Photo: Christian Black/Disney+
After a bit of a drought, a Star Wars series worth your time has come to TV. The Acolyte, set in the era of the High Republic (i.e., a few hundred years before the prequel films), isn’t directly tied into the Easter egg–heavy sprawl of The Mandalorian and its related series. Instead, like Tony Gilroy’s great resistance epic Andor, it has a distinctive sensibility and feeling of authorial intent. Leslye Headland, best known for Russian Doll and her bruisingly hilarious films and plays, created the series, which provides a new read on the history of the Jedi through the story of former acolyte Osha (Amandla Stenberg) and her increasingly dark-side-tempted sister, Mae (also Stenberg), who is on her own quest to kill some Jedi. If you’re familiar with the general tenor of parts of the Star Wars fandom, any new take on the universe tends to make certain staunch grumblers very mad. In this case, however, most of The Acolyte’s innovations are good — not because they might make people mad, though that’s an added bonus, but because they open up exciting possibilities for the Star Wars universe. Also, because The Acolyte is just plain fun, in the mode of a pulpy adventure novel or an open-world video game. Free your mind, embrace the ways of the space witches!
We won’t get too far into spoilers here, but since Headland has already talked about it a bit, The Acolyte will send you scurrying to the “witch” page of Wookieepedia. The series introduces a sect of female Force users, one of whom is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, who have their own interpretation of their powers and conflict with the Jedi. Witches have cropped up in the Clone Wars series and games like Star Wars Galaxies, but now they get a fully developed backstory and the opportunity to provide an alternative narrative to the orthodoxy flowing from Coruscant. That’ll surely tick off fans who are dogmatic about the ways of the Force, but it makes sense that in a vast galaxy, more than one (or two, if you count the Sith) schools of thought would develop around how to use those extra-sensory powers. Escape the binary! Also, these witches bicker like they’re involved in an extended Brooklyn queer commune, which is just delightful. —Jackson McHenry
Headland’s fiddling with a lot of material just outside the typical reference points for mainline Star Wars — read enough about those witches, and you’ll see connections to Darth Maul, the Clone Wars animated series, video games like Knights of the Old Republic, and some early extended-universe novels. That gives her a lot of room to explore a world we haven’t seen much of onscreen as well as space for people to fight over what’s now canonized or not. That’s part of the fun! Maybe what characters have repeated as legend isn’t exactly what went down in the past; maybe something we think is fact about a species or sect turns out to be propaganda. Enjoy the destabilization. —J.M.
By the way, you don’t really need to know any of that. Unlike the ever-expanding Mandolorian universe (now tied to Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett), which is heavy with self-reference and lore, The Acolyte is on its own little island in the past, and Headland ties it back to some of Lucas’s original influences, like adventure serials and samurai flicks. The show even opens with a fight in a noodle shop. —J.M.
Star Wars is perhaps our most strict right-and-wrong, white-and-black franchise. You’re either a good Jedi or a bad Jedi, and one choice can send you down the wrong path, one from which it’s increasingly difficult to turn back. How many “evil” characters in this franchise had to die after sacrificing themselves in one final redemptive act of goodness? (Anakin and Kylo Ren, for starters.) The Acolyte instead pulls on a thread that’s been lingering at the edge of this universe for decades: What if the Jedi are actually fascists who refuse to share power? After the original trilogy, Star Wars media like Phantom Menace, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, and the video games Knights of the Old Republic and Survivor explored this framing, and The Acolyte leans into that concept as the series goes on. The Jedi sometimes feel a bit like the Avengers (i.e., cops), and that can get boring. Complicate your heroes! —Roxana Hadadi
I am resentful about even having to defend this aspect of The Acolyte, but there are Star Wars fans who will kick back against any protagonist who isn’t a white man, and those Star Wars fans are wrong. Amandla Stenberg is great. Lee Jung-jae is great. Carrie-Anne Moss, Rebecca Henderson, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith: all great! Star Wars should be expanding away from its core instead of recycling stories with tensionless prequels and re-creating beloved characters with CGI. The past is the past, innovation is the future, etc. —R.H.
Whenever a hooded figure with a red lightsaber shows up, you know something Sithy is afoot. Sure, the evil order has been extinct for a millennium, according to the Phantom Menace, but rather than take that as gospel — and The Acolyte as heresy — consider this a nice complication to the prevailing narrative. Maybe the Jedi were wrong and complacent (as pretty much the whole plot of the prequels implies); maybe darkness takes other forms in the shadows. We’re excited to find out. —J.M.
Yes, we are reaching the tipping point of “This story is about grief, actually” explanations, but The Acolyte uses Mae and Osha’s trauma as the tiny kernel of a larger story about yearning for self-determination and the conflict between who people are perceived to be and who they really are. What’s more, this grief has driven them both, in separate ways, into the arms of groups who do not care for their fullness as individuals and exacerbate their internal conflicts. Even the characters who are trying to do “good” on an individual level are operating within systems that make that difficult. (Do you bend or break Jedi code to help a former student? Do you do the bidding of a bad guy because it provides an outlet to process your grief?) A lot of Star Wars is about temptation, especially toward the dark side, but The Acolyte is also about the complicated temptations of groupthink and self-repression, too. —R.H. and J.M.
Do commercials about women’s sanitary products make you uncomfortable? Too bad! There is a sequence in The Acolyte’s third episode that implies that space witches getting their periods is a formative experience for the women and girls within the coven. It’s metaphorical and meaningful and moving! Plus, it’s the kind of detail that helps ground The Acolyte in relatable experiences rather than, like, that time Donald Glover’s version of Lando Calrissian rejected L3-37’s desire to be independent and transferred the female-coded droid’s consciousness into the Millennium Falcon, trapping L3-37 there forever. Domestic abuse? Kind of! —R.H.
So you hated BB-8. Grow up! The Acolyte knows where our parasocial relationships are born (and where our merch dollars will go) and offers up an array of immediately adorable droids, aliens, and creatures. A constantly squawking pocket robot named Pip, a wombat-looking tracker alien named Bazil, an alien child who hides behind its parent — after Andor mostly avoided incorporating alien characters, we get a ton of them on The Acolyte, and the visual effects mostly work in that slightly purposefully goofy Star Wars way. They make the world of The Acolyte feel fleshed-out and inclusive, and that’s even before Bazil delivers a reminder that it’s just good manners to use a person’s preferred pronouns. —R.H.
People got big mad when Luke Skywalker swigged bluish-green milk in The Last Jedi. (Was the issue that he didn’t pasteurize?) One of the simplest things Star Wars embraces to signify the immersive otherness of its universe is making the food just slightly odd (lumpy or cube-shaped, or utterly unrecognizable); in The Acolyte, we get a sweet treat called “spice creams,” about which I have a million questions. Is Leslye Headland secretly embedding a nod to Dune, many elements of which George Lucas (allegedly) swiped for Star Wars? Isn’t “spice” also a drug in Star Wars, so is a “spice cream” a psychedelic dessert or candy? What do characters in Star Wars call salt, cinnamon, cardamom, etc., if they can’t use the general word “spices”? I could keep going, but most importantly: I want to taste a spice cream. Can former spice runner Poe deliver me one? —R.H
We survived a crime against nature, pop culture, and the gods when Manny Jacinto was relegated to background duty in Top Gun: Maverick. Thankfully, the actor gets a ton more to do here as Qimir, a smuggler and procurer who helps Mae on her mission of killing Jedi instead of doing it himself. He’s very much a secondary character in The Acolyte, but that’s fine! Jacinto gets to be gross, twitchy, and furtive, a role very different from himbo icon Jason Mendoza on The Good Place and a representative of the more foreboding villain we have yet to properly meet on The Acolyte. His hair is sweaty and stringy, he speaks with a weird cadence, his cheekbones still make me want to die, and it’s great that he’s here in the archetypal Star Wars capacity of smuggler dude with questionable loyalties. Betray me anytime, buddy. —R.H
