Summary
I knowit’s in fashion to hateonThe Acolyteright now. While the show has faced waves of racist and homophobic backlash from a specific sect of fans since its release, there are still lots of normal people who are watching the show and have fair criticisms that have nothing to do with an aversion to lesbians or Black protagonists.
That said, as a normal person who watches the show, I haven’t been enjoying it all that much. The first half of the first season has felt relatively dreary. While I admire its interesting themes and stalwart dedication to not dropping fan-servicey references every couple of minutes, I found myself resisting the urge to pick up my phone and answer texts while watching the show, because I was bored. This all changed once I hit the end of the fourth episode, the exact midpoint of the series, when a surprise cliffhanger had me leaning forward towards my TV, completely locked in.
I’ll be talking about what’s happened in The Acolyte up till now.
The Acolyte Is About Halves And Duality
If you haven’t been keeping up with the show, here’s the lowdown: Osha and Mae are twins who grew up in a very cool, all-female Force witch coven who taught them that the Force is misused by the Jedi. As they are about to be officially inducted into the coven, the Jedi show up and basically say ‘hey, why are you training kids?’ This is, of course, something that Jedi rules state only Jedi are allowed to do. Funny that. The twins are tested for their suitability to become Jedi, and their mother asks them to fail the test. Mae fails, Osha passes, and Mae gets super mad. Bad things happen, Mae appears to die (as does the whole coven), and Osha is rescued and trained as a Padawan.
But actually, Mae is alive, and now she’s on a quest to kill a bunch of Jedi Masters. Trained by a mysterious Master of her own, she murders a bunch of people. Meanwhile, Osha was ejected from the Order because she couldn’t get over the grief of losing her family, and really, you can’t blame her. Since the twins are identical, and nobody knows Mae is alive, they think Osha is getting revenge on the Jedi. She manages to absolve herself and ends up working with her former Jedi Master, Sol, to find the real killer, her sister.
So far, so good, until episode four, Day. This is where things get interesting. What seemed like a straightforward redemption plot where one sister saves the other takes a turn – Mae doesn’t want to kill Jedi anymore, and decides to turn herself in. Her plan, unsurprisingly, goes awry, and the Jedi surround her hiding place like a bunch of magical cops. Then her Master appears out of nowhere andkills everyonebut Sol and the twins in an incredibly choreographed fight. I thought it was pretty cool that so many main characters died in undignified ways, because it flies in the face of the typical television convention of not killing your main characters unexpectedly.
In the next episode, fittingly named Night, the Master is revealed to be Mae’s incompetent, soft-spoken, extremely hot smuggler friend Qimir. After the twins escape, Mae knocks her sister out and takes her place, returning with Sol to the Jedi ship. Osha, in turn, is taken by Qimir to his evil, surprisingly scenic Sith lair.
If you’ve suddenly been moved by the Force to watch The Acolyte because you started seeing gifs of Manny Jacinto’s arms on social media, you’re not alone. Two of my housemates stood by the television, mouths agape, asking me who that beautiful man was as I watched the latest episode.
Now, we see Osha and Qimir starting to get closer – as Mae takes her sister’s place, so does Osha take Mae’s. Osha has an unhealthy curiosity about Qimir, one that manifests through ample sexual tension. It’s a perfect thematic fit, each sister balancing the other, yin versus yang, one learning to understand the Jedi and the other understanding the Sith. Suddenly, the show isn’t about redeeming one sister, but placing these two women on a scale, leaving them perfectly in balance.
Intentional? I Don’t Know. Fitting? Very.
While I don’t think the series taking such a huge turn pace-wise was necessarilyintentional– I doubt that any showrunner wants the first half of a season to be moderately snooze-worthy – it does make a lot of thematic sense. Looking at the show as a whole, everything is about balancing halves: the Dark and the Light, the two sisters trying to find connection, two Masters with their own understandings of the world, individuality and community.
I understood The Acolyte to be one kind of show, but as the second half of the season begins to take form, I’m realising now it’s something else altogether. Of course it all changed halfway through – when else would it? I’m suddenly very interested in seeing how the rest of this story plays out now that it’s no longer what I expected it to be, and I promise it’s not just because we get to see Manny Jacinto shirtless.
Star Wars: The Acolyte
Cast
The Acolyte is a series set in the wider Star Wars universe, in which a Padawan and her former Jedi Master come together to investigate a series of Jedi murders.
