Star Wars: The Acolyte was cancelled at the worst possible time in history

At the risk of bringing up Woody Allen in any context these days, the old Catskills comedy gag he quotes at the beginning of Annie Hall The applications are endless. The joke is two people complaining about a restaurant that disappointed them: “The food at this place is really terrible… And the portions are so small!”

Allen recontextualizes this as a metaphor for life, a sad, miserable, lonely experience that ends too quickly. For me, the irony inherent in this corny gag—the idea of ​​complaining about not getting enough of something you didn’t like—is tailor-made to describe my experience with Disney Plus’ latest live-action Star Wars series, The Acolyte. Disney recently announced that the show would not be renewed for a second season. I shouldn’t be surprised: the first season was deeply flawed, at times to the point where it was disconcerting. And yet I am infuriated by its cancellation, because the story stopped just as it was finally reaching a point of real potential.

Season 1 of The Acolyte was messy and frustrating. The story centers on two Force-sensitive twins, Mae and Osha, both played as adults by Amandla Stenberg. Raised together in a hidden community on the planet Brendok, Mae and Osha were separated by a childhood event that left each sister believing the other was dead. Osha trained with the Jedi and ended up leaving the order before completing that training. Mae ended up in the hands of a mysterious Sith Master. The first season spends a lot of time obscuring all of this, doling out information in such petty little packages that viewers have to wade through half of the season’s eight episodes before they really get a sense of who our protagonists are or what they want.

The first season’s story is told out of order in an attempt to create mystery and intrigue, but the big revelations about what really happened are so heavily foreshadowed or so confusingly executed that they never manage to add up to effective drama. Three of the main characters in season 1 are only introduced after they’ve been killed, or while they’re being killed. And all the while, the audience is supposed to remain captivated by the mystery of why they’re dying without knowing who they are.

You expect them to stay engaged, as Mae and Osha have almost exactly the same argument over and over again in the episodes, first as children, then as adults, without ever really listening to each other. All their personal progress is saved for the finale, where both women abruptly change their moral codes. Mae accepts a solution to their situation that feels radically foreign to her, and Osha leaves with Mae’s Sith Master to accept his training. There’s a sense, by the end of Season 1, that we’ve finally pierced all the veils that showrunner Leslye Headland and her writers have cast over these characters’ basic history. We finally know what kind of story they’re telling, and they can finally get on with it.

Except now it seems like we’ll never get the real narrative that this season was setting up. In hindsight, Season 1 of The Acolyte presents itself as a confusing story for an angry and angsty RPG protagonist, someone full of credible human contradictions and conflicts who is ready to engage in some exciting drama. The clearest and most engaging part of Season 1 seemed likely to be the focus of Season 2: the back-and-forth relationship between Osha and Darth Plagueis’ still-unknown apprentice (played by Manny Jacinto and operating under the name “Qimir,” though Headland has hinted that his true identity will be revealed in Season 2).

The master-apprentice relationship has given the Star Wars franchise some of its richest and most complex drama, and these two certainly promised much more to come — especially given the conflict between Osha’s old Jedi training and her newfound determination to embrace her own emotions and stop putting the desires of others before her own. And then there was the promise of Darth Plagueis on top of that — not necessarily as a known element of a particular story, but as a potentially demanding third wheel in Osha and Qimir’s already delicate détente.

Above all, there is a feeling that The Acolyte had finally hit its stride. Once the show stopped the throat-clearing and teasing and let its characters move forward instead of endlessly negotiating the past, it felt like it was finally moving into territory we’d never seen in a Star Wars TV series before. Osha was always going to have significant personal ethical and moral struggles during Sith training. She’s been hardened by trauma and betrayal, but she still seems too kind-hearted to accept the teaching that other people don’t matter. Exploring her evolving ethics (and Qimir’s, since his starting point was broad and responsive enough to leave plenty of room for growth) could have been a way to actually build the story around the Sith, instead of just repeating the same Jedi/Sith conflicts over and over again, for example, Star Wars: Visions do.

Granted, this is probably all wishful thinking. Season 1 is full of miscalculations about how much viewers needed to know about the protagonist’s present in order for the past to be worth exploring. This story could have been compelling if it had been told in a different way – find out True Detective: Nightmare Before Christmas for a broadly similar structure that spends an entire season teasing “What really happened to these two women in the past?” while building compelling present-day characters and a fascinating season arc. Instead, Season 1 skimps on seemingly crucial details (like quickly skimming over the deaths of Mae and Osha’s entire clan, leaving viewers to fill in the blanks) while wasting time on much smaller details. It’s certainly possible that Season 2 would have been just as infuriating, clunky, and poorly focused, in entirely different ways.

It’s just irritating to have gotten to this point in the story and then have it end. It feels like we’ve just finished the long prologue to a book, only to be told that the author never really finished the rest of the novel. Or, to go back to that old Catskills joke: the appetizer was pretty sour and half-baked at best. But I still hoped that with all the ingredients finally on the table, there was a satisfying meal on the way. It seems like we’ll never know.