Shownotes: The Acolyte S1
Oh come on. After Andor you’ve really got to do a bit better than this.
Look, I fully admit that I am the problem: I keep watching this crap. It wasn’t irremediably bad, but the thing I came back to watching The Acolyte was how thin it all was; not enough butter on too much bread. I kept expecting there to be more to it, in any way, it kept gesturing like there might be, but it never really managed to give you more than was onscreen at the time. Goodness knows, I’m not the most sophisticated of readers, but pretty much every aspect of it felt like we were playing in the baby pool.
None of the places really felt like places: we bounced from A Forest Planet to A Desert-Ish Planet to Another Forest Planet to A Planet With Some Rocks By The Sea and back again. Every distinct locale within them felt pretty much like sets—and I appreciate that they ditched the Volume, but if you’re going to half-arse it this badly then why bother? Distinctive-feeling settings are a characteristic Star Wars strength, so this one stood out.
None of the characters really felt like characters: now, this is perhaps more in line with the Star Wars films, but in general the characters there had simplicity because they were iconic, in the sense that they represented archetypes: the farmboy with a destiny, the helpful wizard, the princess with an attitude, the sex pest, the gay robot double-act, the unhelpful wizard, the other sex pest, etc. Here, the characterisation, where present, felt (as I believe Austin Walker pointed out) distinctly YA (derog), but it was often absent because so much of what they did felt like it was solely to observe the dictates of the plot.
None of the conflict really felt like conflict: but there’s the germ of something in here. Contra Sol in the first episode, the Jedi do take kids, and this is a bit dodgy. However, rather than the ‘strong’ version of this I feel like we could’ve got—a team of Jedi massacre a compound of people who just wanted to be left alone and not have their kids stolen—ended up soft-pedalling it so that no-one would feel that bad. The idea that Mae and Osha were somehow a “split consciousness” ended up not meaning anything beyond providing a reason for the lads to be interested in them.
I liked the bit where the dude was just meditating. I liked the Wookie Jedi. I like them dropping Yoda in it right at the end. I liked Dangerous Bad Boy Jason From The Good Place. There were potentially interesting musical choices on occasion, though not nearly enough. In fact that’s really the bottom line on this show as a whole: potentially interesting, but not nearly enough.