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.