Acolyte Accolades?

This week, the latest Star Wars television series concluded its eight-episode season. To me, The Acolyte was a frustratingly uneven show filled with flashes of brilliance and equally big stumbles. It didn't deserve the pre-scorn heaped upon it by insecure online trolls (of course), but I also find myself thoroughly indifferent to whether it gets a second season or not.

The Acolyte certainly excelled at several things. Foremost was creating intriguing characters -- and not even necessarily the most central ones. The young Padawan Jecki Lon, played by Dafne Keen (of His Dark Materials) was a stoic stand-out. Seeing Carrie-Anne Moss as Jedi Master Indara felt like one of the highest high points of television Star Wars (outside of Andor). And despite being at least the third black-helmeted Sith villain in Star Wars, there was something compelling about The Stranger too.

The show also did well in refreshing some stale ideas in the Star Wars universe, mostly owing to the decision to set it a century before the Skywalker saga. George Lucas really tried to make the prequel trilogy about politics and rarely hit the mark, but The Acolyte mostly succeeds in this area. The Jedi are really shown to be ignoble actors as calculating and compromised as any other group with significant power. Even more compelling to me -- though sadly only raised in the final episode -- is the character of a senator firmly opposed to the Jedi Order (for what seem to be completely valid reasons).

A lot of the fit and finish of The Acolyte is really solid too. There's excellent lightsaber choreography in multiple episodes. Alien planets and sprawling sets look even better still than other live-action Star Wars series (all of which already looked great). And I truly love the score by composer Michael Abels. Like Ludwig Göransson with The Mandalorian, he has found a new sound for the Star Wars universe; but unlike Göransson's complete departure from the John Williams template, Abels' operatic style feels more like a strong extension and exploration of what Star Wars has long sounded like.

Unfortunately, the weak aspects of The Acolyte really undermine a lot of what's enjoyable about it. Plot holes abound, largely because characters rarely behave in ways that seem to make sense for them -- they simply do the thing that the plot has ordained must happen now. Many of the most compelling ideas (that anti-Jedi senator, for example) are withheld until far too late in the season, teeing up a second season we may never get, rather than making the one season we have as interesting as possible.

And now I'm going to brush up against spoiler territory. I'll try to be oblique, but skip this paragraph if you must. The show is far too willing to kill off its own characters, and often for what amounts only to cheap shock value. From the standpoint that The Acolyte has many interesting characters, enough to spare, sure... you can make this choice. But when "no one is safe" (outside of a very few narrative-essential figures), you're soon encouraged not to emotionally invest in anyone. And the fifth or sixth "shocking death" in as many episodes is never going to hit as hard as the first.

I want to say I enjoyed The Acolyte more than not, and so I want to give it something like a B-. But I have a suspicion it will fade from my memory faster than any other televised Star Wars. (The Book of Boba Fett was aggressively bad enough to at least remember). Perhaps a C+, or "just a notch above middling," would be a more accurate mark.