Star Wars TV shows: The Acolyte and Andor
Jul. 19th, 2024 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterBreaking my recent (ongoing since, uh, mid-April) Star Wars binge down by media, because if I don't then it's going to get wildly out of control and nothing will ever get posted. No spoilers to speak of - I've discussed both plots in general terms but avoided going into detail or revealing any major twists.
The Acolyte
Around a century before the Prequel Trilogy, Mae, a Force-wielding assassin, sets out to get revenge on a group of Jedi who she blames for the death of her mothers and their whole witch coven. By mistake, the Jedi investigators - led by Master Sol, a surviving member of the target group - apprehend her identical twin sister Osha instead, who used to be Sol's Padawan before she dropped out of training and ran off to scrape a living as a meknek. Osha's efforts to prove her innocence quickly snowball into a mission to expose the dark master who's guiding Mae's rampage and uncover the truth about what happened to Mae and Osha's family.
My feelings about this show are all over the place. It has lesbian space witches! A romantically charged dark side corruption arc! A hot evil dude with vulnerable eyes and shaggy dark hair! (It's a bit embarrassing how accurately a haircut can identify who's going to be my fave.) From interviews with the creator (which btw, I'm invested enough to be reading creator interviews, so I guess that says something) it's clear she has a strong artistic vision and a gutsy, subversive message she wants to bring into the Star Wars mythos. It's equally clear the cast all believe passionately in the story they're telling, and there are some incredibly strong performances at play - Master Sol and the Stranger both deserve Iconic Star Wars Character status. (Did you guys know Lee Jung-Jae, of Squid Game fame, learnt English for this role? And did you know Manny Jacinto, that himbo from The Good Place, is actually one of the hottest men alive? My horizons have been broadened!) I have strong fannish feelings about the main ship and have already been writing fic. The amount of potential here is ridiculous.
But the execution is ... also ridiculous, and that truly pains me to say, because I want so badly to be able to love it unreservedly. But it's sloppy. Clumsily written, atrociously paced, full of plot contrivances that don't make sense and promising leads that aren't followed up and details that don't withstand even a cursory sense check. The season is eight episodes of a little over 30 minutes each, and two of those - so, literally a full quarter of the show - are flashback episodes, rehashing the same historical event twice in an attempt at Rashomon that doesn't yield anywhere near enough difference in interpretation to be worth the protracted screentime. Much more could have been accomplished with shorter, more selective flashbacks, like in The Last Jedi. Tonally we were all over the place: one minute it was all Game of Thrones style grimdark carnage (which I have some pretty major issues with, but at least if they'd done it well I could have overlooked it as a matter of taste), the next minute the baddie was getting carried off cartoonishly by giant CGI bugs. One review I read questioned who the target audience was intended to be, and I'm inclined to wonder the same thing: it's too dark to be any fun for kids, too goofy to be Star Wars For Grown-Ups, and plays too fast and loose with lore to please the fandom die-hards. That subversive message I mentioned gets buried almost beyond hope of retrieval under the avalance of 'wait, but' and 'no, actually' and 'hang on, what?' that I couldn't quite suppress even as a biased viewer with a strong preexisting investment in liking this sort of thing.
So look. I'm a Sequels fan, my sister is a Prequels fan, and the two of us have spent the whole season flinging stones via live chat from our respective glass houses. Falling in love with the good bits of a bad story is such a quintessential Star Wars experience that I'm not even mad. I just wish the show had made more of its potential, because I can see the story it could have been and it's so damn good, you guys.
Andor
I grouped this together with my Acolyte thoughts based purely on them both being TV shows, but I'm realising now that it makes for a nicely complementary review, since my reaction to Andor is basically Acolyte's polar opposite: I think it's legitimately brilliant telly, I enjoyed it unreservedly, and I have no real fannish feelings about it at all.
This is the story of Cassian Andor's radicalisation, from a nihilistic thief to a rebel willing to lay down his life for the cause. It unfolds in four meticulously crafted three-episode acts, each one basically a mini-season of its own, interwoven with several other connected but very distinct plotlines. Cassian's friends and family are adapting to life under tightening Imperial control; Senator Mon Mothma is playing dangerous political games while her relationships with her husband and daughter disintegrate; petty, power-mad corporate cop Syril Karn is investigating Cassian for murder, with his own career at stake; intelligence agent Dedra Meero is clawing her way up the ISB career ladder while pursuing her controversial theory that pockets of isolated anti-Imperial activity are coalescing into a unified rebel movement; Luthen Rael is playing God with the lives of countless rebels as he puppeteers that movement from under fragile cover in the heart of the Empire.
It's a stridently political show with a lot to say about the banality of evil, the all-too-human inhumanity of empire, and the necessary ugliness of revolution. There's no lightsaber-twirling escapism on offer here - the whole thing feels devastatingly real and almost too contemporary, but only almost. I thought it struck an impressive balance between speaking to real-world issues and maintaining immersion in its fictional setting. The acting is uniformly excellent. The score is exquisite. The locations feel like you could reach through the screen and touch them. I know I'm a little late to the hype party, but I now appreciate exactly why Andor's reception was as stellar as it was. It's Star Wars for people who don't care about Star Wars and Star Wars for people who are already up to their eyeballs in the canon, and it services both demographics (and everyone in-between) as though reconciling their different demands is as easy as breathing.
So, I guess to wrap up: Andor is phenomenal and I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone, but I've gotten everything I want from the show itself and have no real interest in exploring its subfandom any deeper. The Acolyte is a disaster and I can't honestly say I recommend it at all, but I nonetheless hope everyone watches it because I need more people to scream and snark and squee about it with while swapping messy lapslock tumblr meta and gifs of Manny Jacinto's bare arms.
The Acolyte
Around a century before the Prequel Trilogy, Mae, a Force-wielding assassin, sets out to get revenge on a group of Jedi who she blames for the death of her mothers and their whole witch coven. By mistake, the Jedi investigators - led by Master Sol, a surviving member of the target group - apprehend her identical twin sister Osha instead, who used to be Sol's Padawan before she dropped out of training and ran off to scrape a living as a meknek. Osha's efforts to prove her innocence quickly snowball into a mission to expose the dark master who's guiding Mae's rampage and uncover the truth about what happened to Mae and Osha's family.
My feelings about this show are all over the place. It has lesbian space witches! A romantically charged dark side corruption arc! A hot evil dude with vulnerable eyes and shaggy dark hair! (It's a bit embarrassing how accurately a haircut can identify who's going to be my fave.) From interviews with the creator (which btw, I'm invested enough to be reading creator interviews, so I guess that says something) it's clear she has a strong artistic vision and a gutsy, subversive message she wants to bring into the Star Wars mythos. It's equally clear the cast all believe passionately in the story they're telling, and there are some incredibly strong performances at play - Master Sol and the Stranger both deserve Iconic Star Wars Character status. (Did you guys know Lee Jung-Jae, of Squid Game fame, learnt English for this role? And did you know Manny Jacinto, that himbo from The Good Place, is actually one of the hottest men alive? My horizons have been broadened!) I have strong fannish feelings about the main ship and have already been writing fic. The amount of potential here is ridiculous.
But the execution is ... also ridiculous, and that truly pains me to say, because I want so badly to be able to love it unreservedly. But it's sloppy. Clumsily written, atrociously paced, full of plot contrivances that don't make sense and promising leads that aren't followed up and details that don't withstand even a cursory sense check. The season is eight episodes of a little over 30 minutes each, and two of those - so, literally a full quarter of the show - are flashback episodes, rehashing the same historical event twice in an attempt at Rashomon that doesn't yield anywhere near enough difference in interpretation to be worth the protracted screentime. Much more could have been accomplished with shorter, more selective flashbacks, like in The Last Jedi. Tonally we were all over the place: one minute it was all Game of Thrones style grimdark carnage (which I have some pretty major issues with, but at least if they'd done it well I could have overlooked it as a matter of taste), the next minute the baddie was getting carried off cartoonishly by giant CGI bugs. One review I read questioned who the target audience was intended to be, and I'm inclined to wonder the same thing: it's too dark to be any fun for kids, too goofy to be Star Wars For Grown-Ups, and plays too fast and loose with lore to please the fandom die-hards. That subversive message I mentioned gets buried almost beyond hope of retrieval under the avalance of 'wait, but' and 'no, actually' and 'hang on, what?' that I couldn't quite suppress even as a biased viewer with a strong preexisting investment in liking this sort of thing.
So look. I'm a Sequels fan, my sister is a Prequels fan, and the two of us have spent the whole season flinging stones via live chat from our respective glass houses. Falling in love with the good bits of a bad story is such a quintessential Star Wars experience that I'm not even mad. I just wish the show had made more of its potential, because I can see the story it could have been and it's so damn good, you guys.
Andor
I grouped this together with my Acolyte thoughts based purely on them both being TV shows, but I'm realising now that it makes for a nicely complementary review, since my reaction to Andor is basically Acolyte's polar opposite: I think it's legitimately brilliant telly, I enjoyed it unreservedly, and I have no real fannish feelings about it at all.
This is the story of Cassian Andor's radicalisation, from a nihilistic thief to a rebel willing to lay down his life for the cause. It unfolds in four meticulously crafted three-episode acts, each one basically a mini-season of its own, interwoven with several other connected but very distinct plotlines. Cassian's friends and family are adapting to life under tightening Imperial control; Senator Mon Mothma is playing dangerous political games while her relationships with her husband and daughter disintegrate; petty, power-mad corporate cop Syril Karn is investigating Cassian for murder, with his own career at stake; intelligence agent Dedra Meero is clawing her way up the ISB career ladder while pursuing her controversial theory that pockets of isolated anti-Imperial activity are coalescing into a unified rebel movement; Luthen Rael is playing God with the lives of countless rebels as he puppeteers that movement from under fragile cover in the heart of the Empire.
It's a stridently political show with a lot to say about the banality of evil, the all-too-human inhumanity of empire, and the necessary ugliness of revolution. There's no lightsaber-twirling escapism on offer here - the whole thing feels devastatingly real and almost too contemporary, but only almost. I thought it struck an impressive balance between speaking to real-world issues and maintaining immersion in its fictional setting. The acting is uniformly excellent. The score is exquisite. The locations feel like you could reach through the screen and touch them. I know I'm a little late to the hype party, but I now appreciate exactly why Andor's reception was as stellar as it was. It's Star Wars for people who don't care about Star Wars and Star Wars for people who are already up to their eyeballs in the canon, and it services both demographics (and everyone in-between) as though reconciling their different demands is as easy as breathing.
So, I guess to wrap up: Andor is phenomenal and I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone, but I've gotten everything I want from the show itself and have no real interest in exploring its subfandom any deeper. The Acolyte is a disaster and I can't honestly say I recommend it at all, but I nonetheless hope everyone watches it because I need more people to scream and snark and squee about it with while swapping messy lapslock tumblr meta and gifs of Manny Jacinto's bare arms.
