Fossil

There’s a good show buried inside The Acolyte, that they didn’t quite make—or that they made and then unmade—but to dig it out, you have to spoil the show they actually made. This is fine. It’s not a very good show. It has some good parts and scenes, and there are some interesting ideas embedded in the premise. But if you cut away all the slop that it’s also burdened and diluted and confused by, you can get a sense for what the show might have been, a show about what happens when a space cop kills a black woman so he can steal her child and make her a cop too. Of course, it largely isn’t that show. And while one of the most anti-critical habits of modern fandom is to treat a show as if it’s a thing that really happened—and not the end result of a multitude of imaginative choices that could have gone many different ways, and are more interestingly considered as that kind of matrix of possibility—the very least interesting thing about The Acolyte is whatever gets spoiled by giving away “what happens.”

On one level, the show fails for the simple reason that it is interested in the wrong characters. Lee Jung-jae and Manny Jacinto are compelling actors playing characters who have desires and goals, and they work to advance them. They are adults: they take responsibility for their place in the world and they have (or believe themselves to have) self-knowledge, on the basis of which they take action. The two twins, on the other hand, is a role (I won’t pluralize it) that gives Amandla Stenberg very little to work with: both are essentially the same trauma box waiting to be opened, ever since that fateful day seventeen years ago when the Really Bad Thing happened. They are not adults; the seventeen years that they have ostensibly spent growing up and finding themselves in the world since The Bad Thing Happened is barely even gestured towards, much less explored. Instead, one of them is good, one of them is bad; light, dark, yin yang, pick your archetypal binary and that’s what you get instead of a character that exists in the context of all that came before them. They are, and I can’t say this strongly enough, unburdened by what has been ever since they fell out of the coconut tree that was the day The Bad Thing Happened. Instead of being a pair of adults played by an actor closer to thirty than twenty—most of whose life would have been after The Bad Thing Happened—they remain pure functions of the character binaries they already represented when they were frozen in the amber of trauma as children.

The result is that the twins spend most of the show responding incoherently and inconclusively to events because they’re really waiting for the plot to inform them what their true motivations have always been. The mystery, such as it is, will explain why one of them trained with a Jedi and one of them trained with a Sith. But when we find out what happened, the answer is not only boring, it’s superfluous: that the evil one saw the Jedi kill her mother only reinforces her already existing sense that the Jedi are very bad, and so, too, with the “good” one, who becomes a Jedi after the fire, just as she had wanted to do so before. Once the good one finds out that the Jedi killed her mother, she instantly turns evil and kills him. She does this because this is a very dramatic thing for the plot to do.

Anyway, none of this matters, because none of it is very interesting. The lightsaber fights are well-choreographed, and the good actors are good, but the rest of it is just more content slop for Disney piggies. It’s all things that happen onscreen, which are interesting for that reason; the show creates a mystery—what really happened on that day?—and after withholding the answer for half a dozen episodes, reveals the solution with all the unearned bravura of leaping through an open door. But even the answer is strangely nothing-ish, a mash of what everyone already thought about it, with surprisingly few surprises: the bad twin did indeed start the fire that killed everyone (by accident but also on purpose), the Jedi did indeed sort of blunder in and mess everything up with good intentions and also demonstrating why they are bad, and the witches who were going to do some kind of undefined ceremony did indeed seem to be basically bad and scary and up to no good. In short, everyone is right and everyone is wrong. When the Jedi show up and try to take the force-sensitive twins away from their mothers, the mothers protest—which is sympathetic—but also the force witches are about to do something sinister, and undefined, so the Jedi are also in the right; there is a confrontation, both sides use their powers against each other, and it all goes off the rails, until the Jedi kill all the witches, who the bad twin also kills by starting a fire. Because everyone is at fault, no one really is.

If you told me that someone was making a Star Wars show centered on the fallout from a non-black space cop killing the black mother of a child who he wants to kidnap and make into a space cop—and if you told me that he uses deadly force to kill her because she makes a “furtive movement,” an act he both regrets and defends—and that at the end of the show, when the kid finds out the truth, she kills the space cop in question, I might say to you: this sounds like a show that was conceived and green lit somewhere around 2021. I might have said: this sounds like exactly the vibe of that moment.

By the time this show actually got to us, however, the cultural landscape had shifted pretty dramatically. “Woke” is not a term you hear people using in its original usage nearly as much as it gets used as part of the backlash against Black Lives Matter, and everything that that moment of turmoil in 2020 and 2021 represented to the people who want to leave it behind, forever. It’s a shift in public narrative too complicated and multivariant to summarize in a blog post about a stupid Star Wars show, and I’m not going to try, but I suspect this shift is at the root of the problem. Sol is a cop whose entire department needs to be defunded; his murder of a black woman (whose child, again, I must remind us, he is engaged in trying to steal) is covered up by his entire team of bad apples, and most of what we see of the Jedi order is a pretty explicit effort to evade democratic accountability, preserve its privileges, and salvage the institution’s credibility by any means necessary. In the bones of the show, these are not the good guys. Everything the “defund the jedi” politician says, when he shows up in the final episode, is correct.

I suspect that at some point in the last four years, as a George Floyd-era conception slouched its way towards its birth in a moment of High Bidenism, a show about how cops are bad became a show about…. well, nothing. The Jedi in this show are not bad. Sol is unbearably good, and the question of how he came to kill the twins’ mother is left as opaque and illegible as every cop murder must, a tragedy, regrettable and sad, but not something you can derive any insight from. After all, we have the entire rest of the show to demonstrate that Sol really is A Good Guy. Even he will not defend what he did, but being haunted by what he did is a perfect way to demonstrate that it isn’t really “who he is.” Meanwhile, the witches who he killed? The conspiracy of the Sith who are trying to uncover the truth and get revenge? They just feel like the bad guys. They do bad guy things, like force possession and murder, they are scary and evil-ish, and in that way they demonstrate that, regrettable as it may be, sometimes cops have to use deadly force when they feel their life is in danger. Sometimes they have to take kids away from their bad parents. Sometimes–when the normies get mad–the thing you have to do is cover up the truth and protect your reputation and lie to everyone. Or, at least, if you don’t have to, you can, and it doesn’t make you any less of a good guy.

Lili once observed that there was a cluster of shows in the 2010s (Veep, The Good Wife, etc) that were conceived and produced in a moment of anticipation of a Hillary Clinton presidency that, because it never came, makes them interesting fossils from that alternate timeline. Just as it gets harder to remember what the future felt like in 2021—the kinds of possibilities that seemed not only unlocking as the streets filled up with people shouting unheard of slogans, but a unimaginable future that suddenly seemed almost inevitable—the same was true in the last Obama years, when Clinton’s ascendency was so inevitable, so clearly going to happen, that the studios set to work to riff on it. And then, when it didn’t come, it gets hard to remember the zeitgeist that produced it, to remember what compelled creators and studio execs to think that this was the thing to make. The Acolyte feels like the same kind of thing, with the fossil of that alternate timeline buried inside it, of the better and more interesting show, that knew what it was about, and died at some indeterminate time, as the conditions for its life were washed away.