Is ‘The Acolyte’ a Worthwhile Star Wars Series?
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Sometimes Star Wars things are better with no Skywalkers. That’s certainly the case for The Acolyte, the latest streaming series set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The new series is set in the High Republic era and centers around an investigation into someone picking off Jedi. Former Jedi Osha is accused of the crime, but her twin sister Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg) was actually responsible.
A ragtag group of investigators including young Jecki Lon (Dane Keen), by-the-books Jedi Knight Yorn Fandar (Charlie Barnett) and empathetic Jedi master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) forms to look into the events and see if they can find Mae, who has teamed up with the shady Qimir (Manny Jacinto) in service of some mysterious dark figure.
I’m fully experiencing Star Wars fatigue after The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka started to drain my enthusiasm for the franchise. The only hope keeping me interested was Andor, which was a welcome departure from what we’d seen in the Disney Plus offerings so far.
Thankfully, The Acolyte seems to fall more into that camp with less of a focus on member berries and nostalgic callbacks and more focus on telling a new story in this galaxy. And for me, that was absolutely the best choice.
Ever since Rian Johnson showed us what could be if one of our main characters wasn’t secretly from some infamous bloodline and J.J. Abrams retconned that idea after fan backlash, Star Wars has seemed afraid to break from conventions. All roads lead back to Luke Skywalker in one way or another, which puts tremendous limits on storytelling potential and makes an entire galaxy start to feel like a small town where everybody knows each other.
With The Acolyte, we don’t have to worry about Skywalker’s mucking up the flow because they don’t yet exist in this time period. There are Jedi, there are bad guys, there’s scheming, possibly double-crossing, all the dramatic elements we need for a story and it mercifully doesn’t matter whose bloodline the main characters hail from.
So it may be too early to put it up there with Andor, but The Acolyte certainly shows promise. As a certainly recently-retconned granddaddy once said, we shall watch this show’s plot unfold with great interest.
