Does the Force control your actions? Is there a will of the Force? Well, depends on how you ask. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan tells Luke that the Force will “obey your commands,” but that it “partially” controls your actions. How that works remained fairly vague until 1999 when Qui-Gon Jinn told young Anakin Skywalker about how the Force speaks to everyone “continually” through microscopic symbionts called “midichlorians.” This controversial explanation of the Force has sparked Star Wars fan debates for 25 years, but in The Acolyte, there may be some sideways evidence that makes this idea a little more explicable.
When Qui-Gon talks about the midichlorians “telling us the will of the Force” in The Phantom Menace, it seems possible that he could be talking about the Force feeding people word-for-word phrases. In The Acolyte finale, we got two instances in which characters said things that were nearly identical to phrases from the classic trilogy. These are fun Easter eggs, but from an in-universe perspective, why do people in different Star Wars eras have the same catchphrases?
Dialogue Easter eggs in The Acolyte
In the finale of The Acolyte, there are two instances in which people say things that are direct quotes from the original Star Wars films, but in different contexts. No, we’re not talking about Senator Rayencourt saying, “May the Force be with you.” That’s an easy one. Instead, we hear Qimir/the Stranger say: “Strike him down and your journey will be complete.” This is nearly identical to the Emperor telling Luke in Return of the Jedi: “Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete.”
Later in the same episode, Vernestra tells Mae that Qimir was “a pupil of mine before he turned to evil.” Obi-Wan Kenobi says this exact same thing to Luke about Darth Vader in A New Hope.
People in Star Wars movies and shows also say “I have a bad feeling about this” and “Here’s where the fun begins” all the time. So what? The dialogue is reappropriated constantly to remind us of other Star Wars while we’re watching Star Wars. It's like poetry, it rhymes, right?
Well, with all the mystical Force-action in The Acolyte, there could be a clearer explanation. In our universe, these are Easter eggs, but in Star Wars, maybe, just maybe, this is the Force speaking through people.
The Force speaks
In early drafts of Star Wars, George Lucas conceived of semi-immortal beings called “The Whills,” who essentially tell the entire story of Star Wars. “Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else,” Lucas has said. “There was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events. I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force.”
Because these hypothetical beings exist out of time, the cyclical nature of patterns within the stories is probably more apparent to the Whills than to regular mortals. Regular Star Wars canon has touched on this concept with the World Between Worlds, and the idea that the Force has been imbalanced, and re-balanced more than once throughout history. Essentially, the legacy of the Whills still exists in Star Wars, and the notion that the midichlorians are speaking the will of the Force does seem to crop up throughout all aspects of the saga.
Because The Acolyte is particularly heavy on Force lore — and takes place a century before the prequels or the classic films — it seems likely that we’re meant to read “Strike Him Down” and “A Pupil of mine” as more than just metatextual nods to the older films. The Force is particularly a character in The Acolyte, more so than maybe any other Star Wars movie or TV show before it. Figuring out what the Force can do, what it is called, and who has a right to access it are all central questions to the series. And so, it’s probably not too much of a leap to say that some of these phrases don’t only come from the characters themselves, but perhaps, the midichlorians. If Qui-Gon is meant to be taken literally, “They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force.”
If this is true, then suddenly, “Strike Him Down” and “A Pupil of Mine,” weren’t just lines that came from the minds of Qimir or Vernestra or Obi-Wan or Palpatine. If we look at Qui-Gon’s statement, from a certain point of view, these repeated moments of dialogue or spoken not only by the characters but the Force itself.
