Star Wars: The Acolyte Finally Explains The True Beginning Of The Jedi Downfall

There will be spoilers for the third episode of "Star Wars: The Acolyte," so beware.

The road to hell is always paved with the best of intentions, and that's the moral of a lot of fairy tales. It's something George Lucas hammered home pretty directly when he wrote the prequel trilogy, as we watched Anakin Skywalker's slow descent into evil. The overriding desire to do the right thing — even in the face of great evil — is ultimately what drove Anakin Skywalker to the Dark side and the downfall of the Jedi order. He wanted the power to influence the midi-chlorians to cheat death and protect those he cared about. Under the manipulative influence of the Sith lord Darth Sidious, Anakin succumbed to his worst impulses for what he thought were the best of reasons.

However, as we witnessed in "The Phantom Menace," the Jedi were already becoming victims of their own hypocrisy and hubris. It certainly didn't help that the dark side was clouding everything, with the Sith having returned under the radar. In fact, "Star Wars: The Acolyte" may reveal the beginning of the eventual downfall of the Jedi.

It's unfair to solely blame the Sith for Anakin's downfall and the destruction of the Jedi, though. The decay of integrity in the Jedi Order is something that plagued Count Dooku as well, and it was something that even bothered Qui-Gon Jinn. As we first meet the Jedi in "The Phantom Menace," they are mired in the same bureaucracy that Palpatine rails against in the Galactic Senate. By the time the Clone Wars begin, they become generals in the war. The decay of the Jedi even accelerates during wartime, as Mace Windu proclaims that it's not in the character of a Jedi to assassinate anyone, but by the close of the war, he orders Dooku's assassination and personally tries to murder the Chancellor.

As Anakin Skywalker looks for comforting answers about his mother and his secret-wife, he's told, essentially, to just accept their deaths and get over it. They put him in increasingly difficult positions, including asking him to spy on the Chancellor. They deny him the rank of Master, despite granting him a position on the council. There are secrets and lies in the halls of the Jedi temple. Near the end of the Clone Wars, even Jedi like Barris Offee are ready to kill because of the corruption of the Jedi. So many more are ready to abandon their oaths in the Order and step into Palpatine's Inquisitorius.

No one put it more succinctly than Luke Skywalker in "The Last Jedi," Rian Johnson's "Star Wars" masterpiece. "Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified," Luke tells Rey, "But if your strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris...At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader."

Step by step, the Jedi fell as an entire order, but it seems as though we're seeing the very beginning of this fall on "Star Wars: The Acolyte."

"I'm sorry," Master Torbin told the Dark side apprentice Mae in the second episode of "Star Wars: The Acolyte," "We thought we were doing the right thing."

Thematically, this idea is the exact thing that echoes forward to Anakin Skywalker's story in the prequel trilogy. They are willing to compromise themselves bit by bit until that rapid acceleration of decay hits a critical mass during Palpatine's rise and through the Clone Wars.

The events of that night on Brendok seem horrific. They feel more like the First Order taking children than the stories of Jedi adopting them into the order we've assumed they would be. Mistakes were made, for sure. It seems as though that hypocrisy and hubris Luke Skywalker told of was on full display when the Jedi confronted Mother Aniseya. The laws of the Republic prevent Mother Aniseya and her coven from teaching children, but they somehow allow for the Jedi to test children at their leisure and take them to train. Why? How did this law come to be? A hundred years prior, during "The High Republic" era novels, this doesn't seem to be in place.

Add to that Vernestra Rwoh's insistence that no action be taken without rigorous discussion and debate, it leaves one to wonder if the trauma over the war with the Nihil caused them to hide in their shell and lean on bureaucracy, creating some particularly bad habits. This only gets exacerbated over the next 87 years until the events of "The Phantom Menace."

Knowing that the Jedi Order will be no more in 100 short years adds a tinge of sadness to "The Acolyte." The Jedi will not have learned their lessons for another two generations. Luke learned many of the wrong lessons, and Kylo Ren destroyed his school, which means the galaxy would put its hope in Rey (and her upcoming "New Jedi Order" movie from director Sharmeen Obaid‑Chinoy) to rebuild a Jedi Order free of the mistakes they find themselves making, starting right here with "The Acolyte."

The one thing I know for sure, though, is that the four Jedi who went to Brendok and participated in that tragedy were doing the wrong things for what they believed were the right reasons. They will likely be forced to account for that... In fact, Masters Torbin and Indara have already died. Will Kelnacca and Sol meet the same fate? We have five more episodes to find out.

These musings make one wonder if this run-in with the dark side and these string of Jedi murders will cause lasting damage to the Jedi and lead them even further down the path of destruction we know they're walking on. With what we've heard from showrunner Leslye Headland about "The Acolyte," I'd take that bet faster than Watto accepting Qui-Gon's podracing wager.

New episodes of "Star Wars: The Acolyte" debut on Tuesdays at 9:00pm ET, only on Disney+.