Star Wars: The Acolyte Deserved More Recognition

The Star Wars universe was dealt a surprising blow on Monday with reports indicating that “Star Wars: The Acolyte” has been canceled after only one season. The eight-episode series on Disney+ brought the saga’s High Republic Era of storytelling into live-action. It easily stood out as one of the franchise’s most female-fronted, diverse productions, both in front of and behind the camera. This makes the news of “The Acolyte’s” demise even more heartbreaking, illustrating that, in today’s television landscape, it deserved a much better fate than it ultimately got.

In one of her first interviews about “The Acolyte,” series creator Leslye Headland compared the series to a “tent revival” in the “religion” of Star Wars, indicating that it would find ways to challenge fans’ expectations of what the franchise could offer. The show even made headlines before its debut by hiring a writer who had never seen Star Wars, ensuring the series remained impactful without an encyclopedic knowledge of franchise lore.

Your personal mileage on the end product of “The Acolyte” and the way its flashback-oriented murder mystery unfolded may have varied. But it is undeniable that the series offered a lot—characters who instantly became fan favorites, ambitious fight sequences, a much-needed dose of romantic and sexual tension, and new ways of framing concepts from the larger franchise. The fact that these elements are immediately getting book and comic spinoffs proves there is more to explore, even if it won’t be in the series itself.

Unfortunately, you might not know this from the conversation that surrounded “The Acolyte,” both before and while new episodes debuted on Disney+. In addition to review bombing about the series’ diverse elements, some viewers held the show to increasingly higher—and sometimes nonsensical—standards regarding the Star Wars canon. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from a younger version of lesser-known established Jedi Ki-Adi-Mundi in “The Acolyte’s” fourth episode led to an avalanche of vitriol and death threats in the name of “defending canon,” even though nothing about the cameo thematically counteracted his role in the Prequel Era.

“The Acolyte’s” season (and now series) finale was also dominated by chatter about popular characters who barely had anything to do with prior episodes of the show. Some of these reveals had potential for Season 2 and the larger franchise, like the twist that the infamous Sith Lord Darth Plagueis has seemingly been the secret master of Qimir (Manny Jacinto). The series’ very last scene, of Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) confiding in Yoda, could have potentially led to a Season 2 story arc exploring the iconic character’s earlier days as a flawed politician and Jedi as well. Headland confirmed that she deliberately wanted these cameos in the finale. Still, it is disappointing, in hindsight, that the show had to balance the arcs of its own characters with future arcs that ultimately never came to pass.

“The Acolyte” is far from the first or last show of the modern streaming era to suffer such a fate, but the show occupied a different space between the extremes of ongoing adventures like “Star Wars: The Mandalorian” and “Star Wars: Ahsoka” and miniseries like “Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi” and “Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett.”

The cancellation of “The Acolyte” also raises the question of what kind of stories will be told in the Star Wars galaxy in the near future. The modern Star Wars franchise has already been criticized for retreading too many moments in the franchise’s canon, whether in the form of showing yet another character’s POV during the Prequel Trilogy’s Order 66 or in the cramped timeline of “The Mandalorian,” “Ahsoka,” and the forthcoming “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.”

Outside of James Mangold’s in-development movie about the origins of the Jedi, the movies recently confirmed by Lucasfilm fall into a similar pattern, either directly continuing the “Mandoverse” story or delivering an arguably-too-early follow-up to the Sequel Trilogy. Along the way, an ever-growing number of announced Star Wars projects, which could have begun to better diversify the timeline of the stories, have ultimately fallen apart due to creative differences.

It has not been confirmed whether the High Republic Era will be further explored in another live-action series or potential movie, and any adaptation of the fan-favorite Old Republic Era has been languishing in development for at least half a decade. We know that, in one way or another, more Star Wars movies and shows will inevitably be on the horizon, as the franchise remains a bona fide crown jewel in the Disney portfolio. It would be a shame if “The Acolyte’s” fate creates apprehension about setting future installments in eras that audiences haven’t fully explored yet, leading instead to more of the same. The tapestry of Star Wars has become expansive enough to earn a “tent revival” or two—here’s hoping “The Acolyte” won’t be the last one.

The first season of “Star Wars: The Acolyte” is available to stream exclusively on Disney+.

Source: Particle News