TV Review: "The Acolyte"
The newest "Star Wars" series takes the beloved universe in some fascinating directions and leans into moral ambiguity as it explores the unexpected beauty of the Dark Side.
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If you’ve been at all present on social media in the last two months, you’ve no doubt heard at least a little bit about The Acolyte, the newest Star Wars series. If nothing else, you’ve no doubt heard at least a glimmer of how it’s been review-bombed by a certain segment of the franchise fan-base that perceives the show as too “woke” simply because it features a diverse cast and showrunner and because it doesn’t buy into the idolizing of the Jedi. So fervent has the fandom become in its efforts to sabotage the show that they even mistakenly review-bombed other productions with the same name on Rotten Tomatoes.
Let me begin by saying that, unlike far too many in the Star Wars fandom, I actually quite liked The Acolyte. As a bit of a casual fan of the franchise, I enjoy those stories which look beyond the characters that we’ve spent so much time with over the years, and I like it when Star Wars engages with thorny questions like the nature of religious devotion and how rigid adherence to a set of beliefs can sow the seeds of future disaster. The Acolyte grapples with just such questions and, while not every plot point or bit of engagement lands quite as well as it should, I still applaud the series, and showrunner Leslye Headland, for being willing to take some big swings.
The emotional heart of this series is the bond between twins Osha and Mae-ho (both played by Amandla Stenberg). White there is still much about their precise identity that remains a mystery even after eight episodes, it seems likely they are a product of Force manipulation by a coven of witches. Stenberg gives a truly remarkable and emotionally textured performance, particularly since it’s not every performer who could create not just one but two individual characters with their own motivations. Furthermore, given that Mae and Osha seem to be literally two halves of the same Force whole, it’s to Stenberg’s credit that she gives us two characters who are both eerily similar and yet so very different in their motivations.
Of the two, Osha is arguably the more compelling character, because while Mae has been under the malign influence of the Dark Side from the beginning, Osha’s fall is more subtle and, I think, more tragic. The series makes it clear that she yearned to be a Jedi since she was a child but, though she trained for a time with them, she ultimately couldn’t let go of her complicated feelings enough to be able to complete the process. The pull of her sister’s influence is too strong to resist, however, and Mae proves to be the catalyst that propels her down the same path that will be trod by similarly conflicted characters (Anakin, Ben Solo, etc.) in the future. As with the best of Star Wars, the power of Osha’s story lies in its tragedy and how even those with the best of intentions can find themselves drawn into the darkness.
Equally compelling, and morally conflicted, is Lee Jung-jae’s Sol, the Jedi Master whose actions led to the death of Mae’s mother, the collapse of the coven, and ultimately his own demise and Osha’s fall to the Dark Side. Star Wars, however much some parts of the fandom might like to deny it, has had a long-standing interest in deconstructing the legends surrounding this group of religious fanatics. The Acolyte does so through both its narrative–there’s an ongoing dispute between the Senate and the Jedi about whether the former should be allowed to independently investigate the latter–and through Sol’s coming to terms with the fact that his desire to protect Osha and Mae might have had less to do with his protectiveness and more with his yearning to figure out how they came into existence. Jung-jae does some terrific character work here, giving us moving and troubling insight into a man grappling with his conscience and almost unshakeable sense of moral superiority.
And then there’s the Manny Jacinto of it all. Like a lot of others, I was most familiar with Jacinto thanks to his utterly charming performance on the sitcom The Good Place, in which he played Jason Mendoza, the himbo with a heart of gold. This is a very different type of role for Jacinto, and though he at first appears to be a genial smuggler it’s soon revealed that he is in fact Qimir, a Sith master who has been training Mae to be his weapon of vengeance against the Jedi. From the moment he appears his charisma is off the charts, and this doesn’t change even when he shows his far more sinister side. If there’s ever a man who could capture the beautiful and beguiling nature of the Dark Side, it would be Jacinto (and, unlike Hayden Christensen, who was also beautiful, he can actually act).
Indeed, it’s hard to overstate just how physically beautiful he is and how much the camera adores him. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that he’s one of the most stunning male specimens to have appeared in this franchise, with his jawline that could cut glass, his sculpted physique the stuff of which Greek statues were made. The fact that all of this is service to this universe’s equivalent of evil–though whether the Dark Side is evil in the sense that we usually think of it is the subject of a post for another time–makes his presence all the more captivating.
The scene in which Qimir summarily executes several Jedi–including several that we as viewers have already grown attached to!--is arguably one of the most shocking moments in a Star Wars series, and not for nothing has the episode been compared to the Red Wedding of Game of Thrones. I was glued to my seat as it unfolded, hardly able to breathe as Qimir cut down characters that we’d already grown to love and care about and then, to add insult to injury, referred to one of them as merely an “it.” This was the stuff of grand tragedy and high drama, and to see it brought into the Star Wars universe was exquisite and, even if the series had done nothing else right, this would have earned it a rave review from me.
Now, all of this isn’t to say that I don’t have my fair share of frustrations with this season of The Acolyte. No show is perfect, of course, but even so one can see the seams a bit with this Disney offering. The episodes are sometimes astonishingly short, and this leads to both some noticeable pacing issues and a lack of plot and character development. I was left wishing that the series had had more time to breathe rather than feeling rushed, and a few more episodes with a standard dramatic runtime would have allowed for Osha’s fall to land more effectively. Hopefully the series will receive a second season with longer (and more!) episodes, so that Osha, Mae, Qimir, and the rest of the characters we’ve met–those that survive, anyway–can get the development they deserve.