The Acolyte Review - Not Messing Around

There are three main kinds of Star Wars stories. There's the kind where you write whatever you want and call it Star Wars--a common occurrence with the many novels released in the 1990s. There's the kind where you recycle already existing Star Wars stories into something familiar--this has been Disney's primary way of doing things. But, lastly, there are the stories that enthusiastically make use of Star Wars as a setting to create something fresh. There have been a number of novels that fit that bill, as did the first season of Andor--and now, through four episodes, it seems that the new Star Wars series The Acolyte, set a century before the movies, also falls into that category.

The Acolyte centers on a pair of twins, Osha and Mae (both played by Amandla Stenberg). The girls were raised by an unaffiliated coven of female Force-users, but despite living outside the Republic, the Jedi-- including Carrie-Ann Moss's Indara--poked their noses into these women's affairs, leading to disaster. As a result, the sisters are separated for decades, each thinking the other dead--Osha ends up training to be a Jedi before washing out after a few years, and Mae, while everyone thinks she's dead, trains under a secret Sith master. When Mae emerges to hunt and kill the Jedi who made the incursion to her coven, Osha takes the blame and gets pulled right back into Jedi business as they go after her sister.

One thing that sets The Acolyte apart is the way it doesn't dilly dally with the reveal that Osha and Mae are separate people--the show begins by inferring that Osha has a normal life and moonlights as an assassin, but we learn the truth about Mae before the end of the first episode. A lesser Star Wars story would have tried to milk that mystery for several episodes at least.