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After finishing season 1 of The Acolyte, I am left with one emotion:
Disgust.
WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE ENTIRE FIRST SEASON. THE ENTIRE SEASON WILL BE SPOILED IN THIS REVIEW
One of my friends, T. Martin, "I feel like I'm living in bizarro wolrd when I think a live-action Star Wars project is better than you do." And in my review of the first three episodes, I was fairly dour on the show.
However, I become more hopeful with the fifth episode. Here, the Jedi confront the main antagonist of the series. Master Sol (Lee Jung-Jae), Osha (Amandla Stenberg), Yord (Charlie Bartnett), Jecki (Dafne Keen) and others are after Mae (Stenberg) to stop her from killing Wookie Jedi Master Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo). Mae is accompanied by her bumbling partner (Manny Jacinto), but Mae decides to betray her master and turn herself into the Jedi. But she arrives too late to save Kelnacca, who has already been killed. When the Jedi arrive, Mae's masked master arrives and lays waste to the Jedi.
I think one of my flaws as a critic is that it sometimes takes very little for me to be entertained. The fifth episode had an exciting and tense lightsaber fight. Shakespeare decried the undiscerning audience who "are capable of nothing inexplicable dumb shows and noise." But if you give me an engaging lightsaber fight, I get excited.
The fight was also punctuated by the unexpected deaths of Jecki and Yord. With those stakes, I felt myself drawn in more. It was revealed that the masked villain was actually Mae's partner, who had only been pretending to play the fool until now. At the end, Mae tries to talk Osha into running away with her, but Osha rejects her. So Mae knocks her out and switches places with her and returns with Sol. The villain (credited as "The Stranger") finds Osha and brings her back to his planet hideout (which is clearly the one Luke was on in The Last Jedi).
At this point, the show had the power to turn everything around. I was invested and interested In what would happen next. But things began to fall apart. I remained intersted, but there were some glaring problems.
I once read of a certain comic book writer that he was "a good plotter, but a bad writer." This meant that he was able to come up with some fantastic plot ideas, but the execution of these stories in writing failed to live up to the promise of the plot. That is what The Acolyte feels like. After the fifth episode, I could see the creativity of the plot, but the writing fails. Characters behave in ways that make little sense only because it is necessary for the plot to happen.
For example, Osha wakes up on the planet with the Stranger. After watching him skinny dip, she has the ability to fly away in his ship and leave. But she stays and engages him in conversation. This makes absolutely no sense as she saw him murder her friends in the previous episode. Mae was ready to turn herself into the Jedi in the fourth episode, but in the sixth she once again is intent on murdering Sol.
The penultimate episode is a flashback to episode 3 from Sol's perspective. The four Jedi are assigned to the planet to discover if their is a vergence in the force, since the planet is not supposed to support life. Padawan Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman) is homesick for Courascant. Sol stumbles on young Osha and Mae and becomes creepily obsessed with Osha. He fears for the safety of the girls, which is why the Jedi go to the coven. Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) tells Sol that they are to leave the girls alone, but then Torbin discovers the twins have a high midechlorian count. Since this could prove the presence of a vergence, he races off against his masters' wishes to get the twins.
Before continuing, here is another example of writing failing the plot. Torbin acts selfishly and the result will be tragic. But the writing never establishes why Torbin is so obsessed with going home. Sure, he may be bored, but there is nothing compelling as to why he would act so rashly and drastically to return. You could chalk it up to an earlier scene where Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) invades his mind, but this would make no sense and be counter-productive to the coven. The plot depends on Torbin acting impulsively, but they don't make sense.
Sol goes off with Torbin, but he senses that Osha is in trouble because Mae set the fire. Before this, Koril (Mararita Levieva) gathered armed guards and told Mae to "get angry." Sol and Torbin enter and confront the conven. Mae runs in and asks for help. Sol thinks it is Osha. And now here is the point of tragedy.
Aniseya begins to dematerialize into dark particles while deforming her face into a demonic form. As she is doing this Sol sees that Mae is also dematerializing. If I were in his shoes, I would think that Aniseya was killing Mae. So Sol stabs Aniseya with his lightsaber, killing her. But before she dies, she confesses that she was going to let Osha go become a Jedi.
After this, the rest of the coven attacks. Sol barely defends himself out of guilt. But then the witches posses Kelnacca and has him fight Torbin and Sol. Again, this was the highlight of the episode for me. I even watched it multiple time. Seeing a Wookie Jedi in action was quite thrilling. But then Master Indara comes and excorcizes Kelnacca and this apparently kills all the witches. To my mind, Indara has done NOTHING wrong and the deaths of the witches our on their own heads. Sol tries to save Mae and Osha from a falling bridge, but can only save Osha. On the ship home, Sol plans to confess to the council his actions, but Indara says he has a responsibilty to lie in order to take care of Osha.
If the story was meant to show the evil of the Jedi, it mostly failed. Yes, they act unwisely and impulsively, but based on everything I witnesssed, everything they did was totally understandable. The Jedi are on the front lines of conflict in the galaxy. Tragedies like this will happen. But the solution is to take responsibility the way Sol wanted to. The greatest moral failing was the collective lie. That's why it makes no sense for Torbin to drink the poison in episode two. He bears some responsibility to be sure, but he is not a pure villain.
But this brings us to the final episode.
Sol brings Mae to her homeworld. She tries to escape and Sol almost kills her but is stopped by Bazil. Once again, it makes no sense of Sol to try and kill her at this moment. He wants to bring Mae and Osha together to prove to the council that there is a vergence. When on the planet he tries to find Mae. Meanwhile, Osha and the Stranger arrive. Osha confronts Mae, where Mae tells Osha about Sol killing Aniseya. The Stranger confronts Sol, where Sol denies that he did anything wrong. Again, this is completely inconsistent with the previous episode where Sol understood how he failed and wanted to take responsibility before the Council. You could argue that he changed over time, but that is not what he has been implying since the beginning of the show. The lightsaber fight was engaging. The Osha/Mae fight was not. Stenberg's emotional catharsis just didnt register as true.
Finally, Osha confronts Sol about killing Aniseya. Sol confesses and about to say he did it because he loves Osha. But Osha force-chokes him to death. As she brings him to his knees, he tears up and says to her "It's okay." He consents to his own murder.
A few things about this moment. I knew that Sol was going to die in this episode. Because of his actions, he needed to pay a price for his actions in the previous episode. While Sol was not a complete villain, justice required him to atone. I don't really have a problem with that. The problem is how disgusting a scene it was. If Osha had, in a fit of rage, stabbed Sol with her saber like Kylo Ren did to Han, that would not only be more understandable, but it would be symmetrical wot Sol killing Aniseya. But to slowly choke him to death is cruel, intimate, and evil.
If the episode had ended here are soon after, I may not have been as disgusted. But following this, Mae, Osha, and the Stranger flee the Jedi. Osha agrees to become an apprentice to the Stranger, but Mae's memory has to be wiped and the twins have to part. (By the way, there some revelation about the twins not being twins but two halfs of the same person. This plot point never develops into anything interesting or significant that I actually forgot about it until now). We are then treated to a tearful goodbye between the twins. But here is the problem:
I DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS! THEY ARE ALL MURDERERS.
Sol killed Aniseya, but he acted out of ignorance. He is not a murderer.
Indara killed all the other witches to save Kelnacca from being possesed. She is not a murderer.
Mae, the Stranger, and Osha all acted in deliberate cold blood. The show wanted me to feel something for their emotional pain at being separated again. Boo-frickin'-hoo.
Once Anakin kills Mace Windu (and definitely when he kills the Younglings), he is a murderer. He is the villain of the story and while I feel his tragedy, I lose sympathy for him. Or to use a closer analogy, in Captain America: Civil War, Iron Man tries to kill Bucky because he finds out the he murdered his mother. That primal rage is understandble, as Osha's would be. But the movie was smart enough to not let Tony kill him. If he had, Iron Man would have become a villain. Once Osha murders Sol, she loses all audience good will.
And she expresses no guilt or anguish. Even Anakin expressed heartache over his early murders. In fact, her last scene shows her smirking as she embraces the Stranger's hand.
Master Vernestra frames Sol for all of the murders to spare the Jedi's reputation. This avoids any continuity errors with the Jedi not knowing about the Sith in The Phantom Menace.
Like I said, every time I think of the show, I am filled with disgust. Depite interesting plot points and some cool lightsaber fights, it was wrapped in poor passing and mostly poor performances (except for Jung-Jae and Jacinto). They miss the mark at most turns. Affection comes off as creepy obsession. Righteous anger comes off as murderous evil.
The themes are as ugly as the execution. There is a moral relativism at play where Osha self-actualizes by embracing her rage and murdering the closest person she has to a father. We are left with a too-long story that leads our main character into utter darkness.
And unlike the end of Revenge of the Sith, there is no New Hope.
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