The Acolyte

Leslie and I have managed to watch the first three episodes of the new Star Wars saga The Acolyte. 

It is okay, not great or even really very good. Just okay.

And it currently has the worst fan score ever recorded for the franchise, around 16% approval.

I have read some snarky comments about the arrival of the lesbian witch space aliens from Planet Sappho and how they have offended some people. 

It has apparently delighted others, see How The Acolyte Wove Queerness — and Lesbian Space Witches — Into Star Wars.

I do think the woke nature of this series is a bit heavy handed, more an entreaty to millennials and the age war than overtly offensive in any way. Sort of like the dumb mods in Bobba Fett, have to patronize the youth audience, don't we?

It is just so gratuitous and that appeal to all the aggrieved minority groups who finally get their play and moment in the sun unfortunately comes at the expense of real character development and good story telling.

I am not a big Star Wars guy, I tend to watch these things out of sheer boredom. 

I think the acting has been terrible since the very beginning, before Mark Hamill had a drivers license for his X-34 landspeeder. 

And then it got even worse.

But then a remarkable thing happened and it was called the Mandalorian and we all fell in love with the story of the butch alpha killer and his remarkably soft relationship with the cute little baby Yoda, the target he didn't have the strength to see die.

And then that paled at the issuance of the greatest Star Wars tale of all, Andor, one of the greatest series I have ever seen, part 1984, part Clockwork Orange, a riveting tale, one that didn't rely on space aliens and ray guns but instead developed real characters with breadth and intelligence and a dollop of existential dread.

And once the brilliant Tony Gilroy wrote and developed the Andor series I went hot diggety, he has pulled StarWars up from its stupid bootstraps and made it truly wonderful and we can never go back, they slink back down to the faceless, stupid, meaningless action flick that delivers nothing but lightsabers and cgi and characters, which, color, gender and sexuality aside, deliver absolutely nothing. 

Bravo Disney, you learned nothing.