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.
