Almost ten months ago now I was basically getting punked by Ahsoka. Spoilers here for all of The Acolyte.
Once again, we return. It felt like a shame to not watch the new Star Wars TV show, especially in the anticipatory air that has swept in with the cessation of weird shareholder antics over at the Disney corporation: a fully armed and operational Bob Iger 2 will be anihilating entire cinemas in the near future, and all this TV nonsense will likely be swept under the rug, with only critical darlings Andor and The Mandolorian passing into memory. And for me, the era of misery-watching bleak tie-in slop that started back with Obi-wan and ran through Ahsoka may be tied off by — let me see — “The Mandolorian and Grogu”, coming to cinemas May 2026. I can hardly express my anticipation.
Into the muted gulf of my attention is pitched The Acolyte, a startlingly late attempt by Disney to take the straightforward option: just do some regular TV shows, but stuff them full of cloaks, wipe transitions and laser swords. The Acolyte is theoretically free-floating, liberated from the need to tie in to any existing material. Set in what the greasy branding materials define as ‘The High Republic’ (a name presumably picked ex post facto by whoever described the original films as happening ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far far away’), the show can depict a unique setting which blends elements of Star Wars in among novel sci-fi concepts. By which I mean that it’s a cop show set five minutes before The Phantom Menace. They tried! But despite being on the face of it a poor testament to the infinite flexibility of the Star Wars setting, Acolyte does have one real trump card to play: it’s quite good.
The sequel trilogy was, of course, a sequel to Revenge of the Sith even if it struggled to live up to that mantle. Obi-wan was a sequel to the prequel trilogy. Andor was a prequel to Rogue One which was itself a belated prequel to Return of the Jedi. Ahsoka was something of an interlude — when that Thrawn film surfaces perhaps it will seem more like prologue. Into this tapestry we must weave The Acolyte, a show that more than anything seems imbued with the spirit of Attack of the Clones, set in and around the institution of the Jedi at it’s peak, as it slowly and inexorably heads towards its destruction. That movie laid the blame with institutional incapacity, incompetence, and arrogance. “Count Dooku was once a Jedi. [murder] is not in his character.” and all that.
Acolyte opts instead to examine endemic failures: what sort of thing are individual Jedi doing, screwing up and covering up? After all, what is the failing Jedi order if not an organisation made up of failing Jedi? Very straightforwardly inspired by real-world stories of overreaching authority, most obviously the Waco siege, we learn the story of four Jedi who catastrophically screw up a basic assignment in a way that destroys the lives of two young girls. The Jedi aren’t grandly deceived, they don’t have true and pure intentions, they just do the wrong thing for selfish, poorly thought-out reasons, and people die because of it. Then the institution, as institutions are wont to do, merely acts to insulate itself from blowback. It’s simple but effective (six seasons of Line of Duty stand as testament to the story-telling power of ‘this goes all the way to the top’) and crucially well-executed. It’s well-made Star Wars.
Acolyte’s first strength is the cast, with Amandla Stenberg giving a competent dual showing as the sisters Osha and Mae against Manny Jacinto’s smoldering antagonist Qimir and Lee Jung-Jae’s bumbling Jedi Master Sol. There are various strong secondary players many of who, uh, take a sabbatical after the midway point, and Carrie-Anne Moss brings gravity to the crucial but brief appearances of Master Indara, whose inability to rally her underlings to her demands gives the flashback episodes something of a LinkedIn vibe to them at times. Beloved character of tie-in novels and comics ‘Vernestra’ has the unplesant job of doing the various ‘back at the ranch’ cutaways here. She’s played by Green Rebecca Henderson (the makeup still doesn’t look good), who isn’t quite as terminal a presence as Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but there’s not as much clear air between them as I’d like. In fact it’s quite odd how similar their scenes are structurally, with both characters having to cover for their wildcard colleagues — which is odd given that one of them is supposed to be a swashbuckling hero of the New Republic and the other is a corrupt, doomed administrator of the Old Republic. But I digress.
Any true Attack of the Clones must have its Dexter Jettster, and here that’s definitely the elusive and mercurial Bazil, the rodent-like tracker the Jedi hire in episode 4 who quietly becomes the series’ answer to the droid mascot — but where the purpose of the droids has always been to sneak servitude and feudal mores in under the audiences’ noses, Bazil’s animal form actually makes it impossible to ignore his curious mezzanine set of rights. He has a name, he has a job, he speaks a language which can be learned. While ostensibly paying for his services though, the Jedi casually lose him in the evil forest. When he’s one of the three survivors of the clash with antagonist Qimir, Sol fails to acknowledge him at all when they’re back onboard his ship. In the finale, as Sol risks both their lives dangerously thrusting his ship into the asteroid ring, Bazil’s action to intervene receives the kind of blank expression you’d give a malfunctioning machine. Or Droid, even. This guy is obviously a person! But Sol, by this point in every way our perfectly fallen Jedi, can’t see him as human even as his actions contribute to Sol having to head down to the planet and to his eventual doom. When Qimir challenges Mae to kill a Jedi without using a weapon, perhaps this is what he means.
Droids otherwise receive little attention here, beyond the pilot droids who are incapable of abandonning ship in the second episode and Osha’s ever-present personal assistant, whose Damascene conversion late in the series is only really a reflection of the exchange of places between Osha and Mae. Perhaps, like we’re supposed to think of the lightsaber crystal, the sheer hatred rolling about in the air turned the tiny droid evil. Or maybe it’s best to not be quite that literal.
While I described it as a ‘cop show’ before, Acolyte is not structured like a procedural. Rather, it’s firmly in the prestige TV mold — not as structurally radical as the film/serial structure of Andor, but akin to something like True Detective: a single story explored over the season, with the decision sometimes made to weaken the structure of the overall story in order to deliver eight semi-contained episodes. This is worst for the two Rashomon-aping flashback episodes, already beleaguered as they are with child actor leads, which end up separating crucial revelations from the characters they are revelatory to; when Osha removes the sensory deprivation helmet in episode 8 we’re left to figure out for ourselves that she was probably watching episode 7 in there.
Aside from this however the show — perhaps aware of the belligerence of the average Star Wars superfan — takes a confident if hand-holding tour through the ostensibly self-contained main plot. Centering on events on Mae and Osha’s home planet when they were children, we’re drip-fed details about how the Jedi fatally mishandled a situation such that they performed a home invasion, in the process killing their entire extended family of dubious witch-people. The hand-holding peaks with Mae and Osha’s mother, standing at the wrong end of a laser sword hilt, explaining to the audience that she’s good actually and was going to do the right thing had she not been murdered by the space police. But the twists and turns are coherent and logical, for the most part, and contain some genuinely exceptional moves for a Star Wars entry — the build of Sol into a sinister and deranged figure is slow but inexorable. Qimir’s easy company is allowed to lull the audience (and Osha) into forgetting that he’s wizard Rorschach. Even the stuff that’s really rough, like the mind wipe tree ending, is executed with such panache that you go along with it.
Whether by chance or careful planning, some of the stumbling blocks that previous Star Wars TV shows hit are avoided entirely. The costumes never look bad (with the exception of Green Rebecca Henderson’s senate gown, which may well be deliberate), and the team are having great fun playing out Osha and Mae’s internal drama in fabric. The twin characters swap clothes, roles and pairings repeatedly through the story (think Luke in episodes 4 through 6) in a manner that artfully demonstrates the weakness of Sol’s late insistence on their magical nature making them more one person than two. “You’re not even sisters!” he exclaims, even as they straightforwardly behave in the most recognisable sisterly fashion. The sets and locations are solid as well, with the Coruscant scenes just about seeming like they might be taking place in some unpleasant cloisters just off-screen from Attack of the Clones and the inevitable Mos Eisley analogue not feeling like twenty extras milling about on a sound stage, as was the case for the entirety of Obi-wan.
The hooks for additional seasons of story are appropriately integrated as well. Not here will you find Ahsoka’s ludicrous buck-passing cliff-hanger finale; everything promised in the first episode is paid off in the last one, with Sol and the gang all worm food, Osha getting into religion and Mae… well, Mae’s on the backburner for now. Qimir’s scar, the most obvious unopened box, is thematically coherent as-is — there is nothing strictly to be gained by exploring it except in so far as that could form part of a new narrative in the future, which is all you can hope for.
Needless to say, I did not want or need to like The Acolyte, but here I am. Somehow, the dead franchise — which I declared sick beyond all rescue at the end of Ahsoka — has returned. Will they be able to pull this off again? I certainly hope so, though Lee Jung-Jae’s absence would be keenly felt in a sequel season. Part of what made this first season so enjoyable though was the ability of the show to spin characters up in a handful of scenes such that their subsequent loss was felt more keenly; who knows which character actor they’ll have in to be the protagonist in a sequel.
Previously:
- Obi-wan: Episode 1
- Obi-wan: Episode 2
- Obi-wan: Episode 3
- Obi-wan: Episode 4
- Obi-wan: Episode 5
- Obi-wan: Episode 6
- The Phantom Menace (video essay)
- Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
- “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
- Andor: Episode 7
- Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
- Andor: Episodes 11, 12
- Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2
- Ahsoka: Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6
- Ahsoka: Episodes 7, 8
- The Acolyte
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