The Acolyte creator and star explain witches flashback episode

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 3.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away got a little longer ago on this week’s episode of The Acolyte as we traveled back 16 years in time to learn what led to the deadly split between twins Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg). On the planet Brendok, we saw how the Jedi interrupted a witches coven ascension ceremony for the twins being led by one of their moms, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith).

While Mae intentionally failed the Jedi test to see if she could be taken away and trained by the Order, Osha decided she wanted to leave and become a Jedi. Afraid of losing her sister, Mae then either (intentionally or accidentally) appeared to cause a fire that then burned down the entire coven. Mae later seemed to plummet to her death — although she clearly survived — while Osha was rescued by Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae), who brought her back to Coruscant to begin both her training and her new life.

The episode answered many questions, including why Mae is out to kill the four Jedi that came to Brendok and set off the chain of events that took her sister and took the lives of the rest of the coven. And posing those questions before the answer is why creator Leslye Headland chose to not lead the series with the characters’ backstory. “I did always think if you were going to tell the origin story of these two characters, it would be a lot more interesting to dip in a later episode as opposed to starting with it,” Headland tells Entertainment Weekly.

“It just felt more dynamic and more interesting," she continues. "As the writer's room and I developed the overall arc for season 1, we started to get really influenced by Rashomon, and the themes of the show started to rise to the top of duality, seeing things from different points of view. So it made sense to me that when you did go back in time, there are a lot of different ways to interpret an event that happened.”

As for why that origin story takes place within a female witchcraft community, Headland says she took inspiration from the Nightsisters of Dathormir seen on another Star Wars series. “I was very inspired by the Nightsisters storyline and the Ventress storyline on The Clone Wars when I was a budding writer,” says Headland. “So when I got the chance to make a show set in the Star Wars universe, it felt like, ‘Well, of course I'm going to do my version of witches. I just am going to shoot my shot.’”

But The Acolyte journey into witchdom is not a mere extension of what we have already seen on other Star Wars shows, as Osha and Mae’s background perfectly fits in with the women they have become. “As the characters developed, it made a lot of sense that they would be at the center of a coven,” says Headland.  “That the girls would be almost revealed not as children, but as the legacy of what their mother started.”

Headland also explains the coven’s mantra: “The power of one, the power of two, the power of many. In our show, the Jedi have the power of many. I think their mother started as one, and the girls are two, and she wants her legacy to be the power of many. So it was thought of as paying homage to The Clone Wars, but it eventually became the story of a mom and her children and the way that our parents have particular expectations for us. And if Star Wars is anything, it's got a lot of parents and children and living up to or rejecting the legacy of those parents.”

And what are we to make of Aniseya’s comment that she “created” the twins? Headland will not say much, but does tease, “If you keep watching the show, we do talk about that and explore that. I would say there isn't one answer to it. Some characters believe certain things, and other characters believe other things in terms of what she means by that. So you're going to have to watch and decide which side of that argument you're on.”

The creator spent a lot of time chatting with Turner-Smith about the world of witches — perhaps too much time. “We were in my trailer talking for way too long,” laughs the star. “And then they're like, ‘Okay, we need you to actually do some work, Jodie!'”

Turner-Smith says she appreciated the collaborative process with Headland and that her character and the other witches “represent something we've talked about, which this gray area. If you were to think of the light side and the dark side as this binary that exists, the witches feel that they exist in the gray. Also, we are putting too much emphasis on the light and the dark. I think it's more about power.”

And who will ultimately wield that power when season 1 of The Acolyte ends remains the biggest mystery of all.

New episodes of The Acolyte drop Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Disney+.

Additional reporting by Devan Coggan.