Who was The Acolyte supposed to be about?
The pitch for The Acolyte probably kicked ass. It’s easy to imagine how compelling it looked in brief, on paper: A coven of women who challenge the Jedi’s binary view of The Force. Twin sisters connected to a cosmic Force mystery. An assassin out to kill a bunch of Jedi with a secret. And that secret? Maybe they deserved it. That shit is fire. That’s the beginning of a story I want to see. I don’t quite know what happened to the show that we got.
The problem is a structural one. All of the above elements appear in The Acolyte’s eight episodes, but the manner in which they are introduced and dramatized are haphazard and lacking in care. It’s possible to watch the show and come away with a compelling read on it — partly because David Harewood appears as a senator to just say it out loud in the season finale — but it’s less satisfying as a story, a failing best understood by asking a simple question: Who was The Acolyte about?
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An easy answer would be the sisters Mae and Osha (Amandla Stenberg). The plot hinges on their separation from each other and their divergent paths in the ensuing 16 years after the disaster that left them thinking the other is dead. The Acolyte is mostly concerned with the circumstances of their reunion, and the inversion of their initial positions — Mae begins the story as an angry assassin out for revenge, and ends it with her mind wiped, in Jedi custody, the unwitting player her sister was at the start. Conversely, Osha stumbles onto an assassination plot, unaware it’s tied to her personal history, and ends the story where her sister began it: A follower of The Stranger (Manny Jacinto), a rogue that embraces the Dark Side of the Force.
Mae and Osha’s intersecting journeys are, once again, compelling on paper, but instead of building their characters, The Acolyte’s writers continually burden their relationship with lore: They are not normal humans, butbeings manifested by the Force. They are not normal sisters, but one entity split
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