OK. Star Wars time. Sort of.
The latest Disney + show in the Star Wars franchise, The Acolyte, has sparked a lot of controversy. For my part, I was lukewarm towards it. That in itself is not a good sign, given that I'm usually very easy to please when it comes to Star Wars content (I loved The Bad Batch earlier this year, for instance, but then that was genuinely good, wasn't it?). If I were to rank the live action Star Wars Disney + shows, The Acolyte would come in last, though it's a tough call – The Book of Boba Fett only just wins out because it has a Cad Bane cameo and some Mando.
But that doesn't mean I hate The Acolyte. It had some muddled storytelling, and the characterisation was somewhat lacking; the series failed to make us care about the new characters it introduced, which is a pity, as we could do with some new blood in Star Wars stories. However, there were some good acting performances including a fetching villain. Though the writing didn't blow me away, I didn't find it groanworthy either. Also, for those who like lightsabre battles, the ones in The Acolyte were nicely choreographed.
The Force witches (or "Thread" witches, I suppose, as it's what they call the Force) were irritating, though. Can someone tell me why witches and covens are such a thing nowadays in popular entertainment? I would have thought female magic wielders who want to be girl bosses would do well to stay away from covens, which tend to be about surrendering your power to someone else (or, in this case, to "the power of maaany").
But I digress. The main reason so many Star Wars fans took against this series, some before it even aired, was that they got the impression that it would tarnish the Jedi. Defenders of the series haven't helped its cause by highlighting the way it shows "the weaknesses of the Jedi" as one of its good points. For myself, I'm not fond of the Jedi, but I understand if long-term Star Wars fans don't care to see their childhood heroes trashed, and I acknowledge that there are unfair ways to criticise these famous lightsabre-wielding light-side users.
So, bearing in mind that I'm a bit of a Jedi sceptic, did I think The Acolyte was too hard on them? Well, yes and no. To start with, I wouldn't say that Jedi-bashing plays such a large part in the story as all that.
The series takes place about 100 years before the Star Wars prequels and tells the tale of two sisters, twins (kinda-it's complicated) Osha and Mae. Hidden away on a faraway planet, they're about to be taken up in the coven of the aforementioned space witches when a group of Jedi enter the scene. Mae wants to become a witch, Osha wants to become a Jedi. Complications and conflicts ensue, which the two girls see different parts of, and it ends with the whole coven dead and their hideout burnt down. Osha, who blames Mae, is taken in by the Jedi. Mae, left behind and believed dead, blames the Jedi.
Sixteen years later, Mae resurfaces, trained by a mysterious (though not very) dark-side Force user, and starts to take out the Jedi she encountered all those years ago. Osha – who never managed to become a Jedi and has left the order – is first accused, but it quickly becomes clear (thankfully) that she's not the culprit, and she's roped in by her old master Sol to track down her long-lost sister and bring her to task. The identity of Mae's master is revealed soon enough, but the question remains what really happened sixteen years ago.
When we finally get the whole story, I for one could very well understand why the Jedi acted the way they did. Certainly, some of the group behaved badly, but you could argue that their more questionable decisions were motivated by non-Jedi-like emotions such as selfishness, fear and blind attachments. There's nothing in the telling of the Jedi vs witches conflict that directly contradicts the Jedi creed – in fact, it could be used as a cautionary tale on how dangerous it is for Jedi to give in to their emotions. Plus, the witches were certainly no blameless victims either.
Where the series is unfair to the Jedi, in my view, is when it shows how the whole thing is covered up by cool and responsible-seeming members of the Order. Throughout the series, Jedi bigwig Vernestra seems surprisingly anxious about bad PR, as the Jedi Council is facing some opposition by the Senate, and is eager to gloss over as many past and present Jedi mistakes as she can. Now, my beef with the Jedi has to do with their forbidding personal attachments and generally being a bunch of self-righteous killjoys. But I have never seen them as shady or power hungry – isn't that more of a Sith thing? It was hard to believe in Jedi as responsibility-dodging politicos. Surely, owning up to your faults and taking the rap for it (which would probably be harsh and disproportionate) would be the true Jedi way?
Vernestra has a quarrel with a senator at the end of the series where the senator starts to address my own problems with the Jedi. He points out that they claim to be able to control an ungovernable force – by which he doesn't mean the Force itself but their own emotions – and predicts that one day one of these repressed warriors will snap and will be hard to stop. I'm with him on that one: all that emotion-repressing surely can't be healthy, and one would have thought that the hate and fear of the Dark Side could more easily be overcome by positive emotions such as love and friendship rather than sterile serenity. But as for the Jedi being a dangerous "cult", you could say the same about those annoying witches.
