Josh Reviews The Acolyte

The Acolyte is the latest Star Wars live-action TV show on Disney+.  It’s set in the “High Republic” era, about 100 years before the events of Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  (For the past few years, Disney has been working to establish the High Republic as a new era of Star Wars storytelling, with various books and comic book series set in this time-period.  I read the first eight or so issues of the first comic book series, and then I bailed.  I haven’t ready anything else.  The Acolyte is the first TV show set in this era.)  As the show begins, we’re introduced to a young woman, Mae, using force-powers to kill Jedi.  She seems to have a particular vendetta against a group of four Jedi for something that happened in her past.  One of the four, Jedi Master Sol, takes responsibility for finding and apprehending Sol.  To do so, he recruits her twin sister, Osha, who had been his padawan before leaving the Jedi order (or being pushed out?).

I quite enjoyed The Acolyte!!  It’s a fascinating expansion of the Star Wars universe, and it’s filled with wonderful new characters brought to life by a top-notch cast.  I will admit that the show has some serious flaws, and there were numerous times when the approach taken to the storytelling frustrated me.  This is a show whose reach somewhat exceeds its grasp.  But I respect the ambition that creator and show-runner Leslye Headland (who was responsible for the marvelous Russian Doll) has displayed here.  This show is definitely worth the time of any Star Wars fan who might have skipped it.

What works?

The show looks great.  I really like the look of this “High Republic” era.  I love the gold Jedi robes.  All the costumes and props are terrific.  We get a lot of new characters and locations on this show, which made me very happy.  (If Star Wars never again returns to Tatooine, I’ll be very pleased.)  All of the new planets and locations were very well realized.  As has been the case with most of the Star Wars shows, we’re seeing movie-caliber production values on-screen, and it’s very impressive.

This show has some spectacular fights.  I really enjoyed and appreciated the way the show leaned into a martial arts style of fighting, a new approach for Star Wars combat.  We get some gloriously fun and violent lightsaber fights, most notably in the fighting-filled episode five, the Wookiee Jedi fight in episode seven, and Master Sol’s confrontation with the Stranger in episode eight.  These were all wonderfully unique, thrilling fights.  I was on the edge of my seat for all of them.

I truly loved almost all of the new characters introduced in this show.  Lee Jung-jae is spectacular as Master Sol; he’s now one of my favorite Jedi ever.  He’s so noble and also so flawed, at the same time.  Mr. Jung-jae’s soft-spoken style is a beautiful balance to Master Sol’s tremendous fighting skills.  I loved this character.  Amandla Stenberg is very strong playing the dual roles of Osha and Mae.  She’s wonderful in the way she so clearly differentiates the two sisters.  I almost instantly forgot they were being played by the same actress!  (Bravo to the stunningly seamless directing and visual effects work.)  Dafne Keen (Logan, His Dark Materials, Deadpool & Wolverine) is wonderful as Sol’s padawan Jecki.  I love her makeup design; Ms. Keen is wonderful at bringing Jecki’s personality to life through the makeup.  I love how competent and unflappable Jecki is.  I also deeply love Charlie Barnett (reuniting with Leslye Headland after Russian Doll) as the rule-following young Jedi Knight Yord.  I loved what a dork Yord was!!  I love the moment when the show allows us to see Yord’s uncertainty in the premiere, in the moment before he confronts Osha in her room.  And whoever came up with the idea of showing him steaming his Jedi robes (to get them nice and neat!) is a genius.  Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix) was phenomenal as the tough, super bad-ass Jedi Master Indara.  And then there is Manny Jacinto (The Good Place), who is absolutely note-perfect as the shady Qimir.  I was so happy to see Mr. Jacinto back on my TV screen!  He crushes this role, perfectly playing all the different shades of this character.  Amazing.

I liked the structure of the show.  I liked the mystery.  (I particularly like the way the mystery quickly flipped from being about WHO was killing Jedi to WHY; that was a smart turn.)  I liked the tone of the show, and how dark Ms. Headland was willing to go with the story.  The show truly shocked me, multiple times!!  Episode five is a barn-burner, and I was pleased by how they stuck the landing in episode eight.  A lesser series might have flinched in the end and pulled away from the darkness, but this is a show called The Acolyte after all, and they had the strength and boldness to give the show the correct ending.  I was impressed.

What doesn’t work?

The show takes a “mystery box” approach to the storytelling, keeping many details of the backstory secret until the end of the season.  I don’t like this approach, and I often complain about it when I see it in modern TV shows.  Unless it’s done spectacularly well, it makes the storytelling too confusing and it undermines the drama.  If I don’t understand a character’s motivations, then I’m less emotionally connected to what I’m watching happen.  There are exchanges between Sol and the Stranger in episode five that don’t make sense at the time because we don’t know what their history is.  I guess that might play differently upon a rewatch, but a good show or movie needs to work the first time you see it.

I felt that too much was left hanging or unexplained in the end.  For a show that’s the run-time of two movies, and that devoted two full episodes to flashbacks, I was left with far too many questions about what actually happened on Brendok.  Who were the coven of witches, and what connection did they have to the Nightsisters?  What were they doing there?  How had they created Mae and Osha?  What exactly was happening with that pit and the initiation ceremony glimpsed in episode three?  What became of Mother Koril?  There are plenty of other questions as well.  The show hints at the connection between The Stranger and Jedi Master Vernestra, but leaves that story untold.  We never learn if the Stranger is indeed a Sith, and if so, does the “rule of two” that the Jedi spoke of in the prequels apply?  (We have no way of knowing if the Jedi are correct in what they know of the Sith, who have been gone or in hiding for a millennia at that point.)  If the rule of two does apply, is the Stranger the Master or the Apprentice?  I spent the entire series trying to guess who the Master and Apprentice was — I’d guessed the Stranger was actually the Sith apprentice and he was searching for an Acolyte, sort of how Vader tried to convince Luke to join him in the OT — but the show weirdly never actually clarifies this.

In the last few episodes of the season, they introduce a whole new storyline about tensions between the Jedi and the Republic, personified by Senator Rayencourt (David Harewood), who doesn’t trust the Jedi.  In a magnificent speech, he lays out legitimate reasons for his position, and they’re hard to argue with!!  It’s a great summation of the flaws we’ve seen in the Jedi order, as depicted in the Prequels and subsequent Star Wars stories.  So what’s the problem?  First of all, I think this story thread was introduced way too late in the season; I wish we’d had much more time to explore this character and this perspective on the Jedi.

But the core issue is connected to a key bit of ambivalence I have about this show.  On the one hand, I love the show for how it explores the shades of grey with the Jedi.  It’s cool to see the Jedi as noble but also flawed.  I perked up as the season unfolded and it became clear that the four Jedi on Brendok might have done a Really Bad Thing in the past, and that maybe Mae’s anger was justified.  Similarly to the way in which Dave Filoni has spent years using his Star Wars shows to rehabilitate the Prequels, giving concepts and life to what seemed flat in those films, it was intriguing to me to see in this show an attempt to plant seeds to explain how lame and flawed the Jedi were in the Prequels.

On the other hand, as one of my friends put it to me: “what if they ever actually showed us Jedi being COOL?”  Yes!!  I want that!  Ever since the Prequels, we’ve seen flawed Jedi.  But when I grew up, with just the OT as the only Star Wars out there, I always imagined that before Vader and the Emperor destroyed the Jedi Knights, they were awesome!!  So why doesn’t Star Wars ever want to give us a badass, noble, awesome Jedi hero anymore, despite all these stories told in the pre-Empire times??

This also connects to my usual complaints about prequels.  I hate prequels because in general I think they are dead-end storytelling.  We know the Sith aren’t going to reveal themselves to the Jedi for another hundred years, just as we know the Jedi aren’t going to solve their internal problems.  So we know we’re not really going to see anything major happening in the universe, and the narrative has to tie itself into knots to make sure no one actually learns anything and the events we’re watching stay secret.  (This reminds me of the first two seasons of the awful Star Trek: Discovery, which is not a positive connection.)

The timeframe also feels off to me. 100 years before The Phantom Menace feels too recent for the Jedi to be menaced by a Sith Lord (or a powerful Dark Side user, since we don’t know what exactly the Stranger is), because the Jedi Council didn’t believe, in Episode I, that Qui-Gon had encountered a Sith.  “The Sith are extinct, they have been for nearly a millennium,” Jedi Master Ki-Adi Mundi famously states.  I almost wish the show had been set FURTHER in the past, maybe 500 years or more.  That might then have felt like the show would be less constrained by what we already knew from The Phantom Menace.

Shall we dig deeper?  Beware SPOILERS AHEAD!!  Seriously!!

One aspect of the show’s narrative that I liked a lot (and that I successfully predicted in the early going) was the way in which Mae and Osha’s storylines crossed.  This show is called The Acolyte, so I figured it had to be about a character’s fall to the Dark Side.  At first I thought that would be Mae, and we’d follow in flashbacks how she hooked up with the Stranger.  But it was a far stronger choice to introduce us to kind, noble Osha, and then tell the story of her fall.  That was very well done, and it played out very smoothly over this season.

And as I alluded to above, I was glad they didn’t flinch with the ending.  This had to end with the death of Sol.  But Sol was such a great new character that I wasn’t sure they’d be able to write him off the show (especially since Ms. Headland has said she’s mapped out three seasons of the show).  But they did, and it was awesome and tragic, just the way it should have been.

Speaking of guts: episode five!! They really succeeded in faking me out by introducing all those nameless “red shirt” Jedi, and then having the Stranger BRUTALLY murder both Jecki and Yord!!  I did NOT see that coming!!!  I was upset, because I loved both those characters and felt they both had so much unrealized potential.  But, of course, that’s the point, and what made their deaths feel so awful.  I was very impressed.

I predicted that Manny Jacinto’s character was the villain, so the show didn’t succeed in that being a surprise for me.  But that didn’t impact my enjoyment of this character!!  I loved how badass and evil he was!!  I loved his awesome and scary-looking mask, and I marveled at his buff arms!!  I also loved how sexy he was; it was a fascinating twist to have Osha’s seduction to the Dark Side be a literal seduction.  That was well done.  Also: I loved seeing the Stranger levitate!  Very cool.  (And don’t think I didn’t notice how the scar marks on his back were clearly made by Vernestra’s lightsaber whip!)

I enjoyed the show’s many connections to Star Wars lore, much of which wasn’t officially canon yet.  I was overjoyed to actually see on-screen a Sith corrupting a Kyber crystal and turning a lightsaber red!!  That was awesome!!  I was thrilled to get a brief glimpse of Darth Plagueis, the Sith Lord who trained Palpatine.  (Palpatine talked about him to Anakin in Episode III, and the wonderful “Legends” novel Darth Plagueis, by James Luceno, fleshed out his story.)  It’s a nice bit of adherence to non-canon lore to keep Plagueis as a Munn, a very weird, non-human alien.  I hope we get to see more of Plagueis’ story if this show returns for the future.  Speaking of connections to non-canon novels, it was cool that the Stranger’s mask and gauntlets were made out of Cortosis, which could deflect lightsabers.  (Cortosis was apparently first introduced in Michael Stackpole’s novel I, Jedi, from 1998.  Very cool.)

After wondering how we could apparently be seeing Sith only 100 years before The Phantom Menace, when we’d been told in that movie that they’d been extinct for a thousand years, I was delighted and thrilled to see the Jedi who’d spoken that line, Ki-Adi Mundi, appear in a brief scene with other Jedi!!  That was an awesomely cool connection for the hard-core Star Wars fans who noticed that.  It clearly indicated that the makers of this show were well aware that the events of this show potentially conflicted with that line of dialogue.  I liked the idea at the end of this season that we’re seeing a purposeful cover-up by the Jedi.  Or, at least, by Master Vernestra.

Which brings us to that glimpse of Yoda at the very end of the season.  Now I need to know: what did Yoda know and when did he know it??

It’s an intriguing note on which to end.  This season was very enjoyable, but there are a lot of loose threads, and the story feels unfinished.  I hope Ms. Headland and her team are able to make the other two seasons she apparently has planned.  I feel like this could be the start of a very cool, special Star Wars story.  As it is, The Acolyte is great, but it feels incomplete, and not completely satisfying in the end.  Still, I had a lot of fun watching it, and it’s a show I do look forward to rewatching.  I hope we get the two additional seasons Ms. Headland wants to make!

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