Star Wars: The Acolyte (Disney+)

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The latest SW series on Disney+, The Acolyte, is due out this summer (barring any postponements) and reportedly takes place 50 years before Episode I.



It's got somewhat of a horror tone to it so I'll definitely be checking it out.
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Last TV Show Watched: MARVEL's Echo (S1:E3).



For those who haven't heard, there will be an extended look at the show with the theatrical reissue of Episode 1 in May



Why is Disney trying to emasculate men?



First look at the wookie Jedi




A system of cells interlinked
OK...where to start...

I told myself I wasn't going to pass judgment on this thing until i actually watched the first couple of episodes and then gave myself a little time to reflect on it.

Just to quickly catch up on my takes on the previous SW shows: Loved Andor, thought Ahsoka was underwhelming, liked the first season of The Mandalorian, but lost interest as the seasons progressed, Boba Fett was pretty bad, and I never finished Kenobi.


SOME SPOILERS AHEAD for the first two episode of The Acolyte. For those not wanting to read further: I was not impressed.

Right from minute one, The Acolyte was pretty much in a nose dive. The first thing that struck me was the bizarre tone of the initial scenes. Perhaps Carrie Ann Moss being in the scene had something to do with it, but damned if this didn't look, sound and feel like some weird Matrix simulation that used a Star Wars scenario as its environment. The fighting, the wooden delivery of the dialogue, the editing, and even the music all just screamed The Matrix to me.

The episodes were chock full of discrepancies and logical fallacy. After the opening fight scene, in which an assassin kills a Jedi Master with what amount to a couple of pocket knives (!!!), this same assassin is shown being told that "No Jedi can be killed with a weapon of metal ..." I am paraphrasing that quote but I found it odd to specifically site some sort of rule of the show's universe when it had just been contradicted 15 minutes earlier. Anyway, this is once again the minimizing of the Jedi, as some youngster takes out a top master with a toy knife. Dumb.

Another example is that the shows sets itself up as sort of a procedural mystery of sorts, but reveals the killer almost immediately, then continuing on with scenes of people trying to figure out who the killer is. SPOILER ALERT: It's an evil twin! Again, this is revealed almost immediately, so not that big of a spoiler, really. It's also a totally sophomoric and contrived plot device that reeks of fan fiction. This had me scratching my head as to who thought this would be a good idea for the initial episode of the show. Another questionable chain of events has the Jedi, who are acting like local police a lot of the time, warping in to intercept a ship where the good twin, who will of course be blamed for the murder, is working. They claim they are "investigating" a murder, and that the good twin matches the description of the killer, but they don't bother to ask even one member of the crew a simple question like "Hey, with this chick missing for a week recently or has she been working here the whole time?" You know, the first thing anyone investigating a crime would ask - where were you at the time of the crime? Nope, into the cuffs you go and we are out of here, you crook! How did they know she was on that ship? How did they know where the ship was? Do they have some giant air traffic control map for the entire galaxy? Really, really dumb.

There were other issues along these lines too, but I don't want to make a 19 paragraph post nitpicking every detail. The above examples should give folks an idea of the caliber of writing here.

Also: false marketing with Carrie Ann Moss as a main character of the show. Lame!

The first episode jumps all over the place as far as locations are concerned, but manages to somehow not do any world building in the process. I think this complaint can be leveled at most of the new SW content, as I have heard this complaint leveled at the far superior Rogue One, so perhaps as the episodes move along they will flesh out these locations, but as of yet, it all seems really random.

This is a real shame, as the writing was one of the best aspects of Andor, so I was hoping they had taken the hint that people are craving solid writing in these shows. Hey, maybe the show needs time to find its legs, but with the short ass seasons we get of this stuff, it won't have much time to do it. I think I will give it one more episode to get things going in a well way, or I will have to DNF this show, as well.

So far
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



A system of cells interlinked
Most recent episode seemed like a giant F You to the brand, its fans, and whatever shred of lore remained in the Star Wars universe. Easily the worst thing Disney has put out in the SW universe thus far.

Just abysmal. It goes without saying that I won't be continuing on with this one, but I will say it anyway.



So, I decided to do things a little differently with this series. Because I don't particularly care for having to wait a week for each new episode, I decided to wait until the series was almost over to start watching it, and just binge-watched the first 7 episodes at once.

My first thoughts - the SW live-action TV series have mostly sucked when they are trying too hard to be all about fan service and nostalgic claptrap. They have relied too heavily on bringing back old characters, creating new characters who are very similar to pre-existing characters, and just generally tried to do different kinds of remixes on the stuff we already know.

From that perspective, The Acolyte might be the first real attempt to to something that's still part of the SW universe, but without relying heavily on, you know, more of what you've already seen. From that point of view, it is an unqualified success. It really does create something very unique that doesn't feel like a pointless rehash.

The connections to the original films are... so small, many viewers might just miss them altogether (how many casual viewers would even remember a character as obscure as Ki-Adi-Mundi?). There are lightsabers and speederbikes that look, yes, much heavier and not as sleek and fancy.

Because this is coming from the showrunner of Russian Doll (which I really liked), I think there are some vague storytelling similarities, but I would like to watch the finale first to have a better grasp of what she has been trying to do with this season.

Overall, there have been some sharp narrative tricks that have enhanced the experience of something that is almost Rashomon-like in creative ways. This may be a bit more sophisticated than a lot of SW fans are ready for, which means they probably aren't going to be big fans of the show anytime soon.

But from the perspective of "let's do something that's not just rehashing the original films", I think this is a complete and total success.



OMG that was just absolutely, unbelievably awesome.

The season finale of The Acolyte wraps up most of what came before it in a wonderful, thoughtful, and awe-inspiring way. There's just no way you can't help but feel for each and every one of the participants here, regardless of whatever mistakes they may have made.

Throughout the whole season, the show was true to its Rashomon-inspired narrative, turning several preconceptions on their heads and giving us new angles that we had really never seen before in any SW - film or series.

This is not a series for the "fanboys", although a few of them may put down their toy lightsabers long enough to actually try to savor it. It is really for a very grown-up and mature audience, for viewers who are able to enjoy nuance and originality and don't simply want to see the same old crap all over again (which, let's face it, pretty much every previous live-action series has done).

I'm so glad they hired the showrunner of Russian Doll, and I absolutely cannot wait for a Season 2 of this. There absolutely has to be a 2nd season, there's just too much of a story left to tell, particularly around Mae/Osha but also possibly some of the other characters who were introduced but didn't get a lot of screen time this time around.



This is a great essay


In Star Wars, there’s always been more than one side to the story. When Luke Skywalker confronted Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Force Ghost in Return Of The Jedi – having learned that his father is Darth Vader and not, as Obi-Wan previously claimed, a man killed by Darth Vader – the Jedi Master delivered a sly retort: “What I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”

No Star Wars story has dug into the idea of a ‘certain point of view’ quite like The Acolyte – the all-original High Republic-era series devised by Leslye Headland, in which a Jedi cover-up spawns disastrous consequences for all involved. Across its first – and now only – season, the show presented a series of shifting viewpoints on a situation with no clear-cut answers; just flawed people making flawed decisions, whether Jedi or Sith(ish) or something in between. It was a unique storytelling mode for the galaxy far, far away, expanding upon the brief Rashomon-esque Luke-and-Kylo flashbacks in The Last Jedi to deliver a multifaceted story boasting stark revelations; critiques of the Jedi Order; a sympathetic view of the personal betrayals that might draw an individual to the dark side; and real, personal pain. That pain is now felt by The Acolyte’s acolytes: the show will not return for Season 2. It feels like a massive mistake.

For fans, there’ll be a real sense of unfinished business. While Season 1 reached a satisfying point in its cyclical character arcs – ‘sisters’ Osha and Mae had, effectively, switched places on the scale of light and dark, inverting the board with which the show began – there are major questions posed for a potential Season 2 that will remain unanswered. Who, exactly, is the Stranger, the mysterious masked baddie? What exactly was his fractious former relationship with Master Vernestra Rwoh? How does the briefly-glimpsed Sith Lord Darth Plagueis impact the Stranger and Osha’s story? And how would Yoda have responded to Vernestra’s decision to cover-up the cover-up? Unless the remaining story is told in another form – novels, perhaps – we’ll never know.

This is unusual in Star Wars storytelling. Rarely has a story been started that isn’t either finished or later woven back into the wider narrative – arguably, Solo: A Star Wars Story might have spawned additional sequels (a Lando spin-off with Donald Glover has been circling in development for a while), but films are finite. A series without a definitive end is left dangling. The very genesis of The Acolyte came from a desire to expand beyond the much-explored Skywalker Saga timeline, rewinding 100 years before The Phantom Menace to cultivate a new era – as a result, it’s unlikely that the questions unresolved by The Acolyte Season 1 can be tied up on-screen elsewhere. At least for now, it’s its own corner of the galaxy.

That idea – to present something entirely new within George Lucas’ world, not drawn from the animated series or connected to a previous film – was one of the biggest reasons for audiences to be excited by The Acolyte. It was also, always, going to be a tougher sell. Sure, its array of Jedi characters allowed for plenty of lightsaber-centric marketing – but it didn’t have a Baby Yoda to capture the hearts of Star Wars agnostics; nor did it have a character like Ahsoka with its own built-in audience; even Andor spun off a character (admittedly not one people remembered particularly fondly) from the $1 billion-grossing Rogue One. According to Deadline, it was the viewership for The Acolyte that resulted in it not being renewed – it had the lowest-viewed finale of any Star Wars series so far. Regardless of any opinion on the show itself, is that really a surprise, given the lack of name recognition? Should season finale numbers be the measure of success for any Star Wars project going forward? A series like The Acolyte would, undoubtedly, have picked up more viewers discovering it at their own pace on Disney+.

The worry here is that Lucasfilm – or the Disney overlords – may be more hesitant to move ahead with original Star Wars stories down the line. The Acolyte was a risk, extricated from the Skywalker Saga. And it took narrative risks too: its unusual structure delivered two equal-and-opposite flashback episodes at apposite points in the season, each illuminating contrasting viewpoints on its central conundrum; in Lee Jung-jae’s compelling Sol, it gave us a Jedi Master character to put your faith in, only to have you, resignedly, root for his demise in the finale; it dared to take several cast members off the board in an astonishing mid-season brawl. And it offered things we’d never seen before in Star Wars too: a Kyber crystal being bled in real-time; a possessed Wookiee Jedi fighting his friends tooth-and-nail; Cortosis armour with the ability to de-power lightsabers mid-fight. For a franchise caught between being reverent to its own near-50-year history and trying to forge a new future, The Acolyte was hell-bent on accelerating both.

There are concerns, too, that The Acolyte ending abruptly will – inadvertently – embolden the darker side of the Star Wars fandom. It’s undeniable; they exist, loud in voice, probably smaller in number than their presence suggests. But before a single frame of The Acolyte had emerged, they were perpetuating a narrative against the show. That it was ‘woke’ (whatever the hell that actually means), that it would be the end of Star Wars, that it was anti-George Lucas, that it was going to ruin the Jedi. The show’s mere existence (before it actually existed) caused ire in the worst corners of online discourse. These are not people who watched the show and didn’t like it (a valid response for some viewers). These are people who didn’t like it before they’d even seen it. It won’t be the intended effect, but those obnoxious and unwelcome voices will only feel vindicated by The Acolyte’s premature ending.

Meanwhile, those who did support the show are the ones being let down. Fans are not entitled to art; artists are not beholden to their audiences. And yet, Lucasfilm getting behind The Acolyte was a statement of intent: there was a story that demanded to be told here, and it would introduce Star Wars fans into something fresh and new. Not renewing the show for Season 2 feels like a refusal to commit to that story; a creative backing-down, leaving viewers’ personal attachments to the ongoing narrative unfulfilled. Sure, The Acolyte – like any Star Wars series – is an expensive proposition (reportedly $180 million). But the financial investment isn’t just in creating the show itself; it’s in fostering fans’ trust and attention and imagination for the long road. A cultural force like Star Wars can’t afford to be one that lets its fans down.

The disappointment, then, is seismic. Which doesn’t take away from what The Acolyte Season 1 gave us. It presented a refreshing take on a galaxy we’ve long come to know; some of the greatest fight choreography in the franchise; connections to deep Expanded Universe lore; a big-screen representation of (the end of) the High Republic; Trinity from The Matrix using Force-fu. Hopefully, in time, more fans will appreciate what The Acolyte achieved – or, at least, strived for. Opinions on Star Wars rarely remain static; this is the way. But like those decisions made by the Brendok Jedi, the choice to end The Acolyte here is flawed; perhaps fatally so. Here’s hoping it doesn’t send more Star Wars fans to the dark side.

The Acolyte is streaming on Disney+