yeah, that was an issue for me as well. I was just following along becasue she was the only perspective. i was kind of with Sol for a good chunk...but then he just broke my heart with causing the Force Witch slaughter 😭 and i wanted him to have some kind of penitence, but he was still super convinced that he had done the right thing, instead of saying something, "I thought I was doing the right thing" or something like that. I did still like that little Otter tracker guy ❤ But Mae & Osha, they were a big shrug for me, didn't really care about them mostly it was a character behavior sort of thing I think i'm not sure what it was for me exactly that I didn't like or care about them no fault of the actress, but just nothing grabbed me with those two characters
I blame the (probably artificial) time constraints for that. I think if this show had been given 10 or 12 episodes, 40+ minutes each, it would've hit MUCH harder. Leslye Headland was trying to tell a story that was too complicated for the runtime she was granted, thank the suits and bean-counters at Disney for that. The best Disney+ Star Wars show was "Andor". Guess which show was also given the most runtime? It's not a coincidence, good stories need the time to do the story justice. Headland's story wasn't given enough time, whereas Gilroy's was. Imagine trying to squeeze the story of "Andor" into 8 episodes, just ~30 or 40 minutes each- it would've been awful. Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Mando S3, Acolyte, even Kenobi, what do they all have in common? Insufficient screentime to tell the story. edit: More runtime probably wouldn't have helped "Kenobi". The others would've benefited though.
@@andyb1653if the show runner didn't have enough time to tell this story, then write a different story. If you know you only have 8 episodes then tell a story that fits in that time frame. I don't see how we can blame the corporate executives for this one
The biggest problem that I had was that I had no sense of why being a Sith (or whatever) would be something Osha would truly want. She wanted revenge on Sol. She got it. She drew upon her anger and need for vengeance. But I did not get the sense that she wanted to explore her emotions and commit herself to doing that no matter who got hurt. Moreover, I felt like she wanted to be united with her sister, that this was more significant to her than Qimir. But instead we erase her mind, essentially nullifying their relationship. And the happy, inspiring music with "I can't wait to kill people so I can do whatever I want!" REALLY didn't work for me. Just because the Jedi are flawed and hypocritical does make the Sith the good guys. I guess there are a few parallels with Osha selfishly abandoning her sister again (and that Pip's mind wipe foreshadowed Mae's), but I never felt this was adequately expressed by the writer, director, and actor. In the end, the character motivations felt more like moving pieces around a board than something understandable or relatable to the audience.
I'm pretty sure Qimir wanted to kill Mae for betraying him. Osha made a deal for Mae's life. But I still feel like Mae could have gone with them instead of getting her memory wiped, but I guess that was impossible for whatever reason.
JUSTICE FOR PIP. Mae gets a surgical precise mindwipe after factory resetting Pip?! The injustice of it all! Jokes aside, she'll probably get her memories back because they're the same person.
Also I gotta say it is hilarious that Venestra’s plan to AVOID republic oversight was to….. Admit to the discovery of a decades long coverup involving multiple respected Jedi masters of their guilt in the slaughter of a coven so that they could take the children, one of whom then went rogue and murdered his accomplices and then took his own life. Like no sorry um I’m absolutely gonna want to look into that group now lol
The thing is, they *have* the children. For the Jedi, the coven was a mere obstacle. Once they got through it, they managed to get Osha and train her, which led to nothing because she was too old and conflicted. She was not remarkable in any way. At the end of the series they got Mae. Technically they have nothing to look into because the twins are there/have already been there.
In Jedi Fallen Order, Cal Kestis has a kyber crystal that's broken in half which lets him split his lightsaber, I imagine Qimir's lightsaber is similar
Jessie's initial frustration with Sol's "i'll tell you everything" is TRUTH. I could not BELIEVE that they'd opted to fudge it & pretend like he hadn't really said it to extend Sol's personal reveal AGAIN. I was throwing my hands up in despair. It was 40's serial level of the start of the new episode retconning the previous episode's cliffhanger.
I am honestly not surprised that Osha turned. My perception had kind of pulled that Osha was more selfish than you would think, as Mae was more selfless. Osha wanting joining the Jedi doesn't feel like her wanting to be a selfless person, she didn't want to get tied down to her family coven, and a lot of the "bad" things Mae did were because she was coaxed by someone she trusted, or some level of understandable desire for justice. In a way there was a real ying yang element to them.
Exactly! Osha was fine leaving her family behind to join the jedi. And she never once stated any noble intentions for wanting to be a jedi in the first place! Meanwhile, Mae was the more aggressive child, but she only acted out at the thought of loosing her sister.
Mae was more aggressive from the start, in the first scene we saw them with the butterflies. I believe that these witches obeyed to some sort of dark force. Besides, it would have been a good motivation for Sol to protect the sisters from the dark side. But no, "i want a padawan". And now "i love you"? What does this mean? And the sisters changing their minds in seconds...? Makes no sense to me.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 Osha did the same thing to a butterfly, only letting go sooner. All the aggression Mae had was the idea of Osha going to places she shouldn't and that she might leave them.
The series was marketed as a mystery, but it was more like a soap opera where each episode ended on a cliff hanger. It isn't character driven, it is plot driven and the characters react in very strange ways to me. I found myself talking to the screen in every episode, wondering why people made their choices. One second people are trying to kill each other, the next they are friends. I don't feel as if anything was resolved or explained, it is just something that happened but you need to keep watching to understand fully. It felt very unsatisfying. Contrast this series with The Mandolorian where each episode is complete while moving the entire story forward.
i feel like sol does realize he was wrong to kill the mother and feels guilt but his instinct is to continue to manipulate and lie to osha by saying “i did the right thing” butttt yeah its all very vague and unclear so the criticism is fair
I feel like he had a decent amount of guilt last episode but Indara came up with this cover story and explained that it was for the best so he went with it and probably started to buy into that lie. I don't think he would have been able to take on Osha as a pupil if he didn't buy into the lie.
@@XxMusicxKelseyxX oh also now that i think about it when he says “i did the right thing” or “i thought i did the right thing” he may just be referring to shielding Osha from the truth, as in he believes he did the right thing to not tell her what happened
I feel like I'm in the minority for genuinely enjoying the finale and series as a whole. It was fun and that's all I was really asking from it. Looking forward to season 2!
@@gateauxq4604 People expect better from Star Wars than pop trash, because it wasn't pop trash. Pop Trash is what Disney turned it into. Lucas and his team were trend setters, literally inventing new filming techniques and special effect techniques to breathe life into new mythos. Lucas had an idea and a story to tell with the drive and creativity to make it happen. Disney has focus groups, corporate executives, and a 5 billion dollar purchase to justify.
It's implied the vision was ALWAYS Osha, but I think it just needed a little SOMETHING more from Qimir implying he knows that fact, or at least has a hunch that that could be the case, would make him trying to set up the scene that played out a LOT more impactful.
It's possible that Mae did kill Sol like in the vision, but in a more roundabout way. Mae was holding the lightsaber when she got Sol to admit that he killed her and Osha's mother, which is what ultimately convinced Osha to kill him. Mae essentially killed Sol without using the lightsaber, just like in the vision. This also functions as a callback to Mae's final trial, which was to kill a jedi without using a weapon. She couldn't figure out how to do it at first, but this is how. By convincing/manipulating someone else to get them to do it for you.
@@mel-burnes Yeah, I like that the vision is kind of open to interpretation, and comes true in a lot of different ways, even further complicated by the fact that one or more people involved might be lying about what they saw.
i feel like it’s a bigger leap (pun intended) in logic to believe a force user can fly to such an extent, whereas earlier in the show Qimir was more floating down, falling with style, if you will.
Sol doesn't feel hollow to me, he's this knight templar on a mission to help the girls, justifying the destruction he's causing as an unfortunate but necessary side effect. The twins may think they don't want the help but he believes that they're better off. Insisting that everyone who doesn't want him to help just doesn't know better. People like this exist, one of them caused some severe PTSD by trying to cure my ADHD with behaviors that would be classified as abusive in a different context.
This! He is blinded by his own beliefs (in himself being good and righteous) and ambitions (to help, no matter what the other person actually wants or needs).
The witches were shown as aggressive and manipulative from the start. It is still hard for me to think that the Jedi are the bad guys in this series. Well, except Vernestra maybe.
I'm down for a season 2, but Disney needs to give their shows more episodes per season and longer runtimes. This is an ongoing issue with not just the SW shows but also the Marvel ones. If they get more time, the story can breathe.
Hear hear! The 30-minute episodes and 8-episode cap kneecapped the storytelling. I'd be down for a season 2 but I'll bet dollars-to-donuts the review-bombing has made sure that won't happen.
More episodes??? No. Better writing. This lack of detail is by design. We are meant to feel in the dark. They waste time with useless dialogue. They had a whole episode that recycled another episode but from a different angle, and with about 5 minutes of interesting detail but no clear moral distinction. We are meant to feel the Jedi are bad but the writers aren't courageous enough to make that clear. Sol was heroic and in the right.
I really liked how Osha and Mae switched places because at the start of the show they seem SO different like even when they do the "surprise twin!" thing you're like "okay yeah these two were not the same person" but at the end by switching it really shows that either of them could have ended up in either place depending on circumstance
12:43 when Mae and Osha were talking under the tree, since they were a single person, I assumed it was going to end with them fusing back into one person or something due to some weird conditions. 🤷♂
Qimir's saber would have to have two crystals in it. One for the main blade and one for the dagger. It seems like a nod to Cal Kestis' lightsaber from the latest Star Wars game.
For the kyber crystal, that smol lightsaber is a shoto and I remember in Jedi Fallen Order that a kyber cristal might split when you aquire it and the smallest shard can go on a different saber.
Which brings the question (to me as a non-kyber-informed person, at least)... why didn't he pull out the little dagger saber and use that on its own, when Sol chopped the main blade off right below the big beam? Surely a small weapon is better than no weapon at all?
Everything after she bleeds the crystal felt like they had to turn in their paper the next day. The memory wipe thing felt kinda cheap and pointless. I thought maybe they would merge into one person, or reveal plageius was on the planet and there was actually no vergeance. I feel like making a bigger/mystical point about what “balance” in the force via this person split in twain could mean made sense with the whole institutional critique of the Jedi…idk just wanted a little more… Also are they just in a thruple with Plageius now?
I'm very curious to know more about the behind the scenes of this show in particular, because it feels a lot like Secret Invasion in that it feels like there's a great show hidden behind a lot of studio interference and rewrites. Though this show is also plagued with poor performances here and there depending on the director. So it's really just like the prequel trilogy, I guess. And Obi-Wan, which relies heavily on the prequel trilogy for its emotional core for obvious reasons. And despite the clear flaws throughout the show, I wouldn't mind a second season. Based on the online reception of the show and how much of an egotistical coward Bob Iger is, I don't think it'll happen, but I'd like to see what Leslye can do when she has complete control over the show. Then again, Star Wars has been plagued with poor execution of its ideas from the very first film, so maybe it would be more of the same. But I still want to know for sure. Also, yes, Qimir's short saber would have its own kyber crystal. I just assumed he didn't think it would be useful against Sol as a primary means of attack. That, or he was still hoping for Mae or Osha to kill Sol and become his apprentice. Also, this is the second time Sol has absolutely kicked Qimir's ass. Continuing to fight with his short saber would have done nothing but give us an even longer fight. Which I wouldn't have minded, because this series has amazing fights.
I don't believe there was ever anykind of "studio interference", and the way the show is written, feels like there wasn't even any rewrites of anykind; infact it feels like a rough, first draft interms of the script, that actually was in desperate need of re-writing but they just never had the chance. Leslie Headland eludes to this in her interviews she gave. Dave Filoni kinda pandered to her I think, a hard truth Jessie and others may have to accept here is that it seems very much the Creative Director and head of the Lucasfilm Story Group, may have actually been too afraid to reign in Leslie Headland and the very diverse writing team she had working with her on this show. One ofwhich was a Black Woman who Leslie specifically hired purely because she was not even a starwars fan, having no knowledge of the Lore whatsoever, and Leslie wanted atleast one writer who wasn't a fan on her writing team. So if it is true, that Pablo Hidalgo and his story group were just too scared to pull up Leslie on specific things, and make sure her script was solid; instead just pretty much behaving like "yes-people" to Leslie and her team of writers on the Acolyte; that would explain why the writing is so messy. One thing that may have really hurt the show was the fact it got halted for a while, which the reason still isn't clear, but I remember rumors floating around making out the Acolyte is not happening, and scenes being shot at the actual Galaxy's Edge themepark at one point. Then there's the whole thing of that ome woman Exec Producer, who filed a very public lawsuit against Lucasfilm, making out she had not been paid properly for the time she worked on the show; which seems very weird. I suspect something did go down quite messy in the early stages of the Acolyte, that it may not have actually been a Officially, Legit green-lit show when it was first announced. Notice how the Acolyte's title design is the only show that had it changed after a while. The original title design had a lightsaber, slash mark running through it, when it was revealed at the 2020 Disney Investor Day. I speculate Kathleen Kennedy did not go through the proper channels to greenlight this show in the begining, but instead used various internet/social media articles to kind of force Bob Iger's hand, to get the show off the ground; and that's where all the debacle and shaky ground in the early stages comes from. I think it is this, that ultimately affected the show's overall writing and issues with Actors being called back much later on.
@@RaikenXion It they didn't have time to rewrite the scripts, it means the studio wouldn't let them rewrite the scripts because they cared more about meeting a release date. Which means there was studio interference. It's a very different kind of studio interference than in Secret Invasion, but it's still studio interference. Edit: Also, that's a very interesting conspiracy theory towards the end, there. One that doesn't matter, because Bob Iger was the CEO of Disney at the time that this show was greenlit, Bob Chapek was. It was Bob Chapek who was ordering all these Marvel and Star Wars Disney Plus shows left and right (and also anything for Disney Plus, or changing releases to make things Disney Plus originals) because he wanted to give people a reason to start a Disney Plus subscription. Bob Iger couldn't really have done much to stop any of that.
@@DarthTingleBinks Hmm I don't know bout that, Bob Chapek was held hostage (not literally) over the whole "Don't Say Gay Bill". There is definitely something to how exactly this show got off the ground, because I remember seeing a article that talked about a new starwars series that would be all about the Sith, it didn;t have a title at that time, but the article went into how that show would have Lucasfilm's first Non-Binary lead star; this was like a good 2 years ago; so now we know this was definitely the Acolyte. It seems Kathy Kennedy forced Iger's hand here, because if he did not greenlight such a series for D+. she could use media to paint him as a transphobe, which would not be a good look for him. Chapek when he got into power had a system set up where a group of Disney bosses would look at all the shows in the slate, both at Marvel and Lucasfilm, and they would ultimately decide what would potentially be a $$$$ maker, and what would not work overall. This was where he shelved a number of things and green-lit others. It's unknown how far along the Acolyte was at this point. I think "Chapek ordering all the shows" is specifically what Iger wants people, especially the investors to believe, but it was him who was actually committed to ordering tons of shows at both studios, because Iger was the one who established "Disney+" he talked about this as far back as early 2019. Chapek was the one who was careful, and didn't just greenlight everything Iger had ordered down the slate; he was originally known as "Cheapek" when he ran the Parks side of thing at Disney, because he was notoriously known for cutting costs of things; so that really doesn't sound like Chapek at all. I suspect Chapek was the one who originally put a block to allowing this Acolyte series to be made, then when he was get-gone, and Iger returned, Iger went through with allowing the show to go forward, and I think that's where the whole massive delay happened. The cast talk about there being a big halt in filming for some months; then eventually all being called back. I believe that's pretty much what went on bts, and led to the overall hurting of the show's writing overall, and possible change in ideas regarding episodes flow, with how many cooks were allowed in the kitchen in the end; concerning Leslie's writing team.
I thiiiiiiiiiiink Osha misunderstood her force vision and that she saw herself, not Mae, killing Sol while holding a lightsaber she wasn't using. That description is pretty specific and it's what we see happen there. And of course she's only had one force vision before and it was of Mae, so she jumps to conclusions. I really enjoyed this episode (and last week's, and weirdly less so Night and Teach/Corrupt) but I guess it's probably going to fall apart for me at some point. Sol not taking ownership was really the only thing that hit me really wrong. Honestly, this was a tight enough wrap for me on the arcs presented this season that I kinda want the series to end here. Yoda and the creepy crawly Sith in Qimir's basement are questions but I'm not convinced I actually care about the answers to them. Sol is dead and Mae has been "saved". Osha has met Mae's quota, avenged their mother, and gone fully dark side. Venestra is left packing a dozen more skeletons into her closet, and we know they're staying there and nobody's burning down the temple for another 100 years. All the closure is there and it feels like all that another season can do is rearrange the board again. On the Stranger's backup shoto, I've been assuming that like Ahsoka or Maul, he just has two crystals. One of them presumably smaller. So when his main saber is destroyed, I take it that he could draw his smaller one, but already considers himself beaten.
@@mr.b89 Yep, thats Plagueis from Legends art, down to the proboscis monkey nose, in his very first canon appearance. Along with the cameo of the back of Yoda's head, those are supposed to be the hooks for the next season. Vernestra is also going to try to use Mae to track down the Stranger, just as Mae said the Jedi would before her memory wipe. So there's definitely an intended Season 2. For me, the closure of the story told in this season is more satisfying than the remaining hooks for future content are interesting. The only person still alive with conflicts I'm interested in is Osha, and we already know canonically that she does not burn down the Jedi temple, so there's no story I'm interested in there.
There does have to be a separate kyber crystal in The Stanger's detachable tanto style lightsaber. I don't think he stopped fighting because that end of the saber wouldn't function, but because he had no reason to believe he could take Sol with only the tanto, given their relatively even matching for the preceding fight.
I'm fine with memory wipe, when it serves a purpose, but why did they have to leave anyone behind??!?! That was not made clear to me why all 3 of them couldn't escape together. I literally yelled at my TV, "Take her too, why does anyone have to stay?!" Yeah, they flew over in a 2 seater but sisters can't bunch up? Soul's ship can't be stolen by 3 homicidal force users? Pfffffftttttt!!!!! Other than that, the ep was fine.
I didn't buy that Mae and Osha would agree to a permanent separation without a very serious discussion. They had finally found each other, taken care of their traumas, and settled their differences. They had no reason to separate. The "rule of two" was never mentioned, the two-seat ship was never mentioned, and if they were I still think both sisters would have rather stayed behind and faced the Jedi than be forever separated...without even a serious discussion about it. That made no sense to me.
It's because the showrunner and main writer of this show is specifically writing how own Family issues into the story, particularly to do with her young sister, who fell out with her years ago when she came out as gay; and they've never spoken since. She's hoping that sister of hers will have watched this series and maybe reach out to her; It seems that is the only main reason why the showrunner wrote the two twins to ultimately separate at the end.
I have to admit I too am having difficulty with the execution of the series so far. The pacing and plotting have felt very disjointed for me while watching the series. That along with the relatively short episode lengths and small number of episodes have made it hard to become invested in the show. One example, for me, are the characters of Jecki and Yord. We're hardly allowed enough time to meet them properly (and we aren't allowed to meet them in a coherent narrative) before they're killed and I'm hard pressed to genuinely care about the fact that they died. Which is sad, because from the little we saw of her, Jecki was a badass character. And we hardly knew Yord. And while we're talking about him, what happened to his padawan from the first episode? She like completely vanishes and no one mentions her again. Why isn't she on the ship with Sol, Jecki, and Yord when they leave to search for Osha?
It seems like the shorter the seasons, the more jilted the storytelling. I wish there was more time to flesh out & refine the story the show was trying to tell and build the world of that era out. Contrasting with Andor which didn't need to do so much world building thanks to the movies and shows that flank in in that era of star wars so we got more time for storytelling.
I wonder if the reason Disney+ shows like this have relatively short runtimes and episode counts is maybe because Disney thinks that families are watching these shows and they think kids have shorter attention spans. Andor, on top of having an acclaimed writer, was for more mature audiences, so they could get away with having a longer series. If so, that's really insulting toward younger viewers.
Based on interviews and bits of conversations I’ve had with people working on these shows, I think it largely comes down to Disney giving unreasonably small budgets and expecting cinema quality results. And I know they always talk about how high the budgets are but how much money is that really when you are splitting it between about 2.5 movies worth of content?
@@Electiger-y5k Lucasfilm kinda did it to themselves unfortunately by being so transparent with their process it allowed audiences just enough information to become armchair experts when it comes to filmmaking
@@richlynch9068if you can't tell this story with 180 million then you need to tell a different story. Tell a smaller scale story that fits within your near 200 million dollars
I worry that we've subverted expectations of what heroes and villains are so many times in media in recent years that we're no longer able to tell the difference in real life.
That very much seems to be the case, which in of itself goes completely against what George Lucas's vision of *Star Wars* always was meant to be about - "Heroes" *Good* and "Villains" *Bad* and ultimately Good v Evil. The Jedi are most definitely and always have been Flawed, but NEVER the bad guys. Here the showrunner purposefully wrote her whole story to paint the Jedi as the "Villains" while Osha & Qimir end with those two staring out, trying to make them look like they're the victims and overall "Heroes". It's all very weird, but then, this is what happens when you have things in a time where very staples of society get twisted upside down, and there's become a heavy push to make everything now more "morally ambiguous". It is very easy for someone to hide Immoral behaviours and mentalities when the lines have purposefully been blurred so much into a very Gray area.
@@RaikenXionI don't see how the Jedi weren't flawed to outright bad in the prequels, or as represented in the Clone Wars. Anakin came from somewhere, as Jessie pointed out, no? Why should it be inherent that someone being part of the Jedi, an organization with an ideology, is Good?
@@Kye9842 They were not "outright bad" just very misguided and beholden to the Republic, to such a point they lost sight. The Jedi were just incredibly flawed. What leslie headland is doing is making it all morally ambiguous and literally switching the sides. When the Jedi were never the "Villains". She tries hard to paint Qimir in a good light when he very clearly killed those Jedi, especially Jecki stabbing her 3 times then just saying - "was that it's name" showing no *Humanity* whatsoever, yet Headland paints him as sympathetic by the end. That's seriously messed up. You really have to have somekind of sociopathic tendency to write a character like that. You should check out all the interviews of Leslie Headland talking about her inspirations for the Acolyte and especially her own personal issues, as drivers for her writing of this show; it really gives a very big insight into the type of person she truly is.
honestly mae essentially dying, sacrificing herself and being lobotomized to a state where all she remembers is her most traumatic day is uh..... incredibly fucked up. I hope she DOES learn the truth in season 2
Honestly, I'm with Sol on this one - he made a mistake, but with the information he has at the time (Mae telling him they have to be sacrificed, etc.) he reasonably believes he has a split second to stop Anaseya from killing Mae, and Anaseya could have easily prevented it by explaining what she was about to do.
I think this a perfectly reasonable judgement call for an average person to make, but it is very uncharacteristic of Jedi. In the "Phantom Menace", Qui-Gon Jinn is just fine leaving Anakin's mother in slavery and the way he got Anakin out was extremely subtle. Sol basically acted like a Sith, he came in took what he wanted and destroyed everything else.
@@yevgeniygrechka6431 There's not really time for subtlety at that point though, thanks to Torbin (who, while also making a mistake, *was* also just mind controlled - basically everyone's mistakes in both sides are reasonable and understandable, which I take to be the point. Well, except for Koril's). He's not perfect, only a flawed sentient, but the Jedi would be the first to tell you this. It's others who hold them to a standard of perfection demonize them for falling short, and given the nature of the force, the order and Jedi philosophy are really the only option, and far better than any of the alternatives. As for Qui-Gon - he also doesn't have any good options for Shmi. The Jedi are very much down to free slaves by force - they smashed the Zygerrian slave empire and carried out the largest emancipation in galactic history - but they're in Hutt space, not the republic, and they can't take her covertly because slaves in Tatooine have explosive implants for that very reason. They *do* go back (obviously not qui-gon himself because he's dead - but I absolutely think he would have) to free her later, only to find she's already been freed - and disappeared, because she'd joined the underground White Sun liberation movement.
I enjoyed it. The glimpse of Yoda and Plagus was the right amount of fan sevice instead of giving us a ten minute scene with force thene swell and meme reference. The jedi pinning it on a fall guy because yeah these guys are the republics CIA worked for me too.
It's such a weird little thing but I was confused by was why the little tracker sabotaged the guns. Were we supposed to think Sol was trying to kill Mae? And why wouldn't the tracker have gone along with that? And then I think maybe what we were supposed to take from Sol's little speech towards the end was that he was actually seeking power, and Osha was like a consolation prize? With Darth Plagueis, I guess this is explaining how he learned to create life from the vergence thingy? I mean I'm happy if they bring him back into canon. But yeah, this show just drips with unrealized potential....
@@joegroves2517 Between the Droid slaves, the Biological Slaves, and the second rate status of less conformal humanoids, The Star Wars universe has a lot of issues on the table it just ignores for idiot force bullshit stories.
Another youtuber brought up the thought, that Basil might have been an agent for Vernestra. They could have showed us one or two video calls, where she tells him to make sure they all meet on Brendok, because she hopes to find her former padawan there and can finally get rid of him.
“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and make them their own. It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens or Tolkien. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and improve on it. The book is the book, the film is the film, they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
I liked the very first scene where Osha nearly mind-controlled Quimir by accident and then it cut to Sol and Mae and the contrivance of interrupting Sol explaining things so they could have an action sequence chase and my good vibes died. Then the rest of the ep was mostly perfunctory to get to the end states the writing team wanted to in the very short amount of time Disney gave them to do it in. The crit I’ve seen that best describes the show is that it feels like a first draft and hasn’t had any other passes done on it to actually bring out the ideas and iron out clunkiness. I will give them one thing the end status is reasonably more interesting than I assumed they’d be able to get to. Hopefully, if it gets renewed they can hire more experienced writers and get more run time to actually make it work
It feels a lot like Obi-Wan Kenobi for me. It's a good story at its core and has some spectacular moments, but the connective tissue between those moments is lacking. It was pretty clear a couple of weeks ago that the twins were going to end up swapped around by the end and while it didn't happen exactly like I expected, it still happened. I enjoyed it more than Ashoka or Mandalorian, but that is sadly a low bar to cross.
I agree on a few fronts, but I think I found this the least enjoyable of the live action Star Wars shows, and an even worse season finale than Ahsoka's.
@@lorcannagle Again, I disagree, but to each their own. Not that I think Filoni's a perfect genius, I did think Ahsoka's finale was bad (found it the worst of the live action Star Wars *until* this one), and The Mandalorian's continued to slide away from what I was interested in (I wanted that Lone Wolf & Cub/western-style bounty hunter in space show we were teased early on).
I agree about the comparison to the other live action shows. I haven’t been able to finish obi-wan or madalorine, I was bored. I wasn’t with this but this is the kind of thing I enjoyed about the prequel novels and the old republic books.
The first thing I immediately thought of when I saw how Osha altered the kyber crystal was to the Obsidian console game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. This crystal is known as the "Meetra Surik" crystal, whose name was forgotten to history and merely referenced as 'The Exile'. A naturally-formed kyber crystal that forged a bond with the Jedi wielder, resonating with the choices and connection to the Force.
I like where the Osha/Mae story goes, the themes are good, but I think the emotional resonance could have hit better. Part of that I think is the lack of chemistry between Osha and Mae. The fact the same person plays both is understandable at the story level and on a technical level it's well exceucted in that there's no scenes where both characters being present makes anything look janky, it's just that not having 2 people playing the sisters means there's not an opportunity for a relationship to form. Having a real other person to bounce off of makes that kind of dynamic function better no matter how good at acting one is.
Ignoring everything else, Leslye Headland straight up saying they weren't holding anything back for Season 2 while literally spending most of this episode teasing multiple characters and reveals and holding nearly EVERYTHING back for Season 2 is infuriating.
@@flyingsquirrels83 They just straight up dropped multiple cameos and Qmir's previous mentor so casually like that's how you end a chapter of a story. The fight scenes/Episode 5 were the only real standouts. This easily could have been half the runtime and would have been much better for it.
Kyber-questions answers: Yes, Qimir‘s short lightsaber/lightdagger (it’s called a Shoto) has its own kyber crystal. Maul‘s double-bladed saber also has two separate crystals, being basically two sabers welded together. You can actually see that in the CW siege of Mandalore: Maul‘s saber in that story actually has two completely different hilt designs stuck together, since he lost half of his original saber back in Episode 1
I thought double-bladed lightsabers could be single crystal based, just the way they were built would allow the beam to go out both sides. Qimir's would have to be double crystal, though.
@@Tuaron Those existed in legends, but so far all double-bladed sabers we’ve seen use two separate crystals for each blade (just as legends had many different types of crystals, while canon moved back to Lucas‘ version of specifically Kyber). Fallen Order is the best example for seeing a double-bladed saber being constructed
@@CULater000 Fair enough. I'm reasonably versed in Star Wars lore, but a decent amount is also obtained secondhand and I can't always remember if the info I'm remember is Legends or current canon (except Chewie's death in the books, I know that's Legends because it's legendary). I've watched all the shows and played several of the games (not the latest Cal Kestis one, I do mean to get to it, though), but haven't really read the comics or books.
Leslye Headland said that this was the most personal story she's ever told and I'm wondering if she's equating Osha being with the Jedi to her time working at Miramax which would explain the drastic turn on Sol.
As a new person trying to dip my toes into the starwars universe, i thought it was a nice starter/introduction for me. Ive only ever seen the one where anakin becomes darth vader, rogue one, and solo.(for donald glover) and i liked them and kept wantin to go back & see the others to get a fuller scope. Then i saw force awakens and it turned me off for a bit lol then i saw this and now im back on the train to being fan. As for Sol, i felt he felt guilty for killing their mom but didnt have the heart to say it out loud. Thats why he was struggling the entire seasons w the "twins". But i also see your point cause i also thought the flashback episode was him explaining so when they did the whole scene where he gets shocked i was pretty thrown myself, but like you said i feel that was a weird narrative decision but not necessarily a character one? Because he was going to tell her until she shocked him, granted not sure how much help telling her that wouldve been. And i wouldve liked a little clearer apology around that besides a choked up "yes" & " it was an accident" there were a lot of accidents that day. Shit that moment everyone couldve accepted responsibilities for their parts in the fallout of things on that night. But emotions run high w this group. All in all i liked this show, it had its flaws but it kept me in for the most part. (The cast for me was a personal plus big fan of lots of those folks). It was a good example of a handful of broken souls who are lost within a chaotic period, like truly gave me arcane vibes in the back story of jinx and vi kind of thing, on a different scale of course but because of the similarity i could chew on it. Especially w Amandla's performance they were phenomenal to me. Lee Jung-jae as Sol for me also worked but again could be me riding the high of being happy to see him since its felt so long since squid game. But i digress, i hope we get a season 2 and they tighten up on many of the things you touched on, as well as leaving room for other parts to grow and breathe. I do see the ouroboros effect that star wars has knowing this is a prequel i think like you said w the senator the lil allusion to anakin and the cyclical nature of this padawan to pissed sith pipeline because of people like Vernestra. And i know you wanted her to be a lil more Ambiguous, i think i would like that for season 2 when she has mae under her control cause i want to see that trickery at play, season 1 wasnt focused on her so i think thats why it was necessary to see her shadiness from the beginning. And for me it was not necessarily a relief but it felt good to be right about her by the end of the season and helped me gain a better understanding of the different "factions" if you will of jedi. And as much as Sol was truly wanting to help i think theres something to be said that he maybe was more like Qimir than i expected. I mean he seemingly wanted the twins for the same reason, like as much as he was curious bout the whole vergence thing, it seemed like he wanted a padawan and wasnt allowed one for whatever reason, probably him having too strong emotions and letting those emotions guide him rather than the knowledge he learned or something. Im rambling and the train has now left the station. TL;DR; i agree w a lot but im less harsh cause im really new to all this star wars stuff but i fux w it! And im here for it and will take any advice on how i should tackle watching the other films or anything at all. If anyone is still reading this have an fanfuckingtastic day & i love yo faces. 🫶🏾
Before Disney, each lightsabre blade needed at least one crystal (some had two or three crystals to produce different effects, like Corran Horn's dual-phase lightsabre being able to switch from a 4ft silver blade to a 10ft purple blade when he turned a dial) . No idea how they're explaining it now though
I have to agree with you about liking the story that the show wants to tell. Unfortunately it’s flawed in how it goes about telling it. I’m pretty sure that Qimir’s mini lightsaber requires a separate crystal.
I read somewhere that Leslie Headland said the reason why she wrote the main characters Osha & Mae the way she did was to do with her estrangement to her own sister, that they still don't speak. So I'm thinking maybe that was the main reason why Headland had the two get split up, cause Headland did say how she hopes her sister will see this show.
Wow, this finale left such a sour feeling in my mouth, and I was already starting to brace for it as I went to watch it. A lot of issues I'd been having with this show had left me going "well, they might be able to wrap it up decently" but I'd been starting to fear they'd try to extend this to another season because there didn't seem to be "enough meat on the bone", so to speak. They've only very shallowly addressed various ideas but that seems to be the deepest they wanted to go, and stretching it out further just feels not just unnecessary but a bad idea, so when I saw "season finale" on Disney+, I was concerned (though I did go "maybe that's just what they will say no matter what") - realizing the show didn't really wrap much up and seemed more interested in setting up a second season was beyond disappointing. Totally agree that this episode made the previous one worse by tearing down the suggestion Sol was telling Mae what happened from his perspective. Had this series been attempting a "Rashomon"-style look at the past, it bungled that by not quite telling those flashbacks from a single perspective (the first flashback episode having scenes involving the two mothers that Osha wasn't privy to, the latter seemingly splitting between Sol and Mae's) and the fact it still seems designed to withhold details for further mysteries is simply frustrating. Likewise, the Osha/Qimir (is that really his name?) interactions really fizzled out in this episode, even despite failing to reach expectations in their prior episode (6, I guess?), and the inclusion of the "dark side creature/possible Darth Plagueis" was the point where I realized this was not going to be a satisfying finale for me, and would whiff the sense of closure I'd been hoping for even worse than the Ahsoka finale. I'd been hoping for a miniseries and this definitely went "nope, this is gonna be a multi-season show that avoids really getting deeper into any of the interesting ideas". Oh, and it was way too obvious that the vision Osha had was going to be herself, not Mae. Okay, getting too negative, so let's skip to a positive bit: I generally liked the fight scene between Sol and Qimir(?), particularly some of the wuxia-style wire work near the beginning (I'd been hoping for that), but also because Sol's style is so interesting. Pretty sure Qimir(?) has a double crystal situation, basically two lightsabers that can lock in, which is cool enough. Back to negatives: the space chase was both cool and oddly pointless with some really weird beats that made no sense to me. First off, a recurring problem set up in the leadup: Mae seems to treat Pip exactly like Osha did previously despite having acted like it was just an annoying tool in her prior episode (wiping its memory with absolutely no hesitation), and it seems to act exactly as it did for Osha, which is...certainly a choice, one which I dislike and definitely foreshadowed that they were going to try to flip the girls' positions by the end of the episode (compared to the start of the series). Again, the space chase had weird moments, like Sol almost seeming to want to kill Mae and Bazil deciding to help her for some silly reason, both drastic shifts in the way the characters had been written (and you can't argue perspective change - both were shown acting in certain ways contrary to this *when they were alone*, but even when they were with *either twin*), and that was just the start of Sol seemingly acting quite contrary to his previous portrayal. The Vernestra stuff continued to underwhelm until the end, and the introduction of a David Harewood character this late in the game was the moment I knew for absolute certainty that this would be setting up another season, as it laid out a new thread (only hinted at earlier) that could not be wrapped up by the end of the episode. Vernestra had been a wasted element throughout the season, serving a decent enough purpose of "person who gives the mission" at the beginning, then showing up unnecessarily for the rest until the end when they arrive after everything happened (that bit actually worked for me, same with her talk with Mae and to the Council, the burning of Sol's body, etc., that was the only time Vernestra really *clicked* in this series and it feels like she would've been better used if the middle parts were excised). The death of Sol wasn't staged or shot as well as I'd've liked (I felt too little of the tension, Osha's actions didn't seem to correlate with the level of harm she was inflicting, etc.) and he'd already felt like he was being heavily rewritten from the previous episodes that I didn't care as much. The Sol we'd been given in prior episodes would've stated something as simple as "I'm sorry I killed your mother, I thought I needed to in order to save you" or some similar thing, even if it doesn't actually justify or made his actions acceptable, it'd acknowledge that what happened was wrong. And his obsession about "vergence" (an idea really only introduced the previous episode, despite a hint at it in the first flashback) seemed incredibly sudden, seemingly reversing what had previously been set up as an obsession with a connection with Osha and his want to keep her safe - now, he just wanted the twins because there was a mystery thing they were related to and they proved it, etc. Felt too much like a sudden character assassination in order to justify the "twist" of his death. Speaking of: yeah, that twist was way too obvious but also flopped for me. The twins especially had been set up as such cyphers over this series, especially as time went on and their character seemed less and less defined than they seemed to be early on, so the "switch" we get by the end of the episode had less impact, it felt less like they'd turned and more like...I don't know, like we never really knew who either of those characters were. The Mae mindwipe was such a weird deus ex machina that seems to serve no real purpose (if anything, wiping her mind would make her more willing to help find Osha, even if she couldn't immediately go "oh yeah, they're probably here"), it just seemed to be there to set up next season, where they're in the opposite position from the start of this season. My biggest feeling at the end of all this: I cannot believe that the woman behind Russian Doll made this show, it seems to lack that understanding of and focus on character that the other series had. Maybe that should be attributed to Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler instead, or maybe it's just the rest of the people Leslye Headland brought on to make this show, or maybe it was studio interference, I don't know - either way, the use of Headland's name (and Russian Doll because of that) suggested it was going to give us something else and it did not fulfill that. Will I watch the next season? I don't know, maybe, but I'm certainly not looking forward to it, especially as they took the characters who worked best off the board and messed up most of the others. Oh, and the Yoda cameo was cheap, bad fan service. I'm not sure if I'm happy it wasn't a full scene with him or if that made it worse.
Sol doesn't apologize because he doesn't think he did anything wrong. The Jedi take children from their parents, and they don't see the problem with that. And while they say that they don't take children past a certain age because they begin to form attachments, that's can't be true. We create attachments as soon as we're born, but what takes longer to develop are feelings. At a certain point we learn what love is, what anger, envy, jealousy, and everything else. By taking kids before they mature enough to grasp that, they can then train them and mold them to "operate" without those feelings. And that's almost certainly what blinds them to the aloure and presence of the dark side. Sol was too preoccupied with his quest for a Padawan that he was blinded to the signs (and advises) that showed how reckless he was acting. Even before dying, his regret in not saving Mae wasn't for her life, but so that he could show the other Jedi that what he'd done had been justified.
@@shraka agree, but if you hear his comments on the last episode, it really looks like he regrets not saving Mae because if he presented both twins to the council it would validate his actions and prove that Force vergence thing they were hunting for.
The scene with the Senator reminded me of something I read in "Caliban and the Witch" - during the Protestant Reformation, a lot of people were outraged about corruption in the Church and the horrors of the Inquisition. There was a liberatory aspect to that, but it was also co-opted by bourgeios Protestants who took the church's power for themselves in the name of "reform." So yeah, no love for politicians, but they're often right about their rivals ;)
I think sol should have said that even though he killed her mom that it was in self defense , she turned into smoke and he feared for his Life , then osha might of forgiven him . Just like SOL and torbin had to live wit guilt over the witches death , now osha wil have to live wit guilt over killing sol who was basically like a father to her for a decade .
I don't think he was like a father to her. Osha's depicted as not even being too attached to her own mother and twin. Sol speaks of a connection to her, but it seems mostly one sided. Osha never expressed too much appreciation or affection towards him.
This show has been such a disappointment. We still don't know anything about the witches and what their own deal was. We don't know anything about the ritual they did with Mae. What's the deal with Mae's tattoo? And whatever happened to the power of two? Aren't Osha and Mae supposed to be much stronger together? Doesn't Qimir want to use that power? The relationships are pretty poorly developed too. Sol and Osha are supposed to have this deep connection but we barely see any of it. Sol wanting an apprentice in the flashback was just casually brought up and not developed. They don't show any of the master apprentice relationship between Sol and Osha. They don't even take much time to show what Sol thinks about Osha failing to become a Jedi. And Osha finally killing Sol is supposed to be this big moment but it's so poorly developed. They put so much Lee Jung-jae's acting and he is great but the writing completely fails him.
I will say that I didn't thnk Qimir wants to use their "power of two" - far as I could tell (maybe it's because I'm way too versed in Star Wars lore), he was referencing the Sith "Rule of Two", that there is always a Master and Apprentice, etc.
I think a big problem with this show is I wanted to see more, but it just couldn't deliver on the ideas it brought up. Maybe it could have been a good show with better direction and writing.
With regard to the "cameo" I felt from the beginning that the high republic should have been set far enough back from what we've already seen that none of the original characters from the eugh, "Skywalker Saga" would be present.
Agreed. Yoda is even called "master" in that little glimpse we get of him. I suspect he'll be pretty young, but we don't get to see KID Yoda unless he earned the title younger than most do.
I think that it feels very much like a shakey season one of a show with potential. I'd like for it to recieve a season 2 so that it has a chance to develop. I'm not sure in the current climate of shows needing to be perfect (or at least create a lot of buzz) strait out of the gate, that it will get one.
The senator's speech was good, but it felt completely out of place. Like this is something you deliver in episode 3 of a show that's about the political goings-on between the Jedi and Senate, not here. Especially with the finale, instead of trying to tell a simple story a good chunk of the show felt like it's cobbled together from setups to different spin-offs.
@@shraka I'm sort of familiar with Mundi. The lightsaber stuff you kind of assume at a default. 🤷♂️ Yoda was an aspect more familiar to me that gave me a stronger sense of excitement and familiarity that I was looking for at that point in the show. This probably wasn't an experience for everyone and was probably just mine.🤷♂️
You do see one damaged crystal when Qimir's larger lightsaber is destroyed, but I think he should still have the dagger separately since that would require two crystals, yeah.
The show kinda smells like first draft syndrome to me... There are some really good ideas, there are a lot of really interesting directions, some genuinely good creative decisions... it also feels like a lot of them were put into the series the very moment they were thought up, and then shot the next day. Constant setups, constant teasers, and then they don't really land the payoff. Sol has a dark secret that makes him guilty and is keeping from Osha and Mae... turns out it was something we kinda already knew about, and the bit we didn't doesn't really have an impact. Osha sees Mae killing without a weapon, but the future isn't set! Turns out it was just Osha doing it, not Mae, otherwise it was exactly as described The senate will hold a hearing and Venestra will have to face the consequences of the Jedi's unchecked power... turns out no she won't, she lies about what happened, and it resolves in one shot. All of those have deeper consequences and implications down the line but it does feel like another pass at the script could've helped make things more coherent
I didn't interpert Quimir as teleporting away from Osha, I saw it as him beforehand placing some kind of force mind trick on Osha to make her think he was still with her (rembember that Osha can't really block force powers) when he had already left for the other entrance before, and then he just breaks the illusion in that scene while he was long gone from there already
I think Sol's "big relevation" that Osha and Mae are the same person is a bit silly. In fact I'm much more inclined to believe Mae when she says she is her own person. Sure, they may be more deeply connected than most twins, but telling them they're the same actual person seems philosophically dubious and even disrespectful. I don't think they're the same person any more than the two Rikers.
The entire series from the very beginning showed they were distinctly different persons, if "person" is to make any sense at all. Clones are the "same person" genetically, which isn't a big deal in the Star Wars universe, so that's not such a reveal as would have been _how_ they were created from "nothing" by way of the vergence. The story still missed what should have been the important point of Mae/Osha's existence.
It more reminded me to the classic Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", when Kirk is split into two people with opposite characters, one of them good but weak and the other evil and strong. But that should have been consistent through the series, not the girls changing their minds from good to evil and back every time the writers want to surprise us.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 Or better writers might have shown Osha and Mae bouncing back and forth with some kind of definite "what is wrong with me" or "what is wrong with you" when it happens.
I really enjoyed the finale overall. Yet more great fighting sequences and movement in force moments. The Pelaguies reveal made sense to me and I didn’t feel the need to see more than that. The ‘twin’ story was told and could lead to another season but it also firmly leaves the door open for more stories from this point to The Phantom Menace.
I don’t know if you noticed in the scene with komir, but his eyes turned black. Somehow I think Osha tapped into more of the force witches powers than the force the Jedi use. Their powers seem slightly different than those of the Jedi. Edit: I know it’s technically all the same force but they seem to use it differently 😅
I think your final words sums it up for me. this show like many big franchise shows the past few years feel like they want to do something bold and new but then are hamperd by the studios and take an easy way out. So a lot of setup ends up feeling hollow.
On this specific episode, I'm a bit confused why Mae couldn't have just come with Osha. Speaking overall, they definitely show the Jedi to be much less "zen" than what we have seen prior. Like Sol is acting almost like Cad Bane in kidnapping force-children, and Torbin went crazy just because he wanted to go home? Like even when the Jedi turn evil (Pong Krell, Count Dooku), they maintain a calm calculating demeanor, but Sol and Torbin in this episode demonstrated a level of immaturity that even Anakin never did.
The implication of Yoda in the series makes sense because he is supposed to suspect the Sith are more or less around. Or at least he knows about the Law of Two so maybe that's when he learns about it. But I agree with you it feels fan-servicey.
I was talking with my friend about the finale and something donned on me. It's probably not the case, and it would be incredibly stupid if it was, but if it's true that that creepy lil guy in the cave was Darth Plagueis, then there is a non-zero chance that the main sith dude is Palpatine, and I think if that turns out to be true my brain will explode.
I think this show could have been pretty great. The fight scenes were amazing. The premise of a Rogue Jedi assassin taking out some Jedi is really cool. But the whole "keep Brendok a mystery" until the very end really killed the momentum of the show. I feel like if they'd gotten to all those reveals in the first half of the season, we'd have had enough time for the eventual developments and character moments to really simmer, resulting in better execution and us actually caring about some of these characters. Shout out to Philosophy Tube for having a brief speaking cameo in episode 7 though
so the lil lightsaber in the hilt is actually a nice reference to the old EU Luke made a small short lightsaber to help him battle Lady Lumiya who dun dun dun wielded a lightwhip
Jessie, what would have worked if they'd presented Sol as having realized his guilt as you suggest would have been if it had been Sol who had pushed Osha away from the Jedi order because her presence forced him to continually face his guilt. Then Osha could have already been carrying blame against Sol for that action, then have it compounded when she discovered he'd killed her mother and ripped her from her home in the first place. I didn't buy that Mae and Osha would agree to a permanent separation without a very serious discussion. They had finally found each other, taken care of their traumas, and settled their differences. They had no reason to separate. The "rule of two" was never mentioned, the two-seat ship was never mentioned, and if they were mentioned I still think both sisters would tried to work out something or have rather stayed behind and faced the Jedi than be forever separated. That made no sense to me. I was offended by the "temptation shots" of Darth Plagueis and Yoda. They haven't even written season 2 yet, they don't even know what they're going to do with those characters. Those shots were like guy who pulls up in the van and says, "Hey, little girl, I've got candy!"
Someone probably said this already, but in Jedi: Fallen order he can separate the ends because his crystal split when he found it. I think those games are cannon, but I'm not sure what the implication is otherwise
I'm pretty sure that was Darth Plagueis, I'm betting on it. I just hoped season 2 will comfirmed it. And I'm with you, I hoped Mae will never get her memory back, and I've got a feeling that Mae would become Vernestra new apprentice. Or at least teach her about the lightside of the Force.
The memory wipe was just a lazy plot device. What should have happened is that for Osha to accept the dark side and to secure herself against the Jedi, she would have to kill Mae (who also played a role in her mother and Coven dying, however innocent she might have been). But once she kills Mae, they merged into one as they are the same person. The sacrifice also plays into what those who turn to the dark side often have to do - Anakin with Mace Windu and the younglings (and ultimately Padme), Kylo with Han, etc.
1. Smilo Ren likely scaled the wall the same way that he levitated down in the other episode a few episodes back. 2. Smilo Ren saber is a detachable 2 saber(saber dagger really). 3. Plagueis being shown like someone slinking around in the shadows of the cave like a creepy golum was really counter/bad. 4. The memory wipe decision scene was inane. 5. The writing overall for this episode and the series was all over the place and disorganized with so many continuity issues. I think in some ways your analysis overall with the episode et all is rather too generous. 6. This series has been a disservice on so many levels. To me, it doesnt deserve a renewal.
I guess I need the show to confirm that the flashback is someone telling the story because we see events the characters were not privy to so we have to assume that's what happened and not this is someone's version of what happened.
Remember that time when Anakin killed a bunch of Tusken raiders after finding his mom died. Giving into his rage, anger and pain?? Sure loved how his saber turned red then.
I presume it's just two crystals. Big lightsaber and little lightsaber, that's it. :) I think a lot of where this series hasn't worked well for me is it doesn't seem to do a very good job taking us through the characters' thought processes with them. Often their choices just seem kind of off or out of unformed impulses or something.
I think I prefer this episode to the previous one. I disagreed with Sol and Indara that covering up the truth was ever "best for Osha." It shows a severe lack of foresight and a lack of insight about how to avoid traumatizing a child. And it showed me how untrustworthy Sol was. So everything that happened with Sol here seemed inevitable to me.
My problem with this is that I never really cared enough about Mae or Osha for anything to have a real impact for me
yeah, that was an issue for me as well.
I was just following along becasue she was the only perspective.
i was kind of with Sol for a good chunk...but then he just broke my heart with causing the Force Witch slaughter 😭
and i wanted him to have some kind of penitence, but he was still super convinced that he had done the right thing, instead of saying something, "I thought I was doing the right thing" or something like that.
I did still like that little Otter tracker guy ❤
But Mae & Osha, they were a big shrug for me, didn't really care about them
mostly it was a character behavior sort of thing I think
i'm not sure what it was for me exactly that I didn't like or care about them
no fault of the actress, but just nothing grabbed me with those two characters
I blame the (probably artificial) time constraints for that. I think if this show had been given 10 or 12 episodes, 40+ minutes each, it would've hit MUCH harder. Leslye Headland was trying to tell a story that was too complicated for the runtime she was granted, thank the suits and bean-counters at Disney for that.
The best Disney+ Star Wars show was "Andor". Guess which show was also given the most runtime? It's not a coincidence, good stories need the time to do the story justice. Headland's story wasn't given enough time, whereas Gilroy's was. Imagine trying to squeeze the story of "Andor" into 8 episodes, just ~30 or 40 minutes each- it would've been awful.
Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Mando S3, Acolyte, even Kenobi, what do they all have in common? Insufficient screentime to tell the story.
edit: More runtime probably wouldn't have helped "Kenobi". The others would've benefited though.
Maybe cuz ur racist
@@andyb1653if the show runner didn't have enough time to tell this story, then write a different story. If you know you only have 8 episodes then tell a story that fits in that time frame. I don't see how we can blame the corporate executives for this one
Would you have cared more if she was white?! 😂
The biggest problem that I had was that I had no sense of why being a Sith (or whatever) would be something Osha would truly want. She wanted revenge on Sol. She got it. She drew upon her anger and need for vengeance. But I did not get the sense that she wanted to explore her emotions and commit herself to doing that no matter who got hurt. Moreover, I felt like she wanted to be united with her sister, that this was more significant to her than Qimir. But instead we erase her mind, essentially nullifying their relationship. And the happy, inspiring music with "I can't wait to kill people so I can do whatever I want!" REALLY didn't work for me. Just because the Jedi are flawed and hypocritical does make the Sith the good guys. I guess there are a few parallels with Osha selfishly abandoning her sister again (and that Pip's mind wipe foreshadowed Mae's), but I never felt this was adequately expressed by the writer, director, and actor. In the end, the character motivations felt more like moving pieces around a board than something understandable or relatable to the audience.
I'm pretty sure Qimir wanted to kill Mae for betraying him. Osha made a deal for Mae's life. But I still feel like Mae could have gone with them instead of getting her memory wiped, but I guess that was impossible for whatever reason.
JUSTICE FOR PIP. Mae gets a surgical precise mindwipe after factory resetting Pip?! The injustice of it all! Jokes aside, she'll probably get her memories back because they're the same person.
Occupational Health and Safety Administration did a speedrun to becoming a Sith Acolyte 😂
mays reaction (o.//o)
only the OSHA deals in absolutes.
Just like real life (thanks scotus :/)
Darth Fema And Darth Mindraper
🤣 I want a moment with whoever named her.... "you need to see a baby name list...this isn't the name you're looking for..."
Also I gotta say it is hilarious that Venestra’s plan to AVOID republic oversight was to…..
Admit to the discovery of a decades long coverup involving multiple respected Jedi masters of their guilt in the slaughter of a coven so that they could take the children, one of whom then went rogue and murdered his accomplices and then took his own life.
Like no sorry um I’m absolutely gonna want to look into that group now lol
The thing is, they *have* the children. For the Jedi, the coven was a mere obstacle.
Once they got through it, they managed to get Osha and train her, which led to nothing because she was too old and conflicted. She was not remarkable in any way.
At the end of the series they got Mae. Technically they have nothing to look into because the twins are there/have already been there.
@@i.shuuya3231Did you realize that quickhands was talking about the senate wanting to have a close look into the Jedi Order?
Ayo Osha did a heel-turn so sudden even the lightsaber was confused. I love it!
Is it a "heel" turn though?
oshas been foreshadowed to be dark since like episode 4
@@rhaenatargaryen8061Since episode one. Remember the prisoner on the crashed ship.
In Jedi Fallen Order, Cal Kestis has a kyber crystal that's broken in half which lets him split his lightsaber, I imagine Qimir's lightsaber is similar
Jessie's initial frustration with Sol's "i'll tell you everything" is TRUTH. I could not BELIEVE that they'd opted to fudge it & pretend like he hadn't really said it to extend Sol's personal reveal AGAIN. I was throwing my hands up in despair. It was 40's serial level of the start of the new episode retconning the previous episode's cliffhanger.
I am honestly not surprised that Osha turned. My perception had kind of pulled that Osha was more selfish than you would think, as Mae was more selfless. Osha wanting joining the Jedi doesn't feel like her wanting to be a selfless person, she didn't want to get tied down to her family coven, and a lot of the "bad" things Mae did were because she was coaxed by someone she trusted, or some level of understandable desire for justice.
In a way there was a real ying yang element to them.
Exactly! Osha was fine leaving her family behind to join the jedi.
And she never once stated any noble intentions for wanting to be a jedi in the first place!
Meanwhile, Mae was the more aggressive child, but she only acted out at the thought of loosing her sister.
in a way it was just flaky writing
Mae was more aggressive from the start, in the first scene we saw them with the butterflies. I believe that these witches obeyed to some sort of dark force. Besides, it would have been a good motivation for Sol to protect the sisters from the dark side. But no, "i want a padawan". And now "i love you"? What does this mean? And the sisters changing their minds in seconds...? Makes no sense to me.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 Osha did the same thing to a butterfly, only letting go sooner. All the aggression Mae had was the idea of Osha going to places she shouldn't and that she might leave them.
The series was marketed as a mystery, but it was more like a soap opera where each episode ended on a cliff hanger. It isn't character driven, it is plot driven and the characters react in very strange ways to me. I found myself talking to the screen in every episode, wondering why people made their choices. One second people are trying to kill each other, the next they are friends. I don't feel as if anything was resolved or explained, it is just something that happened but you need to keep watching to understand fully. It felt very unsatisfying. Contrast this series with The Mandolorian where each episode is complete while moving the entire story forward.
i feel like sol does realize he was wrong to kill the mother and feels guilt but his instinct is to continue to manipulate and lie to osha by saying “i did the right thing” butttt yeah its all very vague and unclear so the criticism is fair
Jedi ACAB.
I feel like he had a decent amount of guilt last episode but Indara came up with this cover story and explained that it was for the best so he went with it and probably started to buy into that lie. I don't think he would have been able to take on Osha as a pupil if he didn't buy into the lie.
@@XxMusicxKelseyxX oh also now that i think about it when he says “i did the right thing” or “i thought i did the right thing” he may just be referring to shielding Osha from the truth, as in he believes he did the right thing to not tell her what happened
@XxMusicxKelseyxX see I don't think he feels guilty about that at all. He believes she was using dark side powers, and that means he was justified
but he was wright, why would he be wrong?!
That lady turned into the most evil looking dust cloud ever.
I feel like I'm in the minority for genuinely enjoying the finale and series as a whole.
It was fun and that's all I was really asking from it. Looking forward to season 2!
I'm with you! I liked seeing Osha's turn and thought all the fights and character designs were cool
I enjoyed it too. I kept hoping Osha would have not turned but I get why.
Same! I sometimes think people are expecting Shakespeare out of Star Wars when it’s ultimately popcorn/culture at its poppiest.
@@gateauxq4604
People expect better from Star Wars than pop trash, because it wasn't pop trash. Pop Trash is what Disney turned it into. Lucas and his team were trend setters, literally inventing new filming techniques and special effect techniques to breathe life into new mythos.
Lucas had an idea and a story to tell with the drive and creativity to make it happen. Disney has focus groups, corporate executives, and a 5 billion dollar purchase to justify.
It's implied the vision was ALWAYS Osha, but I think it just needed a little SOMETHING more from Qimir implying he knows that fact, or at least has a hunch that that could be the case, would make him trying to set up the scene that played out a LOT more impactful.
It's possible that Mae did kill Sol like in the vision, but in a more roundabout way. Mae was holding the lightsaber when she got Sol to admit that he killed her and Osha's mother, which is what ultimately convinced Osha to kill him. Mae essentially killed Sol without using the lightsaber, just like in the vision. This also functions as a callback to Mae's final trial, which was to kill a jedi without using a weapon. She couldn't figure out how to do it at first, but this is how. By convincing/manipulating someone else to get them to do it for you.
@@lucacaccamese3417 i also think a part of it is that to an extent they are the same person, so Osha killing Sol *is* Mae killing Sol
@@mel-burnes Yeah, I like that the vision is kind of open to interpretation, and comes true in a lot of different ways, even further complicated by the fact that one or more people involved might be lying about what they saw.
regarding qimir “teleporting” i assume he knows the underground route that Mae shows Osha at the end of the episode so he snuck away to take it
We saw him fly when he did the creepy spider-lowering-its-self thing at the end of episode 4.
@@Jed8T8 Yeah, I assumed he did a big "Force Jump" or something.
i feel like it’s a bigger leap (pun intended) in logic to believe a force user can fly to such an extent, whereas earlier in the show Qimir was more floating down, falling with style, if you will.
Sol doesn't feel hollow to me, he's this knight templar on a mission to help the girls, justifying the destruction he's causing as an unfortunate but necessary side effect. The twins may think they don't want the help but he believes that they're better off. Insisting that everyone who doesn't want him to help just doesn't know better.
People like this exist, one of them caused some severe PTSD by trying to cure my ADHD with behaviors that would be classified as abusive in a different context.
This! He is blinded by his own beliefs (in himself being good and righteous) and ambitions (to help, no matter what the other person actually wants or needs).
@v3ru586 For me he seems to be the earliest version of the kind of rigidity we see and characters such as Obi-Wan and Windu
oooph well said (and sorry that happened to you!)
The witches were shown as aggressive and manipulative from the start. It is still hard for me to think that the Jedi are the bad guys in this series. Well, except Vernestra maybe.
I'm down for a season 2, but Disney needs to give their shows more episodes per season and longer runtimes. This is an ongoing issue with not just the SW shows but also the Marvel ones. If they get more time, the story can breathe.
💯
Hear hear! The 30-minute episodes and 8-episode cap kneecapped the storytelling. I'd be down for a season 2 but I'll bet dollars-to-donuts the review-bombing has made sure that won't happen.
i think it'd be better to make it public where the budget is going. Cause im sorry, this show wreaks of embezzlement scheme
More episodes??? No. Better writing. This lack of detail is by design. We are meant to feel in the dark. They waste time with useless dialogue. They had a whole episode that recycled another episode but from a different angle, and with about 5 minutes of interesting detail but no clear moral distinction. We are meant to feel the Jedi are bad but the writers aren't courageous enough to make that clear. Sol was heroic and in the right.
I’m down for another season if they fire every writer, director and surviving actor.
I really liked how Osha and Mae switched places because at the start of the show they seem SO different like even when they do the "surprise twin!" thing you're like "okay yeah these two were not the same person" but at the end by switching it really shows that either of them could have ended up in either place depending on circumstance
12:43
when Mae and Osha were talking under the tree, since they were a single person, I assumed it was going to end with them fusing back into one person or something due to some weird conditions. 🤷♂
They didn't even need to separate though right
Now that would have been amazing. Unfortunately we got a kinda meh storyline, in my opinion
@@TwinRiver100 they should have each put an earring on and did a silly dance ending with a crazy awkward pose touching each others fingers.
@@majorlazor5058 yup, kind of like in Dragon ball Z during the Buu Saga when they Goku and Vageta met the Supreme Kai. 😆
I think Mae still has a role to play. I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up becoming a jedi or something adjacent.
"Master Venestra, of the Avengers Initiative, have you heard?"
That froggy little bastard.
Qimir's saber would have to have two crystals in it. One for the main blade and one for the dagger. It seems like a nod to Cal Kestis' lightsaber from the latest Star Wars game.
We did get more really great kung fu style light saber fights. Those were great throughout the series.
I'll agree on that, definitely.
For the kyber crystal, that smol lightsaber is a shoto and I remember in Jedi Fallen Order that a kyber cristal might split when you aquire it and the smallest shard can go on a different saber.
Which brings the question (to me as a non-kyber-informed person, at least)... why didn't he pull out the little dagger saber and use that on its own, when Sol chopped the main blade off right below the big beam? Surely a small weapon is better than no weapon at all?
Everything after she bleeds the crystal felt like they had to turn in their paper the next day. The memory wipe thing felt kinda cheap and pointless. I thought maybe they would merge into one person, or reveal plageius was on the planet and there was actually no vergeance. I feel like making a bigger/mystical point about what “balance” in the force via this person split in twain could mean made sense with the whole institutional critique of the Jedi…idk just wanted a little more…
Also are they just in a thruple with Plageius now?
They may have been one person at conception but they've been two distinct individuals ever since.
I'm very curious to know more about the behind the scenes of this show in particular, because it feels a lot like Secret Invasion in that it feels like there's a great show hidden behind a lot of studio interference and rewrites. Though this show is also plagued with poor performances here and there depending on the director. So it's really just like the prequel trilogy, I guess. And Obi-Wan, which relies heavily on the prequel trilogy for its emotional core for obvious reasons.
And despite the clear flaws throughout the show, I wouldn't mind a second season. Based on the online reception of the show and how much of an egotistical coward Bob Iger is, I don't think it'll happen, but I'd like to see what Leslye can do when she has complete control over the show.
Then again, Star Wars has been plagued with poor execution of its ideas from the very first film, so maybe it would be more of the same. But I still want to know for sure.
Also, yes, Qimir's short saber would have its own kyber crystal. I just assumed he didn't think it would be useful against Sol as a primary means of attack. That, or he was still hoping for Mae or Osha to kill Sol and become his apprentice. Also, this is the second time Sol has absolutely kicked Qimir's ass. Continuing to fight with his short saber would have done nothing but give us an even longer fight. Which I wouldn't have minded, because this series has amazing fights.
I don't believe there was ever anykind of "studio interference", and the way the show is written, feels like there wasn't even any rewrites of anykind; infact it feels like a rough, first draft interms of the script, that actually was in desperate need of re-writing but they just never had the chance. Leslie Headland eludes to this in her interviews she gave.
Dave Filoni kinda pandered to her I think, a hard truth Jessie and others may have to accept here is that it seems very much the Creative Director and head of the Lucasfilm Story Group, may have actually been too afraid to reign in Leslie Headland and the very diverse writing team she had working with her on this show. One ofwhich was a Black Woman who Leslie specifically hired purely because she was not even a starwars fan, having no knowledge of the Lore whatsoever, and Leslie wanted atleast one writer who wasn't a fan on her writing team.
So if it is true, that Pablo Hidalgo and his story group were just too scared to pull up Leslie on specific things, and make sure her script was solid; instead just pretty much behaving like "yes-people" to Leslie and her team of writers on the Acolyte; that would explain why the writing is so messy.
One thing that may have really hurt the show was the fact it got halted for a while, which the reason still isn't clear, but I remember rumors floating around making out the Acolyte is not happening, and scenes being shot at the actual Galaxy's Edge themepark at one point. Then there's the whole thing of that ome woman Exec Producer, who filed a very public lawsuit against Lucasfilm, making out she had not been paid properly for the time she worked on the show; which seems very weird.
I suspect something did go down quite messy in the early stages of the Acolyte, that it may not have actually been a Officially, Legit green-lit show when it was first announced. Notice how the Acolyte's title design is the only show that had it changed after a while. The original title design had a lightsaber, slash mark running through it, when it was revealed at the 2020 Disney Investor Day. I speculate Kathleen Kennedy did not go through the proper channels to greenlight this show in the begining, but instead used various internet/social media articles to kind of force Bob Iger's hand, to get the show off the ground; and that's where all the debacle and shaky ground in the early stages comes from. I think it is this, that ultimately affected the show's overall writing and issues with Actors being called back much later on.
@@RaikenXion It they didn't have time to rewrite the scripts, it means the studio wouldn't let them rewrite the scripts because they cared more about meeting a release date. Which means there was studio interference. It's a very different kind of studio interference than in Secret Invasion, but it's still studio interference.
Edit: Also, that's a very interesting conspiracy theory towards the end, there. One that doesn't matter, because Bob Iger was the CEO of Disney at the time that this show was greenlit, Bob Chapek was. It was Bob Chapek who was ordering all these Marvel and Star Wars Disney Plus shows left and right (and also anything for Disney Plus, or changing releases to make things Disney Plus originals) because he wanted to give people a reason to start a Disney Plus subscription. Bob Iger couldn't really have done much to stop any of that.
@@DarthTingleBinks Hmm I don't know bout that, Bob Chapek was held hostage (not literally) over the whole "Don't Say Gay Bill". There is definitely something to how exactly this show got off the ground, because I remember seeing a article that talked about a new starwars series that would be all about the Sith, it didn;t have a title at that time, but the article went into how that show would have Lucasfilm's first Non-Binary lead star; this was like a good 2 years ago; so now we know this was definitely the Acolyte.
It seems Kathy Kennedy forced Iger's hand here, because if he did not greenlight such a series for D+. she could use media to paint him as a transphobe, which would not be a good look for him.
Chapek when he got into power had a system set up where a group of Disney bosses would look at all the shows in the slate, both at Marvel and Lucasfilm, and they would ultimately decide what would potentially be a $$$$ maker, and what would not work overall. This was where he shelved a number of things and green-lit others. It's unknown how far along the Acolyte was at this point.
I think "Chapek ordering all the shows" is specifically what Iger wants people, especially the investors to believe, but it was him who was actually committed to ordering tons of shows at both studios, because Iger was the one who established "Disney+" he talked about this as far back as early 2019.
Chapek was the one who was careful, and didn't just greenlight everything Iger had ordered down the slate; he was originally known as "Cheapek" when he ran the Parks side of thing at Disney, because he was notoriously known for cutting costs of things; so that really doesn't sound like Chapek at all.
I suspect Chapek was the one who originally put a block to allowing this Acolyte series to be made, then when he was get-gone, and Iger returned, Iger went through with allowing the show to go forward, and I think that's where the whole massive delay happened. The cast talk about there being a big halt in filming for some months; then eventually all being called back.
I believe that's pretty much what went on bts, and led to the overall hurting of the show's writing overall, and possible change in ideas regarding episodes flow, with how many cooks were allowed in the kitchen in the end; concerning Leslie's writing team.
She bled a crystal.....HOLY SHIT
Love that for her
It was cool, but I wish the blade was more “crackley” like Kylo Rens, and maybe venting out the side where it was broken
It was a very powerful moment for sure.. I was like. .no fkn way
One of the best moments actually. Loved that detail.
@@andyb1653 show has great writing....
So this is a prime example that you should write a whole season. This feels like a part 1 and is not very cohesive.
I thiiiiiiiiiiink Osha misunderstood her force vision and that she saw herself, not Mae, killing Sol while holding a lightsaber she wasn't using. That description is pretty specific and it's what we see happen there. And of course she's only had one force vision before and it was of Mae, so she jumps to conclusions.
I really enjoyed this episode (and last week's, and weirdly less so Night and Teach/Corrupt) but I guess it's probably going to fall apart for me at some point. Sol not taking ownership was really the only thing that hit me really wrong. Honestly, this was a tight enough wrap for me on the arcs presented this season that I kinda want the series to end here. Yoda and the creepy crawly Sith in Qimir's basement are questions but I'm not convinced I actually care about the answers to them. Sol is dead and Mae has been "saved". Osha has met Mae's quota, avenged their mother, and gone fully dark side. Venestra is left packing a dozen more skeletons into her closet, and we know they're staying there and nobody's burning down the temple for another 100 years. All the closure is there and it feels like all that another season can do is rearrange the board again.
On the Stranger's backup shoto, I've been assuming that like Ahsoka or Maul, he just has two crystals. One of them presumably smaller. So when his main saber is destroyed, I take it that he could draw his smaller one, but already considers himself beaten.
If you’re down to 1 blade vs 1 blade and yours is shorter, that’s a big problem.
Isn't that sith supposed to be plagueis
@@mr.b89 Yep, thats Plagueis from Legends art, down to the proboscis monkey nose, in his very first canon appearance. Along with the cameo of the back of Yoda's head, those are supposed to be the hooks for the next season. Vernestra is also going to try to use Mae to track down the Stranger, just as Mae said the Jedi would before her memory wipe.
So there's definitely an intended Season 2. For me, the closure of the story told in this season is more satisfying than the remaining hooks for future content are interesting. The only person still alive with conflicts I'm interested in is Osha, and we already know canonically that she does not burn down the Jedi temple, so there's no story I'm interested in there.
There does have to be a separate kyber crystal in The Stanger's detachable tanto style lightsaber. I don't think he stopped fighting because that end of the saber wouldn't function, but because he had no reason to believe he could take Sol with only the tanto, given their relatively even matching for the preceding fight.
I'm fine with memory wipe, when it serves a purpose, but why did they have to leave anyone behind??!?! That was not made clear to me why all 3 of them couldn't escape together. I literally yelled at my TV, "Take her too, why does anyone have to stay?!" Yeah, they flew over in a 2 seater but sisters can't bunch up? Soul's ship can't be stolen by 3 homicidal force users? Pfffffftttttt!!!!!
Other than that, the ep was fine.
I didn't buy that Mae and Osha would agree to a permanent separation without a very serious discussion. They had finally found each other, taken care of their traumas, and settled their differences. They had no reason to separate. The "rule of two" was never mentioned, the two-seat ship was never mentioned, and if they were I still think both sisters would have rather stayed behind and faced the Jedi than be forever separated...without even a serious discussion about it. That made no sense to me.
It's because the showrunner and main writer of this show is specifically writing how own Family issues into the story, particularly to do with her young sister, who fell out with her years ago when she came out as gay; and they've never spoken since. She's hoping that sister of hers will have watched this series and maybe reach out to her; It seems that is the only main reason why the showrunner wrote the two twins to ultimately separate at the end.
I have to admit I too am having difficulty with the execution of the series so far. The pacing and plotting have felt very disjointed for me while watching the series. That along with the relatively short episode lengths and small number of episodes have made it hard to become invested in the show. One example, for me, are the characters of Jecki and Yord. We're hardly allowed enough time to meet them properly (and we aren't allowed to meet them in a coherent narrative) before they're killed and I'm hard pressed to genuinely care about the fact that they died. Which is sad, because from the little we saw of her, Jecki was a badass character. And we hardly knew Yord. And while we're talking about him, what happened to his padawan from the first episode? She like completely vanishes and no one mentions her again. Why isn't she on the ship with Sol, Jecki, and Yord when they leave to search for Osha?
It seems like the shorter the seasons, the more jilted the storytelling. I wish there was more time to flesh out & refine the story the show was trying to tell and build the world of that era out. Contrasting with Andor which didn't need to do so much world building thanks to the movies and shows that flank in in that era of star wars so we got more time for storytelling.
I wonder if the reason Disney+ shows like this have relatively short runtimes and episode counts is maybe because Disney thinks that families are watching these shows and they think kids have shorter attention spans. Andor, on top of having an acclaimed writer, was for more mature audiences, so they could get away with having a longer series. If so, that's really insulting toward younger viewers.
Based on interviews and bits of conversations I’ve had with people working on these shows, I think it largely comes down to Disney giving unreasonably small budgets and expecting cinema quality results. And I know they always talk about how high the budgets are but how much money is that really when you are splitting it between about 2.5 movies worth of content?
@@richlynch9068exactly , people critising the quality are clowns
@@Electiger-y5k Lucasfilm kinda did it to themselves unfortunately by being so transparent with their process it allowed audiences just enough information to become armchair experts when it comes to filmmaking
@@richlynch9068acolyte had a huge budget though
@@richlynch9068if you can't tell this story with 180 million then you need to tell a different story. Tell a smaller scale story that fits within your near 200 million dollars
I worry that we've subverted expectations of what heroes and villains are so many times in media in recent years that we're no longer able to tell the difference in real life.
That very much seems to be the case, which in of itself goes completely against what George Lucas's vision of *Star Wars* always was meant to be about - "Heroes" *Good* and "Villains" *Bad* and ultimately Good v Evil. The Jedi are most definitely and always have been Flawed, but NEVER the bad guys. Here the showrunner purposefully wrote her whole story to paint the Jedi as the "Villains" while Osha & Qimir end with those two staring out, trying to make them look like they're the victims and overall "Heroes". It's all very weird, but then, this is what happens when you have things in a time where very staples of society get twisted upside down, and there's become a heavy push to make everything now more "morally ambiguous".
It is very easy for someone to hide Immoral behaviours and mentalities when the lines have purposefully been blurred so much into a very Gray area.
I don't really see how this is the case. Could you elaborate on why you are worried, and what instances are worrying?
@@RaikenXionI don't see how the Jedi weren't flawed to outright bad in the prequels, or as represented in the Clone Wars. Anakin came from somewhere, as Jessie pointed out, no? Why should it be inherent that someone being part of the Jedi, an organization with an ideology, is Good?
@@Kye9842 They were not "outright bad" just very misguided and beholden to the Republic, to such a point they lost sight. The Jedi were just incredibly flawed. What leslie headland is doing is making it all morally ambiguous and literally switching the sides. When the Jedi were never the "Villains".
She tries hard to paint Qimir in a good light when he very clearly killed those Jedi, especially Jecki stabbing her 3 times then just saying - "was that it's name" showing no *Humanity* whatsoever, yet Headland paints him as sympathetic by the end. That's seriously messed up.
You really have to have somekind of sociopathic tendency to write a character like that. You should check out all the interviews of Leslie Headland talking about her inspirations for the Acolyte and especially her own personal issues, as drivers for her writing of this show; it really gives a very big insight into the type of person she truly is.
honestly mae essentially dying, sacrificing herself and being lobotomized to a state where all she remembers is her most traumatic day is uh..... incredibly fucked up. I hope she DOES learn the truth in season 2
Honestly, I'm with Sol on this one - he made a mistake, but with the information he has at the time (Mae telling him they have to be sacrificed, etc.) he reasonably believes he has a split second to stop Anaseya from killing Mae, and Anaseya could have easily prevented it by explaining what she was about to do.
I think this a perfectly reasonable judgement call for an average person to make, but it is very uncharacteristic of Jedi. In the "Phantom Menace", Qui-Gon Jinn is just fine leaving Anakin's mother in slavery and the way he got Anakin out was extremely subtle. Sol basically acted like a Sith, he came in took what he wanted and destroyed everything else.
@@yevgeniygrechka6431 There's not really time for subtlety at that point though, thanks to Torbin (who, while also making a mistake, *was* also just mind controlled - basically everyone's mistakes in both sides are reasonable and understandable, which I take to be the point. Well, except for Koril's). He's not perfect, only a flawed sentient, but the Jedi would be the first to tell you this. It's others who hold them to a standard of perfection demonize them for falling short, and given the nature of the force, the order and Jedi philosophy are really the only option, and far better than any of the alternatives.
As for Qui-Gon - he also doesn't have any good options for Shmi. The Jedi are very much down to free slaves by force - they smashed the Zygerrian slave empire and carried out the largest emancipation in galactic history - but they're in Hutt space, not the republic, and they can't take her covertly because slaves in Tatooine have explosive implants for that very reason. They *do* go back (obviously not qui-gon himself because he's dead - but I absolutely think he would have) to free her later, only to find she's already been freed - and disappeared, because she'd joined the underground White Sun liberation movement.
I enjoyed it. The glimpse of Yoda and Plagus was the right amount of fan sevice instead of giving us a ten minute scene with force thene swell and meme reference.
The jedi pinning it on a fall guy because yeah these guys are the republics CIA worked for me too.
It's such a weird little thing but I was confused by was why the little tracker sabotaged the guns. Were we supposed to think Sol was trying to kill Mae? And why wouldn't the tracker have gone along with that? And then I think maybe what we were supposed to take from Sol's little speech towards the end was that he was actually seeking power, and Osha was like a consolation prize?
With Darth Plagueis, I guess this is explaining how he learned to create life from the vergence thingy? I mean I'm happy if they bring him back into canon. But yeah, this show just drips with unrealized potential....
I want to know why the tracker was treated like a semi-sapient prop that only stuck around in order to get the Jedi to Mae at the end.
@@mzaite Yeah, his behavior was so weird at every point.
@@joegroves2517 Between the Droid slaves, the Biological Slaves, and the second rate status of less conformal humanoids, The Star Wars universe has a lot of issues on the table it just ignores for idiot force bullshit stories.
Another youtuber brought up the thought, that Basil might have been an agent for Vernestra. They could have showed us one or two video calls, where she tells him to make sure they all meet on Brendok, because she hopes to find her former padawan there and can finally get rid of him.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 noting in the show supports that. It's a good idea but not one the writers ever had.
“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and make them their own. It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens or Tolkien. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and improve on it. The book is the book, the film is the film, they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
I loved this episode. Also, the kyber crystal stuff is perfectly in line with canon. In order to get a red blade you have to bleed a crystal.
I liked the very first scene where Osha nearly mind-controlled Quimir by accident and then it cut to Sol and Mae and the contrivance of interrupting Sol explaining things so they could have an action sequence chase and my good vibes died.
Then the rest of the ep was mostly perfunctory to get to the end states the writing team wanted to in the very short amount of time Disney gave them to do it in.
The crit I’ve seen that best describes the show is that it feels like a first draft and hasn’t had any other passes done on it to actually bring out the ideas and iron out clunkiness.
I will give them one thing the end status is reasonably more interesting than I assumed they’d be able to get to.
Hopefully, if it gets renewed they can hire more experienced writers and get more run time to actually make it work
It feels a lot like Obi-Wan Kenobi for me. It's a good story at its core and has some spectacular moments, but the connective tissue between those moments is lacking. It was pretty clear a couple of weeks ago that the twins were going to end up swapped around by the end and while it didn't happen exactly like I expected, it still happened. I enjoyed it more than Ashoka or Mandalorian, but that is sadly a low bar to cross.
I agree on a few fronts, but I think I found this the least enjoyable of the live action Star Wars shows, and an even worse season finale than Ahsoka's.
@@Tuaron Nah, this is way better than any of Filloni's bullshit.
@@lorcannagle Again, I disagree, but to each their own. Not that I think Filoni's a perfect genius, I did think Ahsoka's finale was bad (found it the worst of the live action Star Wars *until* this one), and The Mandalorian's continued to slide away from what I was interested in (I wanted that Lone Wolf & Cub/western-style bounty hunter in space show we were teased early on).
I agree about the comparison to the other live action shows. I haven’t been able to finish obi-wan or madalorine, I was bored. I wasn’t with this but this is the kind of thing I enjoyed about the prequel novels and the old republic books.
The first thing I immediately thought of when I saw how Osha altered the kyber crystal was to the Obsidian console game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. This crystal is known as the "Meetra Surik" crystal, whose name was forgotten to history and merely referenced as 'The Exile'. A naturally-formed kyber crystal that forged a bond with the Jedi wielder, resonating with the choices and connection to the Force.
KOTOR is one of my all-time favorite games! I didn’t even think about that until you mentioned it here - good catch!
In a just world every reaction to this episode would be an Alan Wake 2 meme.
I like where the Osha/Mae story goes, the themes are good, but I think the emotional resonance could have hit better. Part of that I think is the lack of chemistry between Osha and Mae. The fact the same person plays both is understandable at the story level and on a technical level it's well exceucted in that there's no scenes where both characters being present makes anything look janky, it's just that not having 2 people playing the sisters means there's not an opportunity for a relationship to form. Having a real other person to bounce off of makes that kind of dynamic function better no matter how good at acting one is.
Ignoring everything else, Leslye Headland straight up saying they weren't holding anything back for Season 2 while literally spending most of this episode teasing multiple characters and reveals and holding nearly EVERYTHING back for Season 2 is infuriating.
Even the whole "mystery" and "jedi detective" aspects of the show that were so pushed by the marketing seemed to be dropped partway through.
@@flyingsquirrels83 They just straight up dropped multiple cameos and Qmir's previous mentor so casually like that's how you end a chapter of a story. The fight scenes/Episode 5 were the only real standouts. This easily could have been half the runtime and would have been much better for it.
The two cameos took up about 15 seconds combined.
Kyber-questions answers: Yes, Qimir‘s short lightsaber/lightdagger (it’s called a Shoto) has its own kyber crystal. Maul‘s double-bladed saber also has two separate crystals, being basically two sabers welded together. You can actually see that in the CW siege of Mandalore: Maul‘s saber in that story actually has two completely different hilt designs stuck together, since he lost half of his original saber back in Episode 1
I thought double-bladed lightsabers could be single crystal based, just the way they were built would allow the beam to go out both sides. Qimir's would have to be double crystal, though.
@@Tuaron Those existed in legends, but so far all double-bladed sabers we’ve seen use two separate crystals for each blade (just as legends had many different types of crystals, while canon moved back to Lucas‘ version of specifically Kyber). Fallen Order is the best example for seeing a double-bladed saber being constructed
@@CULater000 Fair enough. I'm reasonably versed in Star Wars lore, but a decent amount is also obtained secondhand and I can't always remember if the info I'm remember is Legends or current canon (except Chewie's death in the books, I know that's Legends because it's legendary). I've watched all the shows and played several of the games (not the latest Cal Kestis one, I do mean to get to it, though), but haven't really read the comics or books.
Leslye Headland said that this was the most personal story she's ever told and I'm wondering if she's equating Osha being with the Jedi to her time working at Miramax which would explain the drastic turn on Sol.
Yeah, but she was Harvey Weinstein's "acolyte"...so how does that fit in?
As a new person trying to dip my toes into the starwars universe, i thought it was a nice starter/introduction for me. Ive only ever seen the one where anakin becomes darth vader, rogue one, and solo.(for donald glover) and i liked them and kept wantin to go back & see the others to get a fuller scope. Then i saw force awakens and it turned me off for a bit lol then i saw this and now im back on the train to being fan.
As for Sol, i felt he felt guilty for killing their mom but didnt have the heart to say it out loud. Thats why he was struggling the entire seasons w the "twins". But i also see your point cause i also thought the flashback episode was him explaining so when they did the whole scene where he gets shocked i was pretty thrown myself, but like you said i feel that was a weird narrative decision but not necessarily a character one? Because he was going to tell her until she shocked him, granted not sure how much help telling her that wouldve been. And i wouldve liked a little clearer apology around that besides a choked up "yes" & " it was an accident" there were a lot of accidents that day. Shit that moment everyone couldve accepted responsibilities for their parts in the fallout of things on that night. But emotions run high w this group.
All in all i liked this show, it had its flaws but it kept me in for the most part. (The cast for me was a personal plus big fan of lots of those folks). It was a good example of a handful of broken souls who are lost within a chaotic period, like truly gave me arcane vibes in the back story of jinx and vi kind of thing, on a different scale of course but because of the similarity i could chew on it. Especially w Amandla's performance they were phenomenal to me. Lee Jung-jae as Sol for me also worked but again could be me riding the high of being happy to see him since its felt so long since squid game. But i digress, i hope we get a season 2 and they tighten up on many of the things you touched on, as well as leaving room for other parts to grow and breathe. I do see the ouroboros effect that star wars has knowing this is a prequel i think like you said w the senator the lil allusion to anakin and the cyclical nature of this padawan to pissed sith pipeline because of people like Vernestra. And i know you wanted her to be a lil more Ambiguous, i think i would like that for season 2 when she has mae under her control cause i want to see that trickery at play, season 1 wasnt focused on her so i think thats why it was necessary to see her shadiness from the beginning. And for me it was not necessarily a relief but it felt good to be right about her by the end of the season and helped me gain a better understanding of the different "factions" if you will of jedi. And as much as Sol was truly wanting to help i think theres something to be said that he maybe was more like Qimir than i expected. I mean he seemingly wanted the twins for the same reason, like as much as he was curious bout the whole vergence thing, it seemed like he wanted a padawan and wasnt allowed one for whatever reason, probably him having too strong emotions and letting those emotions guide him rather than the knowledge he learned or something. Im rambling and the train has now left the station. TL;DR; i agree w a lot but im less harsh cause im really new to all this star wars stuff but i fux w it! And im here for it and will take any advice on how i should tackle watching the other films or anything at all. If anyone is still reading this have an fanfuckingtastic day & i love yo faces. 🫶🏾
Qimir’s eyes going black when removing the helmet from Osha like Torbin with the witches.
Before Disney, each lightsabre blade needed at least one crystal (some had two or three crystals to produce different effects, like Corran Horn's dual-phase lightsabre being able to switch from a 4ft silver blade to a 10ft purple blade when he turned a dial) . No idea how they're explaining it now though
I have to agree with you about liking the story that the show wants to tell. Unfortunately it’s flawed in how it goes about telling it.
I’m pretty sure that Qimir’s mini lightsaber requires a separate crystal.
I read somewhere that Leslie Headland said the reason why she wrote the main characters Osha & Mae the way she did was to do with her estrangement to her own sister, that they still don't speak. So I'm thinking maybe that was the main reason why Headland had the two get split up, cause Headland did say how she hopes her sister will see this show.
Wow, this finale left such a sour feeling in my mouth, and I was already starting to brace for it as I went to watch it. A lot of issues I'd been having with this show had left me going "well, they might be able to wrap it up decently" but I'd been starting to fear they'd try to extend this to another season because there didn't seem to be "enough meat on the bone", so to speak. They've only very shallowly addressed various ideas but that seems to be the deepest they wanted to go, and stretching it out further just feels not just unnecessary but a bad idea, so when I saw "season finale" on Disney+, I was concerned (though I did go "maybe that's just what they will say no matter what") - realizing the show didn't really wrap much up and seemed more interested in setting up a second season was beyond disappointing.
Totally agree that this episode made the previous one worse by tearing down the suggestion Sol was telling Mae what happened from his perspective. Had this series been attempting a "Rashomon"-style look at the past, it bungled that by not quite telling those flashbacks from a single perspective (the first flashback episode having scenes involving the two mothers that Osha wasn't privy to, the latter seemingly splitting between Sol and Mae's) and the fact it still seems designed to withhold details for further mysteries is simply frustrating.
Likewise, the Osha/Qimir (is that really his name?) interactions really fizzled out in this episode, even despite failing to reach expectations in their prior episode (6, I guess?), and the inclusion of the "dark side creature/possible Darth Plagueis" was the point where I realized this was not going to be a satisfying finale for me, and would whiff the sense of closure I'd been hoping for even worse than the Ahsoka finale. I'd been hoping for a miniseries and this definitely went "nope, this is gonna be a multi-season show that avoids really getting deeper into any of the interesting ideas". Oh, and it was way too obvious that the vision Osha had was going to be herself, not Mae.
Okay, getting too negative, so let's skip to a positive bit: I generally liked the fight scene between Sol and Qimir(?), particularly some of the wuxia-style wire work near the beginning (I'd been hoping for that), but also because Sol's style is so interesting. Pretty sure Qimir(?) has a double crystal situation, basically two lightsabers that can lock in, which is cool enough.
Back to negatives: the space chase was both cool and oddly pointless with some really weird beats that made no sense to me. First off, a recurring problem set up in the leadup: Mae seems to treat Pip exactly like Osha did previously despite having acted like it was just an annoying tool in her prior episode (wiping its memory with absolutely no hesitation), and it seems to act exactly as it did for Osha, which is...certainly a choice, one which I dislike and definitely foreshadowed that they were going to try to flip the girls' positions by the end of the episode (compared to the start of the series). Again, the space chase had weird moments, like Sol almost seeming to want to kill Mae and Bazil deciding to help her for some silly reason, both drastic shifts in the way the characters had been written (and you can't argue perspective change - both were shown acting in certain ways contrary to this *when they were alone*, but even when they were with *either twin*), and that was just the start of Sol seemingly acting quite contrary to his previous portrayal.
The Vernestra stuff continued to underwhelm until the end, and the introduction of a David Harewood character this late in the game was the moment I knew for absolute certainty that this would be setting up another season, as it laid out a new thread (only hinted at earlier) that could not be wrapped up by the end of the episode. Vernestra had been a wasted element throughout the season, serving a decent enough purpose of "person who gives the mission" at the beginning, then showing up unnecessarily for the rest until the end when they arrive after everything happened (that bit actually worked for me, same with her talk with Mae and to the Council, the burning of Sol's body, etc., that was the only time Vernestra really *clicked* in this series and it feels like she would've been better used if the middle parts were excised).
The death of Sol wasn't staged or shot as well as I'd've liked (I felt too little of the tension, Osha's actions didn't seem to correlate with the level of harm she was inflicting, etc.) and he'd already felt like he was being heavily rewritten from the previous episodes that I didn't care as much. The Sol we'd been given in prior episodes would've stated something as simple as "I'm sorry I killed your mother, I thought I needed to in order to save you" or some similar thing, even if it doesn't actually justify or made his actions acceptable, it'd acknowledge that what happened was wrong. And his obsession about "vergence" (an idea really only introduced the previous episode, despite a hint at it in the first flashback) seemed incredibly sudden, seemingly reversing what had previously been set up as an obsession with a connection with Osha and his want to keep her safe - now, he just wanted the twins because there was a mystery thing they were related to and they proved it, etc. Felt too much like a sudden character assassination in order to justify the "twist" of his death.
Speaking of: yeah, that twist was way too obvious but also flopped for me. The twins especially had been set up as such cyphers over this series, especially as time went on and their character seemed less and less defined than they seemed to be early on, so the "switch" we get by the end of the episode had less impact, it felt less like they'd turned and more like...I don't know, like we never really knew who either of those characters were. The Mae mindwipe was such a weird deus ex machina that seems to serve no real purpose (if anything, wiping her mind would make her more willing to help find Osha, even if she couldn't immediately go "oh yeah, they're probably here"), it just seemed to be there to set up next season, where they're in the opposite position from the start of this season.
My biggest feeling at the end of all this: I cannot believe that the woman behind Russian Doll made this show, it seems to lack that understanding of and focus on character that the other series had. Maybe that should be attributed to Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler instead, or maybe it's just the rest of the people Leslye Headland brought on to make this show, or maybe it was studio interference, I don't know - either way, the use of Headland's name (and Russian Doll because of that) suggested it was going to give us something else and it did not fulfill that.
Will I watch the next season? I don't know, maybe, but I'm certainly not looking forward to it, especially as they took the characters who worked best off the board and messed up most of the others.
Oh, and the Yoda cameo was cheap, bad fan service. I'm not sure if I'm happy it wasn't a full scene with him or if that made it worse.
Sol doesn't apologize because he doesn't think he did anything wrong. The Jedi take children from their parents, and they don't see the problem with that. And while they say that they don't take children past a certain age because they begin to form attachments, that's can't be true. We create attachments as soon as we're born, but what takes longer to develop are feelings. At a certain point we learn what love is, what anger, envy, jealousy, and everything else. By taking kids before they mature enough to grasp that, they can then train them and mold them to "operate" without those feelings.
And that's almost certainly what blinds them to the aloure and presence of the dark side. Sol was too preoccupied with his quest for a Padawan that he was blinded to the signs (and advises) that showed how reckless he was acting. Even before dying, his regret in not saving Mae wasn't for her life, but so that he could show the other Jedi that what he'd done had been justified.
The acting makes it seem like he has some pretty serious regrets. It's not satisfyingly put together.
@@shraka agree, but if you hear his comments on the last episode, it really looks like he regrets not saving Mae because if he presented both twins to the council it would validate his actions and prove that Force vergence thing they were hunting for.
The scene with the Senator reminded me of something I read in "Caliban and the Witch" - during the Protestant Reformation, a lot of people were outraged about corruption in the Church and the horrors of the Inquisition. There was a liberatory aspect to that, but it was also co-opted by bourgeios Protestants who took the church's power for themselves in the name of "reform." So yeah, no love for politicians, but they're often right about their rivals ;)
I think sol should have said that even though he killed her mom that it was in self defense , she turned into smoke and he feared for his Life , then osha might of forgiven him . Just like SOL and torbin had to live wit guilt over the witches death , now osha wil have to live wit guilt over killing sol who was basically like a father to her for a decade .
I don't think he was like a father to her. Osha's depicted as not even being too attached to her own mother and twin.
Sol speaks of a connection to her, but it seems mostly one sided. Osha never expressed too much appreciation or affection towards him.
This show has been such a disappointment. We still don't know anything about the witches and what their own deal was. We don't know anything about the ritual they did with Mae. What's the deal with Mae's tattoo? And whatever happened to the power of two? Aren't Osha and Mae supposed to be much stronger together? Doesn't Qimir want to use that power?
The relationships are pretty poorly developed too. Sol and Osha are supposed to have this deep connection but we barely see any of it. Sol wanting an apprentice in the flashback was just casually brought up and not developed. They don't show any of the master apprentice relationship between Sol and Osha. They don't even take much time to show what Sol thinks about Osha failing to become a Jedi. And Osha finally killing Sol is supposed to be this big moment but it's so poorly developed. They put so much Lee Jung-jae's acting and he is great but the writing completely fails him.
It’s only 8 eps not 800 u clown . They show what’s important
I will say that I didn't thnk Qimir wants to use their "power of two" - far as I could tell (maybe it's because I'm way too versed in Star Wars lore), he was referencing the Sith "Rule of Two", that there is always a Master and Apprentice, etc.
I'm pretty sure Sol and Osha's relationships is shown as one sided all through. Osha only ever feels close to her droid
I think a big problem with this show is I wanted to see more, but it just couldn't deliver on the ideas it brought up. Maybe it could have been a good show with better direction and writing.
With regard to the "cameo" I felt from the beginning that the high republic should have been set far enough back from what we've already seen that none of the original characters from the eugh, "Skywalker Saga" would be present.
Agreed. Yoda is even called "master" in that little glimpse we get of him. I suspect he'll be pretty young, but we don't get to see KID Yoda unless he earned the title younger than most do.
@@HumbleWooper He was 900 in Jedi so that would make him about 770 years old in the acolyte. So no, he won't be young.
I think that it feels very much like a shakey season one of a show with potential. I'd like for it to recieve a season 2 so that it has a chance to develop. I'm not sure in the current climate of shows needing to be perfect (or at least create a lot of buzz) strait out of the gate, that it will get one.
The senator's speech was good, but it felt completely out of place. Like this is something you deliver in episode 3 of a show that's about the political goings-on between the Jedi and Senate, not here. Especially with the finale, instead of trying to tell a simple story a good chunk of the show felt like it's cobbled together from setups to different spin-offs.
19:36
i didn't mind Yoda being in there.
i kind of liked that as just have one small familiar thing in this show.
ONE small familiar thing? Mundi not enough? Jedi, Wookies, light sabres everywhere? No? Okay.
@@shraka I'm sort of familiar with Mundi. The lightsaber stuff you kind of assume at a default. 🤷♂️
Yoda was an aspect more familiar to me that gave me a stronger sense of excitement and familiarity that I was looking for at that point in the show. This probably wasn't an experience for everyone and was probably just mine.🤷♂️
@@TwinRiver100I’m just so tired of everything needing to be so interconnected instead of having good well crafted individual stories.
@shraka sorry if what I said was in bad taste or made you feel bad
@@TwinRiver100 No worries. Don’t you want something well constructed and maybe new though?
You do see one damaged crystal when Qimir's larger lightsaber is destroyed, but I think he should still have the dagger separately since that would require two crystals, yeah.
AFAIK, every separate blade requires it's own kyber crystal. (Kylo's T-thing aren't separate blades, they're linked to the original)
Nice that I'm not the only one that cheered for Door showing up, might be my bias for making that a favorite scene.
The show kinda smells like first draft syndrome to me...
There are some really good ideas, there are a lot of really interesting directions, some genuinely good creative decisions... it also feels like a lot of them were put into the series the very moment they were thought up, and then shot the next day.
Constant setups, constant teasers, and then they don't really land the payoff.
Sol has a dark secret that makes him guilty and is keeping from Osha and Mae... turns out it was something we kinda already knew about, and the bit we didn't doesn't really have an impact.
Osha sees Mae killing without a weapon, but the future isn't set! Turns out it was just Osha doing it, not Mae, otherwise it was exactly as described
The senate will hold a hearing and Venestra will have to face the consequences of the Jedi's unchecked power... turns out no she won't, she lies about what happened, and it resolves in one shot.
All of those have deeper consequences and implications down the line but it does feel like another pass at the script could've helped make things more coherent
“I like the show that the show wants to be.” That hit so hard.
My understanding of kyber crystal lore is that two blades requires two crystals, so Maul, Ashoka, or Qimir would all require two crystals.
I didn't interpert Quimir as teleporting away from Osha, I saw it as him beforehand placing some kind of force mind trick on Osha to make her think he was still with her (rembember that Osha can't really block force powers) when he had already left for the other entrance before, and then he just breaks the illusion in that scene while he was long gone from there already
I think Sol's "big relevation" that Osha and Mae are the same person is a bit silly. In fact I'm much more inclined to believe Mae when she says she is her own person. Sure, they may be more deeply connected than most twins, but telling them they're the same actual person seems philosophically dubious and even disrespectful. I don't think they're the same person any more than the two Rikers.
The entire series from the very beginning showed they were distinctly different persons, if "person" is to make any sense at all. Clones are the "same person" genetically, which isn't a big deal in the Star Wars universe, so that's not such a reveal as would have been _how_ they were created from "nothing" by way of the vergence. The story still missed what should have been the important point of Mae/Osha's existence.
It more reminded me to the classic Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", when Kirk is split into two people with opposite characters, one of them good but weak and the other evil and strong. But that should have been consistent through the series, not the girls changing their minds from good to evil and back every time the writers want to surprise us.
@@fiktivhistoriker345 Or better writers might have shown Osha and Mae bouncing back and forth with some kind of definite "what is wrong with me" or "what is wrong with you" when it happens.
I like this show so far, and hearing an season 2 is a thing, i wished these was longer both in episodes and runtime.
It does have a name now. I had to go back and see the scene in the middle I blinked and missed. It's now "The Acolyte"
I really enjoyed the finale overall. Yet more great fighting sequences and movement in force moments. The Pelaguies reveal made sense to me and I didn’t feel the need to see more than that. The ‘twin’ story was told and could lead to another season but it also firmly leaves the door open for more stories from this point to The Phantom Menace.
A friend told me that a lightsabers crystal if broken can allow for a unique build like what Kamir has, so the same saber, same crystal just split
I don’t know if you noticed in the scene with komir, but his eyes turned black. Somehow I think Osha tapped into more of the force witches powers than the force the Jedi use. Their powers seem slightly different than those of the Jedi.
Edit: I know it’s technically all the same force but they seem to use it differently 😅
I think your final words sums it up for me.
this show like many big franchise shows the past few years feel like they want to do something bold and new but then are hamperd by the studios and take an easy way out. So a lot of setup ends up feeling hollow.
On this specific episode, I'm a bit confused why Mae couldn't have just come with Osha. Speaking overall, they definitely show the Jedi to be much less "zen" than what we have seen prior. Like Sol is acting almost like Cad Bane in kidnapping force-children, and Torbin went crazy just because he wanted to go home? Like even when the Jedi turn evil (Pong Krell, Count Dooku), they maintain a calm calculating demeanor, but Sol and Torbin in this episode demonstrated a level of immaturity that even Anakin never did.
The implication of Yoda in the series makes sense because he is supposed to suspect the Sith are more or less around. Or at least he knows about the Law of Two so maybe that's when he learns about it.
But I agree with you it feels fan-servicey.
I was talking with my friend about the finale and something donned on me. It's probably not the case, and it would be incredibly stupid if it was, but if it's true that that creepy lil guy in the cave was Darth Plagueis, then there is a non-zero chance that the main sith dude is Palpatine, and I think if that turns out to be true my brain will explode.
I think this show could have been pretty great. The fight scenes were amazing. The premise of a Rogue Jedi assassin taking out some Jedi is really cool. But the whole "keep Brendok a mystery" until the very end really killed the momentum of the show. I feel like if they'd gotten to all those reveals in the first half of the season, we'd have had enough time for the eventual developments and character moments to really simmer, resulting in better execution and us actually caring about some of these characters. Shout out to Philosophy Tube for having a brief speaking cameo in episode 7 though
He had to have two kyber crystals in his saber. Pretty sure that's the only way that works.
Pretty obvious if you think about it longer than a second.
May the force be with you
so the lil lightsaber in the hilt is actually a nice reference to the old EU
Luke made a small short lightsaber to help him battle Lady Lumiya who dun dun dun wielded a lightwhip
Jessie, what would have worked if they'd presented Sol as having realized his guilt as you suggest would have been if it had been Sol who had pushed Osha away from the Jedi order because her presence forced him to continually face his guilt. Then Osha could have already been carrying blame against Sol for that action, then have it compounded when she discovered he'd killed her mother and ripped her from her home in the first place.
I didn't buy that Mae and Osha would agree to a permanent separation without a very serious discussion. They had finally found each other, taken care of their traumas, and settled their differences. They had no reason to separate. The "rule of two" was never mentioned, the two-seat ship was never mentioned, and if they were mentioned I still think both sisters would tried to work out something or have rather stayed behind and faced the Jedi than be forever separated. That made no sense to me.
I was offended by the "temptation shots" of Darth Plagueis and Yoda. They haven't even written season 2 yet, they don't even know what they're going to do with those characters. Those shots were like guy who pulls up in the van and says, "Hey, little girl, I've got candy!"
I thought sol was pretty obviously lying to himself by saying "i did nothing wrong, except not save you both."
Someone probably said this already, but in Jedi: Fallen order he can separate the ends because his crystal split when he found it. I think those games are cannon, but I'm not sure what the implication is otherwise
They won't handle it well enough. She said she wants to destroy Yoda. Literally praying for no more seasons.
I totally agree with your closing statement about the show: Well put!
Thanks for finding the time to do your review. Oh yes, I forgot to wish you all my best on your engagement. Cheers
I'm pretty sure that was Darth Plagueis, I'm betting on it. I just hoped season 2 will comfirmed it. And I'm with you, I hoped Mae will never get her memory back, and I've got a feeling that Mae would become Vernestra new apprentice. Or at least teach her about the lightside of the Force.
The memory wipe was just a lazy plot device. What should have happened is that for Osha to accept the dark side and to secure herself against the Jedi, she would have to kill Mae (who also played a role in her mother and Coven dying, however innocent she might have been). But once she kills Mae, they merged into one as they are the same person. The sacrifice also plays into what those who turn to the dark side often have to do - Anakin with Mace Windu and the younglings (and ultimately Padme), Kylo with Han, etc.
1. Smilo Ren likely scaled the wall the same way that he levitated down in the other episode a few episodes back.
2. Smilo Ren saber is a detachable 2 saber(saber dagger really).
3. Plagueis being shown like someone slinking around in the shadows of the cave like a creepy golum was really counter/bad.
4. The memory wipe decision scene was inane.
5. The writing overall for this episode and the series was all over the place and disorganized with so many continuity issues. I think in some ways your analysis overall with the episode et all is rather too generous.
6. This series has been a disservice on so many levels. To me, it doesnt deserve a renewal.
Osha sure got real cool with her friends all being murdered in front of her for no reason.
David Harewood alone is reason enough for me to be willing to give this show a second chance next season. He was fantastic on Supergirl.
I guess I need the show to confirm that the flashback is someone telling the story because we see events the characters were not privy to so we have to assume that's what happened and not this is someone's version of what happened.
I literally was like “hey it’s Warlin Door!” Lol
Ki-Adi-Mundi’s birthday reminds me of the exploding scuba tank from Jaws. If you’re enjoying the show, you won’t care.
Remember that time when Anakin killed a bunch of Tusken raiders after finding his mom died. Giving into his rage, anger and pain?? Sure loved how his saber turned red then.
Was his saber's crystal exposed and being bled on?
I presume it's just two crystals. Big lightsaber and little lightsaber, that's it. :) I think a lot of where this series hasn't worked well for me is it doesn't seem to do a very good job taking us through the characters' thought processes with them. Often their choices just seem kind of off or out of unformed impulses or something.
I think I prefer this episode to the previous one. I disagreed with Sol and Indara that covering up the truth was ever "best for Osha." It shows a severe lack of foresight and a lack of insight about how to avoid traumatizing a child. And it showed me how untrustworthy Sol was. So everything that happened with Sol here seemed inevitable to me.