The Acolyte: the carnage of episode 5 explained

We now know who is hiding under the Sith Lord's helmet. A revelation accompanied by a massacre rarely seen in the history of Star Wars. The actors decipher.

The dark side of the Force has done damage, in The Acolyte. Episode 5 released this week on Disney Plus revealed the identity of the famous Sith who had been manipulating Mae in the shadows from the start. And along the way, he engaged in a Dantesque clash with the Jedi of Sol's battalion. And not everyone came out alive… Spoiler alert!

The episode will certainly go down as one of the most brutal ever seen in the galaxy Star Wars. The surprise death of Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) in the first scene set the tone: the Jedi are not untouchable. They can die. And a good number perished under the blows of the red saber in episode 5. We had not seen such a massacre of Knights since Order 66 of Revenge of the Sith.

As we suspected, it was Qimir who was hiding under the helmet from the start. After killing Master Kelnacca, he got rid of the few second-rank Knights accompanying Master Sol's mission. Then, he defeated Yord and especially Jecki Lon. The brilliant Padawan was on par with the Sith Lord for a long time, before being trapped and pierced. A shocking death, carefully calculated by the showrunner and director, Leslie Headland : “I loved pretending to the audience. We see the Sith first kill second knives. And we logically say to ourselves that he is just going to kill a group of secondary characters. That the main ones will be okay… And then, oh my God, Jecki is dead! There we have everyone’s attention!”

In this decryption by Entertainment Weekly, the actress Dafne Keen (Jecki) applauds this audacity: “There are so many directors in successful sagas who are afraid of killing off their characters. Who don't hesitate to bring their characters back to life, to find little writerly tricks to keep them alive… I really like the fact that she kills people. Because if all this isn't really dangerous, what are the stakes? Why are we concerned with history? Leslye makes us love these characters the better to slaughter them like pigs in the slaughterhouse. Yes, this Sith is our villain. We're not just saying it's big and scary. We show you straight up how big and scary he is. This is really creepy!”

And Dafne Keen admits that she knew right away that she wasn't going to last long in Star Wars : “Honestly, that's what was sold to me from the start. That's the first thing Leslye said to me when we met: 'You're playing an alien and you die pretty early.'

Manny Jacinto, he had to keep the secret of his identity as a villain. “And I'm the worst liar too” he laughs in EW, before explaining that he worked a lot for this episode of non-stop fighting: “I had almost four months to train for this sequence. It was the first time I was able to really immerse myself in something with this much action and really use my dance background. We worked on everything. We did boxing, we worked on kicks, we worked on all the choreography. It was tough and they conditioned my body so I could get through that five-man fight scene.”

Manny Jacinto stayed well under the mask for almost all shots. He did the majority of his combat stunts himself. And when the mask falls, his crazy gaze truly seems to attract us to the dark side: “We wanted a character who was not only oppressive and powerful, but who, when you see him, was actually disturbing. insists Jacinto. “We wanted a character that wasn't just a sort of Darth Vader that dominates the screen. His concept is strangeness. It's very subtle, and it's that uneasiness that people feel when they see this Sith Lord“.

So what will its place ultimately be in the big puzzle? Star Wars ? There are three episodes left The Acolyte to see on Disney Plus.