Torbin- A Character Analysis
So with this week’s Acolyte episode showing us what really happened on Brendok, and with this being most likely the final flashback episode, I figured I should dive in to creating some character analysis’ of different characters from the Acolyte. So I decided to start with Torbin.
Torbin is first mentioned in episode one as one of four Jedi that Mae has been instructed to kill without a weapon. While his former master, Indara, is shown, Torbin is not. Pretty straightforward.
Moving on to episode two, Torbin is revealed to be a respected Master who resides in the Jedi Temple on the planet Olega. Mae attempts to assassinate him while he is in deep meditation, but is unable to do so, as Torbin has been revealed to have taken the Barash Vow, and has not spoken to anybody in over ten years as of 132 BBY. This would mean he took the vow in 142 BBY, six years after the incident on Brendok in 148 BBY. This is important because it is likely he took the vow after graduating to the rank of Knight. However, Torbin is a Master, meaning that by the rules of the Jedi, he would have had to train a Padawan in between his promotion from Knight to Master. Whether he did this during his time of vow or not is unknown, but it is likely the former.
This would mean that Torbin would have had to go from Padawan to Master in the span of six years, meaning he likely would have made Knight after the Brendok incident. This will be important for later.
Also, note that it is also quite possible that Torbin never took on a Padawan. You can really only be graduated to Master if you have trained a Padawan who has risen to the rank of Knight. And Sol is a Master, but before he met Osha, he had to Padawan, and Osha never became a Knight, meaning Sol should canonically not be a Master in the first place, but I digress. The point is, in the span of what is likely six years, Torbin was promoted from Padawan to Master, and eventually joined a Jedi Temple on Olega.
Now, getting to his death scene in episode two. Mae offers him a poison to drink to help him ‘redeem himself’ or ‘find peace’ and Torbin ends up accepting it, and stating that he and the rest of his colleagues thought they knew what they were doing. He then commits suicide, a very un Jedi like action. I’ll come back to this later. Anyways, Sol and the others find Torbin’s body, and the episode continues on.
Now, a flashback version of Torbin does appear in Episode 3, but I will be skipping over to Episode 7 as that is where the true character and motivations of Torbin are. Torbin is a Padawan when we see him on Brendok, and as we heard earlier in the show, at this point in the galaxy, Jedi Padawans quite rarely left on missions, and Torbin is shown to be very attached to Coruscant, which makes sense if he rarely leaves the place.
Mother Aniseya uses this desire to return to Coruscant as a way to get inside Torbin’s head and control him, and while it is easy to accept Torbin is merely homesick, I think there is something larger here. Torbin’s fear. Torbin as a character does not strike me as very sure of himself, more insecure and cautious. Which makes sense. He’s a teenager, and teenagers can be insecure, reckless, and irrational at times.
Torbin doesn’t believe he can be a good Jedi. He fears that he doesn’t have what it takes and frankly, Indara doesn’t seem like the best fit Master wise for him. She has good intentions, but takes the more rigid approach to teaching, which the insecure and unbalanced Torbin doesn’t need. Torbin’s fear is failing his master and Sol and Kelnacca as well. Failing them and failing as a Jedi. So he yearns to go back to Coruscant because there he is free of that failure. So he falls victim to Mother Aniseya’s manipulations at first, and when he finds out that Mae and Osha are a vergence, and that they are his key to getting home, away from his failure, which he now fears even more because of Mother Aniseya, he takes that opportunity.
And in the process, he fails even more.
In the episode, we are shown that the witches of Brendok are indeed selfish in some of their actions, and one of the Mothers manipulates Mae and the other witches into fighting the Jedi. They are actively being needlessly aggressive. But Torbin doesn’t know this. So in his eyes, when Sol goes after him, and an entire planet’s population of witches, mothers, and at the time, what he believes to be Mae dies, Torbin cannot help but feel it is his fault, which he admits to Indara at the end of the episode.
So, sixteen years later, when Mae approaches him and offers him a chance to redeem himself for his failures, he takes it. Because Torbin’s mind has been fractured after being essentially tortured by Mother Aniseya. His head is not a safe place. He thinks himself a failure. In his mind, he didn’t just let down Indara, Sol, and Kelnacca. He let down an entire family and population. In his mind, he was the one who killed them. And in his mind, he failed as a Jedi. His greatest fear. And he then spent ten years being trapped with his own thoughts, in his own splintered mind, with only one thing in his head. The fact that he let everyone down, and that as far as he knew, his greatest fear had been realized.
