No Star Wars movie or TV show ever really begins at the beginning. For the original 1977 film, George Lucas pretended he was making the middle chapter of a long-running serial, so he didn’t bother to explain concepts like “Jedi knights,” “Clone Wars,” or “the Kessel Run.” Lucas set a precedent for this franchise that many of the writers and directors after him have tried to follow: Just jump straight into the story and go, go, go.
The Acolyte succeeds at about half of that assignment. The Star Wars TV universe’s latest series begins with a crisis already in progress, in tried and true Star Wars fashion. But I wouldn’t exactly describe the pace of this first chapter as urgent.
Episode one is a solid introduction with a couple of standout moments and a sense of time and place that shows promise. But like a broken lightsaber, it lacks crackle. Created by Leslye Headland (a playwright and filmmaker whose best-known previous TV credit was co-creator of Russian Doll ), The Acolyte begins with a murder.
A mysterious masked woman walks into a noodle shop and baits a Jedi master, Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), into a fight that ends with Indara dead. The most likely suspect for the crime is Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a former Jedi in training (or Padawan) who bailed on the program because she couldn’t shake off a personal tragedy. She has since been working as an off-the-books spaceship mechanic.
But even though she’s been living in deep space, Osha gets identified as .
