I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that I’m not going to be the person who helps protect Star Wars from itself. It’s taken me a day or two to process this episode, and it’s not good. But it’s not bad for the reason everybody else says it’s bad, and I’m not going in on that. These are genuine criticisms, and hopefully you’ll see that too.
We’ve got another fun-filled, action-packed episode of Star Wars that is neither fun, nor filled, nor action-packed, at least not in any way that doesn’t feel contrived. I watched it with the whole family last night, me, Mrs. Know-It-All and Baby Know-It-All, because I wanted to know if I was missing something.
A lot of people are getting into the woke arguments on this one. I don’t have issues with that, because as far as I’m concerned Star Wars has always been inclusive. If there was racism in Star Wars, it was against the droids. “We don’t serve their kind here.” It’s never been a race issue for me. I’ve never once watched it and felt like, man, I don’t see myself. I thought Mace Windu was fine, but it wasn’t more affirming for me because he existed. I was all about the Star Wars universe. I was about the Jedi and the Sith, the light and the dark, and the epic nature of the story.
I feel like nobody over there remembers why they bought it. What did you buy it for?
Sixteen Years Back, and the Twins Who Don’t Match
The entire episode is a flashback. We jump back 16 years to the event that apparently illustrates what egregious, horrendous crime the Jedi committed.
It’s hard right out of the gate. We start with Osha sitting under a tree, presumably meditating, and there’s this butterfly-like thing that comes around, and she stops it using the Force. Then it stops again, and you see it’s her sister Mae.
And I had to pause it right there, because I had to field a question from my 18-year-old. I mention her age because she’s coming into her own mind and her own way of thinking. She said, “Why don’t they look the same? I thought they were twins.”
You have Amandla Stenberg playing both Mae and Osha grown up. Then you have these two young ladies who are supposed to be those same twins, and on my screen they don’t look alike. Baby Know-It-All’s question was why you’d cast two different girls. Why not have one girl play both parts? I can understand if a young actress wasn’t experienced enough to carry both. I started to say talented enough, and that was rude, and it’s not what I mean.
This is a very delicate subject for me, and the first thing I wanted to know was whether the choice was made consciously. That was my first big hurdle, and I hit it every time one of them was on screen. When both of them were on screen it was that much worse. I know identical twins can drift, one gets thinner, one gets pudgier. That’s not what I was seeing. I was seeing different nose lines, cheek lines, jaw lines. And they grow up to be played by the exact same actress, with the same affectations, looking identical. With all the facial technology that exists, you couldn’t do anything to bring them closer together?
It’s worse because of the earlier flashbacks. When Osha was remembering her childhood as an adult, the girl we saw there was the one who plays Mae in this episode. Mae never had flashbacks of her own, so nothing prepared us for two different actresses.
The Acting
All of the acting in this episode is rough. Sol is trying. The gentleman from Squid Game plays a younger version of the same Jedi Master. Carrie-Anne Moss is doing her best, but she’s not given a whole lot to work with. The actor who plays Torbin doesn’t do well. Discount Chewbacca is still just making noise with no subtitles, so we have no clue what he’s saying or what kind of empathy he’s giving.
The two young ladies are doing their best with what they have. I started to say neither of them is good in this context, and that’s not true. The girl who plays Mae does a really, really good job, and frankly she should’ve played both.
They Call It the Thread
Then we get to their mothers. There are a lot of people out there who want to make the two mothers the issue. I could care less. I really could. That’s the least of my concerns. What I care about is that they redefine and recontextualize the Force in a way that’s never happened.
I’ve read more than my fair share of reviews online, all day, because I’ve been trying to process what I was feeling and see if anybody put it into words better. One gentleman explained in a thread that it’s all about the lens you’re seeing it through. George Lucas’s mythology was fairly accidental, theory and legend melded with samurai, and so this is just another group in that world who connect to their religion and spirituality their own way.
We’ve had over 40 years of mythology and 40 years of understanding how the Force works, to say nothing of every single thing that exists in Legends. Disney made the choice, consciously, to say none of that exists and we’re starting brand new. Fine. But you can’t erase it from our minds. You wanted this property because it came with a built-in audience, and that audience already has a fundamental understanding of how this universe is supposed to work. They’ve been spending billions for decades to fuel everything for you. And then you don’t give them that.
These women call themselves witches, which is nothing new to Star Wars. So don’t pretend this is some big opening of the door. We’ve had women in Star Wars forever. We’ve had female Force users forever, and I say Force users because I refuse to refer to it as the Thread. The Witches of Dathomir are a great example, and there are others all through Star Wars. These witches refer to the Force as a thread that can blah, blah, blah, whatever. It just felt off and wrong.
We hadn’t even gotten to the testing yet when Mrs. Know-It-All looked at me and said, “What am I watching?” I paused it. I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “This isn’t Star Wars.”
She’s the hardcore Star Wars fan in the family, not me. I’ve embraced Star Wars as a fandom because of her, the same way she adopted Star Trek and loves the things that I love. And she isn’t a comic book, animation or novel reader of Star Wars. She strictly knows the movies, with a lifetime of understanding behind them. She’s not into any of the ancillary material I’m talking about, and even she was confused by everything going on.
Lampshades
Please understand, if you like this, that’s awesome. I want you to enjoy it. I’m a channel about enjoying things, and I don’t like giving a negative review in any way, shape or form. And truthfully my review isn’t negative per se, other than to say I just don’t know what’s going on, because this doesn’t feel like Star Wars.
I see the trappings of Star Wars, but they feel like lampshades. Here’s your Jedi, here’s your lightsabers, here’s your Wookiees, here’s your droids, here’s your Coruscant. But the heart and soul is missing.
This reminds me of She-Hulk. I love She-Hulk from the comic books. Love her, love everything about her stories, love the irreverent style. And the TV show felt like it was written by people who didn’t understand who or what She-Hulk was but wanted to tell me how She-Hulk is. This feels like it’s written by people who have no concept of what Star Wars is and are insisting on telling me what Star Wars is. I take umbrage with that.
“I Carried Them. I Created Them.”
Further in, the girls have to get tested, and clearly there’s an issue, because Mae and Osha want different things. Osha apparently wants to become a Jedi, or at the very least isn’t subscribing to her family’s mentality. I saw the allegory at play. Parents, respect your kids’ wishes. It felt a tiny bit preachy at times, but I was able to roll past it. That didn’t speed bump me the way the Force stuff did.
Because then you find out about the mothers. One of them carried the twins to term. The other one, with the help of the Force, the Thread, created them. “I carried them.” “I created them.” “And what happens if the Jedi discover how you created them?”
The Star Wars fan in me goes, time out. I thought Anakin was the only one created by the Force. I thought he was the Force Messiah, the Jedi Messiah if you will. Now we find out that a hundred years earlier there was another Force birth of some sort. It flies in the face of the established stories and the things we know, and it isn’t even clever about it. If you’re going to subvert it and tell me the Star Wars I know isn’t what I know, be clever about it.
(This occurred to me in the edit. They could very well be setting up that Mae’s master later hands this process down, and that Palpatine uses it to create Anakin. I hope that’s not what’s happening. But now that I’m thinking about it, that could totally be what’s happening.)
The Star Wars I know is what I paid for. It’s what I’m here for. If I went to a place I knew sold the best hamburgers in the world, and one day they put a veggie burger in front of me and tried to sell me that as a burger, I don’t care how good it looks. If it isn’t the burger I came for, why do I stay?
Who Wants This?
All of this is killing the franchise. Who wants this? I feel like the people asking and demanding this material are people who don’t really watch Star Wars to begin with.
If Leslye Headland is such a Star Wars fan, as we’ve been told and led to believe, why does she want to deconstruct the thing? And why doesn’t she understand that there’s always been female representation, that there’s always been strong, diverse casting?
I don’t like where it’s going. It’s being written poorly, and they’re fundamentally altering Star Wars as we understand it. I could care less about all the other nonsense.
Why Does Osha Want to Be a Jedi?
So the two girls take the test. Mae lies so she doesn’t pass. Osha, we find out, is very honest. And Sol is unusually involved in wanting to make her feel loved and included. Don’t worry, I’ll help you, I’ll protect you, I’ll train you. It’s very weird.
And they never tell us why Osha is this different. She just is. She’s grown up surrounded by this environment and known little to nothing about the outside world, so why does she want to be a Jedi? Why does she want to change her path? That’s storytelling 101, and nobody answered it.
She passes the test, and her mother tells her they’re going to consider what she wants, because she should be able to make that decision. It’s upsetting, but she’s going to let her make her own choice. Fine.
A Candle, a Metal Door, and a Mountain
Then Mae shows up and gets angry with her. Mae locks her in her room, grabs a little candle, a torch, whatever it is, and throws it against the door. That sets a metal door on fire, which somehow catches the electrical. They’re in a fortress built into a mountain, and it catches fire. That isn’t to say fires can’t exist on mountains, but I feel like they’d be started in a way that makes more sense.
And that’s really the end of it. Osha wakes up, there’s a fire, there are bodies strewn everywhere, and you have no idea what’s going on. I’m assuming we’ll find out down the road that Torbin and the Wookiee and the rest of them somehow killed all the witches. Mrs. Know-It-All said, “No, they died of smoke inhalation.” I said, are you serious? In minutes? Not even minutes. The whole thing happens really fast, to all of those people, and none of them could run?
So I’m going to make a prediction here. I believe we’re going to find out that the big bad guy was also there. The one who’s training Mae killed all of them, made it look like lightsabers, and filled her head with the idea that they were murdered by Jedi. I don’t know why Torbin felt guilty, though.
It sounds like they’re trying to build up to the Jedi being the enemies, the colonizers who came in. All of it feels very messy. None of it’s gelling. It’s just bad writing.
The Verdict
Star Wars: The Acolyte Episode 3 lands at a 4.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I’m going to tell you right now, man, I’m not happy with this episode. It was poorly written and it was poorly executed. The visual effects look good. The music was meh. My overall experience was not a good one, and that’s a really sad four and a half.
Yeah. It was rough.
I’m having a very hard time deciding whether I want to keep reviewing this, because it’s quickly becoming a Star Wars I don’t recognize. I may just do a recap at the end. So tell me if I should keep going with these. And tell me if I’m wrong, but if you’re going to tell me I’m wrong, walk me through it. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
