Mae from The Acolyte must kill a Jedi without using a weapon – but how?

The Acolyte, Disney Plus' latest contribution to the Star Wars universe, is a murder mystery. At least that's what its marketing suggested to us. But now that we're two episodes into the season, an entirely different puzzle has become the show's brightest spot for me.

It's an irresistibly Star Wars issue, but more importantly, it's a perfect setting for exactly the kind of action believability that was briefly and thrillingly at the heart of the Star Wars franchise.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Acolyte.]

How to kill a Jedi without using a weapon?

This is the challenge thrown to Mae, our former apprentice, by her master, who looks like a Sith and gossips like a Sith, but who has not yet had much time to embrace his alliances or his philosophy. As a final lesson in her training, Mae must kill at least one Jedi without using a weapon, in order to kill “the dream”. What a dream? The dream that all Jedi live in is, apparently, “a dream that they believe everyone shares.”

According to Mae’s master: “An acolyte kills without a weapon; a sidekick kills the dream.

What does that mean?

That means everyone fights kung fu, baby.

The Acolyte's hand-to-hand combat unfolded from the moment his trailers fell. There are very few things like it in live-action Star Wars – the gravitational coolness of lightsabers is too hard to escape. Jedi and Sith fight with swords; Everybody knows it. Smugglers and soldiers use blasters. Wookiees have crossbows that shoot lasers. Even Chirrut, Donnie Yen's enigmatic Force adherent, but certainly not Jedi, fights with a stick. Blame it on the accessory figurine market, I suppose.

Although Star Wars is rooted in the samurai film, it has precious few callbacks to the immortal trope of a fighter who refuses to draw his blade. But in The Acolyte, this is how every Mae vs. Jedi fight begins, because a Jedi will not rely on an unarmed enemy. In these first two episodes, Mae's clashes with Carrie-Anne Moss's Master Indara and Lee Jung-jae's Master Sol are hyper-fast, gripping battles for dominance, where we can see Mae's desperation contrasted with a cool unbreakable Jedi. We have these wild superhero moments where Mae is looking to steal a lightsaber. mid-fight and encounters an incredibly rapid twist of a supernaturally endowed body. It's the blow-for-blow, arm's-length, movement and counterattack suspense of a great hand-to-hand martial arts sequence.

Mae's quest to kill an unarmed Jedi takes Star Wars back to the realm of fight scene cinema that the franchise developed during the production of the previous films, but which has rarely, if ever, been matched in live action since. But it also gives The Acolyte his best mystery. Not a thriller, but a How to do it?

Sol and his allies solve a murder mystery, sure – we've seen it a million times – but here Mae is banging her head on a koan handed to her by a murder Buddhist, and I'm waiting just the moment she realizes that maybe the answer is not literal.