It's really uncharitable to try to take the pulse of the Star Wars fandom (re Acolyte) by seeing which lumps of shit float to the top on Twitter's trending bit, but it really did persuade me that I wanted to watch this show. Like, if it's pissing 'people' off that much, surely there's stuff in it for me to enjoy. The 'people' are just a bunch of weird racist incels on Twitter, but their goal is to find something "tangible" on which to base their bollocks: they might just point you in the vague direction of an interesting critique on their hunt for opportunities to be racist incels.
And yet, as of episode 5 it's been so painfully calm. Not controversial. Not much to really get stuck into. Not much that some pseudo-academic video-essayist can use as a springboard into the fascinating political theory behind it. (This isn't a failure though – I'm enjoying it, and crucially it's not over yet, so it would be silly to count it out now.)
Looking closer it turns out the big thinkers™ have achieved a whole new level of emptiness in their, uh, 'critiques', with shit like "flammable rocks", "flammable space", and "wait no how dare they change this character's age". It was always empty and stupid dribble from them, but it was never this empty and stupid (barely detectable distinction I know).
From where I'm sitting it almost looks like the failure of The Acolyte to really "go there" (for some incel-irking 'there') has tripped up the Idiot's Intellectual's Outrage Machine, leaving it just on the wrong side of that delicate line what separates 'righteous' from 'cringe'. Sensible folks, previously living their best life by ignoring this crap, are finding it very low-risk to go in and laugh at the "star wars wiki literally 1984" conspiracy over Ki-Adi-Mundi's age, because it is low-risk, because the conspiracy is painfully obvious bollocks.
So I'm gonna put The Acolyte in the newly-coined "meta-progressive" camp, not for any defensible reason, but just because from my tiny perspective it seems to be doing more to destabilise the Idiot's Intellectual's Outrage Machine than a more progressive text could simply by starving them of worthwhile talking points.
For me, what links Star Trek and Star Wars as franchises is that they share the rare privilege of very large 'established canons' spanning decades and very devoted fanbases committed to their documentations. There's some... funky emergent behaviour there.
The first 🌶️ here is that I think Trek has a far "better" canon than Wars. The Trek canon almost feels like it makes sense if you don't think about it too hard. The Wars canon, on the other hand, retains as its most important event a giant, brutal, galaxy-wide fascism that persisted a whopping 24 years before near-total collapse brought about by the actions of like five people and the power of love. It barely works on a metaphorical level for the purposes of the not-very-good finale of the OT, and I think it's a shit foundation on which to build a larger canon.
Lemma pulled from earlier: Star Trek, probably unintentionally, created a weirdly conservative society in service of ostensibly progressive parables. This had been noticed in the DS9 writers' room as early as 1994 and plenty of stories that followed introspected on the idea, but ultimately (🌶️ number two) I think they failed to properly tackle it, and ended up digging a deeper hole with the Dominion War story. DS9 ended 25 years ago and in that time no one attached to an official project has been able to tell any meaningful stories about Star Trek. Even Lower Decks, a deliberately satirical construction perfectly poised to laugh it up at Trek's canon's expense, won't go there. I'm now mostly burned out with Trek. I'm not enjoying watching or talking about it anymore.
And it really hurts that, across the pond in Wars, there's this thing called The Acolyte. It turned out that the Prequel Trilogy had made the same mistake as Trek and constructed a society that appeared to have its shit together (the Federation and the Republic) but also definitely had a weird unchecked powerful elite (the Admiralty and the Jedi) thing going on. There are a good few fans who argue this construction is intentional – that Lucas wanted the audience to see the Jedi as corrupt or inept or hubristic. I'm not convinced; in truth I think (🌶️ three) the prequels are a giant sprawling mess grown from a fascination Lucas had about dictatorships and where they come from, and the Jedi stuff is just flavour. Anakin's story is handled carefully enough, but everything else succeeds primarily on the strength and quality of the action set pieces, visual effects artists, and score.
Okay side rant: the 'Duel of the Fates' soundtrack that people harp on about to no end is just refitted from a lil brass line in the unused cue 'The Trek' from 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park', which is (🌶️ four) the best Williams soundtrack by a considerable distance. It bums me out that soundtracks like these are forgotten whilst Williams' repetitive and hummable cues get praised so much you get creative voids like Colin Trevorrow naming entire fucking films after them. Then again, the lil borrowed melody, now blown up to biblical scale in 'Duel of the Fates', emblematises the incredible ability of Star Wars to do a lot with so little.
With the suspect nature of the Jedi Order/Temple/Council left on the table, The Acolyte was able to do some meaningful introspection on the Star Wars universe, suggesting that the weird unelected cult people probably weren't always a force for good. In episode three it presented the idea of the Jedi as a disruptive force even if their intentions were noble. In episode seven that was revealed to be a misdirection, and the Jedi were cast as explicitly hubristic and ignorant. In episode eight the actual system of the Order was questioned in a surprisingly blunt manner, in a moment of grand catharsis for my spouse (whose opinion of Jedi is so low they spent the climax of Sith praying that Obi Wan and Yoda and especially the long-deceased Qui-Gon would also burn to death in the fires of Mustafar for not just sending Anakin to fucking therapy).
If I compare The Acolyte to Andor: I think Andor succeeds not because it's a new perspective on Star Wars, but because (🌶️ five) it just ignores Star Wars. It's a story about empire rather than The Empire. It borrows a small handful of nouns and characters, but none of these are integral to its story, and said story would persist unaltered were you to lift and shift it into a different franchise. Andor has a lot to say, but it has nothing to say about Star Wars. The Acolyte, meanwhile, only makes sense in Star Wars; this story is specifically about the cultural status of the Jedi, both inside and outside the Wars universe. It's in conversation with Star Wars in a way Andor doesn't want to be.
I wish Trek had done this first. Trek deserved to do this first. Trek has a mountain of solid fuck to process and the reputation of being the "clever" franchise. The dissembly of Starfleet is long overdue a disassembly and there are so many threads to pull on, like the Prime Directive or First Contact Protocol or Section 31, or (🌶️ six) Mr Janeway's Wild Ride. And yet Star Trek is doing sweet fuck all while Star Wars does genuinely interesting things. The Acolyte has deliberately attacked the old tenet of Jedi excellence, branding the canon with a story of Jedi failure, and every Star Wars story after it will exist in that context, and that's just really cool. That's a fascinating place to be. I'm glad we're here.
Last aside: I'm not gonna say The Acolyte was even that well made. Individual moments made me feel feelings (Jecki's death, whew), but other moments confused me a couple times and every cut-to-credits felt out of place, as it happened just one scene too late every time. But that's fine. I've never thought that the often clumsy, uncreative nature of Trek shows made them less impactful or interesting, and it would be weird to try holding this show to a different standard just because of an avalanche of "bad writing" allegations.
Reply from John Colagioia
Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Every Star Wars trilogy's big moral lesson, essentially, is "toxic masculinity is bad" (the heroes succeed when they tell the Jedi to stuff their no-feelings nonsense, and fail when – as you point out – nobody goes to therapy) but the story is so focused on screaming that everything is just a tipping point from going full-bore Nazi that the former is (or at best seems) completely accidental.
And keeping in that tradition, The Acolyte comes off as extremely inept at telling its story – none of the characters stuck with me, and the Sith still make no sense as a concept – but it really does want to change how this works, instead of every production saying "we know that the Jedi are extremely silly, but they're so toyetic..."
And meanwhile, Paramount keeps alternating between "hey, remember _this_episode?" and "I love this franchise," as if they want to keep pace with making everything an advertisement for the next thing.
To your overall point, I've thought about the right stories to do that, but since it's highly unlikely that Paramount (or whatever they call themselves after the merger/buy-out/whatever) would ever hire me, and since any idea would come out longer than your post, I'll keep my mouth shut except to say that the franchise has plenty of fertile ground where somebody could take an innocuous-looking plot device that everybody has taken for granted, and use a failure to pry the franchise apart.
Actually, that reminds me that, while I don't remember the details, when it looked like Enterprise might survive long enough to shepherd a fifth "second generation" show onto the schedule, a few writers posted their rejected pitches. I always struck me that at least two of them took the TNGidea that warp drive was ripping apart space (and the franchise's utter disinterest in dealing with that) to its logical conclusion and balkanizing the Federation, with the new crew/ship tasked with finding a way to rebuild it. I wondered if Discovery wanted to go there with "The Burn," but much like their "basket of deplorables" Klingons from the first season, they quickly dropped any pretense of that having any political meaning...
Reply from me
My little I-can't-write-but-if-I-could fanfiction would be a redo of TNG's 'First Contact' episode, since the episode actually had some really good stuff in its setup and completely fucked its ending (oh, I see, they're "not ready" for Starfleet yet, yeah).
Just, a version of that where the finger is correctly pointed at Starfleet would be nice. The scientist turned Starfleet evangelist would ideally reject the shitty military instead, maybe.
But it'd be stupid to think I'm the first to want to do that. Surely someone in a Trek writers' room is going to get there, right? Please?
Reply from John Colagioia
That's really good, especially in how underhanded the episode (accidentally, I think?) makes Starfleet look the entire time. "We're sworn to never interfere. Also, we have agents committing espionage and recruiting your most influential thinkers so that you'll like us better, and when we think that you're ready, we'll dribble out technology so that you never become a threat to us" feels like it's missing some philosophical leap...
The recurring thought that I've had is sort of a mini-series where a bunch of violent diplomatic disasters getting traced (by minor ambassadors, since nobody else cares) to manipulation of the universal translator. It's maybe more on-the-nose today, when you actually can use some third party to handle a lot of translation, but there's a huge "who controls this and how do we know that they're not interfering with anything" aspect that appeals to me. Like, everybody makes such a big deal about the inherent aggression of Klingons, and you almost have to wonder if that's because Space-Mark Okrand always picks the most confrontational word for everything...
Reply from me
It would be a damn difficult task trying to nail down what in the hell the universal translator actually is so you can deconstruct it, but I love that idea. Especially how it provides a reason besides "narrative shorthand" for how entire races manage to be surprisingly consistent in their affects and vibes ("Sir, have you ever worked with any Bajoran women?" is a line of O'Brien's that rattles around in my head constantly and the more I think about it the more inappropriate it becomes and it's not like they didn't just out him as a bit racist eventually)
Reply from John Colagioia
Oh, the Bajorans are a great example even more fundamentally! Think about how much grief the two cultures deal with because every Federation citizen absolutely refuses to use the local name for "the wormhole aliens," even after they find out that every Bajoran sees it as extremely condescending. The translator could've smoothed that over, but either couldn't figure out the synonym or insisted that it needed a bad translation.
Actually...I think there's a historical precedent for that. Ah, right, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_names_for_the_God_of_Abrahamic_religions - many Catholic missionaries insisted on coining new Chinese terms instead of piggy-backing on existing traditions.
The more I rewatch TNG, by the way, the less I "get" O'Brien. He has such a down-to-Earth reputation, but when they start looking at his personal life, he's whining about getting exposed to Japanese culture and calling Keiko crazy for having second thoughts about the wedding, then they introduce the "oh, he also hates Cardassians" note...