EMPTY STAR WARS TELEVISION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There is no spoon, and there never was one. Second and third spoons need not apply. (Plays ROGUE ONE soundtrack in the background. That’s not commentary or subtext. ROGUE ONE has its faults, its high points: I just chose a soundtrack at semi-random.)
   Fans of THE ACOLYTE …look away, now. If you enjoy the show, enjoy it while looking away from this area.
   Where to begin with a non-show in which nothing much happens? Nothing much happens. That’s a non-spoiler non-alert. I was waiting for the show to start when it reached its predictable end in episode eight.
   THE ACOLYTE. We need a bit of background. Not much. This show is set in a galaxy that’s long ago and, oh, so far away. I fell in love with you before the second show. (Shout out to Darth Coolidge, Darth Bramlett, Darth Russell, and Darth Carpenter for the song tie-in.)
   That’s true. STAR WARS is my thing. But I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE before the second show. Typically, almost a law for Disney STAR WARS, the TV show dropped with more than one episode on release day. And it kept on dropping.
   Spoiler. I didn’t fall in love with THE ACOLYTE after the second show. By the eighth, I wondered if I’d just seen the first zero-content TV series connected to STAR WARS. You may argue that other zero-content shows preceded this one. Who am I to stand in your way…
   To the deep space background, then. STAR WARS gives us a story about the Jedi: interplanetary hippie peaceniks who will, on occasion, dish out death-pain with big sticks of buzzy light.
   The Jedi are in decline, all but extinct, roundly beaten up, and stomped down by the Sith – enemies of all the good things Jedi believe in. A once great Galactic Republic turned into an Evil Empire™ overnight. With a little help from Sith operating in the shadows, you understand.
   Yes, the Jedi are done. But it’s time to fight back. And so, we get STAR WARS movies. At first, three of them. And the word Sith isn’t mentioned once. The actor Don Henderson says the word in a deleted scene from the first movie. I find the lack of its inclusion disturbing.
   Later, that first movie became episode four. And we had three more movies set before it. Easy as 1, 2, 3. Except, there’s a spin-off that links episode three to episode four: ROGUE ONE. That makes it episode four, even though it has ONE in the title, and the first movie that became episode four is now the fifth film in the series.
   To watch them in order, that’s 1, 2, 3, ROGUE ONE, 4, 5, and 6. I have them in 4K and still can’t bring myself to watch 7, 8, and 9 again. It’s going to take an effort. I feel they have to follow on from all the other movies, and that’s a hell of a binge.
   There’s another spin-off with the character Han Solo. That should be after 3 and before ROGUE ONE. It sits off to the side.
   No one counts those Ewok movies. On television, there are many many episodes of spin-off shows. They flit in and out of the main history. Basically, the primary space thrust of the timeline is…
   Okay, 4, 5, and 6 tell the story. Then 1, 2, and 3 fill in the gaps BEFORE. The concept of BEFORE is important. Jump back around a hundred years before the movie series to the televisual time of THE ACOLYTE. The evil Empire does not yet exist. There are no Sith, and there haven’t been any Sith for a long time, a long time.
   The Jedi preside over the Republic as peacekeepers. Cops. Space Samurai. You get the idea. Oh, and there are no Sith. Did I mention a complete lack of Sith? This is what the Republic believed. Before the Dark Times…before Darth Lucas sold the property.
   But they were all of them deceived. For another ring was made.
   Hang on…wrong saga.
   Everyone was deceived. If the Jedi are Space Samurai, and they are, then the Sith are interplanetary spies. Robbers. Space Ninja. You get the idea.
   I’d never heard of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. On this side of the Atlantic there’s the Health and Safety Executive. HSE is also a virus that’ll fuck you up. It’s nasty.
   Anyway, I think HSE looks like just the right sort of name for a Sith character. Greetings, Darth Hse. And you brought the ruins of the battle-droid, I see. Your little joke. We Sith are known for our humour, after all.
    Insert EVIL CACKLE™ there.
   But THE ACOLYTE went with Osha instead. She’s all about health and safety in the workplace. This isn’t generally true of STAR WARS. The saga is full of high walkways with no safety barriers or railings. It’s a science fiction scandal. I’ve asked fellow delegate Binks to arrange emergency powers in the Senate. That should fix a lot of upward mobility problems.
   So. This television show is STAR WARS way before STAR WARS. That’s been done. There’s a whole prequel trilogy covering old ground, remember. But this goes way back before all that. It’s an even longer time ago in the same galaxy we’ve seen already. Before the before.
   If the Republic is doing well, and it’ll be a Republic for a science fiction lifetime yet, then what are the stakes in a story set in the deeper past? Where’s the risk? Can you point me in the direction of the drama? So many options here. Let’s not go with a limiting choice…oh.
   There’ll be Jedi. And they will investigate criminal stuff. Not the regular crime beat. The tough cases. Crime Scene Investigation: Scum and Villainy. But what are the stakes, though? Where’s the conflict? Will we see any operatic drama in our Space Opera? (There is no conflict.)
   This is a hundred years before STAR WARS. You aren’t going to change history, here. Yes, made-up STAR WARS history, but, y’know, still history. We are going to see the Jedi investigate things. Don’t quite know what.
   And there will be Sith. Except that there aren’t any Sith.
   Shock horror, the Sith were around the whole time. Lurking. Skulking. Sneaking. Gollum wasn’t sneaking! Er…maybe he was, after all. We’ll get to that bit.
   Okay. We know from STAR WARS movies that, near the end of the Republic, Sith haven’t been seen for AGES. True story. From a certain point of view. We have the word of the cone-headed Jedi. So it must be true. I searched for cone-head Jedi to reach video clips confirming this.
   If a STAR WARS character in a STAR WARS movie isn’t named aloud in a STAR WARS movie, any name attached to the character is only listed in the closing credits to plug the merchandise related to that character. A tale of many action figures. That’s an old song. If lucky, the character is named eventually on film, somewhere down the line.
   A world-weary view, you say. I don’t make the merchandising contracts.
   Ki-Adi-Mundi, Mr Cone-head, tells us the Sith have been extinct for a millennium. He does this in a movie. His emphasis on the timespan is irrelevant. There was a time when the Dodo had been extinct for five minutes. Dodo ain’t coming back unless someone pulls some Jurassic Park shit with…actual preserved Dodo shit and questionable midichlorian sperm samples.
   Once the Empire is a thing, the Imperials go around announcing the Jedi are all but extinct. Everyone keeps messing this up when considering absent enemy forces. We haven’t seen any. They are clearly dead. Most sincerely dead, as averred by the coroner. What’s the point?
   The point is this. In STAR WARS history, the Sith are gone. They were hiding. The Sith agents make a surprising return and create an Evil Empire™ out of confusion and chaos. So far, so good...concerning the bad.
   And so…in the before the before part of this history, back a hundred years you go into television land, you have a problem.
   In THE ACOLYTE, way before the Dark Times, before the Empire, you can’t throw Sith into the story that’s set ages before all the upheaval. UNLESS. You show Sith skulking in the shadows, being Space Ninja Bastards. (This gets too literal at the end of the show, when Gollum turns up and does a bit of sneaking.)
   What if the bad guys are discovered? As a writing choice, you must then wipe out all the good guys who discover the bad guys. This is a basic building block of any story you attempt to tell in that manner, just to preserve the (made-up) history.
   Reminder of that history. The Sith were destroyed. Then they turned up and created an Empire of pure EVIL. They used the element of surprise to plan a load of shit, before they were discovered too late to stop huge events already long in motion.
   Setting a story before they arrive on the scene is okay…as long as no one knows they’ve arrived on the scene way before.
   Just do Ninja Missions. Have close calls and dramatic escapes under the distracted eyes of the pesky Space Samurai. Make the show heavy on the viewpoint of the Sith. It’s about the baddies as the main characters. Yes. Do that.
   Setting the story BEFORE the other bit BEFORE, you have one job. If anyone spots a villain wearing a Sith label, no one gets out alive. Job done. Can you make it entertaining, though? Please make it about the characters. Conflict. Drama. Upset. Sacrifice.
   Lights. Camera. Inaction.
   Our story opens in the closing seconds of episode eight. That’s my view. Episode eight is a set-up for another series. That’s all it could be. So I thought. And it was, when it arrived. That’s what I found predictable. Not the only problem. But, yes, that.
   Never make your show into a trailer for the next show. That’s liable to get the first show cancelled, so there is no second show. The main symptom of this diseased error is a primary story clearly in the captivity of the secondary story you haven’t told yet. Nor will you tell it, thanks to the symptom of story weakness spread across your meandering tale.
   Part of the problem is this: I want an hour of STAR WARS TV so you can develop characters I could care about. But the longest episode is listed at 49 minutes. Then we knock off the opening titles, recaps, and apocalyptic levels of end credits…
   Okay. You made it shorter. Go for the unexpected bonus. The erosion of screen-time should give us a slam-bang science fiction serial jam-packed into a half-hour serialised format, right? Think Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Hell, I’d take King of the Rocket Men in a pinch.
   Give me chapters full of Plunging Death, Dangerous Evidence, High Peril, and throw in a Molten Menace or a spot of Ten Seconds to Live for good measure. Republic Pictures would repackage these super-short efforts into longer features. I’d take Republic Pictures over the Republic depicted in this STAR WARS TV story, any day of the week.
   Nothing is going to happen. In the trailer we see a masked figure with a red lightsabre facing a Lone Jedi Dude. So. There’s your Sith and Jedi problem in the trailer…
   If you preserve even a hint of STAR WARS by staying true to previous movies set long after this moment in history, if you hope to save the basic integrity of the overall saga, then as storytellers, as TV writers…
   You do so by silencing those characters who witness the mere existence of the masked figure with the red lightsabre. Rocks fall. Everyone dies.
   STAR WARS never cared too much about continuity, scientific accuracy, or avoiding holes in the plot. But we’re talking about a basic bitch chunk of storytelling here. What do we know about this deep past? Nothing. Surprise us. But to connect it to the movies, you must deal with this Sith problem if you show Sith waving Sith weapons around.
   You could have done a story set in the past all about smugglers. No Jedi. And no Sith. Or maybe hints that some people are Sith. Make it a crime/spy story, in space. Test loyalty. Pull the rug out from under the characters. No blasters! Well, no. Loads of blasters. No lightsabres.
   Crime/spy story in space. No Jedi. As far as we know. But ANDOR, hell that’s been done.
   The Sith aren’t there at all, even if they are there. This is how we roll. Beyond preserving that, what do you have? Little, unless you stray from the usual Jedi tales. The stakes, then, are murky.
   Keep the hidden existence of the Sith hidden. That’s it. And so it goes. Phew, that was a close one. After a hell of a high-wire walk, we did it. Spread over eight episodes. We made it. All the way to the end. Which is more than a lot of the audience did. We made it. One job. Success. Until near the end of episode eight and…
   For fuck’s sake. You had one job. Over eight episodes.
   Ah, the episodes…
   They barely pass half an hour of TV each. In at least one case, we were offered just under half an hour. I checked once. Once was enough.
   So, essentially, we’re looking at what amounts to four episodes that run for an hour each. And even looking at that level of the equivalent of two movies, you still ask where the money went. It didn’t turn up on the TV screen.
   Short episodes. And yet, they drag. There is no unexpected bonus of cramming loads of action into a brief episode. The opporchancity is frittered away. Instead, there’s this faffery about hiding the Sith. And little else, beyond the tinny jangling of well-worn keys.
   Keeping the Sith secret could have worked. Maybe it all worked for you. That’s your business, not mine. I wish you well. If the focus of the show had been with the Sith from the start, and the relentless threat of discovery at every turn…then you’d have had tension.
   We’d be on the side of the Sith as they hide out. Almost uncovered. Maybe uncovered, but they laugh it off or throw down some ruse. Hell, I’d be up for a Sith sacrifice to preserve the secret. Would’ve been something.
   Darth Carbonara was awesome. Using those funky moon boots to walk up the walls of the doomed space station as it fell from orbit, I thought she’d jump to the Jedi ship at the last second.
   But leaping into space and taking her secret lightsabre with her, burning up in the atmosphere, was a legendary sacrifice.
   Cue twenty YouTube videos on how Darth Carbonara survived the freefall using her Sith Skillz, based on the type of lightsabre she wielded and a half-remembered bit of advice on attuning to your surroundings she picked up from the deathbed of her old master.
   Instead, we had this series with no content. If you liked the show, you liked the show. Not my business.
   Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
   Spoiler. It was really sad when Jedi #4 and Jedi #5 died to preserve the integrity of admittedly shaky STAR WARS lore. Maybe they were Jedi #5 and Jedi #6. Let’s not trivialise that. Just as sad, really. Whoever they were.
   #TRULYMISSED.
   #GONEBUTNOTFORGOTTEN.
   #TOTALLYFORGOTTEN.
   #IFNOTICEDATALL.
   #SADFACE.
   #SUPPORTTHECHANNEL.
   #BUYMEACOFFEE.
   #UTINNI!
   Here’s the basic tale. Jedi are being hunted. The trailer tells us so. This is a problem with STAR WARS: dialogue is often indirect. The passive statement tells you the Jedi are being hunted. An active statement comes across as dramatic. Someone is hunting Jedi. Hell, now I am interested in someone hunting these Jedi.
   It turns out there are these two sisters. Identical twins, by the look of them. One grows her hair longer, we’ll say. She has a cult tattoo, as well. Covered by her longer hair. Cults feature heavily in the story.
   I feel remiss in not having mentioned Basil the Space Beaver. He’s a merchandising gimmick.
   Once upon a time, on a planet far away, several years ago, there was a cult. That cult was steeped in the lore of the Dark Side of the Force. This is the magical mystical religious scientific stuff that gives Jedi and Sith access to mad funky space powers.
   Too lazy to pick up that coffee cup from across the room? Use the force and levitate the damned drink to you. Communicate across space using telepathic interplanetary Skype calls. And so on.
   Right now, the story is about someone who wants revenge against a particular group of Jedi over an incident that happened sixteen years before. So, in the flashback scenes I guess we’re 116 years before STAR WARS.
   Yikes.
   We’ll get there. Basically, the Jedi turned up years ago and mishandled a mission to recruit two young girls who were very strong with the Force. One twin sister died. For reasons of drama and action, we learn both sisters survived.
   Cue Darth Vader muttering about a twin sister. On second thought, nah, forget that.
   The “dead” sister went off to train with a Sith Dude. And the living sister went to train with the Jedi. It didn’t work out at Jedi HQ. She left the Jedi to become a member of some kind of galactic repair team. Your spaceship is still under warranty and she, Osha, turns up to fix the broken thing.
   Osha has a cute robot that’s a merchandising opporchancity.
   Someone is going around flat-out murdering Jedi fools. She looks like Osha. Therefore, she is Osha. It isn’t long before the Galactic Cops go after Osha. But there must be a better explanation for this. Surely Osha’s Evil Twin™ is still alive and she’s the killer…
   Come on. That’s too obvious. Osha must be the killer. Take her in for questioning.
   I should introduce a spoiler for The Matrix…
   There’s only one Matrix movie. Thank me later. Second and third spoons need not apply. There sure as fuck isn’t a fourth one. Spoiler alert. In The Matrix, Trinity – actress Carrie-Anne Moss – gets into a bonkers fight right there at the start of the movie. She’s trapped in a room.
   Then she’s off and running. She is up against supervillainous agents: Men in Black™. Dramatic shit. She hurtles herself across the rooftops...only to face what looks like certain death.
   EXCEPT. That’s part of the plot. To understand what The Matrix is you really just have to see it for yourself. Or watch videos online, explaining it, I guess.
   Now. Imagine you want to start THE ACOLYTE on a high. Carrie-Anne Moss gets herself into this Trinity-style fight. It’s Carrie-Anne Moss. With a fucking lightsabre. Well, hell, Jeeves, sign me up to that shit.
   And now imagine the start of The Matrix, but Trinity doesn’t make it out of the room alive. Bummer. That’s what we are treated to. And you can hear the committee it took to make this TV show squealing into their ersatz coffees…
   That means, right from the start, no one is safe.
   NO ONE IS SAFE. They tell us that in the fucking trailer. I know no one is safe. Anyone who catches a glimpse of the Sith must die. Of all the stories to go with, you went with a severely limiting tale.
   You gave us Carrie-Anne Moss for a fight knowingly referencing The Matrix, and she dies? This show cost a fortune. You couldn’t pay her for more than that?! Spoiler alert for THE ACOLYTE.
   There’s a whole thing about flashbacks. We’ll be seeing more of Carrie-Anne Moss later in the show and earlier in the timeline. More flashbacks. Too many flashbacks. In one case the flashback-too-far, what else to call it, serves as an extended recap of previous episodes for people who have the attention-span of no attention-span.
   We view what should be a great set-up. Someone is hunting Jedi. So we’ll bring in a character who follows the trail. The good sister. Osha. Your sister is hunting Jedi. It’s revenge for how you were all treated sixteen years ago on that far-off planet with the pretty tree.
   There’s a planet with a pretty tree.
   We see subtitles telling us the names of these planets. Unless you are on an UNKNOWN WORLD. If it’s an unknown world, how did anyone know to go there, or give it a subtitle? Well, the world was so unknown that they didn’t know it was an unknown world: kinda sorta blundered across it. But the subtitle droid stepped in and plastered letters across the screen.
   The planetary subtitles are never explained. Do they have to be? No. But they are bound to be used in YouTube videos telling you why every dead character in STAR WARS secretly survived to come back as a Jedi/Sith or the Bendy Jesuit from the DUNE movies.

KID VADER: I hate sand.

Osha should be the ideal candidate to lead the team in search of Mae, her twin sister. Or I should say “twin” sister. Maybe I should say “twin sister” instead. What would be better than having Osha leading the charge against evil forces?
   Oh, I don’t know. Maybe skip this storyline and show elements of the Republic going after smugglers and scoundrels and rascals, and the like. Show that there are evil factions operating from the shadows, as a precursor to the Empire that’s on the way. Robot armies. Early clone technology. Space werewolves. Hell, at this point I’d accept FINDING SPACE NEMO.
   STAR WARS is A Disney property. I thought we’d be in for an identity switch along the lines of FREAKY FRIDAY. Instead, another Disney production loomed into view: THE PARENT TRAP.
   Fuck, you’d get more mileage out of TWINS OF EVIL, and that’s a Hammer movie about identical twins. One’s a vampire. The other isn’t. Yes, it’s absolute nonsense.
   But you’d be better spending your cinematic time in the company of Jodie Foster on a Friday, Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills trapping some parents, or the Collinson sisters maybe kinda sorta being evil twins, as you’d expect from their movie’s title…
   The big problem with THE ACOLYTE is the reluctance of the twin characters to get involved. If only at least one of them went off on a damn-fool idealistic crusade…
   Your character can refuse the mission at the start. In the first (fourth) STAR WARS film, Luke Skywalker is interested in the idea of taking action. But when he’s presented the choice, he turns that offer down. Then the plot gets in his way and he’s all fired up for adventure. He goes off to the wars out there in the stars.
   But THE ACOLYTE…gives us identical characters who don’t want to travel the path on offer. Spoiler alert. The good one is tempted to the bad path and the bad one is tempted to the good path.
   You see the obvious identity-switch coming from light years away. It ain’t no spoiler. There’s a whole cast of characters, but I’m trying to keep this blog post down in size. Something below the length of a Space Slug.
   Yes, the Jedi are Space Cops. And they have a Space Cop Cadet along for the ride. She’s all about restoring public order and arresting people and clapping cuffs on wrists and taking names.
   On the way to grandmother’s house in the woods, she glimpses a Sith. We’re going to need a bigger spoiler. I should say something about Obvious Bad Guy. How does that go? Obvious Bad Guy is Obvious. What do you call a Plot Twist that runs in a straight line? You don’t call it a fucking Plot Twist, that’s for sure.
   And I have to reference Admiral Ackbar. This fish guy turns up for the defeat of the Empire at the end of the main saga. When not realising it’s a trap or concentrating all firepower on that Super Star Destroyer, he’s a pretty chill dude. A late arrival to the movies, he’s there at the end and that counts for a lot.
   Except…the saga goes on for a few more movies beyond the end. He’s there once more, out of retirement, I guess, for one last hurrah against a new generation of villains.
   Admiral Ackbar dies so fast that you blink and miss it. His death might as well be off-screen for all the difference this makes. There then follows a tragic announcement that he’s gone.
   Not dead. Gone. To the shops, perhaps, for…whatever intergalactic fish guys go shopping for. A space vape. I dunno. Anyway. To casually dismiss a character in an off-screen death, or near as damn it, is to Admiral Ackbar someone.
  With this in mind, I’ll turn to the Wookiee Jedi. Holy flying fuckballs, there’s a Wookiee Jedi. And the Sith Chippendale is sure to hunt him down. This is going to be fucking awesome.
   Wookiee is hiding out in the woods, in his fucking element, while the villain closes in, all Sithed up with no place to go. The clash is going to be absolutely fucking awesome. You’ll see a Wookiee Jedi go full-on prime-fucking-eval on this Sith Bastard and you…
   You fucking wha?!
   Wha?
   Seriously. Wha the fu?
   Did the story just…Admiral Ackbar the Wookiee fucking Jedi?!
   What’s the point? The point is the point of a lightsabre that slashed the Wookiee while he was sitting in his chair. Outstanding action scene of the decade goes to…well, not to that fight, obviously. Off-screen bullshit.
   There’s a lot of cape-flapping, key-jangling, lightsabre-ism, and the truly awful resurrection/reassembly of lines from better STAR WARS products. Ooh, the character said the thing. Wait, saying the thing in that context is absurd. Don’t worry. Another thing will come along shortly, and someone will say that.
   (No, I am not touching that fucking abysmal ALIEN movie, Crapulous, and its recycled mangled characters and recycled mangled lines. Get away from the franchise, you bitch. I prefer the term artificial sequel, myself.)
   Money? I was stunned to learn the average cost of an episode was almost $29 million dollars. And I struggle to see where the money went on the television screen. The huge event in this show is the arrival of the Jedi chorus line in the woods. Need to talk to that Wookiee.   Oh, too late. Killed off-screen in your chair, watching the Twi’lek formation swimming event on the Galactic Olympics. Farewell, Wookiee Jedi. You will be remembered. Who the fuck am I kidding? His name was…
   Toast.
   Everyone is sad. Then the Sith Dudebroguy turns up. Masked, of course. He looks like a serial killer from a slasher movie. Then he sparks up his red lightsabre and the battle is on.
   He’s there to kill all of the Jedi. Any of these Jedi could remember, from training, that the Sith used to be around back in the day and they had red lightsabres. So the Sith are back in town. Except, in the woods.
   Which means…
   Everyone who fights in the woods must die. They can’t report to Jedi HQ that the Sith are back in town, the Sith are back in town. Shout out to Darth Lynott for the musical reference.
   I don’t want to dwell on the cost of an episode and a bunch of unknown Jedi weaving in and out of the woods…but they’d have achieved the same effect filming in a park at night, waving neon tubes around.
   One by one, and sometimes two by two, the Jedi fall to the Sith. And this works. So keep doing this. Wipe out all those who know. You’ve destroyed any hope of suspense, but, hey, you have one job in telling this story. Everyone who realises the bad guy has a red lightsabre…everyone dies.
   What about Space Cop Cadet Blondie? They wouldn’t dare kill off the blonde…if you believe that, I have a Hitchcock movie to sell you.
   After much faffery, we follow Lone Jedi Dude from the trailer, back on the ship and heading off to fix things. And the writing comes in and smacks the story up the side of its fool head. I hate it when the writing comes in and does that to a tale.
   Sadly, the interplanetary telephone isn’t working. It can’t work. Mustn’t work. If a Jedi survives the slaughter, which he does, then he can’t fly back to HQ or even phone home like Spielberg’s Extra-Plastic-Terrestrial.
   You see how tied to the concept the whole narrative is. No deviation. Can’t avoid it, swerve, stumble over, or dodge. The Jedi Team died a fucking death. Leaving this guy to inevitably go up against the Sith Dude once more…and die in the process...later.
   For a whole bunch of characters set on running away, they spend an awful lot of time stopping in the middle of a chase. It’s a thing. A whole thing. But I never got around to the music…
   Heavy spoiler. Come on, you’ve seen clips on the internet. Is there a place for songs in STAR WARS movies or TV shows? Yes. There are musical numbers. Aliens playing in the cantina band back in episode…four. And Jabba’s Palace hosts a musical number in episode…six.
   Is there a place for musical numbers in AGATHA ALL ALONG…yes. That works. It’s riffing off The Wizard of Oz musical. But the musical bit in this STAR WARS show just reinforced the cult theme. You see, kids, the Jedi and the Sith are all about recruiting powerful youngsters to their respective causes. And that narrative paints all sides as horrible.
   The grand notion of a flawed yet benevolent Republic, with its ancient order of magical guardians, the Jedi, is shot down in flames, painting the Jedi as little more than a step removed from being child-enslavers. Or worse.
   Yep. That’s the heavy hint in the narrative.
   Remember this, if nothing else. No one killed STAR WARS. It is still there, on my shelf, ready to watch whenever I feel like it. Even if Disney takes it off the streaming service for eternity.
   I didn’t make it past the first episode of that Willow TV show. And it is gone. Show needed a sense of urgency. More urgent than the one Disney provided. The original movie shares a lot of midichlorians DNA with STAR WARS.
   Plucky adventurers. Mad characters. Encroaching evil. Not a Darth Vader character, honest, guv. And not an Evil Royal behind it all. Madmartigan isn’t Han Solo and he doesn’t fall in love with the princess who happens to be the daughter of the evil one.
   So that’s okay, then. No, the show wasn’t urgent enough. But to kill it off by removing it from the streaming service. Now I know who really fired that shot at the start of Bambi.
   Spoiler alert for Bambi and Finding Nemo. There will be blood. Anyway, look at that interesting thing over there…
   I don’t want to take this over ten pages, so let’s skip to the very end. Ultimately, why can’t we all just get along? There are Sith to fight, that’s why. We reach a point at which all of the Jedi who go up against the Sith…they are taken care of.
   Yes, they went to live on a nice moisture farm in the country. It’s too far to visit, out there by the Dune Sea. But Uncle Owen, the farmer, writes regularly to say everything is going to be okay. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
   No, I didn’t mention the Jedi woman with the green skin and the laser-whip. Indiana Jones in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. Turns out, she whipped the Sith Dudester when he was young, and left scars on his back. And she puts the whole mystery together like an episode of MURDER SHE WROTE on fucking steroids.
   There’s a heavy reference to shifting the Balance of the Force. We didn’t need that, or the idea that anyone else could be a pupil of mine, before he turned to evil. Sure, strip-mine scripts that are set in the future if it makes your typing sessions easier on the fingers. Understand, though, that I will hunt down the people who taught you how to read and write.
   But the context, mutter-mumble. Here is the green Jedi, who had an evil pupil thought dead. She discovers that her pupil is alive. He has to be Sith. So, remember, you have one job. Every Jedi who learns of the Sith must die, to preserve the fucking story.
   Instead, she lives, and she takes her peculiar problem to the head of the Jedi order…Yoda. We see a glimpse of Yoda here, and more of Yoda in later historical documentaries.
   That’s it, though, right there. Fucked up beyond all recognition. You did what you set out to do. Introduce Sith to Jedi for a lively session at the dance in the old barn. And that would have worked, if you’d killed all the Jedi who were up dancing.
   No. You had to go and do that bit at the end, where the green Jedi goes to reveal all to another green Jedi. And I have few words left, beyond raw expletives, at this point.
   Update. I should’ve said the Wookiee had a fight in a flashback, but the damage was done. He couldn’t die in the flashback. Just in the here and now, in a chair, watching synchronised Twi’leks aim for gold in the Space Olympics.
   Oh, and a character showed up, skulking in a cave. It was Gollum, looking for the One True Ring. But it fell through the TV cracks into another show that caused J.R.R. Tolkien’s rotating body to give off a high-pitched whine that fells birds on the wing to a distance of five miles out.
   THE ACOLYTE bows out disgracefully by plundering a scene from the end of another STAR WARS property, giving us the oddball hope that setting this show up for a sequel automatically killed off any chance of making a sequel.
   As for finding faults in ROGUE ONE, here’s a classic: they had Billie Lourd right there. Should have hired her to dress up as her mother instead of giving us CGI Carrie Fisher. If you haven’t seen ROGUE ONE, that’s a spoiler. I haven’t ruined it for you…merely prepared you for that moment.
   With the right hair, makeup, and costume, Billie Lourd would have served as younger stand-in for her mother long enough to make the scene work. Carrie Fisher looked like Debbie Reynolds and Billie Lourd resembles both of them. Why head down the Uncanny Valley™ of face replacement for so short a scene?
   Luckily, I am not in charge of making STAR WARS. Unluckily, it appears no one is. But that’s okay. No one killed STAR WARS. Right there, on my shelf, any old time I want to watch it. Don’t give in to hate. But, also, you don’t have to like sub-standard fiction.