Star Wars Needs To Commit To The Acolyte Season 2 Immediately

Season 1 of The Acolyte has been strange. The production values are great, the performances excellent, the action freakin' awesome. But now that the finale has aired, the response is pretty negative across the board because it doesn't really add up. In other words, we don't really know what's actually going on in this series. We watched a bunch of stuff happen, and it was cool to see, but it's impossible to know what any of it means because we don't have enough information.

This article is free of any spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte. But you can read a spoiler-filled discussion of The Acolyte season finale here if you'd like to read more.

In that sense, The Acolyte is a show that requires a second season, or else it'll end up as an utterly pointless and massively expensive streaming paperweight. Whether it "deserves" another season based on ratings or quality is a separate discussion and not really relevant. What's at issue here is Disney's and the Star Wars brand's relationship with its fans--there's no trust there whatsoever, and for good reason. But it is possible to fix it. Disney just desperately needs to demonstrate some follow-through, something it hasn't shown much of within Star Wars or Marvel in recent years.

Look at the company's track record with Star Wars. The Force Awakens was a huge success when it was released, and was really well liked, and Rogue One got similar acclaim a year later--though the box office receipts were less than half what TFA had earned. Then, things got dicey. The Last Jedi proved extremely divisive, and then nobody at all seemed to like Solo, which was an outright bomb at the box office, or The Rise of Skywalker, which garnered the worst review percentage ever for a live-action Star Wars movie on Rotten Tomatoes, and was just the second to earn a Rotten rating after The Phantom Menace.

The live-action Star Wars TVverse took it from there, and it's been terrible as often as its been good. But it also gave us Andor, which may be the single-best piece of live-action Star Wars media ever released (though it'll be a few years before we can truly judge that). It's without a doubt the best part of Disney's Star Wars portfolio, at least. But Andor is an outlier--it's a complete story even before Season 2 arrives, and people like it because it's a well told story, not because they recognize Star Wars stuff in it.

Andor aside, the problem with the Star Wars situation is the same one that Disney is dealing with in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: It's started many new story threads and left them dangling, and has followed up on very few of them, instead chasing its audience's whims in circles whenever it can. The sequel trilogy was at war with itself, with The Last Jedi purposely abandoning and subverting the main threads from The Force Awakens, only for The Rise of Skywalker to turn around and do the same thing back at The Last Jedi. As individual movies they're all fine. But as a unit, they're utter nonsense--a sequence of frantically pivoting toward stuff they think the fans will like, and in the process alienated a huge chunk of the audience.

The TV version of Star Wars hasn't been any better about that--The Mandalorian morphed essentially into a new season of Clone Wars during Season 3, just as Ahsoka was functionally a new season of Rebels. The actual plot of The Mandalorian--Mando protects Baby Yoda from Imperial hunters--is just a side plot now, and it's starting to feel like Bo-Katan from Clone Wars is the real title character on that show. The new storylines have been sacrificed for the sake of continuing these old ones from animated series, because that's what they think the fanbase wants (and it is what some folks want, but there are other audiences here, too).

But the common issue is that the powers-that-be on Star Wars have always prioritized tuning these shows for shallow, in-the-moment enjoyment only, at the expense of depth or substance. Usually that has meant making something that looks slick and is full of familiar Star Wars imagery and otherwise don't make you think at all--that's exactly what The Force Awakens was, after all. But The Force Awakens was the first new Star Wars movie in ten years, creating a level of excitement they could never replicate once they got into yearly releases.

So now, after eight seasons of live-action Star Wars TV in the past five years, we need some depth. Season 1 of The Acolyte has very little, since all of its mysteries remain mysteries and we don't really know anything about what's going on--there are dangling threads all over the place. It was fun to watch, but it's so full of holes that it can't hold any water. That's a situation that Season 2 could fix by filling in the gaps and telling a complete and coherent story. And it would be a huge boost for the whole Star Wars franchise if Disney allowed that to happen.

There's been a serious negative cumulative effect from the franchise's shallow storytelling--it's been creating a lot of ennui, our feelings of goodwill fading with each new season of TV that's just OK and doesn't add anything to our understanding of the series as a whole. If Disney cancels The Acolyte, that trend will continue for another year, and folks will have a harder time coming back for the next one, and Andor will continue to be seen as an exception rather than a sign of hope that the franchise might be heading in the right direction.

Or, they could renew The Acolyte, and continue the story they've started, and take it all the way to its conclusion without overloading the process with arbitrary attempts at fan service. They could do what they did with Season 1 of Andor: Get the hell out of the way and let their creators make a good and entertaining show, while also telling a coherent story.

Right now it's an issue of trust. The fans have none to spare for Disney with the current state of its two biggest franchises. It feels like every time they sense any sort of trouble with any project, they attempt to pivot it in a direction they believe has more mass appeal, with little regard for whether the plot is impacted or completely broken by the changes--each franchise project rarely makes sense even in its own context, and the big picture never works. The more stuff like that that you watch, the harder it becomes to enjoy any of it, even if you don't consciously realize it until after your interest has faded completely and you moved on to other stuff.

I don't have all the answers for how Star Wars can get its crap together--Lucasfilm has some big institutional problems, like all big corporations do, and it takes a lot to get out of these habits. But canceling The Acolyte now will only cause new rifts, because the people who spent the past seven weeks watching and talking about this series will have wasted their time, and there won't ever be much reason for anyone new to check it out, and the fanbase will collectively trust Disney a little bit less.

But renewing The Acolyte and letting the creative minds behind the series finish out the story they began could be a spark. If Season 2 is good and is able to salvage the story, all will be forgiven, and maybe folks would be able to take it as a sign that Disney itself really does care about the quality of its Star Wars products in addition to the money it earns from them. It wouldn't be that dissimilar to, say, the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, a game that released in a blatantly unfinished state. The devs at CD Projekt RED put in the time and money to fix it, then dropped a really great DLC to cap it off, and now that game is seen as an all-time great open-world RPG--but it took years more work than they expected.

There's no reason why The Acolyte couldn't have an arc of its own like that. Showrunner Leslye Headland is well equipped to do it, even. But Disney and Lucasfilm are going to have to be brave.

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