The first two episodes of the new Star Wars series, The Acolyte, are now out on Disney+, and they’re a useless sloppy mess as a result of diversity being more important than quality story.
What Leslye Headland, Disney and Lucasfilm did with the show is to make sure the series had a diverse cast before anything, and then come up with the story surrounding that diverse cast.
It’s as if they had a list of things to check off that they felt important, but nothing on the list was about producing a good show. So as they focused on diversity, what got lost was quality writing.
Case in point, and it’s something since gone viral on Twitter, is the scene in space with Osha fixing the ship and putting out the fire.
Well, hello, there can be no fire in space (gas won’t burn) as there is no oxygen. You’re telling me no one working on the series knew this?
Well, what the scene did was set up a flashback to where Osha remembered fire from her childhood. Well, how about when she was on the Jedi prison ship, fire broke out, but there was no reaction from her (she could have had the flashback then)? Or why didn’t she pilot the ship (later on in the episode she knows the controls)???
More evidence of diversity coming ahead of quality story comes with Charlie Barnett’s Yord Fandar who in the show comes off just as moronic as the things Barnett says in interviews. Is there no publicist to help these guys out? Does anyone at Disney even care? All the interviews do is piss off and turn off the fans. Is that the intention?
Yord Fandar is useless in the first two episodes and doesn’t even need to be there. Why he is really there is so Dafne Keen’s character can make him look like a simp. The guy is an idiot, and he is supposed to be a Jedi Knight??? If you remove Yord Fandar from the episodes, nothing changes other than some guy being made to look stupid no longer appears in the show.
Speaking of the Jedi, I knew it was all downhill from the beginning with Carrie-Anne Moss who is supposed to be a Master Jedi. Likewise with that one lone white dude who looks like complete shit (guess what? he’s useless, too). Carrie-Anne Moss gets murdered by some newb with daggers. It’s laughable. The white dude Master Jedi who hasn’t spoken in ten years commits suicide. Laughable.
Another scene that bugged me was when Osha was talking to Master Sol and something was said about how Osha wants revenge on “her,” but who is the her? It’s not Osha’s sister, because her sister was 8 frickin’ years old at the time and she thought her sister was dead. Was it revenge on Indara? Well, she was already dead. Do I need to watch it again? What is going on?
It’s around the same scene where Mae used the wind or whatever to create a dust storm and disappear. That was horrible.
They couldn’t come up with anything better? Again, the Jedi come off looking like useless doofuses to prop up a little girl who doesn’t even have a f’n lightsaber, which are just as useless as all the characters in the show yet are used to promote the series because it’s Star Wars, duh.
Some other thoughts:
Set 100 years before the prequels in the High Republic? Who cares? You wouldn’t know it by watching at least the first two episodes. The series could very well be set at the same time as the prequels.
Osha and Mae have two mothers? Huh? How does that work, and the two mothers created a set of twins? Whaat??? Again, all about the diversity thing to shove it in your face that the people who created the show are LGBTQ. 99% of fans don’t care. It would be like constantly putting pro-Trump references all throughout the content in a show targeted at the LGBTQ audience. Get it?
The main villain? We only got a glimpse of the villain at the end of the first episode. Apparently, whoever it is has been training Mae and wants her to kill Jedi in a certain way, apparently to prove herself? Also, those four Jedi were on her planet when she and Osha were little kids and apparently were responsible for the death of their family or village or whatever? There is only six more episodes, they have a lot of explaining to do.
One other scene that bugged me was the dialogue when Osha pretended to be Mae and she is talking to Qimir and she’s like, “Hi.” He’s like, “Hi.” WTF?
Or how about when Mae breaks into the Jedi Temple and first attacks the lone useless Jedi? She then escapes and returns to kill him the next day. How come there are no guards or anything? Again, laughable.
One more: I thought Osha seeing Mae as a young child may have been through The Force or something, or showed the connection between the twins. However, it was revealed that Mae also thought Osha was dead, so that young Mae vision wasn’t anything to do with the actual Mae. Again, it came off as useless.
Final thought: You really want to like The Acolyte because it’s “Star Wars” and there are “Jedi,” but the two episodes are filled with crappy characters, dialogue and sloppy writing. It’s a massive misfire. Rating: 4/10.
