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The Jedi barely appear in the original Star Wars trilogy. Obi-Wan and Yoda are both hermits hiding from their own failures in distant corners of the galaxy, and both die after teaching Luke Skywalker a bit about the Force. Luke himself never technically completes his training, though he gets close enough to be considered a Jedi master in later films. So the Jedi exist more as a exciting symbol in those early films, as well as a mystery: How could a group of people so wise and powerful have just ceased to exist?
The solution to that mystery unfortunately robbed the Jedi of most of the mystique that Obi-Wan and Yoda gave them in the early movies. It turns out the Jedi got wiped out because they were soft, self-congratulatory, and far too hung up on rules that did more harm than good. If Mace Windu had just told young Anakin that he was allowed to go kiss Padme, for Pete’s sake, the Empire never would have been created. The Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons did a bit better by the Jedi, but on the whole, they are, like Boba Fett(*), a George Lucas creation where the more they get to do, the less thrilling they become.
(*) A.K.A. the guy who turned out to be so boring, his own show had to morph into a Mandalorian bonus season partway through.
The newest Disney+ Star Wars series, The Acolyte, at least attempts to openly confront the reality that the Jedi are smug, complacent, and kind of terrible. But the execution of that idea is spotty throughout the four episodes given to critics. And the decision to set it a century before the rise of the Empire seems to defeat the purpose of the whole thing, because the Jedi of The Phantom Menace have learned exactly zero lessons.
The Acolyte was created by writer-director Leslye Headland, who was one of the co-creators of Netflix’s great sci-fi comedy Russian Doll(*). Headland has built her whole story around the institutional failings of the Jedi. A young woman named Mae (Amandla Stenberg) is seeking revenge on a quartet of Jedi masters — the wise Sol (Lee Jung-jae), the stoic Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Wookiee master Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo), and young Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman) — for a family tragedy. And the more we learn about the history, the clearer it becomes that Jedi law — and questions of who is and isn’t allowed to study the Force — played an unfortunately huge role. Meanwhile, Mae’s twin sister Osha (Stenberg again) is working as a mechanic after washing out of Jedi training, and she has to again speak with her former teacher, Sol.
(*) Two of that show’s actors play Jedi here. Rebecca Henderson is Vernestra, a green-skinned, high-ranking member of the order. Charlie Barnett is Yord, a Jedi nerd.
Lee Jung-jae, the Emmy-winning star of Squid Game, brings a necessary amount of gravitas, warmth, and regret as Sol. His relationship with Osha is easily the best and most fully-realized aspect of The Acolyte. Stenberg, Headland, and their collaborators regrettably struggle to differentiate Osha and Mae from one another, even when they’re wearing different clothes and pursuing different agendas. (It’s even worse in the third episode, a listless flashback where the two girls, played by Leah and Lauren Brady, are styled identically.)
Most of the pieces are uneven at best, if not simply underwhelming. Carrie-Anne Moss is used well in an opening action set piece (once again getting to work with bullet-time effects, 25 years after the first Matrix) but is otherwise wasted, and the later fight scenes aren’t as dynamic. There are some amusing bits of business regarding interpersonal dynamics among the Jedi — Yord is so disrespected that even Sol’s padawan, Jecki (Dafne Keen, from Logan and His Dark Materials), feels comfortable acting superior to him — but not a lot. And the idea of seeing a Wookiee Jedi in action is more exciting than the little that Kelnacca actually gets to do.
Manny Jacinto injects some welcome scoundrel energy as Mae’s ally, Qimir. Like Han Solo and Finn, he doesn’t care much about the Force, which is an element the prequels badly lacked. It’s especially helpful in a story that is so much about the Force, and which people the Jedi believe should be allowed to wield it. This was, of course, a key theme of the sequels, both within the story and within the awkward baton-passing between writer-directors J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson.
Johnson’s The Last Jedi goes out of its way to democratize the Force, rather than treating it as something worthy only of characters with noble bloodlines. It positions Rey as the child of nobodies, and its final scene features an orphaned boy casually using the Force to grab a broom and sweep out a stable on Canto Bight. In The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams retcons things so that Rey is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, and he has zero interest in Broom Boy.
Without having seen the back half of the season, it’s hard to know for sure where Headland stands in this debate, but The Acolyte certainly seems pro-Broom Boy so far. Even so, the particular moment in which Headland has chosen to tell this story seems too confined. In The Phantom Menace, the Jedi have been overseeing a peaceful, Sith-free galaxy for a thousand years. They are confident in the rightness of all their decisions. The situation with Mae, Osha, and Mae’s mysterious, seemingly-Sith Lord master, raises questions that fly in the face of where the Jedi are, philosophically, when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon find little Anakin in the sands of Tatooine.
In other words, this feels like a narrative dead end. That doesn’t automatically preclude a good series: The fact that no one learns anything here could be the whole tragic point of the story Headland and company are telling. It’s good to see another Star Wars project that, like Andor, interrogates some of the franchise’s fundamental assumptions. Entertainment-wise, though, the first half of The Acolyte is unfortunately a lot closer to The Book of Boba Fett.
The first two episodes of The Acolyte begin streaming tonight at 9 p.m. ET, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first four of eight episodes.
