Your Eyes Can Deceive you. Don't Trust Them.

I finished up my rewatch of The Acolyte this morning, and my view of the show has changed significantly since it first aired. Previously, I thought it got off to a rough start and then got unevenly better over time. Though it had a lot of great stuff in it, I thought that overall it didn't rise much higher than "pretty good."

But with the advantage of a second viewing, and especially with my realization of how much better the story would flow with episode three put in correct chronological order, the entire thing seemed far more consistent and well constructed. The first time through, I kept hoping for Sol to be the hero that he wanted to be despite his guilt over mis-handling things on Brendok. I put a lot of blame on Indara for the debacle with the coven, and hoped Sol would redeem his fellows from the mistakes of that mission. Seen in full context, though (spoilers ahead), his centrality to the disaster and his subsequent self-delusion pretty squarely make him the villain of the entire story, and only at the end when he tells Osha, "It's all right," as she's Force-choking him to death, does he truly do the right thing.

Some other realizations along the way:

Torbin even more than Sol refused to face his own culpability. He spent ten years in silent meditation, and yet when Mae finally gets through to him, he still says, "We thought we were doing the right thing." Of all of them, his selfish behavior is what brings calamity down on the mission and the coven, but he hasn't the courage to say, "I" when accepting Mae's absolution, and he hasn't the courage to admit that he really didn't think he was doing the right thing -- he just thought he was going to get to go home.

And despite seeing two different versions of the coven's demise, and revisiting their home 16 years later, we never actually see anyone onscreen check to make sure they're all dead.

I doubt there's any real chance of another season, or even an eventual sequel to tie things up, and in light of how good the series came across this time, I think that's a genuine shame.

He's Here.

Two more episodes into The Acolyte, it's more and more obvious how impaired the story flow was by not putting episode 3 at the start of the series. Not only would it have better informed the following two episodes, but the action would have flowed uninterrupted from episode 2, with Mae and Qimir ending that episode having escaped the Jedi, into episode 3, where they arrive on the next planet to hunt down wookiee Jedi Master Kelnacca. Similarly Sol and Osha transition from the mission to find Mae on Olega to attempting to head her off before she gets to Kelnacca. It would have been a steady ramping up of the pace from the investigation and surveillance on civilized Olega to the expedition into dangerous jungle on Khofar. But with the interruption of the flashback episode, that sense of progression is reined back, and the viewer has to climb out of the past to get back into the mounting action, instead of being pulled directly along with it.

We'd also get to see the transformation of Qimir into the Stranger just a single episode after his introduction, again letting us feel a quick-paced development instead of a start-and-stop one.

I can't help but feel that with episode 3 up front, I would have been far more intrigued, and the show would not have needed episodes 4 and 5 to overcome my skepticism, but instead would have notched itself up in my estimation from good to exceptional with all the powerful action and revelations in these two chapters.

And of course, Manny Jacinto's performance in both episodes is terrific, and it would have been great to see it directly build on episode 2.

Maybe someday they'll find a way to revisit these characters and let him bring the character to full fruition.

The Power of One. The Power of Two ...

So. Last time I kind of dumped on episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte. This morning, I got on the treadmill and watched episode 3, and ... 

Good grief, whose idea was it to put this episode out of sequence? It provides all the emotional context we need to immediately engage with the characters, it's honest with us right up front that the Jedi are in the wrong about a lot of things, it provides all the stakes that previously felt missing about the opening scenes that the show started off with, and it's SO much better-written than the other two episodes.

[Spoilers Below]

If I'd started my rewatch with this episode, I would totally have been able to maintain my naive viewer pretense, because we start outside of the Republic, outside of the Jedi order, with mostly sympathetic characters who just want to do their own thing and an interesting conflict because for one of those characters, her own thing is not aligned with everyone else's. The Jedi show up as interlopers who arrogantly intrude on someone else's property and interrupt a private ceremony, making demands they don't actually have the authority to insist on.

Whereas on my original viewing of the show, I was suspicious of everyone's motives for episodes 1 and 2, and then suspicious of the coven in episode 3 because the two well-established parts of the story so far were how much Sol cared for Osha, and how Osha had clearly made a life for herself after leaving the order, if I'd started with E3 in the first place, it would have been easy to see the appropriateness of the coven's concerns and the wrongness of the Jedi's actions, while also believing in Sol's good intentions.

Instead of having the fire alluded to and the deaths of Osha's family laid out with expository dialogue, in chronological sequence, we get to see the tragedy unfold with a full understanding of what's going on ... and then we're left with some uncertainty over whether the witches were actually all killed, or if maybe they were playing possum using the Force in order to protect themselves from the Jedi returning and shield Osha from a lifetime of uncertainty or regret over whether she'd made the right choice. So we still get a major mystery to ponder as the series unfolds, but we also have all the setup we need to become deeply invested in the characters, and we're left without the false drama of "Wait, is this woman waking up on the spaceship the same woman who just killed that Jedi?" followed by the disorienting revelation that Osha "had" a twin, which is the blindingly obvious explanation for who actually committed the murder.

Anyway, now I'm kicking myself for starting off this chronological rewatch of the whole franchise by stupidly failing to use chronology in approaching the very first series of the effort.

Yord. Put Your Clothes On.

Threads was teeming today with Star Wars fans posting hot takes and Episode rankings and throwing gauntlets over which hated movie was actually genius and which truly deserved the notoriety of worst Star Wars movie ever. I left some replies here and there, some of them actually bringing interesting or at least appreciative responses, but I felt slightly left out because I haven't obsessively watched anything Star Wars in several years.

So I sat down and added up how much Star Wars there is and how long it would take me to go through all of it chronologically, just because I think that would be an interesting exercise -- especially if I can put myself in a mindset of, What if I really was seeing all of this for the first time?

Chronological order, of course, means I had to start with The Acolyte ... which might have been a mistake. I don't say that because it's no good, but because I don't have the familiarity with it needed to pretend I'm unfamiliar with it. That is, having seen it when it came out, and rewatched some of the episodes, my memory of it remains clear enough to notice things I did or didn't notice before. That seemed to put my brain in a comparative mode, evaluating this viewing against my previous experience and stymying my efforts to roleplay a novice viewer.

So how did it go?

Well, for one thing, I just couldn't stand to watch it in color. I tried, for a couple of minutes, but the garishness of the color palette and what I consider the low-budget look of the costuming just overwhelmed me. I discovered the first time through (around episode 3) that putting my computer in grayscale mode made the cinematic composition work much better and look more artistic than watching in color, and knowing that just made it intolerable to keep subjecting myself to the show as shot.

It felt like my eyes breathed a sigh of relief when I set the display to black and white and restarted the show. But I think it also made it even harder to indulge in my pretense of finding things novel.

As for the two episodes I watched tonight ... (spoilers ahead)

I didn't remember wrong that the project starts off really rough. Lee Jung-jae is pretty good as Master Sol, and Manny Jacinto is terrific in every scene. But their characters are both playing roles at this point in the story, causing their dialogue to go oblique at key moments and preventing us from immediately getting a good feel for their true personalities and motives.

And unfortunately, almost every character has some similar block making them less accessible than they ideally ought to be. Mae remains masked through almost the entire opening sequence, putting on airs of being a merciless assassin. Osha then has to overcome the barrier of the audience wrestling whether she and Mae are the same person, or if there's some sort of twin thing going on. Yord gives off a stiff, awkward vibe, but how does one measure the degree to which that vibe reflects the unusual situation of arriving to arrest his former colleague, versus how much is simply him being a stiff, awkward person?

As a result, it's very hard to get attached to anyone, even though almost all the characters have likable aspects to them.

I did manage to feel like my uninitiated viewer's perspective made for a more straightforward judgment of the Jedi order during this High Republic period. They're entrenched in their formalism, mired in politics, and constantly express underlying trust issues that hang between them. It's interesting to observe -- but again keeps one at arm's length from whole-hearted enthusiasm for the story. and I actively dislike Vanestra, the head of the Jedi Council, who embodies the entire order by way of her authority.

A personal issue of mine also distances me from the story at this point: I want to watch stories about people who are both competent and good, and these characters are, so far, occluded in both of those categories. By the midpoint of episode 2, Yord is the only one who defies that, as he's pretty obviously straightforward, dutiful, stuffy, and unimaginative even while coming across as a pleasant enough fellow underneath his cloak of formality.

There's more than enough to keep one going -- mysteries as to what's going on with almost all of the characters wafts of engaging personalities from most as well. But so far those attractions merely tease the possibility of a satisfying storyline rather than delivering one.

I know the show gets considerably better. We'll see whether I can follow through on the immense project of a full rewatch ...

Listen, Big Deal.

Sometime last week, I re-watched Solo as the next film in my reverse-chronological journey through the Star Wars saga. Surprisingly, I didn't find myself with much to say about it. Even more than Rogue One, it's very much its own thing, and felt more distinct from the other films than any that came before it in this current rewatch.

Tonight, though, it did occur to me that when Han Solo tells Finn, "Women always figure out the truth," in The Force Awakens, he was talking at least in part about Qi'ra seeing through his self-image as a scoundrel and telling him he was the Good Guy.

What Is It They've Sent Us?

I've really been slacking on my reverse-order Star Wars rewatch, but I finally got to Rogue One this week, and wow, what a movie! It never ceases to amaze me that there are Star Wars fans who don't like this film.

Watching it in proximity to A New Hope and the subsequent films really shows off the artistry of Rogue One, both visually and as a singularly constructed story that's entirely its own thing (except for what's essentially an epilogue that serves as a bridge to the next movie). We meet a set of six terrific protagonists, learn who they are in brief by the various tastes of tragic history we get for them, and see them each complete a growth arc within the framework of an action-packed, aesthetically gorgeous quest for redemption and purpose. The music and cinematography soar and dance together, the villain is uniquely banal in his petty, empty quest to prove himself, and despite the fact that everyone dies, it manages to be great fun for almost its entire length.

New impressions from this viewing:

Everybody goes on about Darth Vader being so much more dynamic and intense in this movie compared to the OT, especially his presentation in Episode IV, but honestly, the most athletic thing he does is twirl his lightsaber in a circle one-handed to deflect blaster bolts. He Force-pushes a guy to the ceiling, which is no more drastic than tossing around the heavy machinery the throws at Luke in ESB. Aside from that, he's just walking down a hallway. Yes, he kills a fair number of guys in a very compressed time-frame, but really, it's downright mild compared to the things we see him do in Rebels.

The Threepio/Artoo cameo stuck out as a bit more forced to me this time ... while simultaneously making more dramatic sense as a bit of foreshadowing that we'd end the film on the Tantive IV heading right into the opening scene of ANH. It was an odd moment of contradiction to recognize both of those things at once.

Another complaint I've seen is that there's no explanation of how Vader followed Leia's ship to Tatooine from Scarif, and the answer was obvious to me this time around. In ESB, Vader orders his underlings to calculate all possible destinations along the Falcon's last known trajectory when it disappears from the fleet's screens. If he used the same trick after the last scene in Rogue One, one of those destinations would clearly have been Tatooine, and he certainly wouldn't discard that as a mere coincidence. Just as his intuition convinced him the rebels were on Hoth in ESB, it would have told him to head for his own homeworld as soon as he found out it lay along the hyperspace routes accessible from the point Leia's ship went to lightspeed.

The context of The Clone Wars and Rebels series makes Saw Gerrera immensely more compelling in this film. If you watch TCW, then Rebels, then Rogue One, you see his entire journey as a lifelong insurgent fighting the Empire, and you see how diminished his chosen path of extremism has left him.

CGI Leia remains the single worst thing in the film for me, and even as such, I really don't mind her.

Having now gone through 4 of the 5 Disney films bracketing the OT, I can honestly say, the people who think Disney has somehow ruined Star Wars are hopelessly out of touch with the things I value in Star Wars. All taste is subjective, and my opinion is certainly worth no more than theirs. But it's crystal clear to me that those people just like Star Wars for reasons other than the ones that attract me to the SW universe.

On to Solo!

You Were Supposed to Bring Balance to the Force, not Leave it in Darkness!

Taking a break from my series on watching the SW saga backwards ... I wrote this bit as a thread on Twitter and got enough positive response on it that I figured I'd post it here too. The context is the contention by some in fandom that Palpatine's return in The Rise of Skywalker ruins Anakin's fulfillment (in Return of the Jedi) of the Prequel-era prophecy of the Chosen One.

The importance of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT is that the Jedi simultaneously place too much importance on it and don't take it seriously enough. That exactly parallels how a lot of fans treat the prophecy.

The Jedi believe in the prophecy, but instead of saying, "We're going to trust in this prophecy and see where it goes," they say, "The boy is too old," and "He's too dangerous to be trained." Instead of trusting their Chosen One's instincts to be right, they tell him to repress his emotional attachments and ignore his awful premonitions. They train him and tell him he's incredibly important, but they refuse to trust him. And that leads to their downfall. Their fear leads to his anger and hatred, which leads to mass suffering.

It's the same with fans. They seize upon Anakin's importance, but they refuse to have enough faith in that importance to trust the Sequels and look for all the ways the ST provides closure to the prophecy.

The balance needed by the Force was never about defeating a particular bad guy. It was always about undoing the misguided Jedi insistence on repressing certain emotions. As guardians of the Force, the Jedi had decided that they should avoid mistakes at all costs ... even at the cost of shutting themselves off from normal human relationships. Luke's triumph in ROTJ showed that they were wrong about the Dark Side being a path from which one could never return. But his training still focused on fear and anger being emotions one should avoid.

It took the hard lesson of losing Ben Solo and retreating into ineffective solitude for Luke to understand the truth that he conveys to Rey in her final lesson in TROS: Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi. Not avoiding or suppressing it, but facing it and recognizing that through mistakes, we grow -- if we choose to learn from them.

The people who cling to Anakin being the Chosen One as a key message of the PT/OT sequence miss the point entirely, because in our daily lives, we don't have a Chosen One walking around doing stuff. There's no lesson in that aspect of the narrative for us to learn from. But we *can* learn to confront our fears, forgive our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and grow as people by taking in the lessons of those mistakes.

That's what Star Wars is about. That's why it's important.

Not because some fictional Chosen One prophecy was or wasn't completely fulfilled when a hero tossed a villain over a guard-rail.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong and there's somebody out there who has been in that precise circumstance and, thanks to Return of the Jedi, was able to voluntarily disarm themselves so their dad would chuck an evil emperor down a hole.