The Acolyte – Day Review

I have amassed a number of television pet peeves in my time working as a critic, but near the top of the list is episodes in a serialized show that exist solely to be a bridge to the major climax of a season. Now, I’m not talking about an episode that takes narrative strides to move the story into position for the big climactic moment while advancing key plot points and providing character development. You know, an episode that is fine and won’t be remembered by fans as that crucial piece of the puzzle, but one that is necessary for the story to get to where it’s going. No, I’m talking about episodes like this one, wherein we learn nothing new about our characters, nothing of note happens, and the sole purpose is to set up the climax of the story. An episode that could just as easily exist as a part of the following one since everything within it is in service to what is coming next.

Just because you set-up a “cliffhanger” – here, the identity of The Master* – doesn’t mean that everything that came before it worked or was even worth the 25 minutes spent watching it. No, this episode was essentially spinning the wheels of storytelling in order to get our key players in one place – a planet that none of them are comfortable on – so that the story could reveal the big bad that it has spent precious little time setting up. Which brings me to the major issues with The Acolyte up to this point: we know precious little about any of our supporting players. We know a fair bit about Mae and Osha, in that we’ve seen their past trauma and know who they are in the present. We know a bit about Sol (mostly that he’s either a liar when it comes to what happened the day Mae and Osha were separated or that he’s utterly clueless, which might actually be worse). But everyone else? Only the bare minimum to give them a discernible trait to latch onto, which is disappointing.

*It’s Qimir (Manny Jacinto), right? We can all agree that it’s him? He was super shifty when it came to chatting with Mae about how he knew where Kelnacca was living, and he was driving home that whole “you have to kill a Jedi without a weapon” bit pretty hard for someone who presumably doesn’t really have a horse in this fight. Plus, you don’t cast someone as charismatic as Jacinto to be the bumbling sidekick. That being said, if it is him, did any of the Jedi get a good enough look at him on Olega to see his face? And if so, why didn’t anyone recognize him? Is there another twist – shapeshifting witches? – that’s in store? There are still four more episodes left, so we need some more plot to churn through.

Now, Star Wars isn’t the greatest when it comes to introducing complex characters – even the original trilogy took a solid movie and a half before we got some complexity to our central heroes. But wow, has that step been skipped in The Acolyte in a major way. Yes, we’re only at the half-way mark in the season, but still, we should have a much better handle on characters like Jeckie and Yord at this stage of the game. And while we don’t need to know if Sol is a good guy or is hiding a dark secret (I genuinely hope it’s the latter – we need some complications in our “good” guys in this story to make it something different than a traditional good vs. evil tale), we should know a bit more about who he is and his position within the Jedi Order. It doesn’t have to be a huge to do either – it could be throwaway lines about how he trains his Padawans or what he wants for himself in the grand scheme of things.

Now that I’ve aired my issues with the episode, I do want to call out the one piece of the story I found intriguing: Master Vernestra’s order that the Jedi Council not be informed of the Mae situation, lest the Senate hear what was happening. This ties into last week’s flashback and the insinuation that perhaps the Jedi were involved in the devastation to a degree that none of them would admit to. We’re seeing that the Jedi, even at this point in time, were starting to make moves that isolated the Order from broader consequences while playing politics to keep those outside of their ranks in the dark. Hell, Vernestra is keeping her own people in the dark. That doesn’t bode well for this particular mission and the eventual revelation that there is a dark Jedi in the universe (assuming that revelation reaches beyond a select few in the ranks at all). Yes, she thinks everything is under control and that Sol and his team can handle things, but boy, keeping this under wraps signals that something is rotten in the Order – something that will continue to be the case as time moves on and the Jedi continue to close ranks and police themselves. Not a good look and particularly ominous knowing how things fall apart in the future.

So, a disappointing episode whose only purpose was as a launching pad for next week’s installment. I’m disappointed that The Acolyte was willing to essentially short-change its audience by only offering a tease of our central villain while also offering absolutely nothing in the way of complex storytelling and character development.