrigglier if he’s leaning into the seduction aspect of the dark side, and while I suspect the show doesn’t mean to dig into that… oof, it really should? Let this stuff be gnarlier and more complicated for a change—you’ve got the room for it. Don’t just leave Osha with a sensory deprivation helmet—sorry, turns out I will be laughing at that forever, that’s pitch perfect edgelord gear on Qimir’s part—and act like it’s going to do the work for you.
The one suggestion that I love from this episode: The idea that Jedi tell everyone the Force is a “use it or lose it” connection and ability. Which is absurd, but makes perfect sense as a method of control, galaxy-wide. It makes it even more manipulative in terms of taking children from their parents: If they suggest that not allowing your child to study the Jedi arts will eventually cut them off from this innate ability, of course a parent would worry that they were depriving their child of something important. Again, it’s a very ugly system that relies on deception and coercion, and actively discourages anyone from using the Force by suggesting that anyone who isn’t a Jedi can’t connect.
I am personally trying not to freak out over Mae resetting PIP, but if he’s truly erased from that… I mean, that would actually be the most evil thing she’s done on the entire show, and it had nothing to do with revenge or being a baby Sith. Just gonna not think about that for now, gonna shove that deep down.
Of course Sol knows what’s going on, but the whole outline of what’s happening on his ship is real messy up until the end. Which is unfortunate, because every close up of his face is so good. Give him more to do. Why do we need Bazil sneaking around in the ducts and all the weird delays, and is it just to mount tension with the incoming rescue party because there was no tension there? It’s fine, you don’t have to pretend that you created any.
Again, we see all the red dust on the ground when the Jedi group investigate, and I’m going to be real upset if they don’t use it. We do get a glimpse into Venestra’s whole deal this time, and there are some great tidbits—like getting lightspeed sickness! So inconvenient, so good. Also, she has the infamous lightwhip, which is a weapon that has been all over Star Wars lore, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen one in live action? Don’t particularly love how thoughtlessly everyone keeps dispatching those poor moth creatures, but we learn quite a bit about her by knowing she carries one.
The fact that the investigative party does think it’s possible that Sol committed all these murders seems… not great? In both the hubris sense of the Jedi believing they’re always the most powerful, and in the suspicion-among-their-own-ranks sense. If there’s so little trust between them, is this a common problem?
But of course the episode gets cut off before we get the confession about whatever happened on Brendok. It would be nice to get a full episode. We haven’t had one in a month!
Spanners and Sabers
- I’m sorry, but when Qimir puts on the white sweater and starts walking back with his gear, my brain went “He’s just some SoCal guy heading to his next yoga class. Follow him, Osha, he’ll take you to Lululemon for some fancy workout leggings.”
- Genuinely trying to think if there’s another moment where we’ve gotten nudity from anyone in Star Wars? We don’t see anything, but it’s relevant that this might be the first time we’re aware of a human character being entirely naked on screen.
- Okay, but Qimir says Osha would have to swim to the ship to leave, which implies that he somehow swum over with her while she was unconscious? Because otherwise how…
- Who is Venestra’s helper, and why does he give “Normally I’d be the person under prosthetics in Star Trek, but they decided to cast me as a human for some reason” energy? I love him. All the random side Jedi in this are so good.
Next week we’ll hopefully finally find out what happened on Brendok!
This show is way too decompressed. This was another episode barely over half an hour long. Back in the day, this whole series could’ve been a 4-hour miniseries shown as two movie-length installments. It’s not bad, but it would be much stronger if it weren’t parceling everything out so piecemeal and wasting so much time getting to things.
And yes, it made no sense that Bazil hid from Sol for most of the episode to drag things out needlessly. Why not alert him right away? It’s not like Mae was with him the whole time.
“The fact that the investigative party does think it’s possible that Sol committed all these murders seems… not great?”
They don’t. That one padawan suggested it, Vernestra shot it down, and the padawan talked himself out of it when he realized Sol wouldn’t have sent a distress call if he’d been the killer.
It amuses me that PIP’s factory reset gives him evil red eyes. It reminds me of a Facebook meme I saw the other day (paraphrasing): “Remember: For every robot that turns evil, there’s an engineer who installed red LEDs in its eyes for just such an occasion.”
I don’t think Qimir said Jedi sense-deprivation helmets are made of cortosis; he just said he designed his cortosis helmet to work equivalently to a sense-deprivation helmet. In other words, it’s not the material that makes it work that way, it’s the design (though I’d think the eyeslit would work against that). The material is for shorting out lightsabers.
“The one suggestion that I love from this episode: The idea that Jedi tell everyone the Force is a “use it or lose it” connection and ability. Which is absurd, but makes perfect sense as a method of control, galaxy-wide. It makes it even more manipulative in terms of taking children from their parents: If they suggest that not allowing your child to study the Jedi arts will eventually cut them off from this innate ability, of course a parent would worry that they were depriving their child of something important. Again, it’s a very ugly system that relies on deception and coercion, and actively discourages anyone from using the Force by suggesting that anyone who isn’t a Jedi can’t connect.”
It’s very strange that you’re taking Qimir’s propaganda at face value as objectively correct. He’s hardly an unbiased commentator, so why trust his interpretation? I don’t think it’s ugly at all. As we’ve seen since the original movies, it’s very easy to give into the temptations of the Dark Side, which makes Force users very dangerous to others. So it makes perfect sense to encourage them to train and discipline themselves to resist giving into those selfish and dangerous temptations, or else to let their Force connection atrophy through disuse. I don’t see how that’s bad when the alternative is becoming Anthony from “It’s a Good Life,” someone whose superhuman power without self-discipline makes them a threat to everyone around them.
In short: The Light Side, the Jedi way, is about cultivating and respecting your connection to all other life through the Force. The Dark Side is about exploiting that connection to give you power over others. Qimir is saying that guarding against the Dark Side is oppressive to people who want to embrace the Dark Side, but that’s as hypocritical as racists and transphobes saying they’re being oppressed when they’re not allowed to insult and marginalize people they don’t approve of. There’s good reason for discouraging a belief system founded upon doing harm to others.
“Okay, but Qimir says Osha would have to swim to the ship to leave, which implies that he somehow swum over with her while she was unconscious? Because otherwise how…”
He said either swim or wait for the tide to go out. So he must have carried her over when the tide was out.
I definitely agree with your suspicious, Mr Bennett (One also suspects that our reviewer might be just a TAD overly-inclined to believe the worst of the Jedi Order).
Next week we’re getting, if not the truth of what really happened on Brendok, at least the other version of it. And I’m betting it will be another pure flashback: all the other episodes form perfect pairs, either with others (‘Day’ and ‘Night’) or within themselves (‘Lost/Found’, ‘Revenge/Justice’). But we’re still missing the other half of the third episode, ‘Destiny’ (‘Choice’, perhaps?), and next week’s episode is again directed by Kogonada. It also ties with the overarching theme of the show, which is about duality. So… I guess we’re in for some answers!
Qimir’s scars look like whip marks, and Vernestra uses a light whip, which I don’t think is a coincidence. Plus, she is acting pretty angry and discouraged. Her early life was a lot like Anakin’s; knighted young and thrown into combat with the Nihil. I think she is either his former Jedi Master, or worst case scenario, has gone full Sith.
Implied nudity: Chewie comes in the shower with Han in Solo.
I sincerely hope Chewie DID NOT come in that shower – that would have been just RUDE.
Have you not seen Solo?
I’m wondering, if to preserve the idea in the movies that the Sith haven’t been seen for a long time, that somehow Sol will still end up being blamed for the massacre, side-stepping the Sith angle. He does seem to be acting slightly more unhinged, so maybe they’ll push that and have Sol either be arrested or killed for the deaths, thus concealing potential Sith involvement.
Or maybe they just never piece it together that Qimir is Sith. He hasn’t actually used the name, just said “the power of two.” The audience recognizes his Sithiness from that and the red lightsaber, but that doesn’t mean the characters will, since they have no experience of the Sith. Even if someone among the Jedi recognizes that he has Sith-like beliefs and practices, there’s no proof that he’s part of any larger movement rather than just being a copycat.
So it’s like that Star Trek: Enterprise episode with the Ferengi. They never called themselves Ferengi in the humans’ hearing, so it’s consistent with Starfleet two centuries later believing they’ve never had direct contact with the Ferengi before.
He did say something along the lines of “you would call me Sith” when someone (Sol, if I remember correctly) asked him who/what he was.
Which still allows the Jedi to interpret him as a lone copycat or wannabe rather than an actual Sith. Indeed, that seems to be the case, since he doesn’t accept the label for himself.
> He’s just some SoCal guy heading to his next yoga class. Follow him, Osha, he’ll take you to Lululemon for some fancy workout leggings.
When I saw that costume I immediately said to myself, “Ah , Manny made off with his wardrobe from “Nine Perfect Strangers!”
Genuinely trying to think if there’s another moment where we’ve gotten nudity from anyone in Star Wars? We don’t see anything, but it’s relevant that this might be the first time we’re aware of a human character being entirely naked on screen.
In the Andor prison arc, we saw the prisoners stripped for the showers. The camera went pretty low down the bare backs.