The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part III)
(This is absolutely the last one, I… I have to move on)
Story.
“A story succeeds for fails in the style of its telling.” You’ve heard me say that a thousand times. Less frequently, but just as important I often ask, “Knowing how the story ends, would you want to read it again?”
No one wants to hear this story again.
This story fails so drastically that I truly hope it gets sent to the Iron Vault of Tax Write-Offs. Supposedly, this cost $180 million to make (that’s twelve Godzilla Minus Ones). But I can’t swear to it. It always amazes me just how cheap a LucasFilm production manages to look on that big of a budget. This show took four years to get made. Four years to create this big of a steaming pile of failure. If you had watched (or had to watch) the first episode all the way to the end you knew, there was going to be absolutely nothing clever in this show. There would be no big reveals. No paradigm shifts without a clutch. Nothing.
As I said already. This series was created out of spite. “A rumor had broken that Kathleen Kennedy had been instructed by Iger and Chapek had ordered her not to green light anything. Leslye Headland knows how Hollywood works and offered KK a chance to make a power play by publicly pitching a TV show to her. It worked, I suspect Kennedy greenlit it without ever looking at it.”
It appears to have been frequently on the budget block. Headland kept it alive through Disney studio politics. Originally she wanted to set this in the Old Republic period because Knights of the Old Republic is where she got the idea in the first place. However, the LucasFilm Story Group was pushing its own brand new High Republic period. A Woke prequel that would overwrite all previous versions. The late Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser LARP hotel was set in that period. A Disney+ series would be a godsend to that faction, so The Acolyte was bumped up a few thousand years. Every six months or so there would be a press release that would let people know that this project was still inching forward. Every so often Hollywood picks somebody at random and declares that this person will be the next big thing and starts shoveling projects at them. They only work out about a quarter of the time, but it does happen. For every six Casper Van Dein’s there’s one Jennifer Lawerance, (whose time at the top is over but she was there for a while).
Anyway, Amandla Stenberg is the current flavor of the month. These days activists start getting brainwashed pretty early. Stenberg was likely being indoctrinated in the womb, her mother shouting slam poetry at her distended belly. Amandla was undoubtedly being dragged to protests by her mother before she could walk. During the time of the #MeToo, she was designated as the new It Girl due to her exceptional amount of genders while still being just white enough for a black girl.
The rumor was that it was an If/Come deal, which is not stellar but it’s not something you can turn down if the offer is coming from Kathleen Kennedy and Hollywood is still pretending she’s not a fuckup. That kept things moving.
There were also some political machinations at the higher levels of Disney. During the first putsch attempt on Bob Chapek, Kennedy appears to have sided with Chapek (at least LucasFilm was the only division keeping dead quiet and they are more Woke than Marvel or Pixar). In gratitude, Chapek appears to have kicked open the money valve for Lucasfilm. Indiana Jones got more funding even after Harrison Ford ripped up his shoulder, and the Acolyte was officially greenlit.
I will give Leslye Headland one thing, I think she had a much different story in mind when she pitched the Acolyte to Kathleen Kennedy. When Headland’s series Heathers was shelved and then butchered into a TV movie, she decided to play Hollywood’s game of situational morals and values. She got Russian Doll made for Netflix and then this abomination for Disney. But she’s paid a price.
This was posted on Twitter by her partner.
Headland knows this thing is hot garbage. There was no making a deal with LucasFilm and keeping your own vision (whatever the hell that was) intact.
Too many notes from the LucasFilm Story Group. Too much testing to see what the greatest number of audience retards find the most acceptable. And of course constant interference from Fort Mickey, Burbank, CA.
I’m going to be exceptionally generous beyond words here and say that maybe, just maybe something good could have come from this if it was one person’s vision.
Believe it or not, there were a couple of things I liked. In a show like this, the Woke-washed characters have battleship thick plot armor. There were two characters that met this criteria. Yord, a twink of color, who had been a Padawan with Osha, and Jecki a virginal lesbian Padawan who had a crush on Osha. They were both killed in the “Red Wedding” episode. That was incredibly gutsy in this day and age, you are not allowed to kill characters with that number of check boxes but Headland did.
The second thing I liked was Lee Jung-jae’s performance. Squid Game Dude threw his heart into the role of Master Sol. He was acting his heart out, trying desperately to accomplish the Atlas-like task of carrying this trainwreck on his shoulders. He was paid to act and he delivered. He was the only actor in the show that could deliver on the fight choreography. He was the only one that came close to making me feel anything beyond sadness that something that used to be so great has been destroyed by the most talentless drones in Hollywood.
That’s as generous as I can be to Leslye Headland, a woman who took on the job of Captain of the Titanic… After it had sunk to the ocean floor in pieces and rotted for a century.
Let’s take a brief overview of the whole disaster. The thing that dug up the corpse of Star Wars and raped it.
Carrie Anne Moss of Matrix fame has a Hong Kong-style Kung Fu fight instead of a light saber duel. She was hired to bring in Trinity fans so fine, whatever, she’s killed in the first five minutes of the series. Ha! Ha! Trinity’s dead! Killed by Mae. Arguably in a lawful dual depending on the law in question.
Apparently that law doesn’t apply to Jedi because Osha is arrested by the Jedi for murdering a character that was used to chump people into watching this POS. She is put on a robot prison barge and escapes because of events too stupid to recount.
Venestra who is a major figure in the High Republic series, (I don’t know anyone whose read them, I’m getting that intel fifth-hand), puts together a retrieval mission. Sol who was Osha’s master leads the mission against Venestra’s wishes. Osha has a vision that Mae is alive and doing bad things.
Mae tries to kill Master Soy, a prematurely balding Jedi Master (apparently in his late 20s?) Failing to get through his force field, she is given advice from Quimeer a Sith Lord in disguise. “Just give him poison and he’ll off himself. I mean look at the poor asshole. What does he got to live for anyway? He has a 36-inch tv, an Xbox, a lawn chair, a filthy mattress without any bedding, and that’s it. He keeps telling everybody he’s Sigma Male but he’s really Delta that scores below a 5 so, he’s been left-swiped 6000 times on Tinder.”
You. Are. Doing. Him. A. Favor. And. He. Knows. It.
Master Soy gratefully gulps down the poison rather than go through the humiliation of having to pop a Viagra before opening Pornhub again.
Body Positive Jedi knight (yeah that happened) spots Quimeer next door and Osha goes out to try and fool him into believing she’s Mae. Quimeer sees through her clever disguise of having the same blank expression as her sister. The bad guys escape.
The next episode is the one with the Lesbian Space Witch Orgy. We find out the twins are the product of an ideal lesbian relationship (ie) no men involved in the process. We meet the twins Mae and Osha. We are briefly given to believe that Osha is drawn to the light side of the force and Mae the dark side. Because apparently she likes to force-crush birds off-camera and then tries to burn her sister alive.
But that plot line is dropped and NEVER picked up again.
Of the the four Jedi Mae is targeting, two are dead, one is Sol and one is a Wookie who had gone back to living like a Wookie. The Jedi set off to find the Wookie in an interminable episode where there is nothing but pointless exposition. Mae turns on Quimeer because Osha is alive, so she’s good now despite being guilty of (realistically) second-degree manslaughter and unsanctioned assisted suicide.
Quimeer kills the Wookie Jedi off-camera to avoid unnecessary adventure and excitement.
However, there is plenty in the next episode, which was the Red Wedding of the series. The Jedi search team that Sol is leading is wiped out to a man. At the end of the episode Mae decides she’s evil again because Osha wants to turn her in despite the fact that Mae wanted to turn herself in during the previous episode. In the final scene, an unconscious Osha is captured by Quimeer.
Now we get the hilariously bad shipping episode. Osha awakens (in more ways than one….*sigh*) dresses in her sister’s Sith garb and stalks Quimeer. He goes skinny dipping and I strongly suspect LucasFilm Story Group asked Fort Mickey if he could go full frontal. When he walks out of the tidal pool, Osha’s eyes are clearly aimed downward.
Quimeer: Join the Dark Side!
Osha: I don’t wanna.
Quimeer: But I’m hot!
Osha: I know but I still don’t wanna… For the most part.
The next episode is the opposing view of the Lesbian Witch Orgy story. Where we are supposed to find out that the Jedi did a bad, bad, terrible thing. Except they didn’t. They were pretty much justified in everything they did except filing a false report so Osha could begin Jedi training. However, the way it’s presented the audience is apparently meant to believe it’s no different from what Mengele was doing at Auschwitz. This is what I mean by situational morality. The people that made this show are so steeped in it they really believe that right and wrong depend on how it looks on screen.
Last episode and this was a doozy.
Everybody goes back to the Space Lesbian Witch Planet. Osha is being shipped hard with Smilo. Sure he murdered her friends but that was six hours ago and he’s such a bad, bad boy. Who can blame her for getting all hot for him?
Mae escapes from Sol due to a contrivance so stupid it would take me another thousand words to make fun of it. She hops in an “escape ship” and says, “I’ll see you in hell!” And leaves the legacy Star Wars fans groaning in agony as she takes off.
Sol is running her down but then Basil the Giant Space Gerbil tears a bunch wiring out bulkehead and she escapes. Basil the Giant Space Gerbil hasn’t been on her side up until now but since the plot required her to successfully escape he changed sides and then ran off.
Truth be told, I’ll take the porgs over Basil any day of the week.
We reach the climax. Mae and Osha have a Kung Phooey fight. Amandla Stenberg has been trained as a dancer so she can at least hit her marks. But she’s no Michelle Yeoh, the intensity simply isn’t there. It’s just a pastiche of what a good fight scene needs to be. Especially when contrasted with Lee Jung-jae. Who was fighting Quimeer, or rather his stunt double in the Smilo Ren helmet.
In stark contrast to Amandla Stenberg fighting herself. Lee delivered, even though they did ruin it with a prolonged wire-fu sequence in the middle of the fight. Look guys about wire-fu. It was super neato from 1998 to 2004 but it’s completely played out now. Don’t use it again. Ever.
Sol defeats Quimeer. But then Mae comes out of nowhere and beats Sol to a jelly. I felt so bad for Lee there was no way to make her look good and he was trying so hard.
Quimeer snarls, “Strike him down and your journey is complete.” LucasFilm is now literally mistaking the audience for the YouTube shills that keep acting they are excited when they watch the parts that are supposed to be exciting but never are.
Mae is good again this minute and wants him to confess his crimes(?) to the High Council.
However, Osha shows up and hears him admit to killing her mother. Osha clearly wants to smash with Quimeer who just murdered her only friends but Sol on the other hand who had been a father figure to her for fifteen years, she deliberately murders because he killed her mother fifteen years ago (even though Sol thought she was trying to kill her sister Mae at the time). And she murdered him with the very first Force Choke.
That’s right my Darklings the Force Choke did not exist until episode 8 of The Acolyte, when Osha invented it to kill her adoptive father who died whispering “I love you.”
She grabs Sol’s lightsaber and (I shit you not) it turns in RED because she’s dark side now. I seem to recall Anakin slaughtering a whole temple full of children and a bunch of other people without his lightsaber changing color but he wasn’t a woman in a Disney Star Wars show. It was completely beyond him.
No Daddy issues here.
This last episode had everything you’ve come to expect from Disney/LucasFilm. Characters like Darth Plagius and Yoda are shoehorned in at the last possible second. Images are meant to evoke feelings in place of logic and plot progression. Characters whose motivations are so situational they appear to have a multiple personality disorder. Finally, cliff hanger ending to try and reel in another unwanted season.
And so much more! This is the most hated of all the Disney Star Wars shows for a reason. This is the one where they completely dropped the mask. Current Year LucasFilm showed what they really think of the original Star Wars movies and the heroism they stood for while trying to bilk those same movies. This show was just copy-paste, and photoshopped moments from the first six movies. Nothing from Disney’s own hated contributions to Star Wars, you understand.
I wasn’t angry at the end of this show. I was just sad.
