They clearly don’t want to give me a week without saying something. And no, the acting hasn’t gotten any better. But the fighting kind of has.

What they’re calling Episode 5 of The Acolyte isn’t Episode 5. It’s the second half of the episode we started last week, and the two of them should’ve been called Day and Night. You ever sit down to watch something, pause it, go to the bathroom, something else comes up, and the next thing you know it’s a day later and you’re like, oh yeah, I didn’t finish this thing? That’s what this felt like. Oh yeah, we didn’t finish this thing.

It was the exact same length as last week’s episode. Put them together and you have a good 40, 50 minute episode. Episodes 4 and 5 are parts one and two, and I don’t care what anyone says. There’s nothing in this episode that had to be its own episode, other than the fact that I feel like they had a mandate that says nope, nope, nope, you’ve got to fill this many episodes or the world’s going to explode. Nothing happens in that first half that qualifies it to have been its own thing.

I Was Wrong About the Biggest Thing

I was right about a lot of things, but I was wrong about the biggest one. I thought we were going to get a flashback to what Sol was going to tell us about, get right up to the fight, and then they’d put the fight off again until next week.

I was wrong. We got the entire fight this week, and it was amazing. It was glorious. It was a wonderful battle and I loved it.

The episode starts with Osha waking up. She hears a sound, she sees a dead Jedi, she sees a dead red shirt, literally. There was a poll going around online asking who you think is going to survive, and one of the answers was everybody dies but Sol. That was on my bingo card, and I was right. Very right.

And I’ve got to admit, Sol looks really good. When he’s standing there with that blue light flooding him and he’s ready to go, he looks dope.

The Helmet, and a Correction From the Edit

When I recorded this, I said the Master’s helmet must be beskar or something. It’s since come out that it isn’t beskar. The metal his helmet is made of is most likely cortosis, a metal out of Star Wars lore that shorts out energy weapons, lightsabers especially, and this is the first time it’s been canonized. I wanted to go back and fix that so everybody understood I do in fact know it’s cortosis. A helmet that shorts out lightsabers. I thought that was way cool.

The show keeps doing cool things like that. It just can’t get out of its own way, because the writing is so poor.

The Choreography Is in a Different Show

The choreography in this episode was on point all day long. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise, and takes points away because they’re mad about something that happened earlier in the series, I couldn’t care less. Those things don’t matter to me here.

Out of nowhere Jecki shows up and fights Mae, and that fight was pretty intense, especially because the whole time you’re sitting there going, oh my God, Jecki, please don’t die, please don’t die, please don’t die. Jecki is one of the few genuinely cool things about this show. Dafne Keen is doing amazing work. X-23 could not be better trained, and she does a lot of really cool stuff in this one.

Then we get an unbelievable fight, Jecki versus the Master. She’s got Kelnacca’s lightsaber, so she uses it when hers gets shorted, and then hers pops back on and now she’s got two. Her holding her own like that is a credit to Sol’s training of her as a Padawan, and I genuinely appreciated it.

Then it’s the Master against Jecki and Sol together, and I thought the two of them did a really good job facing dude down. It had shades of Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting Dooku, which I loved. And Sol against the Master, the two Asian guys doing martial arts that hardcore, hardcore hardcore, is just chef’s kiss.

I guarantee you the writers had nothing to do with it. As someone who’s written plenty of scripts, I can tell you what they probably put on the page: fighty fighty. Or “lightsaber battle, big battle happens here,” and then who wins. The choreography is on another level. The choreography and the script are in two completely different shows.

Nobody Was Surprised It Was Qimir

That fight is what leads to the reveal that Qimir is actually the Master. Is anyone surprised? Because I sure as heck wasn’t.

As the fight was going, there were times you’d see the Master’s arm, and Mrs. Know-It-All said, that’s a man’s arm. She never once thought it was going to be one of the moms. Never once. I was willing to say it could be, but I thought it was Qimir, because they telegraphed the heck out of it, the way bad writers often do.

What I can’t figure out for the life of me is why Qimir is so much better trained than everybody else. It can’t just be because he’s using the dark side. It’s such a radical departure from what we know, which, by the way, isn’t a bad thing. He’s a powerful dude. But I think last week he surprised them more than anything, because his fighting skills clearly weren’t better than every single person’s. Sol was doing a really good job holding his own.

The way Jecki buys it is rough. Real rough. The way Yord buys it is real rough. Jecki was so much of a threat that old boy had to hit her like the Secret Service, three times, twice in the chest and once in the sternum. I don’t know if you come back from that many stabs at once. And then he’s holding somebody at lightsaber point, to the head, and I said, is that allowed? Who holds a lightsaber to someone’s head?

Mrs. Know-It-All was very impressed with the fights. The story around them is still very weak.

He Never Says He’s a Sith

Within minutes of the episode ending, the usual suspects who like to complain about things were saying, see, I knew he was Sith, and the show breaks canon, and blah blah blah.

Dude never once says he’s a Sith. He name-drops it. Sol asks him what he is, and he says, “I have no name, but a Jedi like you might call me Sith.” He doesn’t own it. He’s saying, I guess that’s what you guys would call me, as if the Jedi have to put everything in boxes. It’s like politics, where you have to be right or left and you can’t possibly be any kind of centrist. He doesn’t sound convincing, and he isn’t staking a claim. He’s telling Sol that’s the word you people would use because you’re ignorant. That’s how I took it.

That’s a long way from “I am a Sith, my master is whoever.” Nothing about this guy jibes with anything we know about the Sith. So I’ve got to wait until the end of this thing to find out what they really are.

And I’m going to say this real slowly for all of you. There’s enough wrong with this show on its own merit. You don’t need to make things up and add them. Trust me, you don’t.

Sol Should Have Finished It

Osha stops Sol from doing something I guess he might regret, and I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. Sol, if you’ve done dirt so far, you may as well finish it and save everyone. This is Batman always letting the Joker survive. It was a bad decision. A very bad decision.

And she stops him only to then sic those flying things on him, the ones that came out of the sky with the wings. What does she think is going to happen? They’re going to give him a stern talking-to? The intent is to end him. So it’s okay for her to inadvertently end him, but it’s not okay for Sol to save them all by finishing this fool once and for all. That’s not logic of any kind I can follow.

It’s not Jedi logic either, because we’ve seen Jedi fight to the death and defend themselves. And this nonsense that Jedi don’t fight unarmed men: he is armed. He’s armed with the Force, and if you think otherwise you haven’t been paying attention. He just took out six or seven people with ease. There’s only one solution for that kind of dangerous. If I’m Sol, you end that problem right then, right there. Anything else is a mistake that’s going to cost you, and it did.

It’s a contrivance by the writer. You can’t qualify for me why this was a good choice. It’s more of the same bad writing we’ve been getting.

The Twins, and an Ending That Makes No Sense to Me

Osha facing Mae felt forced. Mae’s turn is weird. I guess trauma victims will sometimes turn like that. She’s been so traumatized that the minute her sister is still alive, there’s no room left for the hate she’s carried all this time. She needs that connection, something to hold on to, somebody to say I love you to. She wants to rewrite history. And I did believe her sister wasn’t going to let her. I believed that very much. I thought it was odd that Osha was going to arrest her, and then the takedown with the stun was kind of, okay, whatever. It could’ve gone either way.

Then she bends over to cut her braids. One, I wasn’t fooled. Two, I’m sitting there going, what are we doing? Is that why they’ve been so identical up to this point, so we could eventually get to this moment and she could blend in?

Bazil’s onto the game, and that’s fine. It gives hound dog otter something to do. But Sol not keying in on the fact that that’s not Osha felt wrong. Maybe they’re trying to say he was distraught, his mind was muddled. We’ll see.

And then the final ending. None of it makes any sense to me. I don’t know the poem he’s reciting. Nothing makes sense to me about this ending.

A Show That Had to Be Cut in Half to Exist

If this had been a 40, 50 minute episode with the flashbacks I thought we were getting, I would’ve let it be its own thing and called last week a bad choice. But this was the exact same length as last week’s episode. That tells me it used to be one episode and they cut it right smack in the middle because they had to, to make enough episodes.

Look, if you don’t have enough to make an entire series where every episode is 40-some minutes, you shouldn’t be making the show. What are you doing?

And the show is stuck, because it’s sitting between things like The Boys and House of the Dragon, which are infinitely better written. This show is more expensive than most, and the best thing I can say about these two episodes is that the choreography was good. That’s your shining light. That’s your saving grace.

Leslye Headland came out this week saying she doesn’t know why people don’t understand it, this is just the story. That’s fine. You don’t understand why we don’t like it because you don’t want to admit the writing is bad. I’m sorry, it’s still bad. Why are you even asking why people could be upset, or suggesting maybe they don’t understand storytelling? Attack somebody else when you learn how to write, because this series isn’t written well.

Now, I’m still here for it. In for a penny, in for a pound. They’re still doing cool things, and I’m doing my best to latch on to those things with fervor. But they are not making it easy.

The Verdict

The Acolyte Episodes 4 and 5, judged together as the one episode they should’ve been, land at a 6 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

It’s not good. It’s not great. It’s sort of mediocre. It’s there. The fight this week was the best part. Last week’s buildup was interesting, and there was buildup, it was getting good toward the end, and it dovetailed into the good that happened in this one. They went balls to the wall and everybody died. I said jokingly, well, maybe the reason Ki-Adi-Mundi doesn’t know what’s going on is because everybody doesn’t make it. And bro, everybody doesn’t make it.

We’re going to finish this thing out, I promise. Then Mrs. Know-It-All and I intend to do another State of the Star Wars Universe, because I think it’s time to really sit down and talk about what Star Wars is doing and what needs to happen. You can bring up woke culture or whatever catchphrase you want…but this is about knowing how to produce good content. And I’m calling it content on purpose, because at this point that’s what Star Wars has become.

Your turn. If the ending made total sense to you, tell me how, because it didn’t make any to me. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.