“What are you complaining about now? You got exactly what you wanted.”

So continues one of the most infuriating and frustrating experiences of my entire life loving anything.

The new episode of The Acolyte dropped and I purposely waited overnight so I could sleep on it. The moment it cut to the director’s name, Mrs. Know-It-All’s first words were, “This is dumb. This should have been part of Episode 3.” I don’t agree with that exactly, but I understand where she’s coming from.

I spent last week walking through what good storytelling is, the multi-act structure, and why this series is frustrating, or at the very least why it’s frustrating to me. Last week’s episode, by the way, gets a 5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. I’m giving you that right up front, because this week’s episode, surprisingly, wasn’t the second half of last week’s.

Thirty-Five Minutes

Everyone’s going to say, but it was 43 minutes long. No. I paused it right when the director’s credit showed up. It was 37 minutes and change. Take off the two minutes before the actual episode begins, the opening and the whole bit, and this entire episode was 35 minutes.

Could it have been tacked onto the back end of last week’s episode? Sure. Would it have made sense? I started to say probably not, but it actually could have, especially because Sol specifically says he’s had 16 years to think about what he’d say to her if he ever got the opportunity.

I’m beginning to feel like there’s a world in which I’m going to have to do some form of super edit to see if I can make this all make more sense.

What I Liked

The episode was fine. It gave us context, it gave us information, it answered all kinds of questions. Yay. Seriously, yay. Wonderful. Ten out of 10 in terms of giving people the stuff they want. That’s in no way, shape or form the Know-It-All Index for this episode, and you should know that by now.

I liked the writing itself. I liked what we saw, because it gave us context. But it’s all undercut. It’s too little, too late. You gave us tons of information, you confirmed all kinds of things, and I see now why they’ve been saying wait till the end, wait till the end, wait till the end. This information shouldn’t have come at the end. I’m talking as a storyteller here, and I do think there’s a universe in which you can edit this together correctly, because the story isn’t being told correctly.

How dare you, who do you think you are, blah blah blah. Yeah, it’s fine, thanks. Just continue down the comments. You’ll be fine.

The Two Jobs of a Penultimate Episode

This entire thing feels like the reveal at the end, and it does none of the things a penultimate episode is supposed to do.

Any TV show throughout history that’s worth a damn, the penultimate episode has one of two jobs. Either it’s setting up the climax, so the very beginning of the final episode is your climax and the rest takes you downhill over the arc. Or it’s the climax itself, so the entire final episode is resolution, finishing off the final moments of whatever the climax was.

This doesn’t do any of that. This is the flashback episode I said was supposed to come, most likely, after the fight started way back in Episode 4. Remember when everyone lit their lightsabers, it looks like they’re going to fight, and dude shows up and throws her aside? I thought we were going to get this right then.

Forget canon. Forget all the stuff people normally argue about. I’m going strictly on story structure, and those are the rules that have been broken. There were people last week who didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. What rules? The rules of story and structure. The rules of narrative, how you actually orchestrate and put a story together.

Because of how the beginning was built, I knew this episode was coming. The info dump from the other side had to be coming, because believe it or not, Leslye Headland is no kind of narrative genius. This all makes sense now. And this information should have been moved earlier in the season, because when you put it here you leave people feeling like none of it was telegraphed. Every mystery seeds and sprinkles details throughout.

Soup With the Ingredients Added Late

As much as some viewers hate to hear me constantly say it, the pushback I’m talking about, the real pushback from Star Wars fans, isn’t the lesbian witches thing. It isn’t any of that stuff. I’m talking strictly about the narrative beats and the story stuff that doesn’t work.

The only way you can tell this story is by having the other side. So when you don’t give that information, and you don’t give any indication it’s coming anytime soon, then me as the viewer, me as the reader if this was a book, I sit here and go, well, what the heck, man? None of this is making sense.

When you tell a mystery, you’re telling us, hey, this is the information you need, and then you imply there’s more. You don’t imply it by not having it. Not having it is why you got the pushback, because all of a sudden we’re sitting here going, there’s something missing.

It’s like tasting the soup and going, there’s something missing from this, and then right before you serve it you add the missing ingredients. It doesn’t have time to cook. It doesn’t have time for those flavors to blend.

In a perfect world, it goes back to that fight scene, the very first time Sol said that when they got back to the ship he’d tell her exactly what he should have told her, what he’d been keeping from her. That moment is why I assumed there was eventually going to be this very episode. An info dump. And the episode’s exactly the type of episode I always thought it was going to be, though not where I thought it was going to be.

Padawan Torbin

To understand the Jedi context you bump into several things. This comes on the heels of numerous Jedi who aren’t Jedi, the way Leslye Headland just talked about in an interview: these are Jedi in the High Republic time, and it’s different than George Lucas’s ideal. Fine. I’m not even going to enter that arena of argument.

Now you have Padawan Torbin, who’s the whiniest, most complaining non-Padawan I’ve ever seen in my life. Nothing about him shouts this kid should be a Padawan. Not a thing. And he’s like this for plot and reasons, because he’s not like this for any other reason. He doesn’t fit into the Star Wars universe. He doesn’t feel like the kind of character we’ve ever established would be a Jedi. I can’t envision Torbin ever having been one of those kids in a room learning from Master Yoda with hair, I don’t know, nicely coiffed hair, I couldn’t care less. He doesn’t fit, and the only reason he doesn’t fit is the writers need him to be this kind of character for this narrative to work.

“But Mr. Know-It-All, Luke was whiny too.” Luke was whiny for many different reasons. He was a kid who was thrown into a crazy situation. This is a Padawan who presumably has been taught to keep his chill, and he has none. None.

A Wookiee With a Metal Detector

All of this next part falls under stuff I actually think is good. What you’re hearing is frustration. Emotional damage.

We open with the Jedi on the planet, and you get this really amazing moment where I get to see a Wookiee with a metal detector. And it is a metal detector. This thing literally looks like a metal detector you could have bought from Home Depot. They’ve added maybe two or three blinking lights. It’s the kind your dad or your granddad used to use back in the day, walking on the beach in Florida. Trust me.

They’re taking samples. It felt very Star Trek, funny enough. Jedi taking samples, okay. It’s a ham-fisted way of showing us they’re trying to discover why this planet was dead not that long ago and now it’s alive.

The only thing that can cause life to be spontaneously created is a vergence in the Force. If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what Anakin was called in the prequels. A vergence centered around a being, a person, and thus he was spontaneously created. So that effectively removes the Anakin argument, and that’s fine. They’ve expanded the definition. This vergence was centered around a place.

I’m not in the camp of people saying you’re breaking canon. I know I said that in previous episodes, because I didn’t have context. This is the episode, this is the information, that would have given that other stuff context. So because you wanted to be clever, look at us, look what we did, ha, you got the pushback. You deserve everything you got, because I’m one of those people that says if you’re the storyteller, I’m going to trust what you’re telling me.

They also name-drop the Nightsisters and those kinds of witches, and they call this a Force cult. They have definitions for everything, and I get it, and it all makes sense within the context of this episode. The second to last episode. That’s why you hear what you hear from me. None of this fits together the way it should. It’s a very unsatisfying puzzle.

The Other Side of Brendok

They split the planet into sectors to check out, and Sol ends up near the tree, which is where the girls were. We basically get to see everything from the previous flashback from the perspective of the Jedi, and you get to see that Sol was there the whole time, eavesdropping everywhere. He reports back, and that’s when they go and investigate. They break in.

Which I didn’t realize the first time. I thought they were on a populated planet, the ladies were just hiding there, and the Jedi were there visiting. That’s what I thought, because you had no context. They didn’t tell the story right. YouTube critic tells Hollywood writer they didn’t tell the story right. Fine. The internet wants to be dismissive. Whatever.

Then we get to the Torbin thing. When they’re facing the sisters, Mother Aniseya goes into his head, and this weak Padawan folds because he’s childish and he wants to go home. Apparently these ladies have the ability to go into your head, and they’re far more powerful than we assumed. That I’m okay with. I’m fine with new information giving me new context.

What I’m not fine with is when you do it at the end and it feels like a weird slap in the face. It feels like this was all held back for the sake of being able to rebut the anger you knew was going to come from the decisions you made, storytelling-wise. All because you want to be clever at the end.

I thought there was going to be a little bit more to it, but no, they really are saying Mae started the fire, and that’s what caused a lot of this. There’s other stuff happening, too. You find out her other mom was egging her on to get angry. It’s almost like Aniseya and her wife were themselves opposites. Aniseya believed what the coven believes, but her wife was angry all the time and leaned toward the darker side. They were light and dark themselves.

Then you get the revelation. Could the vergence have been used to split a being in two? Potentially, the two sisters are, more than likely, one person split in two. Okay. I’m with you, I think, so far.

The Fight, and the Choice

Then the culmination. I don’t understand the translocation thing, because I’ve never known the Force to be able to translocate you, but whatever. They classify it as magic, which means magic is a thing in Star Wars, and really always has been. It’s just another usage of the Force, interpreted differently. That’s fine. They use it to transport someplace else while all the sisters combine, the power of many, remember, and take control of Kelnacca.

That’s why we get the fight, and it’s another really cool looking fight. A lot of wire work. You get to see a Wookiee use a lightsaber and wreck both Torbin and Sol, hardcore. It took Indara showing up to help put him down, because she had to exorcise the thing.

The implication, based on what we saw, is that what she did killed them, because of how the women were connected to him. I don’t think she killed them on purpose. I think she was trying to protect Kelnacca. She cut them off from him, and somehow by cutting them off, they were disconnected from their bodies. I’m trying to make sense of all the pieces here. That’s why they were all laying around, presumably dead.

Meanwhile, Sol has to make a choice. I did see one person conjecture that because Sol had no ability with the dark side he couldn’t help the other one, so he made the choice to save one sister over the other. I guess he’s guilty of that. Then he wakes up, and the episode’s over.

So you get a standalone flashback episode, yet again. After the questions that were raised last week, after the whole situation, after “the physical representation of the seduction of the dark side,” according to Leslye Headland.

I’m exhausted. I’m literally here to the end, so I’m going to be here next week, but it’s been exhausting watching this show.

Storytelling beats aside, I enjoy the story they’ve told, to a point. I’m debating whether it’d be worth diving in when it’s all finished and trying to assemble a better version as a movie. It’s plausible and doable. I just have to see if I’m really willing to commit that much time and effort to it.

The Verdict

The Acolyte Episode 7 lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

On its face it should be higher than it is. But I’m frustrated as a fan and as an audience member, because this isn’t how you tell a story well. There are people who are just going to say this is great because they want to like stuff, and that’s great. I like stuff too, and I enjoyed this. What I didn’t enjoy is where it landed, and the frustration you put me through to get here. So this episode gets penalized for that.

I take things as they are and as they live within the season I’m watching. I won’t judge this by Ahsoka’s measure. I won’t judge this by Obi-Wan’s measure. I’ll judge it by its own measure and within its own context.

I’m absolutely intrigued by where they’re going with this. My problem is this episode makes the rest of the issues I’ve had feel premeditated, in a way that’s frustrating. You clearly knew we were going to be frustrated, because you can’t possibly tell a story the way you’ve told it and expect it to make anything resembling sense, and expect anyone to just accept it. We’re better than that. Fans of Star Wars, you’re better than that. So do better. Seriously.

I hope they stick the landing. I genuinely do. I’m going to be here for it, and hopefully you will be too.

Your turn. Tell me what you thought of this one, and whether this flashback landed where it should have. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.