SPOILER alert:This post contains spoilers from “The Acolyte” finale.
The first season of the Disney+ television series “The Acolyte” ends on a triumphant moment for the Sith. Manny Jacinto‘s Sith Lord known as the Stranger (or Qimir as he’s called before his Sith reveal) has successfully gained a student to teach in all things the dark side. The heel turn is that his student is Osha (Amandla Stenberg), who started the series with ties to the Jedi and who many viewers might’ve clocked as the heroic protagonist of the show alongside her former Jedi master Sol (Lee Jung-jae).
In the season finale of “The Acolyte,” Osha chokes Sol to death using the Force after she finds out that he killed her mother years ago. It’s a moment of rage that pulls Osha closer to the dark side. She had already been teetering between light and dark all season, swayed in large part by her burgeoning relationship with the Stranger. Many “Star Wars” fans clocked a will-they-won’t-they vibe between the two characters, which was certainly bolstered by Jacinto’s seductive acting, and it turns out they were right to feel that way as the show shot a kiss between the two characters to end the first season.
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“I’m just going to put it out there. There was a version that we filmed where Osha and the Stranger actually kiss,” Jacinto told Vulture after the finale aired. “But we felt that it may have not been too earned at that moment. I think it was just too early on.”
“The Stranger killed a bunch of her friends, and she just killed her fatherlike figure [Sol],” he explained. “For them to have this sensual moment just didn’t feel like it was appropriate. It’s just on the cutting-room floor. But I suggested, ‘Maybe not the kiss, but how about a hand-hold?’ Some sort of wanting to console, some sort of physicality that expresses that he cares for her and feels for her and that they’re in this together now. That’s something that, if we do a Season 2, maybe we can work toward, if the fans want it.”
When the kiss did not feel right, Jacinto suggested the Stranger instead place his hand on Osha’s while she holds a lightsaber. That’s the final emotional beat of “The Acolyte’s” first season, as the two touch hands on the Stranger’s home island and their futures remain uncertain. Disney has yet to announce if “The Acolyte” is returning for a second season.
Had the kiss been left in “The Acolyte,” it surely would’ve riled up the “Star Wars” fandom. Such was the case when Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) kissed just before Kylo’s death in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” The two characters were also at the center of will-they-won’t-they fan buzz, with some hoping for a full-blown romance storyline between (a fan movement dubbed “Reylo”). The kiss appeared to give in to these fan demands while alienating a different part of the fandom who felt it didn’t make any sense.
“I felt like we all…it felt earned,” Ridley said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast last year when asked about the divisive kiss. “What was interesting again is intentionality. My feeling in that moment was that it was a goodbye, and that felt earned. You can call a kiss a thousand things, but I felt it was a goodbye. That whole scene felt emotional and I felt I was saying goodbye to the job, too.”
Director J.J. Abrams alsodownplayed the kissbeing romantic during a discussion about the film shortly after it was released in December 2019. “There is as much of a brother-sister thing between Rey and Kylo Ren as there is a romantic thing,” he said at the time. “So it’s not like literally a sexual, romantic thing, but it’s more like they’re bound together in this movie in a crazy, spiritual way that, again, felt romantic to me.”
The first season of “The Acolyte” is available to stream in its entirety on Disney+.
