Rumors swirled online all week that this would be the episode to end Star Wars. Yoda doing weird dances? The Force designed by women? A witch’s brew?
Genre: Science-Fiction Adventure
Premise: We head back in time 16 years when twins Osha and Mae were being raised by a coven of witches. But when the Jedi find out about this illegal activity, they come to retrieve the girls.
About: The writers of today’s episode are fairly inexperienced. Jasmyne Flournoy has never written a television episode or feature film in her life. Eileen Shim did write one episode for House of the Dragon (the show debuts this Sunday by the way!).
Writers Jasmyne Flournoy and Eileen Shim
Details: 42 minutes
I’ve tried my darndest to stay away from the online chatter of The Acolyte because I know it’s all about divisiveness and how there can’t be fire in space or something. None of that has any effect on anything AS LONG AS THE STORY IS GOOD. And, so far, the story is good.
However, despite my best efforts, I could not avoid hearing that today’s episode was going to create a firestorm. I mentally prepared myself. But I’m committed to judging this series on the story and the story alone.
And look, just to be clear – for the people who are saying this series is stupid and it’s making all these dumb choices. Dudes. Star Wars has always been a bit silly. Little teddy bears are responsible for defeating the Empire. You can’t slam Star Wars for being a little silly.
The only time I get mad in Star Wars is when things get sloppy and, as a result, the storytelling suffers. If you’re putting 100% in and you have some modicum of talent, which Leslye Headland does, you’re going to write some good Star Wars episodes.
Famous last words, right?
Here we go!
**Carson watches Episode 3 of The Acoylate.**
Osha and Mae are 9 years old in today’s episode. It’s 16 years in the past and they’ve both been found by a coven of witches. The two head witches, who are also married, argue extensively about how to raise the children.
There is a big ceremony in a couple of days called “The Ascension” which will officially make these two witches. There are going to be a few challenges that are force-related so they do their force exercises whenever they can fit them in.
But just as the ceremony gets started, four Jedi show up (including a Wookie Jedi!) saying what the witches are doing is illegal. They know the two girls are force-sensitive and want to give them the Jedi test. If they pass, they will come to Coruscant.
For this reason, their two mothers tell them to deliberately fail the tests. But while taking the test, Osha can’t help but be truthful. So she passes. Mae is so infuriated by this that she locks her sister in her room and starts a fire! Osha is barely able to escape, but all the other Jedi, including Mae, die in the fire. Osha then hops on the Jedi ship and heads back to the Jedi temple.
Today’s episode had a surprise treat in the credits. One of my favorite up-and-coming directors, Kogonada, directed the episode!
That was cool to see.
I did think the episode was well-directed, although Kogonada seems to have been restrained from adding too much of his own style.
But let’s talk about the writing.
As I always say, the third episode of a TV series is where the rubber meets the road. If it’s bad, your series is bad. If it’s good, you could have a show on your hands.
Unfortunately, the series decided to gamble and use episode 3 as a flashback episode.
Flashbacks are more evil than Sith themselves. Not because they don’t work. But because only a tiny percentage of screenwriters understand how to make them work.
CATEGORY 1
Most screenwriters believe that the audience will blindly want to see what happens in the past because of how it will add more context to the characters.
CATEGORY 2
Better screenwriters understand that audiences don’t like going backwards. Therefore, they have to add more than just character context. They have to add a story to the flashback.
CATEGORY 3
The best screenwriters understand that going backwards is a gigantic gamble. It is taking the story away from the present, where the audience wants to be. Therefore, if you’re going to do it – especially a flashback that’ll last an entire episode – it has to be a great story in and of itself. And if they can’t come up with that great story for their flashback, they don’t write the flashback.
Because they know how quickly viewers can tune out of a series. Which, by the way, is 10 times faster than it used to be, when there were only 50 shows on TV. Flashbacks are a “f*ck around and find out” gamble.
So, where do today’s writers fall?
To their credit, they knew enough to get to Category 2.
There IS a legit storyline to this flashback episode. We’ve got the goal – the ceremony, the stakes – they become official members of the coven if they pass, and the urgency – the ceremony takes place in a couple of days.
We then have the complication that throws everything into disarray – the Jedi show up and say they want the children for themselves.
That IS a story. The problem is, it’s only a mildly entertaining one. And this is what keeps decent writers from becoming great writers. Just creating an okay storyline so that you can give us more context about your characters isn’t going to move the needle.
Let me be clear about this. If you fumble in a present-day storyline, the audience will forgive you more than they will if you fumble in a flashback episode. Because when a flashback episode is weak, not only were we not entertained, but the story didn’t move forward at all.
Remember what we talked about last week. Headland had made the smart decision to use what TV does well to create her series: The Acolyte was an investigative mystery. You didn’t do that this week. You went back to the mistakes that all these other Star Wars shows have made which is to force movie-like storytelling onto the TV format.
Movie-like storytelling is built upon the concept that the viewer gets to experience the entire story NOW. If you take away the NOW part, we get movie-like storytelling without all the payoffs.
So does that mean all flashbacks suck? No. I actually did a feature consult recently where the script was about a famous director. And he used flashbacks throughout. The difference was, his flashback story was even better than the main story! So whenever we flashed back, I was excited. Cause I wanted to see what happened next in that story.
That’s the way you got to think of it. You can’t think of it as a second-banana storyline. Try to make it as good or even better than the main storyline and that way we’ll WANT to flash back.
On a personal level, I didn’t like today’s subject matter. I know some outlier Star Wars comic books have witches in them. But witches aren’t Star Wars. So when you put them on screen, you’re losing a LOT of your audience. Probably almost your entire male audience. So I don’t know why they would do that.
Read the room.
It can’t be all about you. “I want witches cause I like witches!” No. Ask yourself if the audience for the subject matter likes witches. If they don’t, you probably want to go in another direction.
I will say that Headland seems to understand the Jedi better than a lot of the previous Star Wars showrunners. I say that because this Jedi group is a cool group. They all feel like Jedi. They act like Jedi. They talk like Jedi. They basically saved this episode.
This episode isn’t nearly as bad as everyone is saying it is. Someone was telling me that they were going to announce that the force was “female” in this episode or something. None of that nonsense happened.
But they need to get their act together for Episode 4 next week.
[ ] What the hell did I just stream?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’ve got backstory you need the viewer to know, do the hard work and slip it into conversations. Show it through character actions. When Han Solo chirps at Luke in their first meeting at the cantina, saying, “And who’s going to fly it kid, you??” Luke says, “You bet I could, I’m not such a bad pilot myself.” That’s how you slip in backstory (that Luke is a pilot). You don’t have to do an entire episode on a coven for us to know Osha and Mae were once part of a coven.
