Set well before George Lucas’ galaxy became rife with scoundrels, rebels, and despots, Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte is uniquely positioned to crack open a whole new age for the dauntless (or ceaseless?) Star Wars franchise. Throughout its eight-episode run (the show’s season-one finale dropped July 16), the Disney+ series spotlights the end of an era that has only just begun to take root in the saga: the High Republic, a time of Jedi supremacy and spiritual unrest that sowed the seeds for much of the hate, anger, and suffering that takes place in the famous stories that follow it.
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Specifically, The Acolyte is set “100 years before the rise of the Galactic Empire” (a nebulous thereabouts that still has Wookiepedia hounds bickering over its precise BBY date), making it the chronological starting point for Disney’s Star Wars canon (with a suite of comics and novels currently detailing the eons that lead to it). It could lose this distinction in the future, however. At the rate Disney cranks out these shows, we may yet see the story of prehistoric Force users or a Rome-styled Empire show or perhaps a pre-industrialized Star War where Coruscant is but a one-orbak town. For now, at least, The Acolyte is set as far back as live-action Star Wars dares explore, yet it’s no less typical of the franchise’s biggest televisual shortcomings, which have become as achingly familiar as the bone-dry dunes of Tatooine.
That’s not to say the show doesn’t do all it can to shake the dust off this franchise. Its premise challenges the tired Star Wars “dark/light” binary throughg the story of Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a former padawan framed for the crimes of her long-lost twin, Mae (also Stenberg), whose knotty dark-side vengeance quest brings them back into the paradoxically chaotic orbit of the Jedi Order. Creator Headland’s concept is sturdy and, coupled with the show’s yen for hand-to-hand combat, often evokes classic Hong Kong revenge thrillers like Sammo Hung’s indelible Wing Chun movies. (Yes, the fight choreography comes up short compared to Hung’s. But what doesn’t?) As a story of kinship, loyalty, and the desire to break free of an oppressive dogma that demands caution and sets limits, The Acolyte has a lot going for it.
Just look at the Jedi as they existed at this critical juncture: an exceptionally ambitious and canny Sith Lord one century later.
In this regard, The Acolyte feels like a response to the Jedi as they’re portrayed in Lucas’ prequel trilogy and Dave Filoni’s Clone Wars animated series: a society of powerful peaceniks who long ago inserted themselves into the politics and bureaucracies of the galaxy, used their influence to indoctrinate students (padawan training begins in childhood for some wild reason), and yanked the balance of the Force fully into the light—or the light as the Order sees it. Headland is offering further evidence to support Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) controversial assertion in The Last Jedi: strip away the myth and look at their deeds; the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, and hubris.
The Acolyte’s focus on characters who use the Force independent of the Jedi strengthens this approach. There are the Nightsisters (led by Jodie Turner-Smith) who see this natural power as “a thread” and have, let’s say, funky traditions that the Jedi frown at. And there’s Qimir (scene-stealer Manny Jacinto), a Sith-styled master whose knowledge and application of the Force initially come off like artisanal Kylo Ren. But listen to his words, like this line in the season’s best episode, “Night”: “I don’t make the rules; the Jedi do,” Qimir tells Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae). “They say I can’t exist.”
Qimir fortifies The Acolyte’s notions that galactic society is not well and hasn’t been for a long time. Its biggest idea is also one of the most radical of the franchise: Those who uphold a broken status quo—as the Jedi unquestionably do—will eventually lose power to those made to live in their shadow. The Acolyte centers the argument that the rise of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) was less a consequence of war and more of an inevitability, a gaming of a system long since diminished by an inert policing body.
On the surface, it’s solid stuff. Stripped of its season-length padding, The Acolyte might have made an awesome movie. As a series, however, it only further exposes the limitations of Star Wars TV as we’ve come to know it from other Lucasfilm nostalgia-sponging offerings like The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Book Of Boba Fett. Those shows are security-blanket TV; they’re either set in previously established eras or are meant to bridge them, so when they’re adorned in the recognizable ephemera of the franchise, it’s fair play. Setting a show in the High Republic was an opportunity to break the mold, ditch the Star Wars jammie-jams, and dig deeper into this space opera’s untold visual and narrative possibilities.
This is why it’s so disappointing that The Acolyte stumbles in execution. It scrambles to reach an eight-episode length when half would have sufficed. Consequently, the editing from episode to episode is rougher than it should be. There’s a chintziness to the sets, costumes, and makeup (not aided in the slightest by the crummy camerawork and use of lighting) that recalls that other Space TV franchise, Star Trek, where (in the days of network TV, anyway) production limitations were considered an opportunity to innovate with stories and character. In Trek, the cheapness is part of the charm; in Wars, it’s a liability. (Reportedly, $180 million was spent this season, a bewildering sum to reap such humdrum results.)
That’s the problem with Star Wars: It’s always been too big for live-action TV. Its saga is the stuff of grand opera and also a world-famous brand. Maybe this is why Lucasfilm refuses to break the mold. Each entry is expected to span multiple worlds and feature countless alien cultures while striking a delicate balance of tones that range from swashbuckling adventure to muppet comedy to devastating melodrama—and so each one does, regardless of whether or not it needs to. The Acolyte boasts an intimately rendered story that should set it apart from other Disney+ series, yet there it is, space-hopping all over the place and swinging unconvincing laser swords with reckless abandon, crashing into the limitations of what it wants to produce, stuck with what it has been given: a small canvas with which to create something that should, by the strength of its ambitions, feel tremendous.