‘The Acolyte’ Season Finale Recap: Live and Let Jedi

Let’s say you’re a member of some kind of holy order of warrior monks. You’re out with your crew, hunting for a source of powerful magic. In the process, you stumble across the hidden temple of an unknown denomination of magic-wielding heretics. There are only two kids there, and one is visibly unhappy being brought up in her current religion. You pull rank, run some tests, find out the kid would rather leave than stay. Meanwhile, you’re also aware that some of the powerful, magic-wielding heretics would like to, and in fact plan to, kill you. Everyone with me so far?

Anyway, a confrontation ensues, and as a fight breaks out the most powerful member of the cult of magic-wielding heretics morphs into an ominous cloud of black mist. You, warrior monk, have a magical sword. You’re telling me you wouldn’t have stabbed that thing too? Come on. Pull the other one.

This is the core problem with The Acolyte , as I see it: Sol’s hidden crime is just fog-of-war confusion. The visual, of Mother Aniseya transforming into black smoke and Sol stabbing the smoke in a blind panic, simply does not map to the idea that Sol committed murder in order to free Mae and Osha from a sorceress too powerful to be left alive. If that’s what he was doing, it’s the responsibility of showrunner/creator Leslye Headland and company to…well, to depict him doing that , instead of lashing out at a poltergeist with his lightsaber — because what the hell else would you expect him to do under those circumstances? I understand why Osha and Mae would hate him for it, of course. But why would we?

So. When we arrive at the pivotal moment when one of the two young women — who Sol tells us are the same person, though it’s unclear how literally we’re supposed to take this — is supposed to kill a Jedi without a weapon, it’s an enraged Osha who does the Force choke, not Mae. Now that she knows the truth, she kills Sol immediately.

And now we come to the crux of it all. I’m sitting there watching this obviously decent guy get slowly murdered by one of two interchangeable characters defined entirely by their traumatic backstory. I’m talking two total ciphers, by the way, two real zeroes as characters now that we’ve reached the end of the season; if you can identify more than two human characteristics or qualities possessed by either Mae or Osha, I’ll eat Bantha fodder. Moreover, I’m watching an interesting and empathetic actor, Lee Jung-Jae, get written off the show.

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No sir, I don’t like it!

Subsequently, I see this methodical, drawn-out murder presented as some kind of necessary catharsis to reunite the two sisters/clones/whatevers. It’s what finally brings them together, crying in each other’s arms after retracing Mae’s original escape from the witches’ fortress to the special yellow video game cutscene tree they hold sacred. Since we’ve been told they’re literally the same person, it’s a symbolic reintegration of the self. Over murdering a guy.

Can’t say I’m a fan!

And finally, after all this, after a full season of digging up buried memories doled out drip by drip by painstaking, tedious drip…Qimir erases Mae’s memories, so that Master Vernestra has to explain the story to her all over again.

Ladies, gentlemen, friends beyond the binary: What are we doing here? What are we doing?

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It’s not like The Acolyte has nothing going for it. It has, or had, some interesting actors, though it often felt like it was in a race to kill as many of them off as possible. It has a subdued, naturalistic, but still multi-hued color palette — think of the use of purple and green in Master Vernestra’s control room when she’s talking to Mae, for example. This may sound like I’m damning it with faint praise, but any show that resists the temptation to color-grade itself into oblivion deserves plaudits.

And the lightsaber battles kick ass, there’s really no other way to put it. It maddened me that writer Jason Micallef and director Hanelle M. Culpepper kept cutting away from Qimir and Sol’s ferocious, classic blue-on-red swordfight for a comparatively dull sparring session between the mirrored Mae and Osha. I know that’s the Star Wars way, but that’s when you’re referring to the attack runs on the first and second Death Stars — in other words, two of the greatest prolonged movie action sequences ever made . The mastery required to do what George Lucas, Richard Marquand, and especially editor Marcia Lucas did in those two battles has yet to reveal itself in any Disney Star Wars project other than Andor .

Be that as it may, the fight rules. You can hear the white-hot power of their sabers as they grind them into one another, sparking and screeching. You can sense Sol’s fear and frustration as Qimir repeatedly reveals new configurations and uses for his fancy-schmancy lightsaber, just as you can sense Qimir’s fear and frustration as Sol parries every attack. The slo-mo leaps through the air are actually cool-looking enough to justify slo-mo, which is very much not guaranteed when action filmmakers use slo-mo. Just a straight-up badass Jedi vs. Sith lightsaber battle like we had in the old country. Other than letting up on the intensity with the unnecessary cross-cutting, I’ve got no complaints about that at all.

In the end, Master Vernestra frames Sol for Mae’s crimes, in order to keep Mae available to track down Qimir — who was, you guessed it, was a pupil of hers before he turned to evil. (There are a lot of unnecessary callbacks to original-trilogy dialogue in this one for some reason.) Osha and Qimir hold hands (what passes for hot stuff around here) as they look out at the ocean near his hidden home; either Qimir is unaware of the shadowy, monstrous figure who hangs out nearby, or Sol isn’t the only one keeping secrets.

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Finally, we see the back of Yoda’s head. That’s where things are headed for Season 2, I guess.

Which leads us to the other core problem with The Acolyte . (Hey, if Mae and Osha can be the same person, I can cite two core problems.) Simply put, making the Jedi shitty, scheming assholes is both boring storytelling and bad business.

For one thing, we already had a whole trilogy of movies demonstrating how bad the Jedi screwed up. Rian Johnson echoed this theme in The Last Jedi , his overrated contribution to Disney’s creatively disastrous sequel trilogy. This is covered ground. And yet, the Disney/Lucasfilm braintrust keeps coming back to “Hey, what if it turned out you couldn’t fully trust the Jedi?” like moths to a bug zapper.

The thing is, though? People like the Jedi! The Jedi were the good guys of the only part of the franchise that’s universally beloved by the fandom, the original trilogy! Children want to be Jedi! You sell them the lightsabers that make it easier to pretend that they are! (In my day we used wiffle ball bats.) Jedi are as synonymous with “good guys” as the goddamn Super-Friends.

So imagine if Warner Bros./DC premised the entire James Gunn relaunch of its shared superhero universe on the idea that “You know what? The Justice League does more harm than good, actually.” You hear how nuts that sounds?

I’m just not buying what’s being sold here, it’s pretty much that simple. I don’t get the people who are in the market for it, either. I don’t get why Disney keeps trying to sell it to people. The Acolyte: I don’t get it.

Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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