The identity of Qimir’s mysterious Sith Master in The Acolyte has been a burning question in viewers’ minds from the beginning. With the airing of the finale on July 16, we finally got an answer as the show introduced the legendary Darth Plagueis.
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Speculation on the show’s Reddit thread has been rife. Initially, fans thought the Sith Master could be Indara. “I’ve been saying this for WEEKS now and I’m convinced after last episode it’s true,” one fan wrote in response to episode 7. “She faked her death from Mae. She lied to the Jedi council before that. She’s putting plans in motion now for some uncertain reason that we will discover. She wants to know how those damn twins were created.”
Now, with the finale and looking to a potential season 2, fans are dissecting the importance of that very brief cameo that came half-way through the episode.
Was that Darth Plagueis in The Acolyte finale?
While it definitely looked like him, we can’t be 100% sure, though his appearance does seem to match Star Wars art: A Munn male with orange eyes. In one Reddit thread, one fan wrote: “In Legends he was a Muun, and this dude looks like he could be a Muun and in RotS [Return of the Sith] it is implied that someone called Darth Plagueis was Palpatine’s master and the timeline more or less aligns here,” they theorized. (The Acolyte occurs 100 years before Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace—132 BBY (Before The Battle of Yavin). The show takes place when Jedis are at their peak.)
Indeed, as Chancellor Palpatine explains to Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace to Anakin Skywalker: “Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. It’s a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life… He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying,” he says.
“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.”
In another Reddit thread, fans debated whether it actually is Darth Plagueis. “THAT IS PLAGUEIS RIGHT??” asked one, to which another responded: “It has to be. So are we to assume that he was involved in creating Osha and Mae, or is watching from the shadows how he learned how to create life?”
A third responded: “I think the second option. If legend goes by, he spent his entire Sith career searching for a way to create life. He had to learn it from somewhere,” they observed. “And personally, I am very convinced by the series’ vision that there were Force cults that could do such a thing, but they were successively eliminated by the Jedi, who saw them as heretical threats.”
