I really feel so bad for live action Star Wars showrunners now, caught between the Scylla of Andor‘s quality on one side and the Charybdis of Ahsoka‘s “quality” on the other. There’s always gonna be a bar you clear, but there’s always gonna be a bar you fall short of. What does The Acolyte have going for it on its own terms, then? Provided you don’t mind a whole that is merely less than or equal to the sum of its parts, the answer is plenty.
Directed once again by creator and showrunner Leslye Headland from a script by Jason Micallef and Charmaine DeGraté, this second episode whisks the story along, culminating in a confrontation between Sol and Osha on the one side and Osha’s long-lost, presumed-dead sister Mae on the other. Turns out Mae believed Osha was dead in turn, so everyone involved receives quite a shock to the system. Osha deliberately misfires a shot that would have stopped Mae’s getaway car following her and Sol’s inconclusive fight, allowing the sworn killer of Jedi to fight another day.
Mae has a hit list, as it turns out: the four Jedi who were on duty on her homeworld the day her house and family burned. The quartet include Inara, already slain by one of Mae’s throwing knives; Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), who adopted a life of silent meditation as penance for whatever happened and who voluntarily kills himself by drinking a poison provided to him by Mae; Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo), a Wookiee Jedi who lives out in the forest now, frightening away scavengers like a sasquatch with a lightsaber; and, you guessed it, Sol himself. With the help of a weapons smuggler named Qimir (Manny Jacinto), who appears to be a true believer in the cause of Mae’s mysterious Master no matter how he fronts to the Jedi when they interrogate him, she plans on going four for four.
So yeah, there’s a bunch to enjoy here, mildly. Mae’s wuxia attack on Torbin’s impenetrable Force shield is both technically impressive and funny. As Sol, Lee Jung-jae does graceful martial-arts work in his fight against Mae, as he effortlessly dodges and parries her every strike. But Mae’s no dummy: Her use of the Force to kick up a cloud of dust and gravel to shield her getaway was a real “why has no one ever done that before?” moment for me. And a Wookiee Jedi? Come on, I’m not made of stone.
Beyond that, The Acolyte benefits from the vanishingly low bar set by the franchise’s last new live-action outing, Ahsoka. Without commenting any further on The Acolyte’s quality in and of itself at the moment, Ahsoka is not just bad — it’s bad in a way that makes you question your own grasp on reality, somehow. It feels like a show you’d stumble across at 2:47am while semi-delirious from flu and exhaustion, only to wake up the next morning and question whether you’d seen it at all. It feels like a show you’d make after you get blasted by that machine from the Ministry of Love in 1984 where if you turn it up high enough you briefly believe O’Brien is holding up four fingers instead of five. It feels like something legendary Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes are made of — Manos: A Star Wars Story. The Acolyte, with its baseline competence, its dialogue delivered at a normal human pace, and its environments that feel like environments instead some props on a soundstage, cannot help but feel like movie magic by comparison.
But it isn’t. It’s early yet I realize, and you really do often have to give a show time to grow, for the people behind the camera and the final result that airs on your screen. Still, is anyone here interesting enough to want to follow? Sol feels too much like any old wise hero, Osha too much like any young plucky heroine. The fight choreography is good, but when you’re going to do open Kill Bill homages with both your storyline and said fight choreography, you have to be better than good.
There’s the subtlest of hints that Osha and Sol’s padawan Jecki may be forming some kind of love connection. Okay, maybe less than subtle, depending on how you interpret a line like “I’m better company than a droid, and, um, way more flexible.” Jecki’s propensity to think outside the box would indeed make her a more interesting romantic foil for the ex-Jedi than by-the-book Yord, but we can only cross this guardrail-free bridge when we come to it.
The problem facing The Acolyte is that Andor is out there along with Ahsoka, which is to say there’s proof of how good a live-action Star Wars show can be as well as how bad. The Acolyte deserves faint praise for beating the latter, but it won’t deserve real praise until it shows it can hang with the former.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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