Mid Season Check in On the Acolyte

We’re now four episodes into Star Wars’s The Acolyte and it seems time at this halfway point to look at the series and its trajectory over the next month. Not the strongest of starts, the first two episodes are compelling enough to keep viewers engaged. The main set of characters and the mystery at play of what happened to Mae and Osha in their childhood, and who is the big bad of the season, looms large.

For the first three episodes the series is very plot dense. It plows through exposition, leaving little time to speculate on specific parts of the mystery. Did Osha really kill Master Indara? No, it was her twin sister. Who is Osha’s mysterious master? Maybe connected to the very creepy and intimidating man who sold her some poison. How did Mae kill both her and Osha’s family? She lit a fire, but something else involving the jedi seems to be afoot. It’s hard not to be entertained at the breakneck pace of the episodes, that is until episode four happens.

Episode four pumps the breaks on the plot, and feels more like a classic “filler” episode. As Mae is walking through the trees with Qimir looking for master Kelnacca, Osha and the jedi are on a similar path. There’s a lot of dialogue, but not a lot that lets us know anything new about any of these characters, that is until Mae decides that she’s quitting the sith and running after her sister. The ending of the episode is the highlight, as we finally see this sith master levitate from the trees, stalking Osha and ultimately igniting their red blade. The big trailer shot proceeds of all the jedi igniting their blades and rushing the two, only to be pushed back by the sith’s force abilities. Now we have to wait another week for the resolution of this, and what will surely be the reveal that Qimir is in fact Mae’s master.

The series is not interested in being bogged down by the Skywalker lore, and it’s open to the discussion and revelation of different force abilities as well as the hubris of the jedi even before Palpatine came to power. Yet, the setting of the High Republic is both fun and repetitive. In a universe where viewers know the jedi will eventually be standing in front of the greatest Sith Lord, and not know that he is the one running their senate, watching them not be able to suss out the sith lord in front of them hundreds of years in the past doesn’t feel much different. They are still cocky. They are still kidnapping children in harrowing events. They are still preaching to each other that attachment is the thing that Jedi should turn away. In some ways this feels much like the jedi we know from the prequel trilogy but in just nicer clothing. And maybe it was wishful thinking, but I was hoping we would see a little bit of a different attitude from the jedi in this series so we could see how they eventually got to where they were in the prequels.

While not an absolute slam dunk like Andor, there is still promise for this series. Only time will tell if the last four episodes are exciting as the end of the fourth episode was.