Spoilers Star Wars: The Acolyte [Spoilers]

[Ruin Explorer]

I fail to see how the Jedi on screen here have ever failed to be competent.

Yeah it's bizarre to call the Jedi incompetent. These Jedi absolutely are competent. The issues are with their behaviour, not with their competence. Sol is a perfect example of this. He manages to track two people to a fortress without being detected, scale the extremely steep, even sheer rockface and side of the fortress, sneak around inside the fortress extensively and listen in on a conversation, and even when they do seem to detect him, he's able to get away without actually spotted or pursued ("Guess it was just the wind").

But the reason he did that was because he's a weird guy, and being a Jedi has clearly not caused him to not be a weird guy.

Jedi are recruited based on their "M-count". Not for intelligence, common sense, or wisdom. Then they are indoctrinated into an out-of-touch ancient religion.

Yeah this is a major issue people keep overlooking.

The only real qualifications the Jedi as a whole have are:

A) Tradition - I mean, they have managed to keep this going for thousands of years without previously being disgraced or wiped out.

B) Magic powerz - Pretty much no-one else is able to reliably come up with wild magical powers that allow the Jedi to deal with situations that would otherwise be extremely hard to handle, and combined with the their lightsabers, make them an insane force-multiplier (in the military sense of force), capable of defeating large armoured vehicles, dozens of blaster-armed enemies, and so on (they also tend to win space battles because of the Force precog effect, so every one of them is potentially an "ace" pilot compared to a normal non-Jedi pilot).

Unfortunately these two factors have come together in a sort of toxic way where the Jedi are indeed getting used for roles they are wholly unsuitable for, at least by the High Republic and Clone Wars eras.

Hell, because of the nature of their religion, they don't even seem to be good at stuff you can usually trust priests of a big organised religion to be good at, like intrigue (whether stopping it or doing it)!

Well if the last episode is like 7 think I'll rate this show around Obi Wan or below if it's especially bad.
If it's really good behind Ahsoka. In the middle Mando S3.

Seems harsh to me. It's already well above Obi Wan and Ahsoka imo, in that it's actually telling an interesting story.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Seems harsh to me. It's already well above Obi Wan and Ahsoka imo, in that it's actually telling an interesting story.

Indeed, I don’t know what is going to happen in the next episode, which is pretty much a first for a Star Wars show or movie.

But I think plenty of people like their TV shows predictable.

 

[MarkB]

Indeed, I don’t know what is going to happen in the next episode, which is pretty much a first for a Star Wars show or movie.

I don't care what's going to happen in the next episode, which is a disappointing place to end up.

But I think plenty of people like their TV shows predictable.

Maybe the last episode will surprise me, but unpredictable is not a term I'd apply to this series. Most of the reveals have been well telegraphed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But I think plenty of people like their TV shows predictable.

Yeah and I think this is especially true with some "established IPs", like some people get incredibly offended if it's not largely predictable and trite. I mean, to be fair with such IPs it is sometimes the case that attempts to be original often veer into stupidity (c.f. Mando S3, Boba Fett), but that's not really an excuse.

CSI/NCIS/Criminal Minds/L&O's continuing success (with slight apologies to L&O for grouping them with stuff that is clearly a "tier below" - two tiers in Criminal Minds' case!) shows that extreme predictability can be an asset for some though.

Maybe the last episode will surprise me, but unpredictable is not a term I'd apply to this series. Most of the reveals have been well telegraphed.

I think there's a pretty huge gap between "predictable" and "unpredictable". A show isn't one or the other in most cases. It's on a spectrum. I would say that, grading on a curve for Star Wars, this show is vastly less predictable in a good way than most SW TV shows. Ahsoka's did have a couple of unpredictable episodes in the first half, but only because they were so extremely stupid and implausible I couldn't have predicted that. Indeed that's kind of a pattern with a lot of Filoni/Favreau "unpredictable" stuff, it's like "That's just dumb and makes no sense, so yes it does surprise me".

There's nothing wrong with telegraphing a reveal either - that doesn't make a show predictable. A truly predictable show wouldn't even want/need to telegraph the reveal, it'd have been instantly guessed. Some of the guesses in this thread show that's not been the case here. Whereas once Ahsoka, for example, was basically half-way through, I could basically have written the entire rest of it. Right down to some of the ultra-trite lines of dialogue.

EDIT - It strikes me that essentially what a lot of complain-y Star Wars fans (very much including those in this thread) actually want is essentially the Star Wars equivalent of Law & Order, where like, some Jedi go around solving crimes and busting bad guys, and occasionally questions get raised about the Republic, and whether justice is really being done, but all the main characters are Just Honest Jedi Doing The Best Job They Can. All procedural. All safe-ish. Maybe a Jedi equivalent of Det. Stabler from SVU gets too angry and has to go meditate for an episode, and Jedi Benson gets too attached and nearly Force-lightnings someone who was mean to a child. That sort of thing.

I mean I'm not saying I wouldn't watch Jedi & Order: Coruscant*.

* = BTW this literally came to me in a dream a couple of weeks back, literally Stabler from SVU was a Jedi busting people and complaining about the Republic a lot. I guess my brain was not trying very hard dream-wise that night, given I'd watched The Acolyte and SVU earlier.

 

[The Soloist]

With shows like NCIS, you grow attached to the characters themselves and the weekly crime takes the back seat. When Gibbs left for Alaska, I stopped watching. His arc story came to a satisfactory conclusion for me.

 

[Rabulias]

Maybe the last episode will surprise me, but unpredictable is not a term I'd apply to this series. Most of the reveals have been well telegraphed.

Aristotle said the resolution of a good drama should be "unexpected but inevitable." I can imagine a number of possible endings, but I am unsure which of them (or, more likely, which combination of elements from them) will be canon after tomorrow's episode.

 

[pukunui]

Yeah and I think this is especially true with some "established IPs", like some people get incredibly offended if it's not largely predictable and trite. I mean, to be fair with such IPs it is sometimes the case that attempts to be original often veer into stupidity (c.f. Mando S3, Boba Fett), but that's not really an excuse.

CSI/NCIS/Criminal Minds/L&O's continuing success (with slight apologies to L&O for grouping them with stuff that is clearly a "tier below" - two tiers in Criminal Minds' case!) shows that extreme predictability can be an asset for some though.


I think there's a pretty huge gap between "predictable" and "unpredictable". A show isn't one or the other in most cases. It's on a spectrum. I would say that, grading on a curve for Star Wars, this show is vastly less predictable in a good way than most SW TV shows. Ahsoka's did have a couple of unpredictable episodes in the first half, but only because they were so extremely stupid and implausible I couldn't have predicted that. Indeed that's kind of a pattern with a lot of Filoni/Favreau "unpredictable" stuff, it's like "That's just dumb and makes no sense, so yes it does surprise me".

There's nothing wrong with telegraphing a reveal either - that doesn't make a show predictable. A truly predictable show wouldn't even want/need to telegraph the reveal, it'd have been instantly guessed. Some of the guesses in this thread show that's not been the case here. Whereas once Ahsoka, for example, was basically half-way through, I could basically have written the entire rest of it. Right down to some of the ultra-trite lines of dialogue.

EDIT - It strikes me that essentially what a lot of complain-y Star Wars fans (very much including those in this thread) actually want is essentially the Star Wars equivalent of Law & Order, where like, some Jedi go around solving crimes and busting bad guys, and occasionally questions get raised about the Republic, and whether justice is really being done, but all the main characters are Just Honest Jedi Doing The Best Job They Can. All procedural. All safe-ish. Maybe a Jedi equivalent of Det. Stabler from SVU gets too angry and has to go meditate for an episode, and Jedi Benson gets too attached and nearly Force-lightnings someone who was mean to a child. That sort of thing.

I mean I'm not saying I wouldn't watch Jedi & Order: Coruscant*.

* = BTW this literally came to me in a dream a couple of weeks back, literally Stabler from SVU was a Jedi busting people and complaining about the Republic a lot. I guess my brain was not trying very hard dream-wise that night, given I'd watched The Acolyte and SVU earlier.

I was thinking earlier that a Jedi detective procedural show could be fun. And yeah, "Honest Jedi Doing the Best Job They Can" is very much something I'd like to see more of. Less emphasis on making the Jedi out to be not just politically corrupt or misguided but just flat out wrong and more on them being classic white hat good guys.

 

[Rabulias]

I was thinking earlier that a Jedi detective procedural show could be fun. And yeah, "Honest Jedi Doing the Best Job They Can" is very much something I'd like to see more of. Less emphasis on making the Jedi out to be not just politically corrupt or misguided but just flat out wrong and more on them being classic white hat good guys.

I think I would like this too. The problem comes in that antagonists need to be pretty much classic black hat for the classic white hat schtick to work, and those types of opponents are not very interesting to watch week in and week out, IMO.

 

[pukunui]

I think I would like this too. The problem comes in that antagonists need to be pretty much classic black hat for the classic white hat schtick to work, and those types of opponents are not very interesting to watch week in and week out, IMO.

I would be happy with it being a movie or a mini-series. It wouldn't need to be a long-running, multi-season perpetual show.

 

[damiller]

So this thread brought me back to an interest in tropes and using them for gaming as I mentioned a couple pages back, but one i forgot till the discussion of "Jedi and Order" starring Lenny Brisco as a tough but lovable master, was that of sitcom.

At one point I was trying to figure out the tropes for a sitcom specifically for Star Wars. I may have to revisit this concept if nothing more than for my own entertainment.