The Acolyte episodes 1 & 2 – Lost / Found, Revenge / Justice

I watched the first two episodes of The Acolyte last night – the shiny new Star Wars extravaganza.

If you are reading this, you’ve either watched it and are wondering about my profound / shallow thoughts, or you haven’t seen it and are wondering what it’s about and if it is any good.

I’ll try and help both sides.

What is The Acolyte about?

Don’t worry, this won’t be spoiler-filled, I will just discuss what happens in the opening moments and then be more general.

It starts with a superb fight in a bar between an assassin and a Jedi. The general setting and mood reminded me a bit of a samurai or western. The opening generally sets the tone and hints at larger mysteries ahead. It also shows the Jedi in hand-to-hand combat mode, which was fun to see. Predictably, they are pretty good at dodging.

The assassin is pretty chilled out about who sees her and isn’t entirely evil, as she lets a guy off just because he has a kid on his leg. But then she is clearly working for an evil guy, who is probably a Sith, as he has a cool voice and a mask.

This sets up the mystery of who she is and why she is out to kill Jedi.

We then meet someone called Osha, who looks exactly like the assassin but is a mechanic on a space ship—and clearly isn’t the assassin. She actually used to be a Jedi but flunked out of the Jedi Academy. She had a twin sister called Mae, but everyone thought Mae was dead—now it seems not.

I don’t think there was supposed to be a mystery about whether it was her or not. She clearly couldn’t have popped out for an assassination, didn’t have the handy distinguishing tattoo on her forehead, and generally maintained a level of cheerfulness that a Sith couldn’t fake. (Unless you are a fan of the genius theory that Jar Jar was a Sith Lord.) The identical hairstyles were presumably a mad coincidence. Or something to do with the Force…

So she gets arrested for a bit but eventually teams up with the Jedi to track down the assassin.

Like and dislikes, and what does it bode for the future?

I enjoyed it, but I am usually pretty pleased with most Star Wars at first viewing. More Star Wars is a good thing, but there are often bits that niggle at the back of my mind when first viewing something new. Things I wasn’t keen on or even cringed at slightly.

I always thought A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back to be flawless and cringe-free. Then came the Ewoks, who were a bit crap, but at least they clearly ate humans, giving them a slight menace. Since then, there have been a ton more in the new stuff, and even some minor niggles with the original material when viewed with hindsight from new stuff. I won’t rant about that here, though.

I didn’t get too many niggles with The Acolyte – although there were a couple. I will watch them again before episode three, but I think the show is pretty solid and fun.

What I liked

One of the primary appeals of The Acolyte is that it is set a hundred years before The Phantom Menace, the rise of the Empire, and all that stuff. The Jedis are the enforcers and bad boys of the High Republic.

Star Wars has established an incredibly vast and fun universe with so much potential, and I have always lamented the lack of exploration of its history. Unless my memory is faulty, the Jedi appeared around 25,000 years before A New Hope. A lone Jedi, or a group, having adventures or exploring like in Star Trek would be great.

I guess I am growing a bit bored of one main period in history – and all the offshoots, origin stories, and so on that have appeared. So this is welcome.

The characters are all pretty fun and well acted. The sets are good, and the effects are great. No one doubts the budget and talent involved.

I guess the ultimate decider will be where they go with it next. What exactly happened back in the day? Some of the Jedi involved are clearly guilt-ridden and messed up. Something happened that turned one twin evil. Or maybe she was always evil, and that is just how twins always work—a good one and a bad one. At least one has a tattoo. If they had been male, the evil twin would be unshaven and maybe even smoke.

Generally, I liked the show, and have high hopes. This all depends on where they go with it, and I hope it is somewhere knew and interesting. One person struggling with their dark tendencies but then finally becoming good is a bit played out. We’ll see.

tldr – I liked The Acolyte but wasn’t wowed. It depends on where they go with it.

If you haven’t watched it yet, then stop reading now and check out the trailer. Below the trailer there be spoilers and things that niggled me!

What I didn’t like – the niggles – SPOILERS

As I said, nothing especially bad popped out on the first viewing. There is no Jar Jar and there’s not an Ewok in sight. There are a couple of things that mildly annoyed my pedantic sub-conscious.

One was the whole evil twin thing. It has been done so often. Hopefully Osha will turn evil, rather than Mae turn good. Or neither changes.

Another is the crash. Osha straps in, crashes, and then wakes up on the floor completely fine. As this happens offscreen, we are just supposed to go, ‘Oh, okay. ‘ Maybe this will be explained later, but if not, why not show her struggling to land it or at least wake up strapped in or slightly injured? Or something.

And then there’s the whole levitating guilt-ridden Jedi guy, Torbin. First, did Mae not scout the place out first? If she had, she’d have found a skylight that was open right over the guy she was after. Instead, her plan was to distract the door robot with a child, disable it, and then hope no one inside was between her and the target. She seemed to have no exit plan, which made the window fortuitous.

The Jedi notice her incursion, but are mostly just ‘That was weird’. No one is posted in the room, and no one thinks to shut the skylight. Torbin also looked exactly like one of those people you see in tourist destinations like Covent Garden. He deserved all that came to him.

These are just minor quibbles from the mind of a pedant. I will be watching the rest of series.