Where Star Wars: The Acolyte lost me

I wanted to like this show. I love Star Wars. But I just couldn’t stick with it.

The space witches didn’t bother me. Star Wars has had Force witches before, dating all the way back to Ewoks: The Battle for Endor in 1985. I actually loved that movie as a kid, but I digress.

The premise of The Acolyte was interesting. A former Jedi student falls to the dark side. I could watch that.

The cast is pretty good.  Carrie-Anne Moss and Lee Jung-jae are phenomenal.

And that’s about it. A good cast and a promising premise cannot save terrible writing.

I made it to episode 5, surprisingly. As I said, the Force witches didn’t really bother me. Sure, it was a bit cheesy, but I hung out with Wiccans in college. I’ve seen worse.

The plot was inconsistent and confusing with a lot of retcons to the prequels. They completely ignored cannon to tell what they swore was a “new and refreshing” story when really, they just recycled the same tropes from the last forty years.

Now, there are ways to reuse tropes without making the story feel lazy and contrived. And sure, Star Wars is repetitive and predictable. It’s supposed to be. As George Lucas has said, “it’s poetry, it rhymes.” But this is less poetry and more copy and paste. Before episode 5, I told friends, it’s not the worst thing they’ve ever done, but it’s not the best.

Now that the show is over, I’ve changed my opinion. It’s definitely the worst thing they’ve ever done.

Where they lost me, the point where I turned off the episode and abandoned the series is the end of episode 5, where the Sith has mowed through seven highly trained Jedi masters, knights, and padawans without breaking a sweat. The twins have seen each other, and the “good” twin stuns the “evil” twin. The Sith is facing Lee Jung-jae's Master Sol one-on-one and is nearly defeated. He finds himself at the end of Master Sol’s lightsaber about to die when our wholesome protagonist stops him. It’s not the Jedi way to kill an unarmed opponent.

But it is totally acceptable for her to lure in the planet’s flesh-eating, giant insects to eat him alive so she and her former master can escape.

Then, the “evil” twin wakes from her stun after just seconds on the ground and the “good” twin runs after her, only to also be stunned by her “evil” twin so said twin can swap places with her. Her former master senses nothing amiss about the swap and the Sith miraculously survives.

Just to boil it down for those struggling to keep up with whatever was going on in that episode. A Sith or dark Jedi, whatever you want to call him, manages to defeat seven highly trained and armed Jedi only to lose against a single Jedi master, then gets ambushed by a bunch of giant bugs to survive that as well. Then, the twins pull a Parent Trap and no one, not even a Jedi master capable of defeating a Sith in hand-to-hand combat, is any the wiser.

It’s lazy writing. They manufactured a reason not to have Sol kill the Sith and ran one of the oldest tricks in the book to create some kind of tension which, apparently turned out to be not that much tension after all as they figured it out in the next episode.

I saw someone say in another critique that the reason the Acolyte struggles is because nothing is earned. Everything is given to the viewer. There’s no mystery as to who is hunting the Jedi, it’s revealed within an episode or two. They figure out almost immediately what the murderer is after and try to head her off and fail. None of the characters have a clear motivation.

Despite claims to the contrary of the show being “woke” or trying to shove some sort of morality down our throats, there isn’t anything. There’s no message, no lesson. Other than maybe “the Jedi are the real bad guys,” maybe? The show is utter chaos with a bunch of characters running around with seemingly no motivation other than whatever the writers have manufactured. It’s empty calories with none of the heart of Star Wars.

I wanted to like this show. I really did. It could have been so much more than what we got, which is an insulting, poorly written mess with cheap plot devices and seemingly no definitive direction. Granted, I haven’t watched after that episode, just read and listened to reviews.

What I was hoping for was the story of a dark side acolyte, hiding their machinations from the Jedi, leading to the first seeds of the Empire. And maybe that’s where this show is trying to get, but they’re doing a miserable job of it.

LucasFilm, you are capable of so much better than this. Stop insulting your fanbase. The Acolyte is shockingly bad. Do better.