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Episode 5 of The Acolyte, Star Wars’ latest show on Disney+, titled “Night”, gave fans one long lightsaber fight with the would-be Sith Lord unmasked and had some of the best fight choreography in a long while.
Fans might have been wondering how the Sith deflects attacks from all eight Jedi Knights with his armor as we’ve seen the sacred weapons melt almost anything. It’s because he’s decked out with more than just his lightsaber and the dark side of the Force: he’s wearing cortosis-woven armor.
Warning: The following contains spoilers from the fifth episode of The Acolyte. If you’re not caught up, stop reading now.
The Sith Lord is revealed to be the person calling himself Qimir (Manny Jacinto), the trader who helped Mae poison Master Torbin back in Episode 2. The Sith mentioned that he remembered Master Sol and the Jedi felt something familiar. During the fight with Sol and his Padawan Jecki Lon (Dafne Keene), they break Qimir’s helmet. The helm had already taken some serious damage as it deflected and shorted out several lightsabers, confirming it had been forged of the rare, ancient metal cortosis.
This is the first time we’ve seen the metal used in live-action, but it’s been used in other bits of Star Wars stories, dating back to the novel I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole, which is now part of Legends mythos. It was brought into the new Star Wars canon in A New Dawn, a novel by John Jackson Miller that was published in 2014, but Wookieepedia cites the making of cortosis-woven armor goes back thousands of years.
Outside of novels and live-action, it’s been used in Star Wars comics, and even mentioned in the now-iconic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic video games.
The trade-off for its feature is that once it’s mined and extracted, it’s extremely brittle like a dense plastic. Hence how it was easily broken even after taking all those blows. The metal also has ties to Sith lore with the creation of the Null Blade, a weapon used that could short out lightsabers, making their wielder vulnerable.
The Acolyte Episode 5 is now streaming, exclusively on Disney+ with new episodes released Tuesdays.
