Honestly, the Jedi Really Aren’t That Good at Their Job

The Jedi—the galaxy’s supreme spiritual peace-keepers, warriors, defenders of peace and justice, and wielders of the Force. Jedi are trained from a young age to carry out their roles and must show themselves to be truly capable. So why, then, are some of them so crap at their jobs?

The Acolyte, Disney+’s newest addition to the Star Wars universe, finally ended with episode 8, “The Acolyte.” The series has taken us back in time, a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, where we see the Jedi Order thriving during the High Republic era. Naturally, we meet several new Jedi, with one of The Acolyte’s main characters being Sol, played by Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae.

Are The Acolyte’s Jedi even trying?

Sol is considered to be a strong and wise Jedi Master and has been a Jedi for some time, having taken on at least two Padawans—Osha and Jecki Lon. Despite his experience, Sol makes several mistakes throughout the season, and I am not even talking about the major mistake that set the whole story in motion; I’m talking about small stupid mistakes that I cannot believe a Jedi Master would make. These missteps raise an important question: are the Jedi receiving adequate lessons on law enforcement?

The mistake that tipped me over the edge came at the beginning of the final episode when he restrains Mae on his ship but fails to check her pockets, allowing her to take out her sister’s PIP droid and set herself free. This baffled me—if you are restraining someone, if you know they are potentially dangerous, why on earth would you not check them for weapons or other items they can use?! These are Jedi, trained from an extremely young age, but clearly, they aren’t taught basic procedures. What are they teaching them at the Jedi Temple? Sure, fighting skills and Force abilities are super useful, but if you can’t do something as simple as check someone’s pockets before taking them into custody, then I don’t know what to tell you.

There are other moments throughout the show, and the entire franchise if we’re being honest, where the Jedi make silly, unnecessary mistakes like this. In The Acolyte episode 2, “Revenge / Justice,” the surveillance team decides to just stop what they’re doing and have a chat, long enough to conveniently let The Stranger and Mae fight right in front of them and then escape. Sure, they need to escape for plot purposes, but could they not have done it in a way that doesn’t make the Jedi look incompetent?

The Acolyte was not focused on the details

The above is just a symptom though of the show overall, where keeping the plot moving seemed to be all that mattered, even at the cost of the show’s believability. How did a mountain made of rock become so flammable? How did Indara pulling Kelnacca out of his trance somehow cause all those witches to die or pass out? Also, what happened to the witches’ bodies? Unless someone went and cleaned them up, their skeletons should still be there, and that would have made Osha’s horror and despair at the end a little more convincing.

It just seems like the writers didn’t care how they got to a certain point, as long as they got there, and it came at the expense of character-building and plausibility. Sadly, it has me questioning the Jedi’s ability to do the simplest aspect of their job.