The Acolyte is over, and I can’t tell if I’m more frustrated or more relieved.
It’s funny, my immediate reaction is to sit here and go thank God. But the truth is I don’t know that relief is the bigger half. They shoved everything into the back end of this season, and it’s hard to be happy about the things that work when the storytelling has been all over the road.
There are people online who keep asking me, can you explain, can you explain. I’ve literally walked it through with you. I walked through narrative storytelling while I was on vacation, because I wanted to, and people still don’t understand. I don’t know how much more there is to explain.
One new rule for the comments before we get into it. If all you want to do is bash without discourse, I’m not going to entertain it. That doesn’t mean you have to like the show. I don’t necessarily love the show. I like things in the show, but it’s a bunch of really nice pieces that never coalesce into a whole I can agree with. If you’ve got something constructive to say, I’m down to hear it. Know-It-All Nation knows I’m here for the discussion, because there’s nothing better than when you guys tell me stuff.
And since people keep asking what my bona fides are, how many shows have you made: I’ve actually made two TV shows and worked on six. I’ve been in two different writers rooms, and I ran my own writers room at one point for a pilot series I had contracted with Netflix, which fell through because of the pandemic. I’m not a subject matter expert in how every TV show gets made, but I fully understand how storytelling should function. It’s one of the reasons my show looks as good as it does. All of this is left over from when I used to make shows.
The Parts That Work Are Great
Right off rip, this is some of the best choreography and some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever seen. We got to see stuff with the Force that we’ve never seen anywhere else. I loved the entire fight between Sol and Qimir. (I guess that’s actually how his name is pronounced. I’m in the middle of a fan edit of this whole thing, details to follow when I’m finished, and I’ve rewatched all of it. There are elements that do work when you string the whole thing together. Once you get past the editing, the places where the story narrative falls short really do show up.)
That’s the frustrating part. The parts of this that work were great.
It’s no different than Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, and I don’t care if you like the movie or not. I like it as a standalone thing. I’ve always said that in the sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker live unto themselves, and they’re missing their middle movie, whatever that movie was. That doesn’t mean either one is better. Those two connect on a level, and when you’ve got Poe literally saying somehow the Emperor returned, there’s a story in the middle that we missed. The Last Jedi was excellently executed and well written. It just didn’t belong in that trilogy. It belonged someplace else, probably in Rian Johnson’s trilogy that’s never going to happen.
Same thing here. The episodes that worked, worked very well. Episode 5, the fight scene episode, was wonderful. I think some of the dialogue got sort of stiff toward the end, but then you get to this one, and this one also worked great.
There’s No Mystery Here
There are people who took issue with my comparison of narrative structure, and the answer I keep getting is, it’s a mystery, it’s a mystery.
Let’s be real. There’s no part of this that’s a mystery. They’re telling you it’s a mystery, but characters aren’t figuring things out. Characters are just moving. To have a mystery you have to have something you’re trying to find out, and at no point is anyone genuinely trying to find anything out. They’re looking for Mae. They know who did the thing. They’re just looking for her. That’s a chase. It’s a pursuit movie. The actual mystery is the stuff that happened in the past, and Sol knows that stuff. Everybody else who knew it is dead.
So this week starts back on the unknown planet with Qimir and Osha having a discussion. Osha, by the way, who has somehow become completely okay with having this discussion with a man who just murdered people she knows very well. People, dare I say, she called friends. Not long ago she was saying goodbye to Jecki, may her memory live on, and she watched this dude murder her, on top of murdering her childhood friend, our good boy Yord, on top of all the Jedi who were just decimated. And now she’s here.
I understand half the internet wanted to rise up and fight for her agency last week, because that was all I read. How could you say she’s being groomed, how could you say she’s this, how could you say she’s that. That’s just the poor writing. Nothing about this turn feels earned, and that’s the biggest issue I keep finding myself at.
Cool Scenes With Nothing Underneath
So she makes a turnabout, and now we go to her wearing the helmet, and apparently there’s this deep dark side thing. Qimir’s eyes turning black is, I assume, associated in some way with her upbringing and how she was created. I guess. They don’t really make those connection points for us. We’re just supposed to surmise and assume.
I know people will argue with me and say, you told us you want them to show you, not tell you. There’s a measure of exposition that is always required. A measure of it. You can’t go all exposition and you can’t go all showing people stuff, because you haven’t laid the groundwork for any of this to matter, or to make sense the way it’s supposed to. When you tell a story, you string the pieces together in such a way that when you get to the next knot in that string, it’s satisfying.
So she’s breathing in the helmet, very Vader-like, and he tries to take it off her, and she stops him and has this whole moment. I don’t know why. You haven’t dropped any hints as to why, other than the fact that she saw her sister in the first episode, plus some vision-type stuff after that and the trauma we know she’s gone through. She’s had no episodes of that type up to this point, and you haven’t shown the connection.
The most interesting thing about these two characters is that Osha and Mae are apparently two halves of the same person, and you barely explore it even here. I’m sure somewhere on Leslye Headland’s writers room board it says season two, and maybe the climax of season two is supposed to be the two of them merging back together. Fine. But when that moment with the helmet happens, I don’t care, because I don’t understand where it’s coming from.
It’s like Leslye Headland had a series of really cool scenes in mind, and when you get to those scenes they gel, they look good, and it ticks us all off. How did we get to something so awesome from all the lame duck nonsense? Can anyone tell me that?
And if your whole response in the comments is going to be you just don’t get it, or you need to understand, bro, stop. Come at me with intelligence. Come at me with knowledge. I’m all about it. The name Mr. Know-It-All means I’m looking to know it all. I seek knowledge, and I say that as a recovering narcissist. And I want to help you guys become know-it-alls too. So help me understand. Walk me through it.
The Switch, and the Senator Nobody Introduced
The two characters have essentially switched paths. It started back in Episode 6 and it continues here. I said to Mrs. Know-It-All way back in Episode 6, watch, Osha is going to end up being the Acolyte. Sure enough, she does.
Osha gets a vision of what’s coming: Mae holding Sol’s lightsaber and killing him without a weapon. So, chummy chummy, she and Qimir decide they’re going together, and that’s it, they’re just together, because only she knows where it’s at. It’s back on Brendok.
Then we go back to Coruscant, and that one Jedi is there again, arguably one of the most annoying Jedi I’ve ever seen on screen. His character is literally there as an exposition machine to transition us between things. We also get introduced to a senator who is the least consequential and least interesting character in the show, and that’s where we find the culmination of all the political machinations.
The problem is those political machinations have only ever been on the periphery. You can call that a B plot, and I know some of you will, but a B plot weaves into the A plot. Andor is the great example. Every time you get into the Mon Mothma stuff, or Stellan Skarsgård’s stuff, it’s woven in, because those elements interact with the main story elements on a regular basis. Here, other than the fact that Vernestra sends people on their missions and is trying to keep some things quiet, it’s off to the side. It doesn’t connect enough for me to care.
I see where it was going now. That doesn’t make it more satisfying. For those of you saying, see, this is where it was going the whole time: maybe, but you seed that better. You make it interesting. You introduce that senator earlier. When I’m doing my fan edit, I think I’ll probably move that discussion sooner in the narrative.
I had a commenter on YouTube who finally put it in a way that was wonderful to hear. What I keep calling rules are actually audience hacks. That’s fair. These are tried and true elements that storytellers have used for years, decades, centuries, because it’s how you carry an audience from A to B to C. What I’ve been calling narrative structure isn’t necessarily hard and fast rules, although it’s taught in universities and film writing and manuscript writing classes worldwide. It’s how you keep the audience’s attention. And because we’ve seen those elements everywhere else, when they aren’t there, it doesn’t work.
So the political stuff didn’t matter to me, because you haven’t built it to matter to me. It’s always felt like, I need a bridge between this Osha and Mae scene and that one, so we’re going to throw in Vernestra, she’s on the way, drop a little seed. She gets a tummy ache and feels sick, because apparently, in the books, she has a power.
A lot of you have read those books, forgive me. But the vast majority of the people I interact with online on a regular basis haven’t. I was a big EU reader and audiobook fan, I love extra stories, and a commenter on TikTok recommended some High Republic audiobooks that I fully intend to dive into. Thank you, sir. I want to know more about these characters, so in that respect I suppose they’re doing their job. But you shouldn’t have to do homework. Comic book movies shouldn’t make you do it, and Star Wars shouldn’t make you do it. This thing needs to stand on its own feet or it can’t stand.
“Unless She Gets You First”
Once you’re past the politics, you end up with the chase. They get back to Brendok, and it’s the haunted house, the voices, the whole nine yards. Mae and Osha have both disappeared from Sol and Qimir, Qimir himself disappears at one point, everyone’s pursuing everyone else, the Jedi are on their way, and it all comes to a head.
And you get this amazing moment where Sol and Qimir meet, and Sol says I will defeat you, and Qimir’s got a kick-butt line. Basically: yeah, unless she gets you first.
I was like, wow, right on, man. It’s deep. It sounds really cool. And then Mrs. Know-It-All reminded me afterwards. She goes, no, don’t fall into that trap. It sounds cool, but they haven’t earned cool.
You’re right. You’re right. That’s the fan in me. For everybody who thinks I’m a hater out here trying to rage bait: I love this stuff so much that I’m willing to be handled. I used to hate being handled. Handled is when you play sad music at a sad moment, you use a needle drop, and everyone in the theater chokes up because you wanted them to cry. Same thing when I hear that line from Qimir. It sounded awesome, and there’s no substance to it.
Mind you, even Mrs. Know-It-All had to admit the fight scene was dope. There’s a point where Sol backs up and throws the two lightsabers at him, and Qimir swings around and does this whole Avatar: The Last Airbender style thing with the Force. That was such great stuff. Unique, new ways of using the Force. This is what I mean when I say they’re seeding good things and not putting them together right. The fights in this show have been next level, bar none. I’m not going to lie, the Wookiee fight scene was dope. The fight that introduced us to Qimir was dope. All these pieces have been really excellent. They’re just not coming together quite right.
The Scene That Feels Like Star Wars
Then Sol has to face his demons. Osha is now the opposite of her sister, wearing dark while Mae wears the lighter color. Qimir tells Mae to kill him, and she says no, I want him to pay.
I’m going to compliment this part of the story, because this section feels like Star Wars. Mae has been angry, and Qimir has fed that anger, but it was righteous indignation. What Mae wants is justice, and that’s what the Jedi are about. That’s what the good guys, if you will, are about. She wants him to stand in front of the Senate. She wants him to confess.
I see the allegory at play. It’s the classic dirty cop story. You could literally see this exact scene done in a real-world context, a police officer who’s been doing dirty stuff standing in front of a judge. The scene isn’t unique or original, you just redressed it, and that’s fine. All writing is essentially that. That isn’t a criticism of any kind. It’s a genuine, I see what you did there, good job.
Because everyone says you hate stuff, you hate to hate. I really don’t. I hate bad things, and I love great things, and this moment was great. It felt like the truth of her anger. Qimir was exploiting it, but it came from a place of, wrong has been done, you did that wrong, and I want you to face some sort of punishment that isn’t the easy out of summary judgment and death.
But wait, there’s more. Osha, on the other hand, nah. She wants him to admit it, and he admits it.
And they made Sol so pathetic. They framed him, and framed is the right way to put it, as the embodiment of everything we loved about Jedi. We called him the Qui-Gon of the show. And then he gives us, I did it all for you, I wanted you to be safe, I wanted you to have what you deserved. He felt what was right and wrong, because Jedi are clearly the arbiters of what is right and wrong. Or are they, according to this narrative.
Leslye Headland and Her Writers Know How to Cook
Then she does something super unique, and there are people who’ll argue about it, because we’ve seen the bleeding of a kyber crystal done differently before. She begins to bleed the crystal, and then, faced with Qimir, you physically see the manifestation of her turn to the dark side. She ignites the lightsaber blue, it begins to crack, and you watch the blue get replaced with the red.
That’s a classic writing move, and it’s wonderful. Don’t tell me these people don’t know the right way to write. Here’s your pull quote: Leslye Headland and her writers know how to cook.
The editing of this thing, and what they’ve been forced to do, is where it fell short. There’s a universe in which this whole show is maybe four solid hours, a four-part miniseries like Obi-Wan was. Part one, part two, part three, part four, each one an hour, each one with the beginning, the middle and the end it should have. There’s a version of that out there, because the elements that come in strong are strong. They’re just strung together very poorly. The connective tissue is bad.
So Osha gets tired of hearing him talk, chokes him out and kills him without using a weapon, and she’s already stepping into the role of the Acolyte. Mae helps them all escape. They get back to the big yellow tree from the very beginning of this whole thing, and Qimir says he can erase her memory, because they’re going to leave Mae behind. The two of them have effectively switched places completely. He wipes Mae’s mind, and Osha has agreed to come train with him.
They never address the fact that the two girls are one person. Again, I’m sure that’s on the writing board somewhere. Okay, fine. I would’ve preferred that be how we get to the Acolyte. The yin and yang, the juxtaposition of the two people, gets resolved there on Brendok, and she goes into the next season, if there’s going to be one, as a singular person at war with herself, still coming to terms with all the pieces inside of her. Maybe through that season you get parts of them talking, and you see the interplay in her own head.
That’s what it means to be a writer, by the way. You come up with good stuff that makes sense and meshes together.
The Cover-Up and the Button
Then the cover-up. They confirm that Qimir absolutely was Vernestra’s original Padawan, or someone she trained a long time ago who left, and she thought he was dead. That’s why he wears the helmet: you can’t detect him through it. Unfortunately he had the helmet off, so she detects him the minute they land. Now we know there’s that connection.
Everyone’s espousing how great Vernestra is, and the truth is she’s just like everybody else. She’s faulty. She populates this whole story with another lie and makes Sol the enemy of it. So now we know why nobody knows about the rise of the Sith. It’s all one big cover-up.
And then we get the button, and the button is the biggest middle finger in the world, because it’s the most self-serving thing about the show. They’ve dressed this thing up in the trappings of Star Wars to the point that they even give us Yoda. Who, by the way, apparently has never had hair in his life, not in 900 years. The camera pans, we see him, and it’s, we need to talk. There are so many holes in this thing as a Star Wars thing.
The Verdict
The Acolyte finale, at its best, is a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and that’s for this episode only.
It’s a 7 just like last week, because though there are many things I like, you did them badly, and you don’t get points for that. The things you did well don’t outshine the fact that you connected no tissue. You dragged along, and nothing was connected well, storytelling-wise.
I’m a Critic, and That’s the Job
I had people on both YouTube and TikTok point out, oh, so the show’s not good because you don’t say it’s good.
Understand something. Yes, I’m a fan of this stuff, but I’m also a critic. My job is to criticize. There are things I criticize less because I like them and they’re done well. There are things I criticize more because, even if I like them, they aren’t executed well. This falls under the latter. There are a lot of wonderful elements in this show, and my primary criticism, as it’s always been, is that they aren’t assembled well. It’s a very messy show, and it makes assumptions that are neither educated nor earned. By that I mean you don’t get a free pass just because you’re Star Wars. You still have to tell me a good story.
Marvel’s the same way. Secret Invasion, I hated it start to finish. There were wonderful elements in it, and they couldn’t pull it together.
I don’t run a channel whose whole thing is Star Wars. I talk about film and TV, primarily the film and TV that I like and that’s in the pop culture zeitgeist. I’m here as a fan critic. Commentators tell you their bit, and if you don’t like it, oh well. That’s not me. I’m going to tell you what I like, what I don’t like, and why. You don’t have to share my opinion. I don’t hate you for liking something, so please don’t hate me for disliking it, or vice versa. We can all play together.
When I used to hang out with my friends after a movie, we’d go to a nearby restaurant and talk about it, and not everybody agreed. People would say, oh, you’re crazy, maybe throw a french fry at me. At the end of the day it was all good. We were still friends, and we still watched the movies again when they came out on physical media.
From the Comments
A commenter on TikTok said, “I bet you won’t post a video admitting that you changed your mind because it’s not rage baity enough.” What he’s talking about is another commenter’s reply to my criticisms of Torbin last week: “LOL, he’s a tired, scared, homesick teenage Padawan. He folded under the pressure. It’s not unheard of.”
He’s absolutely right. My response to him was: okay, this take I can accept. You didn’t try to attack me for having thoughts. Thank you. And I agree with you. Torbin cracked under the pressure. Absolutely.
Then there’s the comment that made me realize why I’ve actually had a problem with this show. Again, this has nothing to do with any of the woke nonsense. It came from a viewer in the comments:
“As a fellow blerd, or nerd of color, I feel exactly the same. This show has crooked Jedi cops, something I never wanted or needed from Star Wars. This ended the escapism that Star Wars is supposed to be and tried to inject direct real-world colonialism and oppression, which is fine if done right, but it used the historically good guys, and in so doing made them pedestrian and small and not heroic. It removes the only people we have to root for and pretends we never should have rooted for them in the first place, and preaches we were wrong to ever idolize them. What an absolute disrespect of what Lucas built.”
I’m not looking for pushback on that. I’m just expressing what someone commented. It goes on:
“Then when anyone complains about the issues of the show, we’re called bigots or homophobes by the cast and writing staff. They are purposefully ignoring us or gaslighting us, and the media at large is running with the tiny fraction of racist trolls and bots and painting anyone who doesn’t like it as a horrible person. How can we ever improve if all it does is pat itself on the back and ignore anyone who says this is not good, this is bad actually? The show broke my heart for that very reason.”
I’ve seen a lot of that. That’s true.
Now, hey, you can love deconstruction. I get it. I’ve seen more than one comment out there from people saying thank you so much, this was a great deconstruction. That’s great if that’s what you want. It’s never what I signed up for Star Wars for. It isn’t why I go to Star Trek either. I watch these things to get away from real life, so when you inject real life into them, you miss the point of them. You miss why they existed in the first place.
One More Video
I appreciate every single one of you who follows me and wants to talk more about this stuff. There’s one last video coming where I review the entire season overall.
I’m finishing my fan edit, and I’ve got a bit of a window in my work life outside of here, so starting tomorrow morning I’m sitting down and watching the whole thing straight through. Five and a half hours, whatever it ends up being. I’ve already seen people online say this thing absolutely holds up if you watch it in one sitting. Fine. I’m going to do that, I want to see how it fits, and then I’ll review the entire season. That’s when you’ll get the Index for the whole season.
Your turn. Do you see the same angle I see, or am I way off? If I’m off, walk me through it. I’m down, that’s called conversation. Keep it friendly, keep it respectful, and I’ll do the same. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.
