Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Can my entire review just be the Picard’s facepalm meme?

Spoiler Warning

To review or not to review that is the question.  Episode 6 of The Acolyte completely loses the plot with the only compelling aspect being the great performance of Manny Jacinto giving it his all (if not showing all).

Let me start with that positive.  Manny Jacinto’s Qimir is a great addition to the pantheon of Sith characters.  His attempted seduction of Osha to the Dark Side is fun to watch because Jacinto definitely plays Qimir as the Hero of his own story.  He’s not a cackling villainous caricature, but rather a Fallen Jedi who wants the underlying promise of Sith philosophy – the power to have the freedom to live how he wants.  The rather cliché set up of his getting naked and swimming about in a lake is a little obvious, along with the ‘let me leave all my lightsabre, daggers and helmet around for you to play with.’

The other positive moment that I want to recognise is that of Lee Jung-jae’s performance as he processes his grief and trauma in the turning off the transponder moment.  His facial acting was superb, and I felt the weight of his grief and loss.

The other moment I enjoyed doesn’t really fit into the situational context – that being the humorous scene between Master Vernestra and Padawan Mog as he expresses concern over Vernestra joining them because she gets hyperspace sick.  It was amusing. 

But.  

The situation is that Mog has been informed by Sol that the entire team apart from Sol is dead.  The ‘rescue’ team is on their way to investigate the deaths of multiple Jedi.  Is this really a moment to drop in a bit of comedic relief?  I think it was badly timed, and while it may have been an attempt to allude to Vernestra’s book abilities to navigate hyperspace with only the Force or having hyperspace visions, it was not the moment to do that.  This is a serious situation where multiple Jedi have been killed.  The tone was wrong in respect to the wider story. 

Also, Mog is presumably Vernestra’s Padawan – she definitely is in teaching mode on the planet – yet he was going to head off without her?  And this is the first time we’ve seen him?  It’s a bit like Yord’s disappearing Padawan from the first episode.  Yet the mythology and lore of Star Wars generally has Masters and Padawans working closely together on missions.  It feels like occasionally the writer needed another character for the ‘Master’ to play off and threw in a Padawan. 

Mog as a character is scripted and played as a slightly comedic, bumbling Jar Jar-esque nature – and again this type of character for the seriousness of the situation was a misstep in my opinion, undercutting what should be tense and emotionally hard scenes for the Jedi to experience.  Presumably Mog’s erroneous conclusion that Sol went mad and killed his team is meant to come out of his bumbling nature but the story could have delivered this through a different means.

The same can be said for Bazil the Tracker attacking Mae on the ship.  It’s played as a bit of slapstick humour, but really?  Why can’t Mae, the assassin who went toe to toe with Indara, take down Bazil?  Or take out Sol in the midst of his emotional turmoil and steal the ship for herself.  Mae blames Sol for taking her sister away; she’s already killed most of the Jedi Brendok team for her revenge; and, practically, the longer she leaves him alive, the more likely it is that events play out as they do – he recognises she’s not Osha and traps her.

It’s nonsensical for Mae not to immediately try and kill Sol as soon as they enter the ship.

Qimir ‘saving’ Osha to seduce her to the Dark Side – just about believable and in line with his stated desire to have a pupil to teach, to want the Power of Two.  Really it’s no real loss to him if he fails to turn Osha, he just gets to kill her later. 

Sol being so distraught and off-kilter that he doesn’t realise Mae is Osha until one assumes Bazil tells him or he realises that Pip has suddenly been reset in a way that Osha would never have done?  (It does say something about how well they have shown the relationship with Osha and Pip that it is a moment of loss when Mae says she’s resetting him to factory default).  Sol was Osha’s Jedi Master, he should be able to tell that in the Force that Mae is not Osha. 

Fine, they narratively ‘hang a lantern’ on the reason when Mae tells Sol ‘he saw what he wanted to see,’ but, really, the fact that Sol doesn’t recognise it’s Mae stretches believability, and then Sol flip-flops from wanting to tell the High Council everything about Brendok to running away from the rescue team, although OK, ostensibly to save Osha (who we assume he works out is alive and has been taken somewhere off planet by the Sith??)

If Mae’s decision to leave Sol alive is bizarre, and Sol’s lack of ability to identify Mae is bizarre, they are no less bizarre story-wise than Osha’s decision to throw on the helmet at the end of the episode. 

If earlier in the series, they’d had Osha reliving her Force training and showing her one of the sense deprivation helmets the Jedi used to help Initiates and Padawans connect with the Force, or a discussion with Osha and Jecki where they talk about how using a helmet might make her regain her ability with the Force…maybe then it would have made sense for Osha to pick up the helmet.  As it is Qimir’s throwaway line of ‘it’s like those helmets we used to use in training’ is pretty weak for us to make the connection that perhaps that is the reason Osha picks up the helmet rather than because she likes the Sith’s fashion choices or is turning to the Dark side.

Unfortunately I don’t like Amandla Stenberg’s performance of either Mae or Osha in this episode.  The written characterisation of both gives her little to work with and she seems to struggle particularly in Mae’s scenes with Sol to deliver a believable Mae.

The character motivations are all over the place, but worse very little is done to actually progress the original narrative mystery posed – what happened on Brendok?  Having been excited at the beginning of this series about what appeared to be a well-thought narrative spine, the want to delay telling the audience for as long as possible has lead to some very weak episodic story-telling and poor consistency of characterisation.

Let me not even get started again on the episode length or how nothing about the events and timeframe make sense – I blame that on the script and editing choices.

In conclusion:

I’m frustrated.  Unless the next episode is utterly brilliant, I doubt I’ll review again until the end of the series.