"The Jedi live in a dream. A dream they believe everyone shares. If you attack a Jedi with a weapon, you will fail. Steel or laser are no threat to them, but an Acolyte...an Acolyte kills without a weapon. An Acolyte kills the dream."
Those are the words spoken by The Master, the mysterious red lightsaber-wielding villain who appears in the final moments of The Acolyte's premiere, "Lost / Found."
We don't know who he is beyond the fact he trained Mae. His face and voice are both hidden/distorted and while The Master clearly wishes to destroy the Jedi, his Acolyte - not apprentice - can only win the villain's approval by killing one of them without a weapon.
Many of you will understandably assume that The Master is a Sith and perhaps who Darth Plagueis (the Sith Lord who one day takes a young Sheev Palpatine under his wing) reports to. The timeline doesn't quite work for that, making Darth Tenebrous a far more likely possibility...unless there's a new Sith Lord somewhere in that lineage we're only just meeting.
All of that is possible, though we believe The Master is Tenebrous's apprentice. Like many Sith before him, he's likely training Mae to kill his Master with her bare hands, sticking to the Rule of Two. It could be he's unable to beat him, and either way, this mirrors what happened when Count Dooku trained Asajj Ventress and Savage Opress to kill Palpatine.
Before that, Palpatine trained Maul - with Plagueis' blessing as an "assassin" - to eventually serve as his apprentice...as soon as Sheev killed his Master, of course.
This makes sense than him being Tenebrous or Plagueis as a reveal like that will only mean something to the most hardcore of Star Wars fans (and there's nothing to say Lucasfilm are going to remain remotely beholden to Expanded Universe lore).
Another possibility is that The Master isn't a Sith; there was a Sith apprentice called Darth Millennial who rejected the Rule of Two and was cast out by his master, Darth Cognus. He formed a splinter group called Prophets of the Dark Side who worshipped the "Dark Force" religion.
That may well be what we're looking at here so don't necessarily expect The Master to be too closely tied to the Sith and Palpatine's eventual ascension to Emperor. There may even be several Acolytes, with one of them potentially a character like Tenebrous or Plagueis depending on how fast and loose Lucasfilm is playing with EU content.
Who do you think The Master is? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.