The Acolyte was a mess from start to finish and Tuesday night’s jumbled season finale only strengthens my belief that this was a show that needed about three more drafts before going to production. Everything about this show is rough and messy, and the two very fun cameos in the finale (which we’ll discuss below) can’t save it from itself. Spoilers, naturally.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Osha goes to the Dark Side this episode, and that Mae—by dint of losing her memory—goes over to the good guys. After all, Osha was wearing black by this point and Mae was all in white. How subtle! Then again, it’s hard to tell who the good guys are anymore, or who the bad guys are, because The Acolyte is just so angsty and edgy. It’s Star Wars for adults! Or something. Let’s be real, subverting expectations and deconstructing the Jedi is just so 2017.
The Acolyte seems hellbent on portraying the Jedi in the worst possible light and I might be able to accept this if it were just the coverup at the end when Vernestra somewhat bizarrely pins all the killings on Sol when she goes before the Senate tribunal. But this show wants very badly for us to think that what the Jedi did on Brendok is some horrific crime, when I’m right there with Sol: He was trying to protect children from what very much appeared to be a terrifying Dark Side witch cult.
Of course, when Osha and Mae confront Sol after he does a little lightsaber ballet with The Stranger, they don’t bother to get his side of the story and he doesn’t bother to tell it beyond “I did the right thing. I was trying to protect you.” I guess there was no room in the script for Osha to ask “Why?” and for him to say “Well she turned into a freaky smoke monster and started to evaporate your sister so I did what anyone would do and acted in self-defense.”
I will say that I was pretty darn surprised when Osha force-choked Sol to death Vader-style, though it’s so out of left field that it comes across as incredibly goofy rather than disturbing. I was probably already annoyed when, moments earlier, the Sith and Mae exchange banter copy/pasted right out of Return of the Jedi.
“Feel your anger,” Qimir says, sounding woefully less scary and intimidating than Palpatine. “This is the source of your pain. Strike him down and your journey will be complete.”
Compare to The Return Of The Jedi:
“The hate is swelling within you now,” the Emperor says to Luke. “Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger.”
The problem with all of this isn’t merely how derivative it is, but that is a good chunk of what I find irksome. Disney and the show’s creators have promised us something new, something different, something unique. Hey look, we’re in the High Republic, 100 years before the Skywalker saga! But let’s just do the same Jedi stuff as before, right down to paraphrasing famous dialogue, only this time we’ll make the Sith look sympathetic and the Jedi seem conniving and awful.
Vernestra is genuinely villain material at this point. Everyone theorized that she was the Sith’s Jedi Master last week and everyone was right. She senses him on Brendok and he sense her, quickly putting on his mind-control-blocking helmet. She covers everything up, most likely to cover up her own crimes or failings, though it’s not really clear yet (the episode ends with a bunch of loose ends, so we basically need a Season 2 to get any kind of closure, but I can’t say I think a second season would be good for Star Wars as a whole).
In any case, she takes her concerns to this fuzzy fella, and I just can’t wait for Leslye Headland and crew to “deconstruct” Yoda some more. What Star Wars needs more of is a corrupt Yoda who helps coverup Jedi crimes and frames dead Jedi Masters for things they didn’t actually do. Fun!
The other big cameo is, I assume, Qimir’s own master who must be Darth Plaguies, the Sith Master who will later train Darth Sidious, aka the Emperor. If my colleague Paul Tassi is correct, we’re almost certainly leading up to the creation story of Anakin, who Sidious created using the Force just like Osha and Mae.
I figured we’d get one more look at him in the end, but that’s when we got the Yoda cameo. We also get this look at members of the Senate:
If we do get a Season 2 and this story does lead to explaining Anakin’s origins, I’ll be pretty annoyed. I’ve been discussing this a lot lately, but I just don’t think we need to explain everything. We don’t need origin stories for everything. Or backstories. We don’t need to fill in all the details. We don’t need midichlorians. We don’t need to show so much of the Jedi to the point they’re no longer cool or mysterious.
Finally, I’m incredibly letdown by the big emotional apex of this episode. When Osha kills Sol—because she’s apparently so powerful she can kill a Jedi Master with ease—she has next to no expression on her face. It’s basically the one expression Mae and Osha wear on their faces throughout the entire show, unchanging. I hate to say this, but it’s just not great acting.
We needed her to be seething with hatred at this point. We needed her to rage, to drip her hatred all over the ground, to become hate itself, ruinous and feral. Instead, she sort of looks like she’s concentrating hard, but not even that hard. Many of this show’s problems come down to the script and direction, but this moment really showed how lacking some of the acting has been also. You can get away with a good script and bad acting or good acting and a bad script but both? That’s a problem.
Scattered Thoughts:
- The Jedi on Brendok look like LARPers. They’re just goofy. Vernestra tells them to set up a perimeter but then they all just follow Bazil instead. Okay dummies.
- The one Senator who came to Vernestra to tell her he mistrusts the Jedi Order makes a lot of sense given how utterly awful the Jedi are in this show, but this just perpetuates one of the biggest mistakes the House of Mouse has made since acquiring Lucasfilm: Making the Jedi suck. This is not how you sell cool Star Wars toys, Bob Iger.
- Why did Bazil sabotage Sol’s ship? Did he switch sides? Did our alien tracker buddy decide Sol is a villain also? Oy vey.
More Scattered Thoughts
- I alluded to this above, but who is this show actually for exactly? It’s not smart or adult enough to be Star Wars For Grownups the way Andor is. But it’s not fun or upbeat enough to be Star Wars For Kids. So then who is it for? Consultants? People who have a sort of vague appreciation of Star Wars ever since they caught Rise Of Skywalker on at a friend’s dorm room shindig? I just don’t know who this is for. Not dads and not kids, and frankly those are the two big demographics when it comes to Star Wars, no matter how you spin things.
I’ll add more scattered thoughts if/when they come to me.
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