Oh, dear
There’s been a lot of vitriol surrounding the most recent episode of The Acolyte, so let’s get a few things straight.
1) This is not a good episode of television.
2) This has nothing to do with the fact that the cast heavily features minorities and women.
All clear? Great, let’s get into things.
Personally, the most disappointing aspect of this episode is that it completely eschewed the plotline The Acolyte had been building in the first two episodes in favour of a whole episode totally dedicated to the backstory of Oshi and Mae. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a backstory episode, there’s a right time and place—pacing-wise—to do it. This wasn’t it. It feels wrong to rip me away from the main plotline so soon. I feel like a better choice would’ve been to build up momentum and affection for the main characters before doing a flashback like this.
Backstory will also usually flesh out a mystery that has been building throughout the story, perhaps revealing to the audience a key piece of information that has been kept hidden from them. Episode three, Destiny, does none of this. While the first two episodes did set up some kind of mystery surrounding what happened to Oshi and Mae as kids, Destiny doesn’t reveal anything vital we didn’t already know. Essentially, this didn’t advance the plot at all, which makes the whole ordeal feel like a waste of time.
This would be forgiven if Destiny told an interesting, self-contained story, which it absolutely had the potential to do. Oshi and Mae are twins, living on a remote planet, being raised by a coven of witches. They’re illegally being trained in the ways of the Force (which they call the Thread, for some reason), and are being kept hidden from some Jedi who might be interested in training them.
Unfortunately, everything about the execution of this set up is flawed. We’ll skim over this quickly, but the two child actors playing young Oshi and Mae are not great. They’re on screen for pretty much the whole run time and they are not fun to watch. This is in part due to the dire coming-of-age-ceremony rubbish that we’re forced to endure.
Oshi doesn’t want to do the ceremony. Mae does. They bicker. Oshi doesn’t want to be a witch. Why? Shrug. The episode puts the viewer in the uncomfortable position of wishing there was more to these characters so that they have something to latch onto, while simultaneously wishing they could fast-forward through their scenes just to be done with them.
Then there’s the coven. Honestly, the idea of a coven of witches practising the Force and avoiding the Jedi sounds cool as hell. Alas, it’s not put to any dramatic use. A full forty-minute episode later and I have no clue what the purpose of these witches is. Why do they hate the Jedi? Why do they exist at all? I don’t know, and it’s making me worry about getting another flashback episode. (Side note: the witches do a chant at one stage that is one of the embarrassingly lame things I’ve seen in Star Wars in a long time).
Oshi and Mae’s mother seems bored in every scene she’s in. I feel like the writers wanted us to be impressed by this powerful, female leader, but she doesn’t do anything apart from lecture the kids and argue with the rest of the witches. When her conflict with the Jedi finally came to a head I thought ‘Aha! Here’s where we get to see who she really is!’
I assumed we’d get some kind of demonstration of ‘The Thread’. Maybe we’d see how their practise differs from the Jedi’s Force. These are witches after all, let’s see some magic! Instead, the conflict fizzles out with no action, just quiet acquiescence. The first two episodes had some excellent fight scenes—this is just people talking in rooms for forty minutes. There’s no rising action, no tension. I want to like these characters—they have such potential—but the narrative refused to give me any reason to.
Every single line of dialogue is painfully on the nose. The complete lack of subtext or complexity to anything happening on-screen makes the entire episode feel barren. Recently, we’ve heard of Netflix demanding that creators make their shows so basic that they can be understood while you scroll on your phone, and this has the same feeling. It feels like a punishment to actually attempt a deep engagement with the story.
The entire climax of the episode felt especially muddled, too. As we learned in the first two episodes, Oshi believes that Mae started a fire that killed her entire family, so naturally that’s what the entire episode is building to. The reason why the fire starts is honestly laughable, and as for the death of Oshi’s family… well, it was either clumsily portrayed, or we’re missing some vital information, because it left me scratching my head as to what actually happened, and I can’t tell if it was on purpose or not.
Look, this is a plodding, plotless mess. The whole ‘story’ could’ve been told to another character offhandedly in a few sentences. In fact, it was! In the previous episode! We didn’t need this. It’s a real shame that some of the more classless elements of the internet get to point their fingers and scream ‘Woke!’ at this episode and rake in thousands of views on YouTube.
It’s frustrating, too. For some, the buzz around the poor quality of this episode alone means they’ll probably never watch the series. I still have hope for The Acolyte, as I’m quite enjoying its primary plotline, but this feels like a mortal blow to the series, which isn’t justified. I wish the producers had had the foresight to realise that this episode in particular was going to be on the receiving end of so much backlash simply because of who was on screen, and had strived to make it extra good in order to prove the more poisonous elements of the internet wrong.
Instead, Destiny is just more fuel for their fire. Putting aside the lunacy of Star Wars being such a focal point in the culture wars, at the end of the day, I just want them to do better. This was a head-poundingly boring episode of television. This can’t be the standard. It’s on par with the lowest elements of Book of Boba Fett. Dire, dire stuff. Let’s just hope they do better next week and we can put all this behind us.
***
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