The Acolyte (Disney+) - Full season review

When I watched the first two episodes of The Acolyte at the Madrid premiere I praised its cinematography, the fresher elements, and the uniqueness of the murder mystery approach for live action, as we had seen that already in animated form with several The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch story arcs before. I then hoped it'd keep the good narrative pace, and expected it to hide a big twist or two down the line.

However, whereas it kept some of those values, soon enough did it go sour in several key aspects, not just for Star Wars, but for pretty much any series that is supposed to be good and engaging. It felt like the Obi-Wan Kenobi show at times. And not in terms of cinematography, choreography, or production values, no. The Acolyte looks beautiful most of the time, with great art direction, fine use of colour, and exciting shots and cuts. Not to mention some of the best fights since the Ahsoka show, with an added martial arts touch to them. Furthermore, visual quality and care is much better, even if CGI backgrounds become jarringly apparent in some environments.

What The Acolyte shares with Obi-Wan Kenobi is an embarrassing lack of direction and supervision. It shares the absolutely dumb moments, it shares the feeling that some of the episodes have been so horribly cut and calculated that they look like cheap filler no one needed, and it shares the contradiction between taking itself seriously but then not so much, and vice-versa.

It had been marketed as perhaps the darkest thing so far in Star Wars, but then it needed to lean on cartoonish, silly jokes all the way until a certain point to then drop the starkest twist in Episode 5. So stark, so weirdly balanced that it just felt so wrong, so gratis. And at the same time, both that episode, together with Episodes 7-8 as season finale, are the more consistent in terms of storytelling and, well, pure entertainment.

Showrunner Leslye Headland promised us "a lot of emotion, love, and passion", and while I now understand what she meant, for those elements to click the whole show desperately needed better character development. Every single one of them, with no exception, have their moment(s) of illogical takes or suddenly-changing behaviour which breaks what you had come to think of them, or the little attachment you had grown to them so far. And one could say it's to show how they're all human, hesitant, and imperfect, but it's not that, it's just poorly scripted twists.

This includes the two more solid Jedi characters in the shape of Lee Jung-jae's Master Sol and Carrie-Anne Moss's Master Indara, who paint a very clear, convincing picture until they're also caught in weird turns and nonsense. And again, not because they're hiding something, we all know they are, but because they had been directed in a strange manner.

With this dichotomy between "hey that was cool/fresh/interesting" and "what did I just watch" you might even struggle to keep watching until you reach the final episodes, where all the truth shall be revealed. But then it isn't. The runners deliberately leave a bunch of loose ends to be taken care of in The Acolyte: Season 2, which might very well happen despite the negative reactions and reviews. This was after all set at a very interesting moment within the Star Wars' timeline, and even if the series doesn't rely on fan service and references as much as the work by Dave Filoni, it is right there towards the end to link this to the main entries directly, in that very specific way and with those characters fans expected. And this goes beyond the canonical struggle and the otherwise intriguing concept of "The Vergence", which I won't spoil here.

Overall I get and support the main message this series wanted to send. And no, haters, it wasn't about forcing inclusion or pop music into your beloved fiction. It was about fearing the unknown, about how religion can go from powerful to dangerous, about making decisions for the supposed greater good, and about dealing with your own corruption in different ways. And it also gives us one of the best descriptions of the Jedi's arrogance, an ominously foreseeing one at that point. All that hits the mark, just in such awkward and some times artificial ways it doesn't feel real or compelling. And the fact that the main protagonist duo with Amandla Stenberg's Mae/Osha only delivers a couple of believable lines doesn't help.

So "the greatest teacher, failure is", as Master Yoda would say, and we're left with quite a flawed show that, for the umpteenth time, could have been much, much better. Will they learn from that failure while keeping what is good or salvageable? I'm not sure, as some episodes (3, 4, 6) and moments here are so off-putting I fear many won't care anymore. However, with a more diligent tone, with a tighter direction, and without the bits that go against Star Wars' and just narrative logic, I now want to know what happens to a few characters, even if I'm excluding Osha and Mae.