Star Wars is one of those properties that can be really amazing when it starts to get into its groove. And going back a hundred years before the rise of the Empire feels like it might be a safe bet. But I’m hearing weird crosstalk and criticisms about The Acolyte, and two episodes just dropped on Disney Plus. Should it have been two? I don’t know.
We’ve heard about this show for years at this point. It stars Lee Jung-jae, Charlie Barnett, Rebecca Henderson, Manny Jacinto, Amandla Stenberg and Dafne Keen, with Carrie-Anne Moss making an appearance. And it doesn’t waste any time. They get to acolyting really quickly. Out the gate, Amandla Stenberg’s Mae goes looking for Carrie-Anne Moss’s Indara, and we’re introduced to this very kung fu-esque fighting style involving the Force, which I thought was fine.
Spoilers from here on, because I’m going to be all over everything in these two episodes.
Not the Show We Were Sold
At its core this show wants to give us new things. I’m going to do my best not to hold this against it, but it’s not what we were sold on. At least not yet. We were sold a show that would focus on the darker side, the Sith, the dark side, whatever you want to call it. What we’re getting is an awful lot of time with the Jedi on their side of things.
The problem is it feels a lot like Episode One in terms of tone. You’re investigating some things, they’re doing some stuff, you even see Trade Federation people.
Amandla Stenberg plays not only Mae, she plays Mae’s twin sister, a former Jedi Padawan who left or was kicked out of the Order for whatever reason. Mae has a vendetta, and you find out very quickly there’s a story about her childhood. They haven’t given us all of it, but her village was destroyed, allegedly. Sol and three other Jedi found Mae’s sister, and Mae was presumed dead. Mae is the one you’ve seen with the knives. Her twin, who studied to be a Jedi briefly, is basically doing astromech work now.
Fire in Space
The show isn’t fast to get out of its own way. You have the scene on the outside of a ship where Mae’s sister goes to fix something, and you have a fire. In space. Fires require oxygen. There is no oxygen in space.
The argument that it’s coming from inside the ship doesn’t actually work either. If that were the case, the flames would be almost like a torch, going in one direction, which is the direction the oxygen’s going in. It doesn’t do that. These are wild flames, as if there’s a fire sitting right there on the hull.
I get it. This is the same universe that gives us sound effects and explosions in space. But it took me out of it real fast, and there are a lot of little beats like that. They make you go, were you guys thinking about what you were doing, or were you just being sloppy?
We’ve Never Really Gotten the Jedi
There’s a bunch of criticism on the internet asking why this is about the Jedi if Star Wars isn’t just about the Jedi. But we’ve never gotten the Jedi. Some of you think we have, because you’ve seen the comic books or the cartoons or the animation. When it comes to actual Star Wars, the only times we really have is the first three movies, and there they’re on their back heel, fighting for survival and investigating stuff. Past that, there’s not a lot we’ve seen of them.
Truthfully, I want Old Republic. What they’re giving us is allegedly supposed to be High Republic. That’s why they’re wearing the white capes and the orangey tan, dark tan vesty things, and then when they travel they switch into the brown cloaks.
The whole story is a revenge plot, but we don’t know anything about who the enemy is. I feel like the show thinks it’s creating a mystery box, and it’s not mystery boxed enough for me. We’re thrown right into the middle of things, so it’s wonderful that we don’t have to wait through a whole lot of setup. But I kind of feel like we needed it, because right now you could butt this right up against The Phantom Menace and it would belong there. I know it’s 100 years before the rise of the Empire, which would be 100 years before Revenge of the Sith, and that brings up its own slew of issues. A clearer idea of where we are would have been better.
The Jedi Are Dense
The other thing I don’t like is that the Jedi are stupid, for lack of a better way to put it.
I’m not a big fan of Yord. After the situation with Mae and Indara happens, they’ve put out some kind of an APB for someone who looks like her. So immediately the Jedi go, oh, it’s this person, and they go pick up Mae’s sister, the former Padawan. She was Sol’s Padawan, in fact. Sol’s Padawan now is Jecki Lon, Dafne Keen’s character, the one with the orange skin and the little horns. There’s a world in which they could have given us that transition less ham-fistedly.
When Yord and his Padawan show up, they’re very much, you’re under arrest, this and that. Isn’t this the person who allegedly murdered a Jedi Master? One who was arguably vastly more capable than Yord or any of these other minor people? Why are you acting tongue in cheek and glib? The characterization doesn’t fit.
And I sit here and go, why would someone let you arrest them if they just committed a horrendous murder? Why would they go back to life as normal, in a place where you’re pretty capable of tracking them down? The math doesn’t add up for me, and it shouldn’t have added up for the Jedi either.
Even when Rebecca Henderson’s Vernestra shows up, it’s there must be some mistake, and the evidence against her is strong. What evidence? You have an eyewitness, and I’ll give you the eyewitness. What I’m questioning is that your alleged culprit says, yeah, sure, take me, let’s go, I trust the Jedi, I trust the system. That doesn’t sound like a cold-blooded killer to me.
Two Episodes That Feel Like One
The episodes are each just shy of 35 or 36 minutes, and neither one felt like its own episode. They felt like they should’ve been connected, and like they’re connected to something else. I have a feeling the third episode is going to give me a sense of completion on a specific piece of the story, whether it’s act one or whatever you want to call it.
That’s a mistake that has happened a lot at Lucasfilm of late. They did it with Obi-Wan. They take something that feels like a four, five or six hour movie and chop it up to fit a number of episodes, and the episodes don’t feel like complete episodes.
If you remember Quibi, the service with the 10-minute chunks, none of the storytellers thought about the fact that you have to give me something satisfying start to finish, because you still have to keep the actual chemistry of a story. Episode one here finishes, and while it’s not a cliffhanger, it finishes kind of cold. I was like, well, thank God there’s a second episode coming.
That’s one of the reasons I’m reviewing both parts together. I’ve been trying to break up shows that drop two episodes at the start, but this one needed it. Dare I say it probably needed to be a three-episode premiere, because I’m hoping the third is what wraps up that first act of whatever the story is. The pacing seems off to me.
Pieces of a Mystery
Mae is hunting down people who have something to do with her childhood. We don’t know why she holds them responsible. We don’t know what they did.
One of them is a Jedi named Master Torbin, and he’s been suspended, meditating, I guess for 10 years. As soon as he comes out of it he looks at her and says, “I’m sorry. We didn’t know what we were doing. I’ve been waiting for you. Forgive me. We thought we were doing the right thing.”
They’re giving us pieces of something. But there’s so much incongruity in what’s happening that I’m not pulled into the mystery as much as they want me to be. They haven’t given me enough of the existing story to understand why I care, and that’s the biggest problem. There’s too much dependence on the fact that we’re Star Wars fans.
Carrie-Anne Moss is gone, and I’m like, what’s going on? I’m hoping we get some kind of flashback that tells us what actually happened, one that involves her character, Master Torbin, and everybody else Mae is going after.
The big thing is that Mae is clearly being trained, and the unknown, faceless person refers to her as acolyte. “The Jedi live in a dream. Steel or laser are no threat to them. But an acolyte, an acolyte kills without a weapon. An acolyte kills the dream.” They’re setting up a new type of mythology, and that’s fine.
The Verdict
The Acolyte’s two-episode premiere is a 7 and a half out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Let’s be real for a second. There’s some work that needs to happen. These episodes were a little bit all over the road. It’s establishing something I’m enjoying, and I love seeing the lightsabers. But the Jedi seem dense and a little thick, and I feel like that’s a misinterpretation by whoever wrote this. Show me you don’t know how Jedi work without saying you don’t know how Jedi work. It’s like they took the cop position Qui-Gon had in The Phantom Menace and tried to move along that same line.
This is new material, so I’m not even judging it on the things of the past. Ahsoka was being judged on Clone Wars and the story it was telling. Kenobi was being judged on its own merit, but also on where it sits in time relative to everything else. Same with The Book of Boba Fett, same with The Mandalorian seasons two and three. What this has going for it is everything The Mandalorian season one had going for it. We haven’t blazed this territory yet.
Am I keen on what they’re calling the High Republic? Not at the moment, because at the moment it feels an awful lot like the regular Republic. In the comic books of old you at least had the Jedi with a power pack attached to their lightsaber, something that said this is another time. Compared to the prequel trilogy, this could be yesterday.
So I’m going to hang on tight, and we’re going to see.
Your turn. How did you feel about the pacing, and should this have been a three-episode premiere? And does this High Republic feel like a different era to you, or just the regular Republic? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.
