"Star Wars: The Acolyte": Pain makes a lightsaber bleed – but who causes that pain?

In Star Wars, Sith lightsabers emit a hue of deep red, the color of blood, sin and the reckless human passion that the Jedi say pulls Force-users to the dark side. While the visual and thematic impact of a red lightsaber may be apparent to us, the question of how and why dark side practitioners use red lightsabers in a galaxy far, far away remained unanswered in live-action until the final episode of the "The Acolyte," in which Jedi Master Sol's (Lee Jung Jae) discarded lightsaber turns from blue to red in Osha's (Amandla Stenberg) grip as she descends into grief and rage.

Osha, an ex-Jedi Padawan, had already suffered from the violent loss of her entire family and struggles to keep her roiling emotions in check as Jedi teachings enjoin her to do. When she discovers that it was Sol, her erstwhile father figure, who killed her mother in a fit of misguided intentions, the dark side of the Force surges forth through Osha, choking the unarmed Sol through one hand and bleeding his lightsaber's exposed crystal through the other.

The transformation of Sol's lightsaber draws from material in the "Darth Vader" comic books, which itself is a retcon of the first offscreen explanations of red lightsabers from the age before Disney. After the emergence of various unofficial theories, Star Wars lore established in the 2000s that while the Jedi extracted Force-attuned kyber crystals from natural sources to power their lightsabers, dark-siders, whose alignment cuts them off from those sources, used special furnaces to create synthetic, more powerful red crystals.

The latter practice, regarded by the Jedi as a heretical perversion of nature, underscored the differences between light-siders, who sought harmony with the living Force, and dark-siders, who valued brute strength above all else and foreshadowed the replacement of "a more civilized age" with the techno-fascist Empire.

This concept, along with everything else that wasn't explicitly stated in the original and prequel trilogies, was tossed into the non-canonical ether known as "Legends" when Disney's takeover of Star Wars in 2012 reset the universe's lore. But through "Darth Vader," the writers of the new canon invented a fresh lightsaber theology evocative of the mystical, intangible nature of the Force from the original trilogy; one in which a crystal's corruption comes not from the head, but the seat of one's emotions.

When Vader is reborn in his black armor, he has no weapon on hand but his natural connection to the Force; the Emperor, his new Sith Master, says he must murder a Jedi and take his lightsaber. Vader fulfills that mission, but the crystal within, an inherently light-side object, is not yet bent to his will. To obtain mastery over his prize, Vader goes to Mustafar, the fiery planet where he lost his wife and much of his own body, and pours into it his hatred, sorrow and rage, torturing the crystal with his own pain, corrupting it with his own corruption, until it has shed its natural blue for red.

"Teach it your pain. Teach it your anger," the Emperor advises. "Hear it sing a hymn of darkness. Make it bleed."

Amandla Stenberg as Osha in "Star Wars: The Acolyte" (Lucasfilm/Disney)

Osha receives no such instruction; the ex-Padawan is too immersed in passion to even notice the crystal bleeding until she ignites Sol's lightsaber. Her fall is not an intentional process, but a gravitational pull that she, by losing control of her darkest emotional urges, can no longer resist. The dark side has twisted Osha, and she in turn has twisted a Jedi's weapon into a mockery of its original nature and purpose.

But what is the original purpose of a Jedi lightsaber? Since the first Star Wars film was released in 1977, the Jedi have sought to embody the ideal of self-possessed, morally immaculate Force-users committed to upholding peace in the galaxy. Paradoxically, the lightsaber a Jedi wields is an object that kills, threatens and maims, presumably in service to noble causes, and in "The Acolyte," it is used to rip apart Osha's family in a chaotic situation that for everyone tripping over their own mistaken instincts, might have been avoided.

It might be unfair to call Sol trigger-happy when he runs his lightsaber through Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), since witnessing both her and her daughter dissolving into black mist is terrifying for someone who knows nothing of witch-magic. But from the first meeting with the coven to the final confrontation, he has been acting on an impulse fueled by an outsider's suspicion and the hubris of a self-appointed savior, without seeking to understand. Only the Jedi are deemed civilized, and therefore their orthodoxy of the Force should be imposed on others for their own good. To Sol, a ceremonial marking on Osha's twin Mae is not a respected tradition, but a sign of innate evil not to be missed. These markings are customary among many galactic cultures, Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) has to remind him.

Sol does not heed her guidance. Instead of using his ample time to gather information on their customs and ease tensions with an insular community that understandably feels threatened by the sudden emergence of armed intruders, Sol misrepresents the situation to himself and ultimately chooses violence in order to retrieve a child that he feels destined to train in the Jedi ways. His Jedi companions join in the fighting that kills most of the other witches and later participate in a cover-up to Osha and the High Council that pins all of the blame on Mae. Indara may have provided a voice of reason throughout the conflict, but in the end, she still enables the destruction of the entire coven as the mission's leader and helps set Osha on her long march to the dark side.

All the poor decisions that Sol and the Jedi have made up to this point, even if well-intentioned, invokes the mindset and behavior of a colonizer who uses generational assimilation, erasure of identity and rewriting of history to assert power over others. Indara's warning to Sol not to "confuse what Osha wants with what you want" is a relatively small-scale allusion to the final stage of the Jedi Order's evolution, hundreds of years into the future: generals at the head of clone armies and space armadas, blindly serving a corrupt government and supposedly liberating Separatist planets via aerial bombardment like it's 1968.

Osha now has a father figure, at the cost of the family she had always known. Sol trains Osha like all other Jedi younglings to control their negative feelings; unlike the other Masters, however, his training of her depends on the lie that he had no role in her mother's death. Even if some well-adjusted Jedi like Obi-Wan Kenobi can regulate, rather than stifle, their impulses, other Jedi like Osha and Anakin Skywalker suppress their fear and trauma in order to appear in control without actually being in control. The Order's emotional support system, to the extent that wisdom imparted by venerable Jedi Masters can be called that, is at best inconsistent and at worst disastrous — as in the case when Yoda tells Anakin that he must "let go" of everything he fears to lose. (He doesn't.)

Lee Jae-jung and Manny Jacinto in "The Acolyte" (Lucasfilm/Disney)

To the Jedi's credit, their doctrine does not, in theory, insist on the unhealthy collection of emotional debt. Like the lofty political mission that the Jedi strive to uphold, however, their conviction to perfect their connection to the Force is clouded by a rigidity and haughtiness that pays little account for imperfect conditions and what exists outside the Jedi understanding of the world.

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. If the Jedi Order left a healthy amount of space for its most troubled members to come to terms with these emotions, or a group of Jedi did not take it upon themselves to act as saviors driven by impulse, or Sol summoned the moral courage to tell the truth before getting cornered, perhaps Osha would have trod a different path. But in "The Acolyte," the collective weight of Jedi mistakes falls on Osha in one catastrophic moment. And while the lightsaber she corrupted wasn’t that pure, metaphorically speaking, in the first place, it could be argued that the Jedi primed the lightsaber for that bleeding.