‘The Acolyte’ Proves To Be Yet Another Divisive ‘Star Wars’ Offering, But Everyone Agrees This Scary Ass Mask Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

In the seminal 1987 motion picture Spaceballs, a feature-length parody of the original Star Wars trilogy, Rick Moranis plays the villain of the piece, a nerdy and irritable fellow cloaked in black armor. Instead of Darth Vader, he is called Dark Helmet. It’s the perfect later-period Mel Brooks travestying of an icon. On one hand, it’s an incredibly weak joke: no deeper meaning, wordplay, or even a common pun, without any particular affinity for imitating the George Lucas style. “Dark” sounds like “Darth,” and “Helmet,” uh, is what he wears. On the other hand, it’s a perfect expression of disdain: Yes, that’s pretty much the whole deal with Darth Vader, especially in the first Star Wars movie. He wears a dark helmet. In Brooks’ simplicity, he savages Lucas’s.

In 1987, helmets figured heavily into Star Wars, but they had their limits. Vader’s helmet was memorably removed during the climax of Return of the Jedi, at the character’s own insistence, revealing the pale, semi-elderly burn victim underneath, looking up on his son Luke Skywalker with his own eyes. (The fact that Dark Helmet is unceremoniously just Rick Moranis in Spaceballs both, again, betrays a lack of true interest in the material, and represents a near-perfect, very funny dismissal of it.) The stormtroopers, of course, never take off their helmets, a major part of the series’ iconography. That sense of mystery was even greater for Boba Fett, the faceless-to-us bounty hunter who briefly appears in the second and third entries of the trilogy. But Vader was the only lead character who spends most of his time in a hard, opaque helmet, something that remained true in the Lucas-made prequel trilogy, too. There, the helmets were mostly callbacks: the clone troopers who would later become stormtroopers, and Jango Fett, father of Boba – and, in a way, of all the clones. Beneath those cool helmets were… mostly the same face.

Ask different people about the problem (if any) with the revival of Star Wars we’ve seen under the ownership of Disney, and you’ll get different answers, likely based in part on age, gender, and overall mental stability. But it seems inarguable that one thing vexing the franchise is exactly one of the reasons Disney bought in the first place: abundance. Star Wars is no longer six super-canon movies and a bunch of cartoon shows, comics, books, and toys of varying-to-questionable importance. Now it’s a whole system, of eleven movies (and counting), six live-action TV series (and counting), several well-regarded cartoons, and a whole lot more stuff officially designated as part of the story. This means more droids. More aliens. More lightsabers. And more goddamn helmets.

Even I, a person who would like to think of himself as a relatively chill and non-insane Star Wars fan, has experienced helmet fatigue – in part perhaps because they seem to be objects the series can bring out to pacify older fans, with views of Star Wars as rigid and difficult to pierce as beskar armor. So naturally The Force Awakens brought the series back with a nouveau-Vader helmet for villain Kylo Ren, and when Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi smashed it to bits (a good decision; Adam Driver’s face is intensely expressive and the in-text reason for the helmet is basically cosplay), J.J. Abrams returned and stitched it back together for The Rise of Skywalker (a bad decision, despite the fact that the glowy stitch lines looked cool). For good measure, Abrams also helped create Captain Phasma, a second-in-command trooper with… a shiny helmet.

For the first live-action Star Wars TV series, Disney unveiled The Mandalorian, which is basically Fett Helmet: The Series, designed specifically to fetishize Fett-style armor and essentially turn it into a character without the credited actor actually appearing on set most of the time. Then, for good measure, they added an actual Boba Fett show. A helmeted Vader showed up in Obi-Wan Kenobi, naturally. Even the largely helmet-free Ahsoka featured “night troopers” led by Captain Enoch, who has… a face-shaped helmet! Spooky but also: why? Meanwhile, Star Wars merch remains positively covered with Vader’s helmet, stormtrooper helmets, Mando helmets – presumably at least partially because they don’t involve any pesky images of actors. As the importance of this headgear has been codified by the merchandise-like Star Wars logo that precedes the TV shows, is it a coincidence that the two most interesting Disney Star Wars productions so far have been The Last Jedi (smashes Kylo’s helmet, throws Captain Phasma into the fire) and Andor (no major helmets)?

So when the mysterious baddie on The Acolyte concealed their identity with – get this – a Dark Helmet, it didn’t seem particularly planet-shattering. If anything, it seemed like yet another instance of a Star Wars series creating a variation on a theme rather than its own distinct identity.

And yet: There is something about this one. Some of it has to do with the design: Rather than directly riffing on the trooper model, it more closely resembles something out of a horror movie, with weathered-looking metal giving way to a disturbingly lengthy smile full of metal teeth along the bottom. It looks a little bit like the xenomorph from Alien; comics fans might note that it also resembles the Isz, creatures from Sam Kieth’s terrific The Maxx with rictus grins and no visible eyeballs. It feels off-model in the best way.

The design is terrific, but there’s also some function behind it, as revealed in The Acolyte Episode 6 (“Teach/Corrupt”). Star Wars fans familiar with various de-canonized extended-universe lore already suspected that the helmet was the re-canonization of cortosis, a material capable of temporarily de-powering lightsabers, which helped Qimir (the formerly masked bad-guy stranger) on The Acolyte in a massive brawl with jedi in the fifth episode – he could basically head-butt lightsaber blades to snuff them out like a lighter. The presence of cortosis was confirmed in “Teach/Corrupt,” where Qimir further explained that the helmet serves as a sensory deprivation tool that allows him to more fully connect with the Force, and the Force alone. So when he was fighting all those jedi, he was essentially doing so with a more badass-looking version of that blinding training helmet Luke wears in the very first Star Wars while the little spherical droid zaps at him. He was flying blind and also seeing everything.

This brings a new twist to the standard Cool Space Helmet, and what it means to put this one on. When Qimir wears his helmet, he’s attempting to achieve a kind of Force purity, a darker (literally, we see in a POV shot) version of the lack of the attachment that the jedi preach to their own acolytes. The fearsome self-presentation is still there with the helmet’s creepy exterior, but inside, there’s a singularity of purpose that might be even scarier. So when “Teach/Corrupt” ends with the good-hearted Osha donning the helmet herself, at Qimir’s urging, there’s a genuine sense of spiritual mystery that matches and then flips the initial cool-helmet intrigue that motivated fans’ interest in Vader or Fett back in the day. This time, we know exactly who is beneath the helmet; the fear and mystery comes from what the wearer might tap into. (It also connects to the Mandalorian episode that wrings a lot of emotion from Mando actually removing his helmet, just that once.) Leslye Headland (the Acolyte creator who also co-wrote last night’s episode) may have created the most intertextual Star Wars series yet, remixing elements of The Phantom Menace and The Last Jedi as it goes along. If she can make a Dark Helmet seem cool, scary, and dramatically compelling again, anything seems possible.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.