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Talking The Acolyte (with some ending spoilers)

I liked The Acolyte a lot.

I’m putting it A-tier if Andor is S and Ahsoka and Obi-Wan are B.

I really like that it leaned a li’l more heavily into new ideas over reincorporation of old ideas. Every Star Wars project need to strike the right balance there because we need both; it needs to be the galaxy far far away that we’re all familiar with, and that galaxy needs to be large enough to still have new things to discover, and I like where The Acolyte landed there.

Now, some of the following thoughts include ending spoilers so turn away now if you’re still thinking of seeing the show. (It's also maybe not gonna make sense if you haven't seen the show.)

Tension and turnaround

One awesome thing about episodes 1, 2 and 4 of The Acolyte is how whenever it looks like something obvious and boring is going to be stretched out over the season, like I’d think “oh no, now she’s gonna clear her name and she’s obviously gonna succeed but it’ll take all season”, I immediately get proven wrong and it instead happens right away and something new more interesting also happens. The show keeps going “yes, and” in a great way.

I know that that’s the sort of thing Pitch Meeting guy makes fun of as if were barely an inconvenience, but it’s a step in the right direction for TV and comics. I hope we’re finally seeing a pendulum swing away from the hyperdecompressed era that almost killed comics.

Unfortunately, the Rashōmon-style flashback episodes 3 and 7 completely undermined that momentum. They involved the sort of “let’s make clear what we’ve hinted about earlier” and though that’s a really common narrative device, two kinds of things tend to happen. Either people got the hints and then seeing the full story is a tedious eye-roll (the excruciating movie 21 Grams is my goto example for this problem). Or we didn’t get the hints and only understood the full story when it was revealed, and in that case the hints were the parts that was the waste of time. Redundancy and repetition can be beautiful and poetic but it can also be a drag.

While those flashbacks were still good since we got to see the Jedi in action, especially them messing up, and we got to see a different side to Mae and Osha, the non-linearity contrasted the otherwise great pace of the series.

Ending

The memo wipe seemed dumb to me or at least it didn’t properly explain to me as viewer how that is not an even worse outcome than the stranger taking both.

Yes, I understood that they didn’t wanna leave with him. They didn’t want that, we as the audience didn’t want that, Sol wouldn’t‘ve wanted that. And then the compromise was that Osha would go with him. And then the compromise on top of that compromise was that Mae would get the memo wipe. But to me it seems that combining those two compromises you end up with something much much worse for all three involved, whether considering it together or separately, than if they both had left with him.

That’s not just a lesson for writers, it’s a lesson for thinkers and reasoners of all stripes: when making a decision, take a step back. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.

Killing and Dying

There were no good guys in the show. The Jedi were killers and colonializers, the coven were mind controllers, Osha and Mae were like Frank Castle in space. I wanna see a Star Wars where compassion and non-violence is depicted positively.

Two kinds of reviews

Unreasonable