I’d been thinking about writing this since around the third or fourth episode, but as I think I’ve previously mentioned my husband and I don’t binge shows, and on top of that summers are really hectic for us so we barely watched any television at all, and now that we’ve finally finished the show it’s been cancelled and just a little bit of hell has broken loose.
I was pissed at the announcement, but for some reason I didn’t think others had become particularly invested. Probably because all summer I felt like I was hearing: a) nothing, b) vaguely negative criticisms about the pacing or the writing, or c) the (sadly) typical braying from the ‘go woke, go broke’ crowd about how dare a Star Wars show feature a mostly non-white cast and lesbians and space witches??? Don’t they know Star Wars is for straight white cis men only?
I don’t know if the cancellation had anything to do with Disney listening to these racist, misogynist, homophobic Musk humpers – reportedly the cost was upwards of 180 million and there simply weren’t enough eyes on the show for that price to make Disney happy, and I think chronically online people have a distorted idea of how influential their voice on online spaces actually is in the real world – but they certainly were celebrating the cancellation like they had been listened to, which is a message unto itself, honestly. Rolling Stone has a great article about the worst Star Wars fans ruining it for everyone else (I’m trying to keep this article spoiler free in case someone who can wants to go in blind, but that article and most articles talking about the cancellation are absolutely not so keep that in mind).
But once the cancellation was announced there was a lot more angry reactions than I suspected. It probably shocked Disney, too. Where was all the support for the show before they decided to can it? Honestly, the seemingly out-of-nowhere backlash bothers me more than the cancellation on its own, because this once again feels like streaming and binge culture ruining everything. And I know, The Acolyte was dropped weekly, but that doesn’t make it immune. These streaming services need their shows to be immediate hits. Massive hits. Everybody who has a television is watching the show at the same time. It’s all anyone can talk about. It’s the summer event of the year. It’s getting parodied in SNL every other week. The memes, they have to have the memes!
And if it’s not? Fuck it. Cancel it. Replace it with something else looking for that same high. And, in the absolute worst cases, delete it off your streaming service completely and pretend it never happened. Willow who?
The Acolyte wasn’t that massive hit. It also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Willow (not that I think Willow deserved to be memory-holed). I’d say on average it’s a solid B with some A+ moments scattered throughout. If this were Ye Olden Days of television and The Acolyte was airing on the WB it would have gotten, like, ten fucking seasons. If it were on Fox it would still have been cancelled after one season but then have gathered a cult following who would mourn it’s ‘brilliant but cancelled’ status online for the rest of their lives.
This is supposed to be a recommendation post but all this minor bullshit got in the way. To that point, even though it got cancelled and even though I just called it a B show, here’s a bunch of reasons why you might want to check out The Acolyte anyway. Do it fast before Disney decides to pretend it never happened!
There’s No “Homework”
Not really a Star Wars fan? Have a vague, general sense of what’s going on through cultural osmosis but otherwise haven’t actually seen anything since you got dragged to The Phantom Menace by your parents because your little brother wanted to go? No problem! The Acolyte takes place in a time period not explored by any previous movie or television show: the High Republic. Specifically one hundred years before any of our usual cast of assholes was even born. There’s two very minor references to other Star Wars-y things that you may or may not recognize, and if you don’t it does not matter. They are true easter eggs, fun little things for people who recognize them but not crucial to understanding the current story. Of course people and places you aren’t familiar with are going to be talked about, but it’s expected you don’t know those things because they’re all new, so no on is going to valiantly walk through a door and pause a few seconds for applause while you’re sitting there thinking, ‘who the fuck is this dork?’
It Explores How Fucked Up the Jedi Order Is
I don’t think the Jedi order was supposed to be as completely deranged and unhealthy as George Lucas made them out to be in the prequels, but I also think George implied a lot of things without realizing it in those movies and it doesn’t matter what he meant to do, what matters is that the Jedi Order he designed is somehow a worse facility for children than Hogwarts.
Basically little kids – and I’m talking little kids – are tested to see if they are Force sensitive and if they are they are taken away from their families to train. And I mean fully taken away – this isn’t a summer camp or boarding school and there’s no annual Family Day. The Jedi see the Force – the power they train their entire lives in – as split down the middle into the Light Side and the Dark Side, and then they spend their entire lives not “giving in” to the Dark Side, and apparently the best way to do that is to cut off all emotions and personal relationships. Like, how the hell does a person learn to work through negative emotions when they’re taught from a very young age to suppress them all? And at the same time are built up to be basically space cops? Can that person even recognize when they’ve gone completely off the rails?
While this is not the main focus of the story, nor is it a complete deconstruction of the Jedi Order, it’s the closest popular Star Wars media has ever come to even acknowledging that the system is fucked to the max.
The Lightsaber Fights Are Fucking Rad
You ever watch a lightsaber fight in a Star War and think, “Why do these people never remember they are also telekinetic?” Well, so did whoever worked on these fights. There’s real creativity in the choreography on display, and it feels like they were made by people who actually wanted to see new and interesting thing in a lightsaber fight instead of just someone inserting one into the movie because it had been the regulated seventeen point eight minutes since we had last seen one.
The Sith is Actually Cool and Scary
This one is potentially just me because I think every single asshole we’ve seen swinging around a red lightsaber has ultimately been a sad sack wet noodle with the exception of Darth Maul who has honestly been wasted up until this point and needs his own movie where he goes around killing stray Jedi while shirtless.
The Stranger is the next best thing. His first altercation with our Jedi heroes is essentially shot like a horror movie, and you can get a sense of how freaked out the Jedi are about this guy because he knows their moves, he knows what they won’t be expecting, and the Jedi have gotten so powerful and up their own ass they barely even remember what a ‘sith’ is.
There’s a lot more I want to say about it but their identity is one of the main mysteries of the show so please just take my word for it that this guy fucks severely.
The Show Does Not End on an Actual Cliffhanger
I’ve seen this complaint getting bandied about the internet and it’s not true. There are plot threads that are set up for the next season that will obviously never be resolved now, but the show is not cut off in the middle of some death defying feat or mystery, and most of the questions set up at the beginning of the show are answered.
Whether you should watch this show is entirely up to you but if any of what I listed is of interest to you I suggest you go check it out. Like I said, it’s B Tier and as much as people want to blame the bigots for this one I think it ultimately just wasn’t what Disney wanted. But if you’re anything like me and you’ve spent way too many of your precious few hours watching Charmed and Supernatural back in the day then you need to get the fuck in here because this thing is way better than either of those two.
That should be my tagline. The Acolyte: Better Than the CW.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 