A Sith by Another Other Name

What does Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. even mean anymore? When you look at a long-running franchise, you tend to be able to pick out thematic ideas that you can use to define what a franchise is all about. Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture. is, generally speaking, about the hope for our future. Sharply divided politics, sexism, racism, hate and greed and anything else bad you can think of, all of that is solved in the future utopia of the Federation. Threats are external and the general goodness of the Federation eventually wins the day. Even in a blasted out future where the Federation has almost dissolved, all it takes is hope and pluck and a reminder of what the Federation stands for to get the galaxy back on track.

I’m sure you could find many, many franchises like this. The MatrixA speculative future story with superhero and anime influences, The Matrix not only pushed viewers to think about the nature of their own reality but also expanded what filmmakers could do with action sequences and filming. It then launched a series of movies, games, and comics, creating a franchise still talked about today. is about choice. TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. is about battling fate. Buckaroo Banzai is about being cool in the 1980s. A good franchise can be boiled down to the core idea or theme or theology it’s ascribed to. That theme gives a throughline for the franchise, and so long as the series stays the course and continues to do right by its ideals, it will likely maintain the base quality needed to keep its fans engaged. But thinking over it, I’m not actually certain I understand what Star Wars is actually about. Not now, anyway.

Back when Star Wars was just the Original Trilogy, it was easy to see the theme because the movie basically told us about it. There’s a good side and a bad side to the Force, and in a war when evil, ascribed to the bad side, has taken over the galaxy, a hope and goodness is what is needed to overthrow evil. Hell, the first movie was eventually retitled A New Hope just to underline that point. And then when the prequels came out, the series shifted to a character study of Anakin Skywalker, watching his rise, fall, and redemption as he fell to the Dark Side and then was brought back to goodness by his son, Luke. The prequels weren’t as strong as the original trilogy, in part because watching events we already knew the outcome for is less interesting than seeing something wholly new (and also, George Lucas is bad at writing politics), but we can at least understand that throughline.

But then the franchise kept going. At first it was just The Clone Wars, filling in details between Episode II and Episode III, to give us more of a story we knew. Except once George Lucas sold his studio (and all rights associated) to Disney, the franchise kept going. A Sequel Trilogy of films came out and there was no plan in place to guide their story. Additional films were released to fill in more details we hadn’t seen but did already know from context in other films. More works were added on in various eras of the timeline, putting in more adventure. But at a certain point the idea that Star Wars was meant to be about something was lost. Is it a study of good guys and bad guys? Well, The Mandalorian (at least in its first season) was much more shades of gray. Was it a study of the Empire? Then why do the sequels take place after the fall of Palpatine (who then, somehow, comes back). What are we really talking about here?

When I discuss Star Wars I call it “the one with laser swords and space wizards”, and, really, that’s about the best summary of the franchise I can define (which is also why works like Rogue One and Andor stand out to me since they don’t have laser swords or space wizards but are still in the franchise). Star Wars, more than anything, is an aesthetic. You can make a story, set it in the world of Star Wars, and so long as you say something about the Force or talk about the Empire, boom, you got yourself a star war. But that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s not like in Star Trek where characters talk about upholding the ideas of the Federation. You understand what that means. You get why that’s important. Most of the time, in Star Wars, you don’t even know what the Jedi want because their instructions are never clear. Feel but don’t feel, sense but not too much, and never give into anger but also fight with conviction. It’s a mess.

On the one hand, from that perspective (and yes, we’re finally getting around to talking about the show), I can appreciate the swings that The Acolyte takes. In the show we’re introduced to a few important characters that give us perspective on the Jedi order and just who is in charge of the Force. The Jedi state that no one can use the Force but other Jedi. They essentially make it a crime. If you have the Force you should be trained. If you aren’t trained you don’t get/ to use it. And then we’re introduced to a few different people who either aren’t trained as Jedi and use the Force, or are Jedi and misuse it. Without spoiling anything, this perspective is interesting.

The Original Trilogy told us that the Jedi were good and the Empire (and, by extension, the Sith Force users at the top of the Empire) are bad.Everything since then has muddied that water, and now we have a show, The Acolyte, that actively questions everything about the Jedi, and that I can appreciate. If you’re going to raise these points and ask these kinds of nuanced questions about right and wrong, good and bad, Jedi and Sith, then you have to have people that ride along that gray line that don’t easily comport to any one side of the philosophy. I think, from that perspective, the idea behind The Acolyte works. I appreciate the idea of it.

What doesn’t work is, in essence, everything else about the show. The series struggles to get us attached to any of the characters that matter. We have two lead characters, Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg as twins who have great strength in the Force), but we never really get solid development of them. Osha was a Jedi-in-training but she quit because she could never get her anger over the (supposed) death of her sister out of her mind. We don’t see this, she tells us this, which, coming from a fairly peaceful character who doesn’t seem to have much anger in her, rings false. Mae is going around killing Jedi because she blames them for the (supposed) death of her sister. Why she thinks her sister is dead when, from what we see, she shouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion, is never made clear. The show even hides specifically why she’d be mad at the Jedi she’s killing (as it’s motivated murders) until late in the run. Everything that’s important to us is hidden, or comes late, or just doesn’t matter in the context. Our leads don’t feel like real characters.

The Jedi also don’t feel like real characters. We have a set of four – Lee Jung-jae as Sol, Carrie-Anne Moss as Indara, Dean-Charles Chapman as Torbin, and Joonas Suotamo as Kelnacca – who, for reasons not initially made clear, are being hunted by Mae. The series eventually shows us why Mae is angry, but it’s this weird unreliable narrator arc where we have to be shown the same events twice, from different perspectives, just to see everything. And once we do get to see it, we actually do agree with Mae. The issue is we never really get a good reason for the actions of the Jedi, or what comes after, and everything feels very forced. It doesn’t work.

We’re supposed to pick up on some bond between Sol and Osha (who is eventually trained by Sol as his padawan), but we only get told about everything that happens after the fact. We hear about their bond after Osha has left the Jedi Order and is on her own for a time. We only get told why Mae is angry until halfway into the series, and by then we’ve already made up our mind on stuff. Either we buy the relationships in the series for what they are, or we disconnect completely (and considering how many negative reviews there are for the series, it seems like most people disconnected). It feels like, in eight episodes, The Acolyte wants to tell a sweeping story about moral ambiguity and how even the Jedi can become misguided, and that’s great. To do that justice, though, the series has to do the work… and it doesn’t.

Having watched through the whole series, I can state that the way the series is structured doesn’t work. Instead of starting en media res with Mae killing a Jedi and then the Jedi Order coming for Osha (which is a plot point I bitched about in my review of the premiere), the series should have started at the beginning, with the four Jedi on a planet, searching for signs of the Force (as we’re told they’re doing), stumbling across Osha and Mae, and seeing all the details and fallout from that encounter. Do this in the first episode, not in the third and seventh episodes.

From there, we don’t jump ahead. Instead, we spend a couple of episodes with Sol and Osha, with him training her and her learning to get over her anger (or failing to do so, really) as the Jedi Order. You have to sell this part of the story, to make us see how he teaches her, see her failing, see the bonds build between them, so that we care. This should be like Anakin and Ahsoka, a special connection between master and student, with us appreciating how they work as a team. Hell, I think you could do an entire season of this, intercut with a B-plot of Mae finding her own dark master, and watch her training from the other side. Only at the end of the season would we see Mae communicate with Osha, her freaking out and losing her temper, and because of that, Osha leaves the Jedi Order. And maybe, in the last moments, she finally learns that her sister really is still alive.

From there we could cover the same events that happen in this season but, because the leg work has been put in to develop the characters and their past, we actually care. We’re engaged with Osha as she goes off to find her sister. We are willing to follow her, on the run, as she tries to evade the Jedi Order that thinks she’s the murderer. We can learn about her temptation from the Dark Side of the Force as whispers come from Mae and her master. We see her evolution, and we can question the Jedi Order, from within and without, over the span of two seasons. That’s long-form storytelling that makes us care.

That’s the issue with this first season of The Acolyte: I just don’t care. The show has a number of cool moments in it, like a fantastic battle between a cadre of Jedi Knights and Masters and one Sith warrior, but more often than not the series skirts by on the standard aesthetic and motifs of Star Wars, Despite it’s nod towards questioning the Jedi and their motives, this first season is so muddled, tired, and confusing that it’s points never really land. Are the Jedi good, and are the Sith bad? Who knows. I’m not even sure the writers on this series know, and when you have a show set in this universe, built on the structure George Lucas made all those decades ago, you really should know.

At this point Star Wars really isn’t about anything, and The Acolyte proves that. This is a waste of a first season. It has big ideas, and it feels like the series is trying to say something important, but in the end it all falls pretty flat. The Acolyte is pretty, but it’s a glossy Star Wars show without any substance, nuance, or ideas that matter inside past that shiny shell.