WITHOUT WORDS - “The Acolyte” is a show that exists, I guess

WITHOUT WORDS

The latest Star Wars show on Disney+, “The Acolyte,” has just finished, leaving with an overwhelming feeling of…meh.

Don’t get me wrong. There are certainly things to like about the show. The fight choreography is solid and I like that they’ve decided to escape the narrow timeline surrounding the first six films that most of their other projects have focused on. There were also a few deeper cuts like the introduction of cortosis metal that were well integrated into the show and not just there for those like me that would recognize it from books written twenty years ago.

But…everything else kind of fell flat for me. The pacing in the early episodes was off, some of the sets had the same cramped feeling that other Disney+ Star Wars shows have suffered from, and while some sets worked, others like the jungle planet felt extremely fake. But these are all fairly minor nitpicks that could be ignored, or at least minimized, if the story and characters were interesting enough to hold one’s attention.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find either aspect of the show particularly engaging. In terms of the plot, I think the general strokes have some potential, but the execution and details on an episode by episode basis just don’t deliver. So much of this first season (because the show definitely sets up for a second, though whether or not a second season will come to fruition remains to be seen), revolves around keeping the viewer engaged through questions. Who is killing the Jedi? Who is the guy with the red lightsaber? What happened the night that the main characters were separated? But every time an answer is revealed, it is usually the most obvious and least interesting one. Some of these mysteries still remain even after the season concluded, but I don’t feel the particular need to have them answered.

And that’s largely because most of the characters in “The Acolyte” fail to hold any sort of gravitas. Part of the problem is the dialogue, which veers towards Star Wars prequel levels more often than one might hope and does little to nothing to endear a viewer to anyone on screen. Even more detrimental is the lack of consistent character motivations. Almost every main character in the show makes some sort of decision that feels incongruent with their character up until that point, and this is especially so with the two protagonists. The twins are only consistent in their inconsistency, and trying to keep up with their randomly shifting impulses is a task bordering on futility. By the end, I care for neither because I cannot understand either and thus feel very little need to see what would happen next to them.

A lot of this feels like it could have been cleaned up with more time in the writing room. Characters and plots could be better fleshed out, pacing could be adjusted. As I said earlier, the show seems to have the right bones for a good story, it is in the details where it fails. From a script standpoint, it feels more like a first draft than a finished product.

This is hardly the first Disney+ show to have this problem, with a number of Marvel and Star Wars products created specifically for the streaming service also struggling in this department as of late. One wonders if there is a “quantity over quality” mentality that is going into the production of these shows. Those like “The Acolyte” have the feeling that they needed more time in the oven, but perhaps because Disney feels the need to release something every few weeks from one of the two properties to keep subscriber numbers up, we were served something rushed and underbaked. There is a certain level of fatigue that has been expressed in both fandoms lately, largely because the quality of these shows has been all over the place.

There were certainly things to like about “The Acolyte,” but I would struggle to recommend it in a landscape where there are so many other things to watch. It has more creativity than other shows like “The Book of Boba Fett” or “Kenobi,” which felt more like the Disney corporation checking things off their to-do list than stories being told by people who want to tell them, but it also feels unrefined and one often has to engage in significant mental gymnastics in order to justify much of what happens on screen.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER