Television Review | The Acolyte

Analysis

The Acolyte is a show that was very much in dialogue with its audience as it was being released. The way it's constructed, the way its story was told week-to-week, invited discussion and speculation among viewers in a way fairly unique among Star Wars shows. I think this more than anything can be blamed for the show's downfall; it invites close analysis but cannot withstand it, and it might have been better received if audiences had thought about it less. If The Force Awakens was J.J. Abrams cleaving closely to the Star Wars formula, The Acolyte is Star Wars cleaving closely to the J.J. Abrams formula.

I suppose I should mention that, before The Acolyte even premiered, there was a well-developed campaign to cast the show as everything wrong with modern Star Wars. I'll admit I'm a bit perplexed why this show became a lightning rod for racist types to complain about, given that Ahsoka was also a show with a black woman in the lead role and an otherwise not predominately white male cast, and I don't remember that getting review bombed; maybe it did, but if so news of it didn't reach me. I don't generally follow fan controversies, because that whole scene is incredibly astroturfed and also, generally, pretty inconsequential. But in this case, when the cast and crew engaged with said fan controversy scene, and when poor word-of-mouth and poor viewership forced a premature cancellation of the series.

Actually, I think that the role of outright bigots in The Acolyte's poor reception is overstated relative to the role of fans upset that the show, at least as it was marketed early on, seemed to be an attempt to fix what few fans considered broken, namely the Jedi's role in the overall story of Star Wars as noble protectors of the Galaxy against evil, especially as personified by the Sith. I think there's a general backlash brewing against the Man of Steel-style of story re-interpreting classic heroes as flawed, amoral figures. Now, I'll say at this point that The Acolyte is not a show about how the Jedi are evil, it's a show about how the Jedi might make enemies who aren't simply one-note evil figures like Palpatine. That's a subtle distinction, one probably too subtle for even the finest marketing department to convey, and furthermore spelling out ahead of time what the Jedi's role in the story would ruin the twists that the show depended on. So, yes, this show was sold to the public as something for the "Vader did nothing wrong" crowd, which put a lot of fans off, more than were put off by a diverse cast.

In any case, this review is not about public reception nor is it meant to be purely a post-mortem on the show. I don't find the serious hatred of this show to be particularly informed or coherent enough to respond to, anyway. An honest assessment of fan/viewer sentiment is hard to nail down. In this way, I would describe The Acolyte as the Dr. Anthony Fauci of Star Wars shows: impressive in some ways, deficient in some critical ways, and subject to an insane hate campaign as well as a counter-campaign of effusive praise while deserving neither.

So all that said, this is my site, where you're going to get my take on a TV show and no one else's, so here goes: I really liked elements of The Acolyte. I think that, moreso than was the case with, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett, that this was a sincere attempt to make a really good Star Wars show, to make a show that would be a lot of people's favorite. But I do think that the show failed in a lot of what it set out to do. As a show nominally about the Sith, for instance, it fails to really explore what the Sith are and how they function at this time. We actually know very, very little about the Sith in Canon compared to how much we knew of them in Legends. This show promised, in a way, to address that, but it didn't really deliver.

Qimir is, apparently, a Sith; that's not actually made clear in the show itself – it could be assumed but there were elements of his character that suggested that he was only aping Sith traditions – but it has since been confirmed in creator interviews. He's on odd Sith, in that case. He's not cast in the big villain role within the story, so the writers could afford to make him less overtly malevolent than some Sith, but given that we don't have much context for the Sith at this time, he comes off not really evil enough. He's a killer, sure, but he's otherwise basically just a hedonist, which, while not inconsistent with the Sith ethos, isn't really what they're about, either. The Sith are all about the pursuit of power, in the Force yes but also just in life generally. You couldn't imagine Qimir establishing an Empire. Which, in fairness, might be the point; it could be that's meant to be the deficiency that leads Plagueis to reject him in favor of Palpatine. (I see a fair bit of Set Harth in Qimir, and of course Harth was ultimately expelled from the Sith for being fundamentally unserious.) That's part of the problem with deferring character exploration for a later season: even if we did get a Season 2, it would be working uphill to actually develop the Sith in this period. I will say that Manny Jacinto performed the role quite well, well-enough that you didn't realize how little the character really had to do with anything else in the show.

Mae is our other Sith, or prospective Sith, or whatever. She and Osha (both played by series headliner Amandla Stenberg) are the other part of the show that I don't think quite worked. Mae starts out as the driving force of the plot, but mid-way through she sort of drops out of that role. Once she and Osha switch places, she becomes a bystander for the rest of the show, essentially. Osha is the reverse of this: she shows up in the show but is given very little to actually do for most of the show. Who she is, what she wants, and what her values are go unexplored. If we had set out with the knowledge that she harbored hatred for her sister for supposedly killing their family and destroying their home, she might have had a bit more going for her. As it stands, we get very little from Osha until the very end of the show. She was there, but she was really just getting pulled along by the plot's events. When she gets taken in by Qimir, we aren't given any reason why she'd become a Sith until we find out, in the last episode, why she left the Jedi. By then Mae is an all-but-forgotten vestige of a character. Stenberg does what she can with both roles; Osha and Mae feel like different characters to the extent that they feel like characters, which was not always a full extent.

The series isn't all bad. The action scenes are what really recommend it. In early episodes it's all hand-to-hand combat, which is flashily but believably choreographed. Actual lightsaber fighting shous up mid-way through the show, and it is also excellent. The style is not the same as Nic Gillard's from the Prequels (the other show with good lightsaber work, Obi-Wan Kenobi, was very dependent on the leads having trained under Gillard) but I'd say it was of the same quality. It's exciting. It seems lethal without sacrificing the acrobatics Jedi are known for. I hope to see the stunt team for this show get more work on future Star Wars projects. Christopher Clark Cowan was the action designer, Mark Ginther was the stunt coordinator, and Lu Junchang was the assistant fight coordinator; I'll be looking for those names in the credits going forward. They can be proud of their work here; there wasn't a bad or even unremarkable fight scene in the whole show.

The other thing that recommends this show is Master Sol. He's the best-conceived, best realized character in the show, and Lee Jung-jae delivers the best performance out of the cast. Reportedly, there was a desire to cast Keanu Reeves in the role, which would have made the show a Matrix reunion with Carrie-Ann Moss. I've not seen a lot of Reeves's filmography, but I can't imagine he'd have been as good as Lee was. Sol is present throughout the show but he's really key to the in-the-past storyline. This past storyline is what I'd call the good part of the show. The present-day parts have some of the excellent action scenes but otherwise it's either teasing reveals about the past or trying the build the future storyline without spending enough energy on itself; it ultimately ends unresolved. The past storyline is resolved, ant it's resolved well, not least due to Lee's performance.

Sol is how you do a Jedi villain. And he is a villain; his role in the story is wrongdoing. But he's not a malicious person in any way. He is true to the Jedi ethics of selflessness and protecting helpless innocents; he's not a Pong Krell or a Jorus C'baoth, he hasn't fallen to the Dark Side nor is he otherwise secretly evil. He's a demonstration that you can be a good person and try to do the right thing and still wind up hurting people. He's a brave, admirable hero, but a hero wasn't necessarily what was needed on Brendok.

I'm reminded of a couple things by Sol. First is the parallels between Sol's killing of Mother Aniseya and a certain sort of cop killing. Not the sort that's clearly justified or the kind that's clearly not; the third kind, which TV shows love so much, where an officer mistakes someone for an immediate mortal threat and shoots them, only to find out that they weren't actually about to kill anybody. Now, the Jedi aren't police; they aren't tasked with public order in the same way, and certainly they aren't emergency responders. But they are expected to do good as they travel the Galaxy, and they are trained to fight if needed to defend others. When he suspects that Mae is being harmed, he strikes at her "attacker", believing he is saving a little girl but actually just killing her mother in front of her.

The other thing I'm reminded of in Sol, not by what he does on Brendok but the guilt he lives with afterwards: show creator Leslye Headland. Before becoming a producer herself, Headland spent several years working as an assistant at Disney subsidiary studio Miramax, including a year working directly for Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax leader who is, as I write, in prison for and facing further charges of sexually assaulting numerous actresses, something which his role as a top Hollywood producer enabled. Many of Weinstein's victims have mentioned the Weinstein's criminal activity was known to others in his circles, who kept quiet to keep their places in the film industry. Headland has gone on record saying she was never assaulted, nor did she personally witness any assaults, though she was otherwise ill-treated and was not surprised by the accusations. I'm not in any sort of position to speculate how much she knew or suspected or should have done or whatever. What I will say is that I think there may be a bit of her in Sol and the other Jedi characters whose inner conflict revolves around feeling that they didn't do anything really wrong on Brendok but also dreading having to defend themselves against an inquiry. They hope that the world can just move on and forget what happened, but of course the victims can't and won't do that.

Sol's final protests that he did nothing wrong seemed like him voicing something he'd been telling himself for a long time. It's not that he's denying that anything bad happened, or that he hurt anybody; he's saying that there's nothing else he could have done. Whether he had any business interfering with the coven at all is left deliberately vague. He thought he had to intervene on behalf of Osha and Mae, based on what he saw while spying in the coven's fortress. The Council advised the Jedi to leave them be, but the Council wasn't there, hadn't seen what he saw. From what we, the audience see (which is more than what Sol sees), Aniseya seems to genuinely love the girls, but Koril is shown to be abusive, throwing Mae down the stairs in a bout of rage, and the rest of the coven seem to see the girls as a means to some end. Osha knows how to leave her room via some sort of access tunnels to get around the door that Mae locks (from the outside of their room), which indicates that she and Mae might be kept locked up regularly, which is certainly a troubling notion. We never find out what the ascension ceremony is, really, but we do know that it was kept secret from the girls and that Osha was not an entirely willing participant. Of course, children often have to do things they don't want to do or don't fully understand the implications of, things that are innocuous or even ultimately beneficial to them. We aren't outright told whether the girls are in danger or not; instead, even though we know more than Sol does, we're left with similar doubts.

I find it very interesting that the impetus for the tragedy on Brendok was suspicion of child abuse. That's a bit of a heavy subject for Star Wars; that may be why, as much as for deliberate storytelling reasons, The Acolyte is so coy about what was going on in the coven. Child abuse is all too real and all too horrible, but because it's so horrible it's often at the center of a tragic panic. The notion that a child is in danger works, more than anything, to stop debate and thought and drive immediate, impulsive action.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Mae and Osha were in a bad spot, genuinely, since I don't think eight-year-old girls generally don't really want to leave their homes (not just idly, but taking sincere action to try to leave) with people they just met unless their homes aren't safe. But again, that's a call made with very limited information.

Throughout much of the show, the story seems weirdly amoral for Star Wars. That is, Star Wars is a lot of different things depending on the project, but usually there's a core of the struggle of good against evil. That's there in kids' stuff like Rebels and The Bad Batch, it's there in more adult stuff like Andor, it's there in books and video games and other Star Wars media. It's there very strongly in the Original and Sequel Trilogies, and it's there in a sort of morphed sense in the Prequels and The Clone Wars. Even in stories without traditionally heroic figures like Thrawn and The Book of Boba Fett, there are still notions that there are right and wrong ways to be an Imperial officer or a crime lord or whatever. When that theme of good vs. evil isn't there in Star Wars, the stories become a bit pointless-seeming. Zahn's Ascendancy trilogy is a good example of this; those books are well-written, had a good sense of worldbuilding, and were interesting enough to keep me reading, but they still felt a bit hollow since there wasn't much real reason to want to see the Chiss prevail over the Grysks.

The story of The Acolyte similarly doesn't focus on any sort of grand moral conflict; it's all very personal character drama between people who are keeping secrets, seeming to be deliberately acting to isolate themselves from the greater narrative of Star Wars. It also doesn't really send the audience away with some new insight on good and evil, either. There is a sort of message, which becomes very apparent in the end, that essentially boils down to "honesty is the best policy"; this is not a lesson anyone in the show learns, but it's driven home to the viewer in the final episodes. There's a counterpoint theme acknowledging that honesty is painful and not without its risks. So in the end I'd say that The Acolyte is a moral tale, just not one with a moral model.

But that's just in the end. Until the end, it's not really anything, which is a problem not with this show in particular but with a lot of streaming series in general: despite running for eight episodes, it's not an episodic story, it's one long thing delivered chopped up into installments, where nothing, big or small, gets concluded until the finale (to say nothing of the fact that much isn't concluded even then). Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka had the same problem, but this is a streaming industry-wide issue, really.

As for the technicals: I already mentioned the fight choreography looking great, but this show overall looked pretty good, with some exceptions. Creature effects were consistently movie-quality, even for alien characters who only show up briefly. There are quite a few non-Human characters in the show, in large and small roles, and all look quite convincing. Bazil felt pretty pointless, an obligatory cute critter a la Grogu, but he looked fine. Costumes generally looked good but sometimes looked a little more newly-made than was appropriate.

Special effects work was good with a few exceptions. Force abilities (telekinesis, etc.) were conveyed especially well on screen. The two memorably off moments were the scene in the first episode where Osha's on a spacewalk (fire in a vacuum aside, something about the lighting didn't make it look like outer space) and the moment where Qimir gets carried off by bugs, which looked every bit like Manny Jacinto getting clicked and dragged up the the corner of the screen by a computer mouse.

I can't remember a single musical moment from this show, or what the theme tune is, which is highly disappointing for Star Wars. There was a bit of Kylo Ren's motif that seemed to play when Qimir showed up in a scene, which fueled a lot of speculation that he was some forebear to the Knights of Ren, but I'd imagine that's probably either a coincidence or the scorer being lazy and pulling in villain music from another Star Wars project. (I won't necessarily blame the composer, just as I certainly wouldn't blame John Williams for his droid army march being re-used for the clones in Episode II.)

Recommendation & Rating

The Acolyte is not the worst I've seen from Star Wars, not by a long shot. It has fantastic action sequences, and a story that's told engagingly. There's clearly been a lot of effort put towards making something great. But it isn't great, not least because it isn't really complete. I never saw enough of the central characters to really connect with them; it seems much of their characterization was being deferred to a second season that isn't coming. Even if it were, as it stands this season is not a full narrative. The backstory, revealed in multiple passes, actually is a complete narrative and is the better-told part of the show. I don't think the show deserves scorn so much as it deserves pity; I wish it was a bit different, that it had achieved its potential.

If you are a big Star Wars fan who was put off by bad word-of-mouth, I'd say give The Acolyte a shot if you were at all interested. You'll probably like it and you might even really like it. But I don't know that, given the wealth of great stuff out there for people to watch, that I could argue for general audiences to watch this show specifically. I could do that for other Star Wars shows, but not for The Acolyte.

Addendum

What does it mean for Star Wars that The Acolyte got cancelled? This is the first sort of big, immediate cancellation of a Star Wars project that's had a release. There's a lot of qualifying words in that last sentence, because of course there have been a lot of Star Wars projects cancelled by this point: Rangers of the New Republic, the Rogue Squadron film, a trilogy of films from Rian Johnson, another trilogy from the Game of Thrones guys, the original version of Episode IX, a James Mangold Boba Fett film, all got announced early and scrapped a bit later. The Book of Boba Fett got a season but appears to have been sort of quietly cancelled, insofar as Temeura Morrison has said that show's poor reception seems to be keeping Boba Fett from featuring in future Mando-verse projects. But The Acolyte is the first proper cancelled-after-one-season-via-press-release failed show Star Wars has had. So what does that mean?

Does it mean that we won't get more shows set in other time periods? I think that's possible. I don't think the time period was the problem from an artistic standpoint, but I'm a Star Wars fan. It could well be that general audiences might hear of a show set a hundred years before anything else and get put off.

Does it mean that Star Wars shows will have tighter budget's going forward? Almost certainly. As much as things like top-tier fight choreography and creature effects are great, they cost a lot and clearly contributed to this show's massive production budget (estimated at approximately $200 million). Insofar as I can tell, the way forward for Star Wars is going to be a return to theaters (where there's more money to be made) and fewer shows on Disney+, so a reduced overall budget for Star Wars I don't think will result in a bunch of really cheap shows, but I do think The Acolyte is likely to remain the most expensive Star Wars screen project for a very long time.

Will The Acolyte get removed from Disney+? This I really don't think will happen. Lucasfilm has had this happen, with the series Willow, a sequel to the '80s fantasy film of the same name, which failed to turn Willow into a franchise and which was subsequently removed, alongside a bunch of other underperforming shows, to save Disney money paying royalties. I don't see that happening to The Acolyte, because that would amount to declaring a Canon project non-canonical, which I don't thing is a can of worms Lucasfilm wants to open, and because Star Wars is still going forward. It's one thing to scrap an entire franchise, like Willow, but to try to scrap just part and move forward otherwise is a lot riskier. Like poorly-received MCU series, The Acolyte isn't going anywhere.

Actually, on that note, I should say that I fully expect the story of Osha and Mae and Qimir and Vernestra Rwoh will continue. I don't think it'll be on-screen, but, just like with Qi'ra after Solo bombed and killed future "A Star Wars Story" films, I expect we'll be getting books and comics. Indeed, we've already gotten a Kelnacca comic and we'll be getting a book about Vernestra from the character's creator Justina Ireland, each giving some backstory to characters shown in the series; I don't think we'll have to wait long for announcements of the Acolyte story continuing on the page, as well. I do not think it's likely that The Acolyte will get renewed, un-cancelled and brought back for a second season. A second season would absolutely be made cheaper, given a reduced budget and probably a different production team tasked with keeping to that budget. It wouldn't have Sol, either. So the two things that were good about Season 1 (Lee Jung-jae and the great fights) probably would not be present in a Season 2. Yes, many shows like The Clone Wars and Rebels took a few seasons to really get good, but those were a) cheaper, b) for kids, who are more forgiving, and c) from before The Mandalorian and Andor demonstrated that Star Wars shows can hit the ground running. For live-action, big-budget, tentpole projects, that's what Disney's going to want. So yeah, I think the days of Star Wars shows being given 3 seasons to find their footing are probably behind us, for good and ill.