I finished watching The Acolyte last week. Not the week I wrote this, but the week prior. Pretty much two weeks prior to the day this went up. I was watching it in chunks to match up with the Patreon episodes of A More Civilized Age, so I watched shortly after episode 5 came out and then the Friday after episode 8 came out. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with the show initially, but one of the things Austin Walker said in the first episode of AMCA’s covered of the show reframed the entire thing for me in a way that made it much easier to enjoy: The Acolyte is a YA show. Once I started treating it with the same level of seriousness and mindset as I treated most of the CW-type YA shows I’ve seen in my life (which is not many, to be honest), the whole thing felt way more enjoyable (which even applied in retrospect, given that I started listening to the podcast episode minutes after I finished episode 4 of The Acolyte). Once you stop expecting deep character motivations for every decision and can silence the voice in your head comparing the show to Andor, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I’d call it a good show, even, in the way that chips are a good food. It’s not the most substantive thing out there and you can easily find issues to pick at if you want to, but it’s mostly fun enough that none of that really matters. To once again paraphrase Austin Walker from multiple episodes of AMCA, there was enough interesting stuff going on most of the time that I didn’t really care about the stuff that didn’t work (with a few notable exceptions). All-in-all, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone who likes Star Wars and especially to those interested in stories about how the Jedi (individually) aren’t always good people and how the institution as whole is pretty rotten.

Most of the criticism I have in mind for the show comes with positive and negative sides to it. For example, the writing of the first season of the show is great in its broad, season-wide strokes, but suffers frequently in it’s moment-to-moment work. The general plot is one that interests me greatly and promises a really interesting future for the show if it gets renewed for one or more seasons, which will hopefully be enough time for the show to really shine. That, unfortunately, seems unlikely in the current media landscape of 8-episode “seasons,” weird budgets, and horrible (but relatively small in number despite their relatively enormous volume) Star Wars “fans” who work to shoot down anything that isn’t bland “Jedi are always the good guys, actually” crap by screaming about it endlessly online.

I’ll admit I’m pretty out of the loop about the online reaction to this show, given that I’m not on twitter were most of those unpleasant fans live and scream their heads off about anything and everything that isn’t their interpretation of movies that came out multiple decades ago, but I don’t think the show is worthy of that much distaste. Sure, the episodes themselves are directed and edited weirdly, with odd cliffhangers and episode endings that seem to exist for the sole purpose of creating tension that doesn’t really exist in the show, but the overall story is an interesting one that could have used a bit more time to build itself up. I can’t really blame the writing of this show since so much of it was probably restricted by whatever weird requirements Disney handed the team (since they seem to be the most intent on creating this weird release schedule, collection of limited episodes, and appeals to prestige television when something lighter and pulpier might be better suited to the subject matter or format). I look forward to reading articles and watching bonus features that will hopefully shed some light on the production process of this show since all I can do is speculate until then. Suffice it to say, for now, that the writing could have been stronger, even within the limitations I could observe as a viewer, but it wasn’t so weak that it really took me out of the show. Sure, I’ve got plenty to talk and write about now that I can view the show in retrospect (none of which will appear in this spoiler-free review), but only a few of these thoughts occurred to me in the moment, such was the show’s ability to carry me away with it.

Another piece of double-edged criticism was the fights. I mostly loved the fight scenes, which were stylistically distinct from how Star Wars normally does fight scenes, but some of them worked better than others. Some of the wirework was great, allowing the fight to be slowed down and sped up even as people moved and leapt around in ways that most actors wouldn’t be able to in order to represent a hand-to-hand fight fueled by the force, but sometimes (mostly in the earlier episodes) it didn’t work as well. Some of the fights absolutely showed how practiced and heavily rehearsed they were (which is good!) and some showed that they weren’t that rehearsed and maybe a bit too reliant on special effects to make up the difference. Unlike a lot of Jedi-centric combat scenes from the history of Star Wars, there was a LOT of hand-to-hand combat that treated lightsabers (all of which looked absolutely SICK in this show, so much better than pretty much anything else I’ve seen in a live-action show or movie prior to this) as merely an accessory to the combat unfolding rather than the focus. That, combined with some elements of the Star Wars: Legends “Canon” brought into the new Canon and given life in a brand new way, made for a lot of incredibly memorable and entertaining fight scenes. I’d say my positive feelings about the fight scenes vastly outweigh the negative ones since I can’t conjure a mental image of a moment where a fight scene didn’t work but there’s entire battle sequences that spring to mind when I think of what worked well. I don’t know that a fight in Star Wars has been this fun to watch since the battle of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi against Darth Maul in Phantom Menace (which was a huge game-changer given that most of the fights up to that point had been much slower, heavier fights) with the incomparable Duel of the Fates playing in the background.

While a lot of the acting was pretty alright (it’s difficult to draw a line on where “decent” acting falls versus bad acting since there were some issues that seemed to stem from poor character writing rather than merely poor actor performance) there were quite a few standout performances. Some of them coming from actors that didn’t do a great job in previous episodes. It was really all over the place, save for a few of the eventual mainstays, some of which weren’t properly revealed until almost halfway through the show, but the show as a whole seems full the sort of performances you’d see in older shows during their first season where the actors, writers, and directors were still figuring things out as they went, just compressed into an uncomfortable eight episodes instead of the then-usual of twenty-to-twenty-four shows used to get before everything was made for streaming platforms. The Acolyte has a lot of potential for future growth given where it ends its first season, but I think we’d have gotten a better version of the show if it had been given more than eight episodes and if it had been given some room to settle into comfortable habits rather than cram everything into eight dense but somehow still roomy episodes. I don’t know what Disney plans to do in regards to the future of the show, especially given that any season 2 will exist in a world after the strikes and new writing contracts of 2023, but it will hopefully be better off for the protections and requirements gained in those strikes rather than continue to risk being strangled by the horrible practices of major streaming platforms. So I’ve got some hope, but I’m not going to be holding my breath.

I don’t know if I’ll have a spoiler-filled review or discussion blog post for this show. It was a lot of fun but there wasn’t much of substance that I feel qualified to discuss. Well, nothing that would make for an interesting critical analysis or enthusiastic gushing post, anyway. Most of my in-depth discussions with fellow watchers have wound up landing on how weird the show feels when you’re not caught up in it and how some of the stuff doesn’t really work outside of the moment it happens in, when the show is fun enough to get you to suspend your disbelief and run with it. Any attempt to analyze it inevitably lands in the problem areas and struggles to emerge from then since “this was fun” doesn’t make for much of a conversation. As I’ve said a few times, not everything needs to have some greater meaning or depth for it to be worth your time and attention. I feel like The Acolyte is another example of this and while I’m sure you’ll watch it and have problems with it (namely you’ll wind up wondering why people make the inexplicably decisions they do with no prompting or discernable reason for their choices) just remind yourself that this is best viewed as a YA show about exploring big emotions and self-identity via big swings that don’t necessarily hold up to the scrutiny of an emotionally mature adult. Which, you know, feels weird to say about a show featuring a pair of protagonists that are in their early twenties at the youngest, but the vibes of a CW-type YA show are there and it’s so much more enjoyable if you don’t question it until the episode is over.