As a dedicated Star Wars fan, of course I’ve seen The Acolyte. Well – one episode. Unfortunately, the events a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away sometimes have to give way to events right now in the local galaxy. But I have some thoughts. I doubt if I’ll be exposing any huge plot points, but if you fear spoilers – see you next time.
The story is set well before the emergence of the Empire, at a time when the Jedi are at the height of their powers as protectors of the galaxy. Which means we won’t have any irritating references to any Skywalkers. Or at least, I hope so. One thing immediately apparent is that the cast is multi-cultural. That has been the tendency at Disney for some time and it’s a good thing. All of Earth’s ethnicities like to be seen on screen. But I don’t know if it’s just me, but painting an ordinary human green or blue seems like a cop-out when we’re talking aliens. That happened in the Marvel franchises, too. I also have to wonder about otherwise perfectly ordinary humans having a few spikes added to their heads. But then, plenty of people add bits of metal to their faces in the here and now, so maybe I’m just old.
The story starts with the murder of a Jedi Master at the hands of a warrior using the dark side of the Force. I was pleased that the battle between the two women wasn’t the overused light sabre duel we saw too often (imo) in Ahshoka. The warrior was obviously a force user, able to levitate her weapons into her hands. And she was obviously nasty. Good stuff.
We move to a scene in a Neimoidian trade ship where we meet Osha, the female MC. Turns out the warrior we met earlier is her twin sister who is supposed to be dead. Somebody fingered Osha as the assassin and the Jedi front up to arrest her. No questions are asked, nobody wondered how she’d made it from the trade ship to the remote planet, nobody asked anything. The arresting Jedi who knew Osha from her days at the Jedi Academy, come across as a couple of self-righteous jerks. Do the two Jedi take the young woman back to Coruscant themselves? No, they send her back in a droid-controlled prison ship. So much for innocent until proven guilty. There’s a preplanned escape by the other prisoners, Osha is stuck on the ship by herself, and it crashes on a convenient planet. By this time, her old master in the Jedi order learns Osha is accused of murder but has escaped. He goes looking for her.
A few things made me wince. The first is the scene where Osha clumps around on the outside hull of the spaceship, in space, to fix something. She uncovers a faulty whasname, which bursts into flame. Like a campfire. Um. Star Wars plays fast and loose with physics but surely their writers should know that sort of fire requires oxygen which is in short supply in a vacuum. It’s a trigger scene, wrenching her back into a forest fire in her past, but even so.
The crashing prison ship tears through the atmosphere and breaks up as it hits the ground. Yet Osha unstraps and walks out completely unscathed, not even a bruise. During the descent she demonstrates that she has forgotten all her Jedi training by being unable to bring her hand-held computer, which had fallen outside her reach, to her hand. Sol, her Master back in the day, comes to the rescue with the two Jedi who arrested her.
The stage is set. It’s an old trope, twins demonstrating Yin and Yang, the two sides of the Force, pitted against each other.
I’ll keep watching because it’s Star Wars. But it hasn’t grabbed me the way the first episode of The Mandalorian did.