What The Acolyte’s Darth Plagueis Could Have Looked Like in Canceled Season 2

Somehow, Darth Plagueis returned—and was quickly ushered off the stage, never to be seen again. At least not on The Acolyte, which was canceled following the end of its first season in July. The show, which teased it would reveal more about Darth Plagueis’ plans for the Sith in the decades before The Phantom Menace, was instead left on a cliffhanger. We’ll never know what Plagueis was doing hanging out in that cave, what his relationship to the Stranger was, and what he had planned for Osha.

Beyond the plot points a second season would have explored, we’re also left with the question of what Plagueis would have actually looked like on the show. If you remember, the Dark Lord of the Sith only pops up in a single shot, most of his body and face covered in shadow as he watches the Stranger and Osha from the mouth of a cave. We only really see the Muun Sith’s eyes from under his hood and one skeletal Nosferatu-like hand creeping into the light. While Plagueis’ appearance was described in a bit more detail in the pages of the old Legends books that are no longer in-continuity, we currently know very little about what he is meant to look like in actual Star Wars canon.

But concept art released on Twitter by Saby Menyhei, who worked as an artist on The Acolyte, may give us a good idea of what Plagueis would have looked like once he fully stepped into the light. The art has since been taken down, but it revealed one potential design for the villain that would have seen him in more elegant attire than the hooded and armored Sith that usually pop up on screen. He’s dressed in an all-black tunic and pants adorned with gold trim and complete with a flowing cape and hood.

The look actually makes sense for this particular villain. In Legends, Plaguies’ public persona was as a wealthy Muun businessman named Hego Damask II, who not only ran a mining corporation but also spent a lot of time with the power brokers and aristocrats of the galaxy. The Acolyte seemed keen to follow Plagueis’ Legends history through references to cortosis, a rare metal the Dark Lord mined in the books, as well as the unknown planet where the Stranger was based, which looked a lot like Bal’demnic, at one point a base of operations for Plagueis in Legends as well. So it stands to reason we would have seen the aristocratic side of Plagueis on the show too, a potentially interesting approach that would have fit with the show’s overall Prequel-era vibe.

Whether Star Wars ever returns to the character is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be on The Acolyte. When we talked to showrunner Leslye Headland just after the finale aired, she told us just how much thinking and planning went into Plagueis’ big reveal, a moment that initially left viewers guessing as to whether it really was the mysterious Sith Lord first mentioned in Revenge of the Sith.

“I’m very proud of how we introduced him,” Headland told Den of Geek regarding the spooky one-shot cameo. “I really wanted it to feel like a creepy horror film [and] him to feel different than other iconic villains, which was actually kind of difficult. I wanted him to be in a space that we had already been in so that you didn’t feel like we has just aimlessly walking around. That he had a lot of stature and had a foreboding feeling in his presence.”

When we pointed out how much the show’s version of the Muun reminded us of Nosferatu, Headland revealed that she actually had another inspiration for the moment.

“I was using the reference of Gollum in Fellowship of the Ring,” Headland explained, referencing the moment in the Peter Jackson film when we briefly get a glimpse of the character following the heroes as they journey through Moria. “I wanted it to feel like, you’re pretty sure it’s him, but you can’t totally see the character design. You get the foreshadowing, the important bits, [like] the hand of the Muun.”

Even if we never get to see Plagueis in live-action Star Wars again, we’ll always have that creepy hand…

Star Wars: The Acolyte is streaming now on Disney+.