Season 1 of The Acolyte was a mess, but I’m still mad it got canceled

At the risk of mentioning Woody Allen in any context, the old Catskills comedy joke he quotes at the beginning of Annie Hall has endless applications. The joke is two people complaining about a restaurant that disappoints them: “The food here is really terrible… And such small portions!”

Allen recontextualizes that as a metaphor about life, a sad, miserable, lonely experience that goes by too quickly. For me, the irony inherent in that lame joke — the idea of ​​complaining that you didn’t get enough of something you didn’t like — is tailor-made to describe my experience with Disney Plus’ latest live-action Star Wars series, The Acolyte. Disney recently announced the show is not picked up for a second season. I shouldn’t be surprised: the first season was deeply flawed, sometimes to the point of shouting-at-the-television in bewilderment. And yet I’m irked by its cancellation, because the story stalled just as it was finally reaching a point of real potential.

Season 1 of The Acolyte was messy and frustrating. The story revolves around a pair of Force-sensitive twins, Mae and Osha, both played as adults by Amandla Stenberg. Mae and Osha grew up together in a hidden commune on the planet Brendok, and were separated in an event in their youth that left each sister thinking the other was dead. Osha trained with the Jedi and eventually left the order before completing her training, leaving Mae in the hands of a mysterious Sith Master. The first season spends a lot of time glossing over all of this stuff, distributing information into such stingy little packets that viewers have to get halfway through the season’s eight episodes before they really have a sense of who our protagonists are or what they want.

The entire story of the first season is told in no particular order in an attempt to create mystery and intrigue, but the big revelations about what really happened are either so heavily foreshadowed or so confusingly executed that they never really generate any real drama. Three of the main characters from season 1 are not introduced until after they’ve been killed, or as they’re being killed. And all the while, the audience is expected to remain enthralled by the mystery of why they died, without knowing who they are.

They’re expected to stay engaged, because Mae and Osha have almost the exact same argument in episode after episode, first as children and then as adults, without ever really hearing each other out. All of their personal progress is saved for the finale, in which both women abruptly reverse their moral codes. Mae accepts a solution to their situation that doesn’t sit well with her, and Osha goes off with Mae’s Sith Master to accept his training. By the end of Season 1, we feel like we’ve finally broken through all the veils that showrunner Leslye Headland and her writers have thrown over the basic histories of these characters. We finally know what kind of story they’re telling, and they can finally run with it.

Except now it feels like we’ll never get the real story that this season was setting up. In retrospect, season 1 was The Acolyte plays as a confusing backstory for an angry, angsty RPG protagonist, one full of believable human contradictions and conflicts who’s primed for some thrilling drama. The clearest and most compelling part of Season 1 seemed likely to be the centerpiece of Season 2: the push-and-pull relationship between Osha and Darth Plagueis’ still-unnamed apprentice (played by Manny Jacinto and operating as “Qimir,” though Headland has teased that his real identity is would be a season 2 reveal).

Master-apprentice relationships have given the Star Wars franchise some of its richest, most complicated drama, and these two certainly promised a lot more of that – especially given the conflict between Osha’s early Jedi training and her newfound determination to embrace her own emotions and stop putting the desires of others above her own. And then there was the promise of Darth Plagueis on top of that – not necessarily as a familiar element of a given story, but as a potentially demanding third wheel in Osha and Qimir’s already delicate detente.

Above all there is a feeling that The Acolyte was finally hitting its stride. Once the show stopped clearing its throat and teasing and just let its characters move forward instead of endlessly negotiating the past, it felt like it was finally moving into territory we haven’t seen before in a Star Wars TV series. Osha has always faced significant ethical and personal moral struggles during her Sith training. She’s been hardened by trauma and betrayal, but she still seems too good-hearted to accept the teaching that other people don’t matter. Exploring her evolving ethos (and that of Qimir, since his starting point was broad and reactive enough to leave plenty of room for growth) could have been a way to actually build the lore around the Sith, rather than just rehashing the same Jedi/Sith conflicts over and over again, for example, Star Wars: Visions do.

Granted, this is probably all wishful thinking. Season 1 is full of miscalculations about what viewers needed to know about the protagonist’s present to make the past worth exploring. This story could have been exciting if it had been told differently — watch Real Detective: Nightland for a largely similar structure that spends an entire season teasing out “What really happened to these two women in the past?” while still building compelling present-day characters and a mesmerizing seasonal arc. Instead, Season 1 skimps on seemingly crucial details (like skipping over the deaths of Mae and Osha’s entire coven, leaving viewers to fill in the blanks themselves) while wasting time on much smaller bits of business. It’s certainly possible that Season 2 would have been just as annoyingly clumsy and misfocused, in entirely different ways.

It’s just annoying to get to this point in the story and see it end. It feels like we’ve just finished the long prologue to a book, only to be told that the author never finished the rest of the novel. Or, to go back to that old Catskills joke, the appetizer was pretty sour and half-baked at best. But I kept hoping that with all the ingredients finally on the table, a satisfying meal was on the way. It seems we’ll never know.