Review – Star Wars: The Acolyte

It is becoming an annual tradition for the culture wars to flare yet again with the delivery of fresh red meat from the fine folks over at the Walt Disney Corporation. Star Wars fans have had no shortage of opportunities to engage in their favorite activity: Hating Star Wars.

Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, and the third season of The Mandalorian have all been received as mediocre or poor continuations of a franchise that had burned through most of its goodwill after the sequel trilogy. Franchise saviors Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau have even generally fallen outside of fans’ good graces, with their upcoming 2026 The Mandalorian & Grogu film being greeted with a shrug.

The few universally positively received projects like Andor: Season 1 have unfortunately been drowned out due to the flood of content which includes recent announcements of new seasons of Ahsoka and Andor, a new series called Skeleton Crew, and upcoming films from Shawn Levy, Taika Waititi, James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Obaid-Chinoy. For good measure, this summer saw the release of one of the franchise’s most controversial entries to date.

Content Guide

Violence/Scary Images: PG-13 action violence with characters being shot by laser guns or slashed and killed by lightsabers, most excessive gore is kept offscreen and implied. Blood is depicted.
Language/Crude Humor: A few uses of h*** but generally limited.
Drug/Alcohol References: Characters are affected by substance use.
Sexual Content: Nothing is depicted but there is implied sexuality with partial nudity.
Spiritual Content: The series depicts an all-powerful “Force” that religious orders and occult witches access to gain powers like levitation, superhuman agility, and the ability to conceive life.
Other Negative Content: Postmodern themes of moral relativism, temptation, and positive depictions of witchcraft, with a poor depiction of mainstream religious institutions.
Positive Content: Themes of truth, family, perspective, and honesty.

Review

I’ve been holding off watching and reviewing The Acolyte for several months until the heat from the nuclear meltdown surrounding the show cooled. Not since Star Wars: The Last Jedi, seven years ago, has a Star Wars property been so thoroughly hated and eviscerated by the internet, nor thoroughly promoted by adamant defenders still seeking a revival. Like many Disney projects, the series fell into the ongoing culture wars surrounding Disney and its properties. One side declared it “woke“ nonsense that pushed lesbian space witches, and the other side celebrated it for its diversity and queerness.

It wasn’t worth wading through that debate at the time. However, a postmortem is in order with season 2 canceled and the internet having moved on to crucifying Disney+’s Agatha All Along and Amazon Prime’s The Rings of Power. Whether the show deserves its 18% user rating on Rotten Tomatoes is worth considering.

The series is part of Disney’s ongoing High Republic multimedia project. Starting in 2021, Disney began a new ongoing narrative project set in the centuries before the events of the original Star Wars trilogies that charts the decline of the Republic from the height of the Jedi order to the corrupt status quo at the beginning of the prequel trilogy. I only read the first book, Light of the Jedi, and found it mediocre. I haven’t checked in on the project’s various twists. However, The Acolyte is intended as the largest chapter of this multimedia project to date, being the first time this period in the franchise is depicted outside of novels and comics. 

Set a century before the events of the prequel trilogy, the Jedi Order finds itself grappling with a bizarre existential crisis when it appears a former Jedi has assassinated a leading Jedi Master. With three other masters being targeted, the presumed assassin is cornered. It quickly becomes clear she is innocent, as her long-lost twin sister appears to be the actual culprit. This pulls her into a massive conspiracy that threatens to reveal dark secrets about the Jedi Order. 

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the series is as bad as some of its most vociferous online critics have alleged. It’s very much sitting in the territory of half-baked CW-tier television shows with cheap production design and CGI (despite its monstrous $180 million budget). There’s cool stuff in here if you’re willing to take the show at face value. Episode 5’s ridiculously over-the-top asymmetrical lightsaber duel, its willingness to kill main characters (several of whom have major actors attached), and its expanding upon themes from the prequel trilogy work in the context of a lurid soap opera.

Sadly, mediocre is the best way to describe the series as it exists. The show’s storytelling problems are modest and dull. It starts as a murder mystery, immediately solves the mystery, and quickly shifts gears into a slow-burn villain origin story, with most of the plot dedicated to a low-rent retelling of Rashoman. The plot shifts constantly with revelations, abrupt status quo shifts, and murky character motivations. The performances are uneven, with many of the characters delivering dull stoic performances that don’t highlight what makes these characters interesting. The season ends on a cliffhanger suggesting its developments and revelations will affect the future. However, the unlikely reality of a second season leaves those revelations hanging.

From these decisions, any number of convoluted storytelling issues emerge. The result is a show that’s mostly murky but filled with shallow logic and a few genuinely interesting ideas and moments. But this makes it easy fodder for the internet, where tangible details become the focal point of most lay criticism. The narrative becomes both that the show is brilliantly queer-coded and subversive, and also that it is hampered by “woke” pandering and poor story logic.

This also comes with the added philosophical problem that the show is trying to focus on a character’s slow decline into villainy. Osha starts the show as a woman with deep grievances against the Jedi Order and Jedi who “saved” her from a cult of space witches who have the power to immaculately conceive life (something the Sith implicitly seems to be seeking in the background). The slow revelations of the Order’s moral degradation and authoritarian grasp over who gets to access the Force pushes her into the show’s dark climactic final moments.

Because the show is trying to justify this turn, its moral underpinning becomes entirely post-modern and morally relativistic. Osha’s witch mother Aniseya confidently tells her as a young child in episode 3 that, “This isn’t about good or bad. This is about power and who is allowed to use it.” This is remarkably more radical than the deconstructionist themes of The Last Jedi, where the villain echos these sentiments and they are rejected by the protagonist. The moral being set up by The Acolyte is analogous to saying Rey OUGHT to have joined Kylo Ren in joining the First Order and burning the galaxy to the ground.

The Acolyte ultimately becomes a story about the evils of organized religion, moral binaries, and the unknowability of ultimate truth, as evidenced by the fact the Sith character is portrayed both as a passionate heartthrob and a physically attractive romantic partner for Osha. It becomes a story about temptation winning, although a second season might’ve undermined that conclusion. As it stands though, the show fetishized the evil of its antagonist.

On paper, this is fine. There’s nothing wrong in genre fiction with telling villain origin stories or acknowledging the tempting nature of sin. If it weren’t, Goodfellas or Shakespeare’s Macbeth would be morally toxic stories. They aren’t, though, because both stories have a moral core to pull back from the lead character’s hedonism and pride to reveal the dehumanizing nature of those sins and the degradation they cause to the soul. The Last Jedi even tacitly pulls back at the last minute to admit that “killing the past” or surrendering to despair are bad things.

The Acolyte isn’t bad because it’s diverse or because Osha has lesbian witch parents (although the casual normalization of witchcraft in this and Agatha All Along raises an eyebrow). It isn’t even necessarily bad because most of its plot points are easy to poke logic holes into. The show is mediocre because it lacks brevity, wit, and a moral core that isn’t driven by moral nihilism. It is a stew of interesting and subversive ideas floating around a cheesy sci-fi original series. It’s stilted and awkward when it needs to be acerbic and moralistic.