The structure of the episode was a bit confusing. They left out scenes (intentionally, I believe) and presented situations that didn’t make any sense due to the information we were missing. Perhaps you can say this is an effort to generate intrigue for future episodes, but I would say that the sequence of events that unfolded did not make me more interested in learning what the revelations are, but rather they simply annoyed me because they seemingly painted other situations as nonsense. For example:
- Why does Mae hate the Jedi so much when it seems like they were quite willing to negotiate and Sol showed great empathy?
- Why does Torbin feel so much guilt when Mae was clearly the initiator of the violence?
- How did all of the Witches die so suddenly in the same place?
- What were all of the other Jedi doing during this very quick fire/destruction?
I agree - the direction of the Coven fire scene was disjointed and confusing. Mae lights a small flame, which nearly instantly engulfs the surrounding area, then some sort of “reactor room” is shown, causing further explosions/damage to the compound. We then see all the witches dead, their corpses piled up on the floor, but they don’t appear burned.
Giving the show the benefit of the doubt and assuming all of this was meant to suggest some deeper mystery, one possible interpretation is that we’re meant to suspect that the Jedi massacred all those witches for some reason. This would explain why Mae later hates the Jedi, and also explain why Torbin willingly committed suicide, seemingly out of guilt. Of course, it’s a really hard sell to convince an audience the Jedi would do something like this, but perhaps it has something to do with the “dark magic” used by the witch Mother to spawn life using the Dark Side, “an ability some consider to be unnatural”.
Another possibility is Mae believes (perhaps due to some misunderstanding) that the Jedi massacred all those witches, but she is mistaken, and different POV perspectives of the Coven fire will later shed light on what really happened.
Who knows. We’ll see. But the worst possible outcome is probably that what we saw of the Coven fire is simply meant to be a straightforward, face-value depiction of what happened. Meaning that Mae’s little fire inexplicably killed everyone because the writers were too lazy to think of anything else. I lean more in the direction of believing the disjointed footage of the Coven fire is meant to suggest a deeper mystery that will be later revealed via a different POV of the same events.
I guess the general problem is there’s no directorial cues in the Coven fire scene that lead the audience to experience a sense of mystery or intrigue, or suggest something is “off”. Like the sort of directorial cues you’d see in a Hitchcock or Kubrick film where even a normal conversation can be made to feel “off” and laced with mystery/intrigue. The Coven fire is presented in a straightforward, but weirdly disjointed manner, in a way that feels more like bad editing rather than imbued with intrigue. But I suspect there is, in fact, a greater mystery here surrounding what actually happened during the Coven fire.