I finally watched the fourth episode. The writing continues to be so weak. Character motivations and decisions, especially, are unclear and nonsensical.
Mae suddenly thinks that her task is impossible because Jedi don't attack the unarmed, even though she was adamant that they do in the opening scene of the first episode. She's also hung up on that point when she just made a Jedi kill himself (who knows why that didn't count as an unarmed kill) and nothing's stopping her from being the one to do the attacking. Her master didn't say that the kill needed to be honorable or in self defense. That doesn't seem to occur to her, though, nor does going back and asking her master for clarification or hints on how to pull it off. She just gives up, instead, and decides to surrender to the person that she was determined to kill just a few minutes earlier. It always seemed likely that we were going to get yet another redemption arc, but for her to just give up being bad in the middle of the series, and with no motivation other than "this is too haaard," is really unbelievable.
Osha isn't any better. She wanted to be a Jedi enough to walk away from her family, but then eventually quit her training, perhaps because her past haunted her. Now, she learns that her twin sister is actually still alive and must be stopped, but instead of wanting answers and to help bring her in alive, she tries to give Sol the slip, skip town and go back to her mechnek life. When Sol stops her, she thinks that he wants her to rejoin the Jedi and looks disappointed when he says no. Does she want to be a Jedi or not and does she have concern for her twin sister or not? Ironically, it's Mae, the evil twin, who expresses loyalty toward her sister in this episode, instead of the other way around.
This is minor, but there's a scene in which Yord insists that Osha hand over her blaster because it's the property of the Jedi Order and, then, in the very next scene, tells her that he's concerned for her safety. It's just one example of where it feels like different writers are writing different scenes.
I read that the character death in this episode was done offscreen because of budgetary reasons. It boggles my mind that they couldn't afford a single death scene in a 30-minute episode that cost more to make than Godzilla Minus One and that they would do that to a unique character that they've been teasing. We'll eventually see the character fight in another flashback, since it's in the trailers, but it's kind of ruined now.
The show is starting to remind me of The Rings of Power, which was also undone by weak writing and revealed two character identities that were predictable and disappointing. Here, there's a similar feeling that the master is going to end up being an existing character and underwhelming. My hunch is that it's going to be Mother Aniseya, since the master walked up and looked into Osha's eyes like a mother seeing her daughter for the first time in decades and then Force pushed all of the Jedi away similar to what Mother Aniseya did to her witch sisters and daughters in the last episode. I imagine that the clues that it could be Qimir and having characters say "he" are misdirection so that we don't suspect that it's her. Also, the master probably needs to be someone that Osha knows or else she has no more purpose in the story, and probably needs to be someone else who has a grudge against the Jedi because of what happened that night at the temple, since Mae has suddenly lost hers, apparently.
