"The Dark Side of the Force is the pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural."
There has been a lot of talk about the new Star Wars TV show The Acolyte. Critics love it, giving it an over 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Most old school fans of the Saga seem to hate it, calling it the worst thing since The Last Jedi. Is either side correct or is the truth somewhere in the middle?
Bottom line: The Acolyte is not good.
But it is not She-Hulk level bad.
This review will be SPOILER HEAVY because there is really no way to talk about this show without talking about the plot points.
The story revolves around the murder of Jedi. I would say it is a murder mystery, but the show reveals the murderer part way through the first episode. The mystery is not who the killer is but why. And this too does not feel to be very deep.
The murderer is Mae (Amandla Stenberg) who is hunting certain Jedi for a past crime against her. She is under the tootalge of some dark force user (hence the title of the show). Her twin sister Osha (also Stenberg) is a dropout Padawan who is arrested mistakenly for Mae's crime. She encounters her former master Sol (Lee Jung-Jae), former fellow Padawan-now-Jedi-Knight Yord (Charlie Barnett) and Sol's current Padawan Jecki (Dafne Keen). Together they try to track down Mae before she kills again.
The first episode was mostly boring. Osha is essentially Rey 2.0. She is smarter than everyone around her, especially concerning technology and seems to be the key to everything. Mae also seems to have very little personality other than angry. Yord and Jecki also seem to have an absence of anything intersting about them. They try to have an MCU-type banter, but it feels very out of place. The only interesting character from that first episode was Sol, but he really only began to become intriguing in the second episode.
I do have to say that episode 2 was better than I expected. This is mostly due to Sol, who shows more depth than the other characters. Mae tries to assassinate a Jedi who is an impervious Force bubble in a state of meditation. Her solution is to talk him in to commiting suicide by drinking poison. Some critics found this plot point stupid. I actually found it a bit intriguing. She basically threatens to expose his past crimes or let him die with his secret. This points to some horrible sin of the Jedi.
The first two episode have a lot of plot contrivances that don't stand up to much scrutiny, but I do not want to nitpik.
Episode 3 is the one that seems to be drawing the most ire.
Here we learn Osha and Mae's origin. They are from a coven for all-female Force witches. Their leader Mother Aniseya used the Force to conceive the twins in the body of Koril (Margarita Levieva). They are training the girls to take over the ways of their order. They call the Force "the Thread" that weaves into the destinies of all and that some can "pull" on the Thread. Aniseya wants the girls to take the burden of their teachings onto them. But when Sol and other Jedi discover the girls, they invoke the right to have the children tested as Jedi. Mae doesn't want to leave and so tanks the test. Osha wants to be a Jedi and decides to leave. Mae decides to try to murder Osha by setting her room on fire. Osha escapes but finds that all of the other witches, including Aniseya, are dead. Sol tells her that Mae's fire killed them all.
A lot of people say that this ruins Star Wars. I would say that it doesn't do anything to win back fans lost by The Last Jedi. The fanbase of Star Wars is 70% male. This show is clearly designed at drawing in (as the Critical Drinker calls them) "modern audiences." But that which is modern is the soonest out of date.
The reason why The Last Jedi should be considered a bigger turn-off is that the philosophy antithetical to Star Wars was placed in the mouth of its biggest hero: Luke Skywalker. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine spoke Star Wars heresy, but was acceptable because he was clearly of the dark side.
Whether showrunner Leslye Headland means to or not, her Force witches are clearly evil. Their alternate view of the Force sounds like Palpatine saying "If one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all of it's aspects, not just the dogmatic, narrow view of the Jedi." This pretty much sums up the perspective of these witches. The clearest example of this is in the creation of the twins.
Palpatine told Anakin about that the "Dark Side of the Force is the pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural." Anakin's fall to the Dark Side is motivated by his desire to have control over things that he should not. He was a Jedi, but he wanted the power of a god. Palpatine tells Anakin about Darth Plagueis who was "so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life."
Aniseya and Koril have taken upon themselves the power of the Dark Side. Why is this such a problem. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is subtitled The New Prometheus. Dr. Frankenstein sins because he tries to take the power of God and use it for his own ends. Aniseya and Koril are doing the exact same thing. This is also the reason why we Catholics condemn things like IVF, which rejects God's design for the creation of sacred human life and instead tries to take that power for ourselves. The Force Witches come off as horrific cultists who use wicked powers to produce children to indoctrinate.
Now, the show is clearly moving towards some kind of moral equivelancy between the witches and the Jedi. There is no doubt that Mae's fire did not kill all the witches. One of the Jedi was clearly battle-damaged from a confrontation. My guess is that it will be revealed that the Jedi attacked the witches and killed them all. Afterwards they each reacted to their crime in different ways.
To be sure the system of the Jedi is flawed. The Prequel Trilogy made this same point: the Jedi were too removed from human connection to see things clearly. This is why Qui-Gon Jinn was the model Jedi who knew when to defy the council and why Luke Skywalker embraces his connection to Anakin and ignores Yoda and Obi-Wan's directive to kill him. In The Acolyte, the taking of Force-sensitive children from their families is clealry a problem. But The Acolyte seems to be putting both the Light Side and Dark Side on the same footing.
This philosophical perspective is the biggest objection that most fans seem to have with this show. My biggest problem is that the show is just not very good. The characters outside of Sol are not that intersting. The visuals are decent, but not compared to season one of The Mandalorian. The performances are not very good outside of (again) Lee Jung-Jae as Sol. Carrie-Ann Moss is not in enough of the show to get a sense of her performance. Stenberg does not have the presence to draw in the audience in a compelling way. This could be a problem with the writing more than the acting. Thinking back to The Mandalorian, think about how much Pedro Pascal was able to compel us with just his body language and his voice under the writing and directing of Jon Favreau.
I'm going to continue to watch the show to see if it improves.
But I am not hopeful.
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