The Acolyte episode 1: Lost/Found

The Acolyte is a new series streaming on Disney+. It is set in the Star Wars universe and occurs 100 years before the fall of the Jedi and subsequent rise of the Empire.

What happened: A Force-using assassin confronts Jedia Master Indara on Ueda. The assassin insists she's there on unfinished business. Indara believes she recognizes the assassin and is surprised by this. After some dramatic Force-enhanced martial arts, the assassin (although clearly outmatched) kills the Jedi by using endangered bystanders as a distraction. Sometime thereafter Jedi Yord arrives at a Nemodian cargo vessel and arrests Osha, a meknek (repair tehnician) on the ship, for Indara's murder. Yord and Osha know each other. Not only does Osha match the description of the killer and had no alibi for the previous day, it turns out that she departed the Jedi order as a Padawan under murky terms six years prior and had a strained relationship with Indara. Shipped to Coruscant on a prison ship, Osha is caught up in a prisoner escape. Left behind when all the escape pods are stolen by fleeing prisoners, she rides the damaged prison ship to a crash landing on the froze world of Carlac. While stranded there, Osha has a Force vision that leads her to believe her twin sister, Mae, thought to have died in a tragic fire as a child, is actually alive. On Coruscant, Jedi Sol, Osha's former master, is sent to hunt for his former Padawan along with his current Padawan, Jecki, and Yord. Osha tries to flee but is cornered, where she tells Sol that Mae is still alive. The episode ends with Mae reporting to her boss, a mysterious figure with a red lightsaber.

Disturbances in the Force: Talk about bait-and-switch. All of the promotional materials in the lead-up to this show heavily featured Carrie-Ann Moss as a Jedi, and she was unceremoniously killed off five minutes in. I'm sure we'll see more of her in flashbacks, but the move feels like a cheap stunt. Yes, it shows none of the main characters are safe from harm, but viewers know none of these characters yet. The Force-Fu martial arts fight was fun and something we'd not seem in Star Wars until now, but Moss' presence here just draws attention to how similar the fight choreography is to the Matrix films. There are more red herrings--when we first see Osha, immediately following Indara's death, some of the first dialog brings up the fact that her crewmates don't know where she was earlier on her day off. Of course we assume she's a deep-cover assassin as Amandla Stenberg plays both Osha and Mae. As viewers, we figure out pretty quickly that Osha cannot be the killer--her personality isn't a front and even though she's a former Padawan, her use of the Force is limited at best--a far cry from the skills of Mae. This misdirection comes and goes fairly quickly, which leaves me scratching my head. If it's a genuine red herring I'd expect the episode to string the audience along longer, but instead the show's like "Ha ha! Fooled you again!" and then moving on. I get that this is supposed to be a mystery, and reversals and red herrings are staples of the genre, but it's so slight and incidental it's almost like a stutter-step. There's another scene where Sol explains to Jecki that Osha's sister died in a fire long before, that he watched her die. Yet as soon as Osha say's Mae's alive, Sol is like, "Yeah, that makes sense." I have a growing feeling that any dialog or character development may be rendered meaningless in the very next scene. This show gives me whiplash from scene to scene.

That may seem like I hate this show. No, I'm actually enjoying it with some reservations. There is behind-the scenes intrigue, with reference to the Jedi's political opponents using Indara's death against them. The characters are entertaining. Yord is a pompous ass who in High Republic Jedi regalia and uses rules as a blunt force instrument. What's great is that the other characters don't seem to like him much more than the viewers. Jecki is an eager-to-please Padawan who is also by-the-book, but not to the extreme of Yord. And Sol is a veteran Jedi haunted by regret. Osha is the plucky heroine out of her depth and unable to use the Force to get her out of scrapes. Mae is the ruthless killer on a mission of vengeance who can use the Force quite well, even though she's not particularly powerful compared to Jedi. The "twins separated at birth" shtick was well-worn before Star Wars used it the first time with Luke and Leia, but I'm willing to give it a chance.

Another nice touch is that none of the ships look familiar. Likewise for the droids. The clothing, too--especially the formal Jedi robes that are more pompous and elegant than the monk robes seen in other films and series. The Force-Fu fights were fun even if I wish they'd have drawn less attention to the fact they are completely derivative of The Matrix. I love the idea of a Force-trained assassin defeating more powerful Jedi through trickery. I'm not enamoured with the idea of a Sith pulling the strings--why does it have to be Jedi vs. Sith again? But judging by Trinity's early exit and the other red herrings in this episode, that could be a misdirection as well.

This is the first of the live action Star Wars series to have an infodump text crawl at the opening. Well, the text didn't actually crawl, it just sat there. But you know what I mean.

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