Swinging for the fences

Lucasfilm streamed the finale of its latest series, Star Wars: The Acolyte earlier this summer, and word broke this week that the studio has decided not to continue the series into a second season. I've been thinking a lot about the series since it wrapped up, and piecing together what I felt about the show and its place in the larger Star Wars ecosystem and where it goes from here.

After Lucasfilm and Disney released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker into theaters in December 2019, they've been trying to figure out how to keep the franchise going beyond the nine-episode "Skywalker Saga" that formed the core of the story and world. This isn't an insurmountable problem: the sprawling Expanded Universe provided something of a roadmap until that canon went away prior to the arrival of the sequel trilogy, while films like Rogue One and shows like The Mandalorian and Andor have showed that it's possible to tell good stories in this world without the Skywalker name.

But it's also hit or miss: there's the desire to pull back to those familiar characters, like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Boba Fett, and others who've popped up here and there, and the most immediate films on the horizon are ones that step back into some of those familiar characters, like Din Djarin and Rey.

That's why I was intrigued by Lucasfilm's decision to step further back into the timeline with its latest series, The Acolyte, setting it about a century prior to the events of The Phantom Menace, at the tale end of a major project they've been calling The High Republic – a collection of novels and comics set during the Republic's heyday. Removing the series from the familiar settings of the Skywalker Saga would give its creator, Leslye Headland, space to operate and play out what was billed as a "mystery-thriller that will take the audience into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark side powers in the final days of the High Republic era."

There are significant spoilers ahead for the series.

Set a century before the rise of the Empire, The Acolyte starts off with a startling scene: an assailant tracks down a Jedi Master named Indara and after a brief and intense fight, slays her with a knife. In quick succession, we watch as two more Jedi, Master Torbin and Kelnacca are struck down by this mysterious figure. The Jedi Order quickly come to believe that it was enacted by a former Padawan named Osha Aniseya, who had been taken from a cult of witches living on a planet named Brendok 16 years ago by the slain Jedi. She was trained by Sol, the last Master in the group who's still alive, but ultimately left the Jedi Order and was found working as a mechanic on a spaceship.

Over the course of eight episodes, Headland takes us through the connection between this group of Jedi and Osha. They quickly realize that Osha wasn't the one who perpetrated the murders: it was her twin sister Mae-ho, who they had thought perished during the Brendok mission. Mae, as it turns out, had not only survived, but was discovered and trained by a Sith agent (called The Stranger, and played by the outstanding Manny Jacinto), who appears to have a vendetta against the Jedi Order. He takes apart Sol's team of Jedi, and as they all converge on Brendok, the events that took place there begin to come to light, and showcase a much deeper conspiracy that helped kick off their current predicament.

At its highest points, The Acolyte seemed as though it was aiming to be the Star Wars equivalent of HBO's True Detective or Mare of Easttown, a slow slow-burn mystery that deals with buried conspiracies that forces everyone to deal with an issue that they'd rather leave forgotten. Master Sol and his companions discovered that Osha and Mae were particularly strong in the Force and might have been the result of some powerful meddling, and decide to try and force the community to give up the girls to train them as Jedi. Things go south: Sol kills the girl's mother, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), and has to make a choice: save Osha or Mae. He ultimately leaves Mae to fall and assumes that she perished in the resulting explosions and fires.

On paper, this is a really interesting mystery, but one that was ultimately stymied by a handful of factors: the show's lackluster execution, as well as a sense that the show's writers spent a lot of time overthinking what they were trying to accomplish.

There's a quote from Rogue One's Gareth Edwards that lives rent-free in my brain, something he noted in the film's Celebration reel back in 2016 when talking about how to bring something new and different to the franchise: "if you're too respectful of it, if you didn't do anything new or different, take a risk, then what are you bringing to the table?"

New and different are essential things in keeping any long-running franchise fresh and relatable to viewers, while fans are often a bit more conservative in their desires: by and large, they want more of the same, the story and character frozen in place from their last entry-point. Headland's been talking about how she was a huge fan of the Expanded Universe and drops some neat throwbacks to it throughout the show, and it feels like she's been trying to find the balance between telling the story and slotting it into the existing lore and canon.

I've often noted that I see Star Wars not just as a single, sprawling story, but as a genre in and of itself that can contain all sort of stories. We've seen high political intrigue in the form of Andor, military science fiction from Michael Stackpole's X-Wing novels, romance in the form of Beth Revis's The Princess and the Scoundrel, and western adventures by way of The Mandalorian.

A slow-burn conspiracy mystery is well-suited for this particular world, and by and large, I really dug what The Acolyte was about: a story of how heroic characters are fallible and can make some awful choices, all while confronting the image that we have in our heads of what these heroic characters are actually like. This is where I think Star Wars is often at its strongest: the darkness of The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas's vision for the Prequel trilogy, the way Rian Johnson upended our expectations in The Last Jedi, and how Tony Gilroy brought us a darker version of the Rebel Alliance in Andor. The Acolyte brought us a new look into how complicated the Jedi Order was, and that sometimes, they're not always the good guys.

This is something that we've seen before: Karen Traviss's Republic Commando novels, told from the point of view of a handful of clone troopers, paints a very different picture of what the Jedi Order is, and there's elements of that vision in this show: the Jedi are an order that is tasked with maintaining peace and order throughout the galaxy, but while they're largely benevolent, they're not unaffected by the political happenings that are going on around the galaxy. We see that they're concerned (rightly!) about superpowered individuals running amok throughout the galaxy, and get a bit snippy when others (like the Galactic Senate) question their workings. In that way, the Jedi Order isn't too different from a major religion: a force for good in the eyes of a lot of people, but also unwilling to share power or market share, lest they lose their favored position in the hierarchy of the world. This take is something that I've long wanted to see in Star Wars, and for the most part, the show delivers.

Where it doesn't falls into a couple of categories. The first thing was the execution of the series, which is pretty superficial, all things considered. Weird camera angles, CGI, acting, these aren't generally important to whether or not a story works, but when they don't hold up, they pull attention away from everything.

The bigger of them is that it felt like the show's writers spent a little too much time overthinking, and ended up making the story a bit more complicated than it needed to be.

One of the things that the Sequel trilogy played with was the idea of a "Force dyad," where a pair of force-sensitive individuals have a deep and unbreakable bond. Headland and the show's writers pick up that thread with Osha and Mae's story, putting their own twist on it as a soul split between two bodies. In doing so, they're able to play with some really interesting points about the duality of the Force's Light and Dark sides, with the characters ending up in some interesting places by the time the series wraps up.

Master Sol is forced to make a heartbreaking choice during their initial encounter (save one girl or fail to save both), but this dyad theme doesn't really figure into the core conspiracy beyond the surface level, and it ends up feeling a little too wonky for a casual viewer who hasn't immersed themselves in a ton of the background lore – also an issue with another of this year's streaming shows, Ashoka. Lore isn't bad, but it's often distraction.

What's frustrating about the show and its cancellation (or as Lucasfilm has pedantically put it, not canceled, because it wasn't greenlit for a Season 2) is how much of the studio's planning seems to be at the whims of some of the worst people in Star Wars fandom.

There's a running joke that nobody hates Star Wars more than diehard Star Wars fans, and in the years since Disney purchased Lucasfilm and released the latest crop of sequels and spinoffs, there's been a cottage industry and network of YouTubers and news sites that have made hay out of every single rumor and development, often crowing that identity politics and Kathleen Kennedy are slowly running the franchise into the ground.

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One of the biggest complaints that I saw about this show was how it made the Jedi look like the bad guys, complaints that go hand-in-hand with "The Last Jedi ruined Luke Skywalker," while films like Rogue One and shows like The Mandalorian are praised because they don't really push the needle that far: they're remixes of a lot of common elements, but don't really change the underlying meaning of those things we're fans of. (I think Andor is a weird exception to this: it's been highly praised, pushes our understanding of the franchise, and didn't get a ton of pushback.)

This is a problem for storytellers for any long-running franchise: how do you push the story forward when fans don't really want to be challenged in a meaningful way?

In some ways, just waiting fandom out can do the trick. The Prequel trilogy was reviled after the release of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. It's hard to sometimes conjure up the same feeling of vitriol on message boards at the time. The Clone Wars was the same way when it hit theaters, but eventually turned out to be a super popular thing. The Sequel trilogy? Wait for 10-15 years and see how the mood will turn when the kids who were introduced to the series through those films come of age, and after Lucasfilm can backfill any of the continuity issues or the "somehow, Palpatine has returned" moments with books and comics. The Acolyte? My 11-year-old son really enjoyed it – it's the first Star Wars thing that he's really sat through beginning to end.

In other ways, I think Lucasfilm could stand to have more of a long-term vision for what they want to do with the franchise. Filling out the last trilogy in piecemeal fashion as they did is still perplexing to me. Change is important for the longevity of any sort of franchise like this, but I also think that abrupt changes in direction, tone, or style really don't work – for any property. (I'll forever maintain that The Last Jedi should have been Episode 9, with The Force Awakens easing us into this new era with something utterly recognizable, and with an episode 8 that should have bridged the two, but that's me.)

Where does Star Wars go from here? They'll presumably burn off whatever hanging threads left over from Acolyte (and oh, there were some great threads left hanging) in some books or comics down the road, and we'll at some point get The Mandalorian & Grogu and the Rey film in a couple of years. What I'd like to see is more of an idea from the start that Lucasfilm is putting out stories where they know the direction, and have a way to cap them off in a satisfying way, rather than throwing out a one-off and hoping that fandom won't be fickle and childish about it.

The Acolyte actually felt like it would have been good as a one-off story, had it been a bit more streamlined: hanging story threads like the appearance of Darth Plagueis and whatever will happen with The Stranger and Mae point to a much larger story that really shouldn't be constructed while the plane is mid-flight. It's perplexing to me, because Lucasfilm has so much control over its story through the Story Group, but can't seem to figure out the end game for most of these stories. We have a growing list of unfinished stories like Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Acolyte, Ashoka, and The Book of Boba Fett, which are essentially left hanging. It's frustrating because these are cinematic stories with momentum behind them, and it often feels as though you're wasting time delving into them.

There's no easy solution to this. I think fans and the studio needs to stop listening to the more toxic factions of fandom and concentrate on the telling of the stories, fans need to stop being so goddamn fickle and childish and precious about what stories are being told (ie, not treating everything like an apocalypse), and accept that the Star Wars (or any other franchise) that you fell in love with is a malleable thing and won't – and shouldn't! – be the same static thing moving forward. It should change and update itself and get weirder with time.

Otherwise, we're just remixing the characters and stories, a self-deprecating loop that sucks whatever joy we gleaned from it in favor of commercials for the next year's toys. For all the complaining that YouTubers and commentators have made about the franchise since Disney's acquisition, I think they've done a lot to push and experiment with where the franchise can and should go. Not all of those experiments will work, but not everything has to.

Ultimately, I thought The Acolyte was a decent and engaging series. It fell short for me of the high water mark that Andor left behind, but had quite a lot going for it: it expanded the world in some unexpected directions and introduced us to a series of new characters that I'd love to see down the road. While this particular story came to a shorter-than-expected closure this time, I'm hoping that they'll keep trying to swing for the fences and come up with something just as interesting.