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'The Acolyte' Canceled: Disney's Star Wars Spinoff Done After One Season
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Well, no surprise there.
After the first two episodes I was willing to give it a chance, especially since they dispensed with the whole "Is she or isn't she the killer?" nonsense almost immediately.
Then everything went to shit in episode 3 and I just stopped watching. Mae's damage vs. the Jedi is that she set a fire that killed everyone? Seriously? How is that the fault of anyone except Mae? To the point where she wants to kill everyone else?
If you had kept watching, then you would have learned that episode didn’t show the full picture and that Osha’s memory of the events had been altered by the Jedi.
Honestly it's kind of infuriating how many people were drawing conclusions after barely watching the show, or the many people that clearly never bothered to watch at all and based their entire opinions exclusively on social media ragebait. And this no doubt also contributed a lot to poor viewer stats.
The show wasn't excellent by any means, it could've been so much better, but I didn't feel like it was that bad as a lot of people made it seem like. And it definitely needs one to watch the entirety of it before drawing any conclusions considering the story and character developments.
Good example was people complaining about the fact that Carrie-Anne Moss's character being killed off within 5 minutes in the first episode, yet they didn't even bother to think about or wait for the fact that she could appear in more episodes through flashbacks. Clearly the show was made around misguiding viewers and infamous "subverting expectations".
It's a shame the show has to end this way, but at least the main story about the twins feels semi-complete. But unfortunately also a lot of open endings still, which are maybe better left like this, or perhaps wrapped up in novels or something.
It's my understanding it was released episodically like broadcast television. It doesn't matter how bad a show is I'll probably binge the whole damn thing if the entire season drops at once, but give me an exit point and one bad episode could be the end.
They want a series to keep viewers around for more than a month, and I think they are trying to replicate the water cooler conversation piece that Game of Thrones was. I remember spending a few minutes each week discussing GoT with coworkers, driving everyone's interest.
That being said, I just really don't like shows where you feel you never know what's going on until they put the pieces together for you in the last episode. I get it's supposed to keep you intrigued and speculating, but mostly I just get angry that show runners substitute mystery for caring about the characters.
The GoT strategy only works if the writing is good. Dialogue and plot quality are vital, specially when you're watching an episode to episode release model. Often times I felt like I was watching a bunch of middle schoolers cosplaying and making up the dialogue and story as they went along on the playground. Nothing of interest was happening, no deep topics were explored, what was said had no literary or poetical interest, it lacked any complex structure and it sometimes didn't have any structure at all, there was nothing to discuss on the hypothetical water cooler talk. Its cancelation is probably going to drive more conversation than any of its episodes ever did.
The problem is that people then base their entire opinion of the show on an incomplete story.
It's fine if people don't like a show and don't want to continue watching it. But people judging an entire show based on only one or a few episodes, or just on social media ragebait, shouldn't be taken seriously. And I feel like exactly the latter has been happening with this one a lot.
Sadly a lot of people are easily convinced by communities circlejerking and dogpiling on this kind of stuff these days.
And the amount of people downvoting and not engaging in the conversation pretty much confirms that 🙄
"Not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Should be thrown with great force." - Bill Miller.
If the narrative is so poorly constructed that it turns away viewers instead of engaging them, that's a problem.
Episode 3 made me feel like I wasted my time watching 1 and 2.
If the show cannot keep their audience engadged and interested. That's the fault of the show, not the audience. You see many stoped watching after just a few episodes. Cause the show had so many flaws that enough is enough.
@PunchingWood
That's about right. It was mediocre. Which is to say, I had fun watching it with my kid. They introduced a solid villain. I hate to see that story dropped.
They introduced a solid villain only at the end.
It would be like Star Wars where you don't see Vader until the trench run.
@jordanlund
I'm talking about Manny Jacinto's character, who was there through the whole season.
I think this is broadly giving them too much credit. Right-wingers wanted to make a big culture war battle about it, so they pissed and moaned so hard about nothing that it influenced more centrist or liberal people into overthinking the show or just bandwagoning and saying its shit. I just assume that anyone complaining about the plot either didn't really watch it with an open mind, or had quite poor media literacy - it was very obvious to me watching it that we had an incomplete picture, I even said as much on Lemmy and got a bunch of downvotes for it lol
I didn’t hear any political commentary about it, and watched it with an open mind that was invested in another Star Wars story, especially after Andor. And I watched it episodically. But, holy fuck. It broke all the force rules built up until this point, and the story didn’t make any sense. The Pitch guy did a great recap of it.
Honestly, I just don’t believe you. Or maybe you just didn’t realise the criticism/commentary you consumed was ideologically motivated.
It didn’t break any “rules” of the force whatsoever, even as far as there are rules. Not that it would even matter if it did, imo. The story made perfect sense. It might not be a story that you liked, and that’s okay - you’re allowed to dislike things. I don’t like cabbage. But it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, or that cabbage is a sign that farmers don’t know what vegetable fans want.
The full picture is worse though. Mae really did set the fire that destroyed the place. Mae also locked everyone inside before that. She didn't directly kill everyone, but they did that themselves by mind controlling one of the Jedi.
No it’s not? The fire is literally almost completely irrelevant. The important thing is that Mae, as a child, witnessed the Jedi break in to their home, murder her mother, and that the Jedi basically are ultimately responsible for all of the trauma she experienced.
That’s what Acolyte is about, not trivial bullshit like fire in space. The only people who give a fuck about that are absolute losers.