I’m still enjoying the show just for the pure Star Wars-y-ness of it (way more so than Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, or Ahsoka, for example, IMO, even though I did like the latter two), but the last episode flashback basically cemented “here are the dumbest 4 Jedi in the galaxy, plus the dumbest force-witch-leader in the galaxy, and how they all accidentally commit mass murder”. So many dumb decisions by the Jedi, and then the force-witch boss decides to turn into a smoke monster next to the Jedi all of a sudden, without warning, and accidentally gets stabbed.
Maybe someone who knows lore better than I do, a low bar, gets things out the conclusion that I didn’t?
In any case it didn’t do it for me.
Ah well.
Well, that was an ending.
I don’t but I remember reading that the reason dark jedi have red sabers is because their emotions turn the kyber crystal red. That’s all I have to offer though.
Critical Drinker has some fun reviews of the episodes.
I don’t know if that is great control or luck that a light saber whip, light whip? saber whip?, could be used that way and not cripple but wow. Again, instead of having therapists, the Jedi with emotions, things they aren’t prepared to handle, are what causes most of the problems. Also, how does one with so many emotions, and secrets like a failed padawan, get to be so high in the Jedi Council?
This reminds me too much of Ahsoka in that we got the beginning of a story but not the full story. Or the prologue to a story. No, this reminds me of a review I read once about the Phantom Menace. They asked who the main character was of TPM. They argued it was no one because
Qui-gon dies with a half hour left in the movie and wasn’t in all scenes prior to it.
Obi-wan is out of the middle of the movie for a large part.
Anakin doesn’t even show up until forty minutes into the movie.
Likewise, who or what was this about?
Sol’s redemption via death? Except he died believing he did the right thing, so there was no redemption.
Osha accepting the Dark Side? When we meet her, she’s a mektek and not particularly selfish or evil. To get to this ending changes everything we saw before this with no hint, so feels cheap.
Venestra, who becomes more and more important as the show goes on? She may not be a dark Jedi but darn if she doesn’t straddle that line. Maybe a story about politics corrupting her because she wants the Jedi to be perceived as pure might be interesting.
Mae, who moves a lot of the early episodes but then does little after that? If it wasn’t for good and evil existing in the SW universe, her story could be righteous vengeance, especially with Sol being unrepentant.
It’s a mess with no coherent theme, no real central character to give us an arc. That’s what I would say about Ahsoka as well.
I still watched it, I just don’t know if I would watch it again.
Thanks for the discussion!
Yoda sit on?
Weird that the light-whip moment from the trailer wasn’t in the season.
The guy skulking in the cave as Osha and Smilo Ren leave Smilo’s hideout is Darth Plagueis.
It showed up in a flashback in one episode, didn’t it? I remember seeing it, but I didn’t watch any of the trailers.
In the Lore/Extended Universe, Palpatine straight up tells Vader that the Kyber crystals are alive, in a sense. And that the Sith have red blades because that’s the result of the negative emotions that being “Dark” impacting the crystals.
Speaking of the EU/possibly non-canon stuff, in the video game Knight of the Old Republic,
Revan’s memory is Force-wiped into forgetting that he was a Dark Lord of the Sith, before eventually recovering his memory. I’m pretty sure that that would be a permanent wipe, if possible.
So I’m pretty sure that Mae’s mindwipe isn’t going to be permanent.
I’m happy with the ending. No surprise that Sol was killed. I was surprised that Qimir was not. I expected Mae and Osha to go off together to train themselves.
I liked the character development of the twins. They basically circled around each other. Mae got the clarity to turn away from the dark side. Osha turned to the dark side.
I also like how the series started to break the coding that light-side equals good-guy and dark-side equals bad-guy. The Force is more about state of mind than morality. Do you control your emotions or do they control you?
I quote myself from a month ago…
I legitimately think this was bad… like…BAAAAAD.
The fight between Sol and Darth Mendoza was good. And the brief moment of green jedi lady sensing her old pupil and him frantically putting back on his helmet. The rest often left me saying “But why though?”
Bazyl disables Sol’s ship…but why though? He knows Mae is bad.
Mae is going to give herself up… but why though?
Etc.
I think that was my fundamental problem with the series as a whole - I rarely understood any of the characters’ motivations for anything they did. It’s just bad writing.
I can agree with the lack of clearly defined motivations, but I am increasingly of the opinion that the big bads in most of the SW canon are the Jedi. Light or dark, a complete lack of any nuance or flexibility is a BAD thing.
Well, destroying a whole planet was a pretty big bad thing to do.
Yeah, and I don’t like it. The Jedi not being perfect, fine. But the Jedi being no better than the Sith, or the Sith being the good guys? What’s the point of it all, then?
The Jedi are flawed but selfless. They try to help others even if they make mistakes and fail sometimes.The very core of the Sith is selfishness and treating others as tools for your own ends. I think it says more about society than we want to admit to look at that and say, “Maybe the Sith have a point and aren’t the Jedi kind of weird?” It reminds me of how in the last decade or so the color Black in Magic the Gathering (which in the flavor embodies ambition , selfishness and amorality ) has gotten a face lift with people saying, “what’s so bad about that?”
I read a history book on crime and violence that talked about how some of the most violent periods in US history coincided with a coarsening of the culture and I think this is the kind of stuff they mean.
No, they are not the Big Bad. In the first Star Wars they are thought to be dead and gone, and in effect they are. In the prequels they are shown to be severely flawed, stuck in a narrow-minded rule-following arrogance. In the High Republic (which I haven’t read) it’s supposed to be the Golden Age, the romantic era when they were at their height of heroics and successfully fulfilling the myth.
So The Acolyte has to bridge the gap between height and downfall. It has to be a story about the downturn, where it went wrong, how this could’ve happened. There are some very fairy-tale ways you could approach that in this setting, but they managed to make it very human.
They aren’t the big bad, they are the flawed and the fallen.
For me, the scale felt small, the characters seemed very simplified; the potential wasn’t realised. But what it did well was make the Jedi’s fall make sense and be empathetic.
Also, fantastic light sabre fights.
It was in episode 6, when Vernestra and her group were on the jungle planet examining all the dead Jedi. One of those mothra things flew at them and Vernestra used the whip saber.
He thought Sol was going to get them both killed trying to dock with Mae’s ship while flying through the gravel rings.
Smilo’s ship only holds 2 people (they showed us it has 2 separate cockpits for some strange reason) so someone had to stay behind.
The Jedi are arrogant and convinced of their own moral superiority, even in the face of contrary evidence. Why didn’t Sol & company report what had really happened on Brendok? Why is Vernestra so resistant to the elected government having oversight on their own police force? She’s now lying to the Senate and the Chancellor to protect the reputation of the Order. Defund the Jedi!
There is just so much that ended up not coming together for me.
One bit of many. Sol. Okay I can accept he is that clueless. I can accept that he was both blinded by wanting his own padawan … but also that he had to prove he was right about the vergence? An academic on steroids? “I’m right!” Fine. But all these years his actually being a narcissistic doofus was missed by everyone?
Really none of the character arcs feel earned or fleshed out; they feel more random.
Probably though my biggest complaint is that I don’t get a good through line about the balance of light and dark. The Jedi fall from heroes into dysfunctional cops failing to even do cover up well … not very interesting. Light and Dark seem to be presented as a choice between pretending to be ignoring your connections and emotions, or letting them completely control you?
And now Yoda is getting recast as complicit in a high level cover up? Yoda had a growth arc in the animated series sure. But he didn’t start from there.
I agree completely. I especially didn’t understand Bazyl. Carry a translator, dude, because it’s a special elective to learn your language!
I’m pulling in all of them as they are all related. Ish.
I think this is a simple answer that convoluted a beloved franchise. When Lucas made Star Wars in the 70s, he was pulling on serials and other earlier shows that portrayed things in black and white, right and wrong. Forty five years later, society is allowing for nuance and gray but what Lucas setup kinda doesn’t. We also expect that in our stories to reflect on our current culture.
Many may know this but I’m stating the obvious, just in case.
Took too long, so there were responses.
I think this is partly my above answer and also trying to make something for today’s audiences. I liked Joss Whedon’s Buffy, Angel, and Firely but have to separate that from what happened later with the artist himself. We have many examples of that in the entertainment industry. Things that used to end someone’s career, aren’t as bad today or they come back from it. (Not to mention other areas of life where this happens.)
What I don’t like is instead of being something positive, and showing how to control, or work on control, over emotions, they aren’t. They are just ignoring it which, as DSeid and others point out, ends up creating weaker characters.
Take Smilo Ren’s answer to why he wants to do as he wants. “To do as I want and teach as I want.” IIRC. We get responses like that instead of a nuanced look at why they want to look into forbidden areas. I mean, when current shows are making the prequels seem better in character development (thinking about Anakin being tempted by Sidious via Plagieus’ findings to help Padme), there is something wrong. Finding out Smilo wanted to help someone, or even remove the scars from his back to get rid of the reminder of his training would be better than what we got.
Thanks for the discussion!