Well yes and no? Yes it was there but I think it was conceived as that being all good and moral just like the cowboys were in the Westerns.
This show is definitely going to explore the … entitlement, narrow mindedness, and arrogance of the Jedi.
That was my first impression, too.
The Jedi in the prequels weren’t evil. They were complacent and navel gazing and full of hubris but they weren’t evil. If it does indeed turn out they slaughtered this coven, that’s beyond the pale.
That said…they do turn a blind eye to stuff. So maybe a few did the deed and the rest shut-up about it. I’ll bet thats it. “AJAB” and all that.
Like i said, the broad strokes and ideas are ok.
You know what the Jedi need? They need fucking therapists. They need to employ a race of Betazed like aliens and assign one to people who need it.
Anakin killed a handless Dooku. And even if he were influenced…Anakin plainly needs therapy
“Attachment leads to fear. Fear leads to…” Hold the fuck up Yoda. Hold up right there.
Dogma leads to anger, anger leads to hate.
Well, I’m enjoying it. I’ve liked every Star Wars TV show to different degrees, and this one has been suitably intriguing to keep me interested. Ask me again when the season concludes, which is when I properly cast judgement.
Hey I LIKED Boba Fett. I liked Obi-Wan.
I greatly enjoyed the first two eps of Andor, but at some point the toxicity of fans and creators created apathy. I just couldnt bring myself to finish Andor or watch the third season of Mandalorian.
Didnt watch Rise of Skywalker either despite liking Last Jedi for what it was. A kabillion dollar bottle show that tried to subvert expectations at every point. It felt like a bottle episode with a side quest.
You really should - watch Andor, that is. It’s good TV, not just good SW. Season 3 of the Mandalorian is best ignored, though.
Oh yeah, Andor is great. It would work without the Star Wars setting and doesn’t rely on “Ya like lasers?!! We got 'em! You like droids? We got them too!” It’s just a solid story about insurgency.
I’ve actually been indifferent or negative toward a lot of the shows.
Ahsoka was pretty terrible IMO.
Obi-Wan was fine.
Mandalorian up until the last season was good…the last season was bad.
Boba Fett was so bad it lost interest in its main character for a whole episode and became another show. Although funnily some of the stuff I liked in Boba Fett were things people HATED. Like I loved the Mod gang. I thought they were the most interesting new bit of SW lore the shows introduced.
See? I forgot to even list Ashoka. Thats how apathetic I’ve become. I loved her in Mando season 2. At THAT time I would have been glad to see her series.
I liked the Mod Gang. I didnt know who Cad Bane was, but I was excited to see everyone else so excited to see him.
Getting back to The Acolyte. I also predict that while the head witch is Darth Plagueis…
The theme of the show is that the Jedi inadvertanly created Darth Plagueis (as they did Vader). In wiping out her people. And the subtext being “Women are the life-bringers. Ones with nature. Men fear us and wipe us out.”
See! Big, interesting swings…very poorly executed. Alan Moore did it better in his American Gothic Swamp Thing arc.
And by that point I had learned who Bane was, and understand the fan service of it, but really? Big universe and there’s so few bounty hunters around that we see the same one over and over again?
And that’s at least a positive of this show. They could do a Yoda walk on but they aren’t. New characters. Whether or not the characters end up being ones we care about with a story that engages remains to be seen but nice to be a fresh story.
Regarding witches - which coven type was the Mountain Clan group that Morgan Elsbeth was taken in by? They seemed like this group in philosophy to me.
I didn’t mind the first two episodes. I really adore Sol and I like a mystery. I think it’s a great idea for SW to maybe explore genre space warrior stories, even if I don’t like a lot of the recent content myself.
HOWEVER, I thought this episode was crap. I hated the girls, hated the mothers, hated the acting, hated the writing, hated the whole thing. I’m not out. It was just not for me. It still has time to redeem itself, but my hopes for that are now diminished.
In principle, I’m not against a flashback with child actors and shit but it has to be done well. Maybe it would have worked better with little pieces of it strewn throughout other episodes?
Also, I’m fucking done with witches. Dathomor or not. Like if they were a variation on Dathomor witches, why? We’ve seen them so many times. If they were something different, also why? We don’t need a second witch sect. No more witches, no more Mandolorian lore. I need occasional sips of those two lore items and they’re being forced on me via waterboarding
I know I nit pick but I do like the new Star Wars content. I’m a role player, so I like the visuals I see in the show.
Critical Drinker had a review of ep3 and he was a brutal as you would expect.
I think I’m more disappointed. Take the training dialog we had in Ahsoka. It was clumsy because instead of Ahsoka telling Sabine how she did something, we get these vague philosophical statements. Instead, Ahsoka should say, “I think of the Force as a hand that grabs something and brings it to me.” “I see the Force around an object and pull it toward me, like I’m a magnet.” “By pushing the Force toward someone and suggesting something, I can influence the weak willed.” Something. Anything. I get that they can’t actually explain how it works but they can do much better than what we got.
@Fair_Rarity I agree. I’m tired of writers creating something new instead of using something that already exists and expanding the canon on it. I don’t know if they don’t like playing with someone else’s creation or want to create and add to it themselves but it seems a waste to add more convoluted lore at this point.
Thanks for the discussion!
Some YT guys made an observation, “Are you trying to make me feel sympathy for the witches and The Mother”, which made me think…
if they are going in the direction I think they are, maybe they should have made the women more sympathetic. Brighter. Their planet brighter. More agrarian then cultists.
And make the point before the audience turns on them:
"These Jedi. these monk cultists who tell their members you cant love. You cant have family. You cant have attachments…and if you do things any other way, THEY say it leads to the “Dark Side”, WHO defines what is the light side and dark side of the Force? THEY DO. Well isnt that convenient.
Who the hell are they to define what is good and what is evil?"
See. You can have your patriarchy, you can have your Bacchus women and eat it too.
…they really should have smiled more, huh?
They smiled plenty. Even the little butterfly force choking psycho
I feel like I suddenly got a flash of insight into how terrible it must be to write for a franchise with that massive a fan base, knowing that no matter what you end up doing, some substantial fraction will think it’s nothing but a steaming dump on a shining legacy. (Not that either of the above isn’t an entirely valid opinion to hold, mind.)
As for the show as such, I’m kinda middle of the road. I liked the first two OK, but the third one didn’t quite come together. I can forgive the stilted dialogue as just a consequence of being part of some highly ritualized, insular society, but for the same reason, the immediate readiness of young Osha to leave it all behind just fell flat for me. None of the emotional beats seamed really earned. If this was an attempt at developing the two sisters’ back stories, it pretty much fell flat, in that basically all the emotional disconnect between them was already in place without taking any time of developing it.
Although I do hope we’ll see that story from another point of view. Young Mae drops a lamp and the entire stone fortress burns down with no survivors just seems too big a stretch.
And Sol should’ve known Mae survived. This is Star Wars, nobody dies falling down the random bottomless shafts that for some reason seem to be the single design feature every culture in the galaxy has adopted. At least they have OSHA now…
To be fair it is not necessarily regular fire. She pulled a thread on it.
No he shouldn’t have. But to be fair, as soon as new evidence came to light, he changed his mind, and was right to do so.
Fair observation.
I agree with DSeid because I didn’t know of Cad Bane, not having watched Clone Wars, which is where I think he appeared. When he showed up in Mando, it meant nothing to me.
I was speaking more broadly, which I didn’t explain well. Cad Bane is a bounty hunter. He’s in the bounty hunters guild. Whether it was him, or some new bounty hunter, works for me. They didn’t create a new organization like the bounty hunters guild.
In contrast, the sisters in this episode. Are they Dathomari witches? I don’t think it was specifically said. At the moment, then, it looks like the writers created a new group of witches, rather than use a group that appeared in a recent show. Maybe they want to do some big reveal later that these are the Dathomari witches. I’m at the group level in this case. Introduce all of the Dathomir witches you want but define them as such.
That could be a fine line but that’s how I see the distinction.
A few things to add. Star Wars seems to span a galaxy. Maybe more than one but mostly a single galaxy. Therefore, when they say something like Bounty Hunter Guild, I assume there is one across the galaxy. Same for Dathomir witches. If a new group is going to be introduced, I expect them to introduce them and explain them. They had the perfect opportunity to give us some exposition by explaining their Order to Osha and Mae so that they understood the ascension ritual and what it meant. Then we as viewers would know who they are as well. Instead, nothing is explained, and that’s why I don’t know who I’m supposed to sympathize with, the witches or the Jedi. Or either, really, since both came across as wanting it to be their way. It can be said that a coven could be singular, instead of galaxy spanning, so maybe there are more covens. Again, show or tell us that. There is only so much non explaining that can be done before the show (or book or whatever media) is confusing.
I can agree that we don’t see why Osha wants to leave and why Mae wants to stay. In that regard, the story fell flat.
This episode also showed me how tough it is to distinguish uses of the String. We see Osha use the String to make the flying creature stop. Later, Mae shows up and does it as well but Osha chastises her for it. Why? What did Mae do differently? If it was hurt or damaged, I couldn’t tell. I can understand the difference between pushing someone back with String and choking them, at least.
Thanks for the discussion!