Let the record show it was neither my decision nor yours to spend the first six episodes of The Acolyte teasing a mystery to be revealed in the seventh. That’s the kind of decision made by a creative team confident in its choices — in ability to reveal and conceal at will, to generate fresh interest while continuing to string us along, and to deliver when the time finally comes.

Based on this week’s episode, that confidence was misplaced. Not one choice made in “Choice” proves capable of bearing the accumulated weight of the six episodes of “What really happened on Brendok on that fateful night sixteen years ago?” that preceded it. 

The script stumbles right out the gate by casting this flashback episode as a sort of alternate take on the previous such installment, which showed us the Jedi’s arrival on Brendok and the tragic end of Mae and Osha’s coven from Osha’s perspective. The problem is that nothing whatsoever is gained from shifting the focal point from Osha to Sol, or to his fellow Jedi Indara and Torbin, or to their mothers Aniseya and Koril. They might has well have simply re-aired that earlier episode, just with the cameras placed three feet to the left. That’s the revelatory new viewpoint we’re getting.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Acolyte for Decider.

The episode ends admirably oddly, with Osha putting on Qimir’s helmet — it’s made from cortosis, a metal that both shorts out lightsabers and has a sensory-deprivation effect so that your only remaining sense is the Force itself, provided you can tap into it. We see her put the helmet on through her eyes, watching the world go black except a little sliver of dim light. We hear her breathe, and the credits begin to roll over the sound effect, not Star Wars-y music as has been the case…well, literally every other time I’ve watched anything Star Wars. 

I’m impressed by this willingness to break the mold, also reflected in the decision to let actor Manny Jacinto flex his full sex appeal as Qimir. Obviously, I’m impressed by all the cute little guys. But I’d be more impressed if I felt these innovations came in service of material that provided any of it with a compelling context. Evil twins, mistaken identity, “What happened?” “I’ll tell you everything” episode after episode…there’s not much to go on there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Acolyte for Decider.

Did the Jedi really brainwash Osha into believing a lie about the arson incident? Can they brainwash people like that? Or is Mae just delusional? It may be somewhat interesting to see Sol and Mae hash this out, just as it’s somewhat interesting to meet a Sith who’s not trying to conquer the universe or topple the Republic but just be evil on his own. Somewhat interesting is fine, if you just like Star Wars and your main criteria is “Is there more of it?” I still have no idea what this show is about, what it’s trying to say, what reason it has to exist beyond those two four-letter words.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Acolyte for Decider.

5. Bad guys who look like if the Hellraiser puzzle box existed in a galaxy far, far away

Seriously, check out Mae’s masked, anonymous Master. Look at that array of metallic whatchamacallems that makes him look like the Chatterer cenobite. Dig the way he descends from the sky in the background out of focus like a vampire when he first appears in this episode. Check out how he wordlessly punks out an entire Jedi SWAT team. Getting real “We have such sights to show you” vibes from this fellow in a way I haven’t from a Star Wars villain since the initial appearance of Darth Maul. I realize that “design a cool guy in black armor” is barely a challenge for a seventh grader, let alone professionals, but still.

I listed some things I liked about this week’s episode of The Acolyte, along with some things I didn’t, for Decider.

For their part, the daughters are divided on how strongly to adhere to the ways of their mothers and the other witches, the only people they’ve ever known. This is an interesting dynamic given what we know of the twins’ future selves. Mae, the villain, isn’t the rebel; she’s the mama’s girl, the true believer, the religious conservative. Osha rebels not out of wildness, but out of self-knowledge; she knows she belongs out in the galaxy somewhere, not cooped up where the only other child she’s ever seen is her twin sister.

All this takes on an extra dimension when the four Jedi whom Mae will later hunt show up planetside, in search of rumored children receiving illicit Force training. (The witches call the Force “the Thread” and distrust the Jedi as lunatic monks or something to that effect.) On one hand, our instinct is to regard the interlopers as colonizers, imposing a foreign religion and luring children away from their heritage. On the other, our instinct is to regard the witches as puritans or cultists, restricting an intellectually and emotionally restless child to the ways that suit them, not her.

So which instinct should prevail? Are we right to recoil at the way Koril infantilizes Osha as incapable of knowing her own heart, forcing a belief system and future upon her that she doesn’t want? Or is she the lesser of two evils, when the alternative is a lifetime of service to a holy order that’s perfectly comfortable luring children away from their families for life?

Of course, there’s the added wrinkle of the long-running fannish debate about the nature and degree of the Jedi’s benevolence as rulers and space cops. Some of it is trolling, and some of it is intellectually overburdening what is essentially a children’s property, but some of it is a sincere attempt by fans of the setting to follow certain threads about Jedi teachings and practices to their logical endpoints. Whatever the case, many viewers will be bringing their preexisting feelings about the Force-wielding warrior-monks with them.

In story terms, the debate gets cut short by Mae, who goes berserk and tries to burn Osha to death rather than allow her to voluntarily leave the sisterhood. Mae’s repeated cries of “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?” at the nonconformist Osha will ring ugly in the ears of a lot of people who received similar treatment from their own families for whatever reason. However you feel about the Jedi, only one side here is trying to burn heretics at the stake.

I reviewed the interesting third episode of The Acolyte for Decider.

The problem facing The Acolyte is that Andor is out there along with Ahsoka, which is to say there’s proof of how good a live-action Star Wars show can be as well as how bad. The Acolyte deserves faint praise for beating the latter, but it won’t deserve real praise until it shows it can hang with the former.

I reviewed the second episode of The Acolyte for Decider.

Based solely on this premiere, The Acolyte isn’t the airless continuity rejiggering of Obi-Wan Kenobi or the baffling MST3K-level misfire of Ahsoka, but nor is it a show that feels, I dunno, necessary. Considering that it’s the first live-action Star Wars thing set outside the lifespans of the characters from the original trilogy ever, the potential to redesign what the Star Wars Universe looks and sounds like for another era seems like a massive dropped ball just for starters. The default state of Star Wars shows seems to be “expensive action-figure playset.” Here’s hoping The Acolyte sets its targeting computer for “engaging drama” instead. You can put cool creatures in an engaging drama, too.

I’m covering the new Star Wars show The Acolyte for Decider, starting with my review of the first half of its two-episode premiere.

Throughout the Ahsoka journey — and what a journey it’s been, am I right? — I’ve insisted that the people who say its problem is assuming everyone’s familiar with the Dave Filoni cartoons to which it’s a direct sequel have identified the wrong problem. This is Star Wars after all, and you don’t exactly need to consult Wookieepedia to figure out which characters are good, which characters are bad, and which one-sentence-long backstories and motivations have driven them in those directions. I didn’t need to be familiar with Ahsoka, Sabine, Hera, Ezra and the gang to figure out they were Rebel soldiers and friends, that Ezra was lost in some big victory, and that the loss has haunted the otherwise basically genial survivors. You don’t need to know anything beyond that.

But occasionally, you do need to feel something beyond that, and that’s where the two most recent episodes of Ahsoka have failed. That includes this episode, inexplicably subtitled “Dreams and Madness” despite the total lack of dreams or madness in the episode itself. Sure, you can understand that Sabine’s reunion with Ezra, Sabine’s reunion with Ahsoka, and Ahsoka’s reunion with Ezra are big deals. But unless you spent several years watching some genuinely hideous computer-animated children’s cartoons, I’m not sure how writer-creator Dave Filoni expects you to actually feel about this stuff. I’m not sure I feel anything at all, other than boredom.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex, man? Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex…on weed? It’s fuckin’ crazy, man! It’s like you are a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away!

I reviewed this week’s Ahsoka, which contains the worst moment in the history of Star Wars, for Decider.

Good looking show, right? Sheer image-making used to convey a range of emotions, from joy to PTSD. An overall sense that maybe there’s more to the Star Wars Universe’s magic than cameos of preexisting Star Wars characters. (I know the whales have been around before, apparently, but they’re new to me, and they’re not really “characters” anyway, even if the enormous blue eye of the mother of them all seems very wise.) And everything given ample room to breathe in dialogue-free silence. 

And, finally, there’s the rub. By “ample room” I mean “more than ample room.” I mean “Wembley Stadium” room. I mean “the lone and level sands stretch far away in ‘Ozymandias’” room. I mean “the distance between one point in space and another as described by an unfortunate passenger in Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’” room. I mean a writer and director and showrunner who keeps trying to stuff a 22-minute animated-series runtime of shit into a 50-minute live-action series runtime bag and, as you’d expect, coming up empty, over and over.

Take the two most impressive visual sequences in the episode: Ahsoka’s spectral and sad fog-of-war memories, and the flight of the space whales. Both phenomena are repeated, virtually identically from one iteration to the next. Ahsoka doesn’t just return to the Clone Wars, which she helpfully names in case anyone watching Ahsoka is unfamiliar with the Clone Wars (lol) — a needless idiot-proofing decision, echoed by the egregious of having Anakin occasionally flash into his Darth Vader outfit, as if we need the reminder and would be like “oh, right, that’s who he is!” 

No, she also returns to a second battle, one that took place after she and Anakin had parted ways, so they can rehash the same conversations they already had about violence and warfare and the need for soldiers and so on. Whatever magic was in the first sequence has the air let out by the unnecessary second. Moreover, constantly cross cutting from the dream world to the real one — a major plot point, given that we’re required to see General Hera’s Take Your Child to Work Day visitor Jacen use his Force sensitivity to hear the sound of Ahsoka and Anakin’s lightsaber duel so she can…be retrieved while floating unconscious under several feet of water. It’s a dopey idea that’s not worth the sacrifice of the mood and look otherwise maintained by the flashback/dream/vision.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

“Sabine…can I count on you?” “………You know you can.”

“Is everything alright?” “…………Be careful out there.”

“Best get underway soon.” “…………Is that a note of fear in your voice?” “……Experience.”

“Relax.” “…Don’t worry about me.” “…I’m not.” “…Good.” “……Should I be?” “……What?” “……Worried.” “…………Nope.”

Imperial torture scientists toiling in the bowels of the detention level on the first Death Star for months couldn’t come up with a method of interrogation that would leave the human mind in the kind of state required to deliver the dialogue in Ahsoka. The endless pauses, the soporific delivery, the nature of the dialogue itself — my god, look at that last exchange; I honestly can’t believe Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo were handed a piece of paper with those words in that order typed out on it — are all so bad that I kept waiting for Joel and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater to start dunking on it during every pause.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Ahsoka, which aside from some lovely imagery and a killer performance by Ray Stevenson is the most embarrassing Star Wars thing I’ve ever seen, for Decider.

Ahsoka comes across as the bare minimum of Star Wars required to make Star Wars fans go “Sure, I’ll watch it.” It feels less like a television show, let alone a movie, and more like a Happy Meal tie-in toy. If you’re absolutely desperate to hold something from a galaxy far, far away in your hands, it’ll do in a pinch. But the better toys, and the imagination required to make them worth playing with, are found elsewhere.

I reviewed today’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

Instead, though, most of our time is spent with Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Man, I just do not know what’s going on there. Winstead’s delivery is completely undistinguished — où sont la Swango d’antan? — and Bordizzo and Dawson sound like someone forgot to wake them up. I don’t want to oversell this, mind you, it’s not like I’m outraged or appalled or upset, I’m just confused. I know these actors. How did this happen? What do you think? Post a comment.

And the show still displays absolutely zero facility for action or suspense, an absolute dealbreaker for the setting. I’m trying hard not to constantly compare Ahsoka to its predecessors, but the heist of the hyperdrive by the bad guys has an apples-to-apples comparison in the form of the heist in Andor, while the double-bladed two-on-one lightsaber battle Ahsoka has with a droid and that mystery assailant is straight-up Duel of the Fates stuff. In neither case is the comparison a flattering one. It’s an embarrassing one, is what it is.

I reviewed the second episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

The costumes look like decent San Diego Comic-Con cosplay. The commemorative mural on display at a big ceremony in Sabine’s honor is laughably amateurish. The children’s drawings Sabine finds in a bunk on Ahsoka’s ship are so obviously an adult trying to draw like a child that it’s almost a provocation to include them. The opening crawl is a syntactical nightmare. The score is frequently dreadful — a ghastly guitar-driven rock song here, lugubrious and out-of-place string sections there. Two lengthy sequences involve puzzle-solving you normally think of as the domain of the parts of Tears of the Kingdom you don’t like playing.

The performances aren’t helped by the dialogue, naturally. There’s only so much anyone can do with clunkers like “May their courage and commitment never be forgotten” or “Mentoring someone is a challenge” or “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.” (Jesus.) The ne plus ultra of this combination of bad writing and bad acting comes in this exchange between Dawson and Bordizzo’s characters:

“I go where I’m needed.” “Not always.” “You never make things easy.” “Why should I? You never made things easy for me, master.” “There is nothing easy about being a Jedi.” “Well, then I should have made a good one.” “Yes, you should have.” It’s like listening to an AI voice chat program train. 

I reviewed the series premiere of Ahsoka for Decider. Dreadful.

That Andor, a Star Wars television series on Disney+, received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama doesn’t tell you much about Andor. Like all awards shows, the Emmys are ultimately about themselves; following their nominees and winners from year to year is less a way to keep track of what’s actually good and more a way to track the values of the Academy of Television Arts & Science’s values and preferences as they change, or don’t change, over time. For example, the acting on the satirical HBO dramedies Succession and The White Lotus was very good, but please take it from someone who covers this stuff for a living: In no way did these two shows alone contain the eight best supporting actor performances of the year all by themselves, unless they were the only two shows you watched.

Similarly, Andor’s nods for Best Drama, Best Directing, and Best Writing — three of its total of eight nominations — are very nice for Andor, a show acclaimed by nearly every critic from nearly every quarter. But please note that the rote exercise in IP management Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka Ewan McGregor’s Divorce Attorney Needs a New Pair of Shoes, also landed a nomination in the historically competitive Best Limited Series category. Put it all together and what you have is evidence that Emmy voters listen when the Mouse tells them something is For Your Consideration, that’s all. It’s just like how the capture of an entire category by two shows that aired on the same network/streamer in the same time slot on the same night while parodying the same kinds of people tells you more about how Emmy voters like spending their Sundays than anything else.

Fortunately, what Andor’s success in the gold statuette realm really means is that we have another opportunity for us, you and me, to talk about just how good Andor is. 

I wrote about Andor for Decider.

The new Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! Stefan Sasse and I discuss the season finale of Andor, available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

And remember, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour is brought to you by Manscaped! Groom your area and save 20% plus get free shipping when you use the code BOILEDLEATHER at manscaped.com!

Our latest patreon-exclusive Andor podcast is about that big final post-credits scene. Listen and enjoy1

If anything ties Andor together, it’s this: a conviction that great things are made from small pieces, painstakingly assembled. It was true of the bomb, it’s true of whatever they were building in that prison (a post-credits scene reveals it to be components for the planet-killing weapons system on the Death Star), it’s true of the growing Rebellion, and it’s true of Cassian Andor himself, a lowlife who’s gone from scrambling to survive to fighting for something much larger than himself. It’s amazing to see a Star Wars story this thoughtfully constructed, adding brick to brick to brick until the most impressive story that universe has seen in two decades is right there before our eyes.

I reviewed the season finale of the truly excellent Andor for Decider.

One of the most unusual things about the show is that, especially in the early episodes, Cassian Andor is not particularly charismatic. We’re used to dramas centered on the most magnetic guy in the room.
You probably were in a room with him and never noticed. Cassian had to be that guy because this is a big show that wants to tell the story of people that big shows never cared about before. It’s the only way to be honest about a revolution.

Yes, there are leaders, but revolutions are not made by leaders. They’re made by numbers, by conviction, by regular people thinking they can do something extraordinary. This is the story of one of those people that was never celebrated. Oh, this person is going to bring change, this person is different — no, not really. The strength of community, that’s what the show is about.

You cannot fall into the trap of making the charismatic, funny guy who you know from the beginning is going to find a way out. You have to think the opposite. You have to question, Why are we supporting him? I was always saying, “Let’s avoid movie moments as much as we can.”

I interviewed Diego Luna about his incredible Star Wars show Andor for Vulture.

Stefan Sasse and I discussed the penultimate episode of Andor‘s first season on the latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast!