The Acolyte’s first season made Star Wars’ dark past feel like a bright future

Though Disney Plus’ older Star Wars series have sometimes been fantastic, recent seasons of shows like The Mandalorian and Ahsoka have felt like the products of a franchise unsure of how it wants to move forward. As another show set in Star Wars’ past, Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte seemed like it might similarly wind up being hamstrung by the tedium of lore and distracting nostalgia plays. But by embracing its identity as a story free from the burdens of having to connect with anything but itself, The Acolyte’s first season became one of the more promising signs of Star Wars’ future.

Even with its new time period and focus on the Dark side of the Force, The Acolyte’s twisting mystery about unusual twins torn about by an epic power struggle larger than themselves made it a quintessentially Star Wars narrative. In former Padawan Osha and Jedi-killing assassin Mae (Amandla Stenberg), you could plainly see The Acolyte interpolating aspects of the Skywalker saga’s biggest heroes and villains. But for all of the ways that The Acolyte echoed Star Wars stories that came before it, the series understood the importance of using those parallels as thematic texture to strengthen its own ideas, rather than points of fascination solely meant to keep viewers watching.

That became abundantly clear as The Acolyte introduced Jedi Masters Sol (Lee Jung-jae), Yord (Charlie Barnett), and Venestra (Rebecca Henderson) as avatars of the High Republic era — a point in Star Wars history when the Order was much more part of the dominant power structure. As the first Star Wars series to really delve into life during the High Republic, The Acolyte was in a unique position to shine a light on how the Jedi’s institutional power allowed them to insert themselves into others’ affairs under the auspices of keeping balance in the Force.

Sol genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing as he leads the charge to pull young Osha and Mae (Lauren and Leah Brady) away from Mother Anisaya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and her coven of Force-using witches in flashbacks scattered through the season. But the cavalierness with which he tries to assert his authority over the girls’ lives is precisely what leads to their home being destroyed — something Sol hides from Osha after Mae is presumed dead.

The Acolyte’s exploration of how a lack of oversight gave rise to deceit within the Jedi Order made its story feel like a nuanced (if unevenly paced) deepening of the Star Wars franchise’s larger ideas about how absolute power can corrupt those with the best intentions. What made the show a compelling watch early on, though, was the way it used characters like Mother Anisaya to present the Force as something almost too multifaceted to be defined by the traditional Light / Dark binary.

That kind of perspective is what gave The Acolyte a distinct air of freshness after years of Star Wars projects that have often felt unable to break free of simple, color-coded storytelling about good versus evil. Star Wars has always framed feelings like anger as vectors for darkness within its Force-wielding characters, and that very much seemed to be the case with Mae as she hunted down Jedi at the behest of her Sith master Qimir (Manny Jancinto). Similarly, The Acolyte repeatedly emphasized how Sol’s fear of the witches was part of what pushed him to try taking both twins away from their mothers despite other Jedi like Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) urging him to wait for guidance.

But as often as The Acolyte’s characters murdered and manipulated one another, what was fascinating about the show’s depiction of the Force wasn’t the idea that the Dark side was rising as its Light counterpart dimmed, but rather that neither the Jedi nor the Sith could comprehend the magnitude of what Mother Anisaya accomplished in creating her daughters. It’s never really clear whether the witches themselves fully understood what Osha and Mae are, or what the coven’s plans for the pair were before Sol’s intervention. But the loss of what might have been — perhaps a different school of Force-sensitive thought well-suited to balance out the Jedi — is one of the bigger tragedies The Acolyte leaves you to sit with as its story begins airing the truth out in its second half.

The Acolyte’s approach to world building and remixing established canon were strengths that made it feel much more akin to Star Wars: Visions’ shorts than the franchise’s other live-action shows. Sometimes, this meant that the first season unfolded with a sense of breathless urgency that left promising characters like Padawan Jecki (Dafne Keen) killed off just as their plot lines seemed to be gaining steam. But it also made the show feel focused on actually moving forward through this chapter of history instead of fleshing out the High Republic era in exhausting detail.

The Acolyte’s eponymous season 1 finale led with action and devastating catharsis as it brought its players together in a confrontation that laid bare how much pain and suffering the twins endured as a consequence of the Jedi’s actions. And yet as genuinely powerful as it was to see Sol own up to his (and arguably the entire Order’s) responsibility in hurting Osha and Mae, the finale could not resist the temptation to close out on a pair of cameos from characters whose presences portend an uncertain future for The Acolyte.

It’s obvious that Disney’s very interested in keeping The Acolyte around for more seasons that seem poised to introduce the twins to Yoda and Darth Plagueis as the show continues to close the gap between the High Republic Era and and the events of The Phantom Menace (which is set just 100 years later.) Bringing this group of characters together could lead to The Acolyte feeling too tidy and overly-interested in making itself work as yet another avenue back to the Skywalker saga.

But this first season was an ambitious and ultimately successful exercise in proving that Star Wars can be so much more than nostalgia-addicted rehashes when Disney gives it a proper chance to be.