#fillik

They billed the show as a mystery but they’ve already answered a bunch of questions that were set up in the first two episodes, sometimes within the same scene the question is asked. The characters (and by extension the audience) have a pretty wide understanding of who both Osha and Mae are and where they come from, even if we don’t have the exact details of what happened the night of the fire. Osha and Mae both know the other is alive, we already know who the assassin is without there being another possibility or explanation for them, we know who all of the targets are and where they’re located, we have the motive, and each conflict or scenario they introduce is resolved almost immediately. There’s no rising tension in the story or significant interpersonal conflict between the characters on each side, the characters aren’t that complex, and people too readily accept the answers they’re given with little protest or reactions based on a unique perspective that would make them feel more like people.

Even if who the assassin is, what their motive is, who their targets are, and where those targets are located apparently isn’t the main mystery we’re supposed to be following with the show, all of those questions are put forth and then immediately solved, meaning there’s not really a whole lot of mystery in a storytelling sense. If the main mystery is supposed to actually be about Mae and her master, not the crime drama about the assassinations that the marketing team billed the show as, then they should either have had Mae commit all three assassinations in the first episode while Osha is having to contend with the core cast being suspicious of and finding her, or made those the inciting incidents that happen prior to the show that cause the rest of the story, cutting out most of Mae’s appearances in the episodes to keep her character a mystery and focusing on Osha figuring things out. That gets a lot of things out of the way and opens up a lot more time in the show to explore the characters and move forward with Osha discovering and driving the story herself

I have some criticisms of their choice of technical production and design, but most of them come down to uninteresting camerawork on uninteresting and ineffectual set designs and environments. It feels like they plopped cameras onto singular sets they built to represent the entirety of that location without creating the connective tissue used to show characters going from one place to the next. Characters are in one place before we see them already in the next plot relevant location they need to be in with little travel time. We don’t see them arrive or depart or enter anywhere, they’re simply there. The temple had Sol’s one classroom, and later the jail cell. We didn’t get to see Vernestra following Sol to his office where they could talk about the assassin in private, we didn’t see Sol and Jecki walking out into the halls of the Temple during their discussion of Sol’s connection to Osha, we don’t see Osha traversing the ship and climbing up to the hatch to the outer hull of the freighter, we don’t see Yord and his padawan getting to Osha’s quarters, we don’t see much of the trio on Sol’s ship, we don’t see the escaped prisoners being found or taken to Coruscant, we see Torbin’s room from the same angles every time people are there, etc. etc.

The camerawork doesn’t help either. It feels like it’s being shot by people accustomed to doing theater on a proscenium stage, mid shots for conversations and wide shots for walking and rarely any tracking cameras following movement or pulling back to show travel from one location to another or following characters as they walk away, let alone anything more complex than that. Both the sets and cameras feel stationary, not dynamic and interesting, and it doesn’t help that a lot of the script consists of conversations that take place sitting and talking, or standing and talking. People aren’t DOING anything during these scenes and it’s hard to walk and chew gum at the same time when there doesn’t seem like any action is needed to get from one location to the next, or any obstacles (physical or emotional) forcing them to double back or change trajectory or pursue objectives other than get to the location that character needs to go next for the main plot to happen. It’s just not interesting or dynamic, and while you can tell the actors did what they could with the scripts they were given, the writing is weak and there’s only so much you can do with a bad script.

Character and Plot: Mae

I don’t know what a good alternative would be but I would have liked a different means of provoking the Jedi into a fight outside of Mae intentionally causing havoc and killing/maiming a bunch of people first. It was only after she assaulted the bystanders that they started to fight her back, and she was willing to presumably kill a bunch of other bystanders first as a means of distracting or provoking the Jedi when the Jedi already had engaged her in her fight.

I think Mae’s focus needed to stay on the Jedi because otherwise Mae garnered a lot more attention from local authorities and put a price on her head for drawing the wrong kind of attention (senseless killing of innocent people, causing mayhem and collateral damage and picking fights with everybody, not just the specific person she had beef with), making her overall objective more difficult since assassinations are supposed to be done in stealth, which seems to be how the writers intended for her to be interpreted. If anything, sparing bystanders in order to have them witness a fight where the Jedi attacked first seems like it would support her case after a declaration that the Jedi do attack the unarmed. Is she intended to be seen as a ruthless killer, or are her attacks purposeful, calculated, and premeditated?

If all it took was one small blade to kill Indara, I’m not inclined to believe she’s that good of a Jedi Master. We the audience have seen hundreds of examples of Jedi being trained to combat multiple assailants while experiencing numerous distractions, and we’re supposed to believe Indara couldn’t stop two blades she had time to see and knew were both coming? One of which Mae doesn’t even throw until after Indara has already stopped the other one? What it tells me is that Indara isn’t really that aware of her surroundings and isn’t a seasoned Jedi

That moment would have played better if Mae had thrown both at once, and if we’d seen the evidence of the blade going clean through Indara’s chest to the other side. If Mae is angry and if her use of the Force gave her enough physical strength to kick the four-hundred pound table at ground level earlier, there should be enough force and emotion behind the blade that it drives through Indara’s chest into the post behind her and splinters the wood, buckling the support beam. The showrunners made a Jedi assassination show, so show us what level of ability— Force-powered or otherwise— it takes to assassinate a Jedi. Make it bloody, make it vicious, and convince me this assassin is a legitimate danger.

If they didn’t want to show enough bloodshed to warrant the right audience reaction, my alternate suggestion would have been to have Mae level the building. We could still have Mae choosing to allow the barkeep and his kid to escape, with him being able to act as witness later. If she’s been practicing the Force in secret like the opening lines say, show her using the Force more impressively, or using skills we and the people within the show haven’t seen before. I don’t know if bringing the building down would count as not using a weapon to kill the Jedi, but it would have been a better way to show how someone not formally trained by the Jedi was able to take down a master.

Even if Mae isn’t supposed to have mastery of the Force yet, we need to see her do more than small-scale telekinesis and heightened agility, acrobatics, and strength. Her master can (we assume) be withholding even more impressive dark-side Force powers from her until she completes the mission to kill a Jedi without a weapon, but I don’t quite believe she’s strong enough to evade or defeat the numerous trained Jedi in those first two episodes. It felt like the showrunners were dampening the Jedi’s capabilities in order to make her seem like she could be on their level, when what they should’ve done was elevate Mae to theirs.

I want to see proof she’s being trained by a Dark Force user, and right now she reads as a pretty good infiltrator, but not all that impressive of a killer. All of her skills right now are no different than ones the Jedi already use. Giving her some kind of Dark Force powers would make her more impressive and feel more like a threat, something like a Force lightning whip, or blades of pure energy, or puppeteering bystanders to fight her targets/act as human shields against their will, or pyrokinesis (which tbh would be very cool thematically, especially when it’ll probably later be revealed she didn’t intend to set fire to the coven’s headquarters). Redemption arcs will always be stronger when a character has done some legitimately terrible or horrific things before they change.

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One of the criticisms I mentioned is the script. There’s frequently unnecessary dialogue; in this opening fight when Indara asks “What are you doing here,” Mae doesn’t have to say “I’m here to kill you” because it’s already obvious by Mae’s actions that’s what she’s there to do. Indara’s real question is either “How did you survive?” if she knows it’s Mae despite all odds, or it’s “Why are you trying to kill me?” if her part in Mae’s past truly is innocent and/or she believes Mae to be Osha (forehead tattoo notwithstanding; Osha left the Order and for all Indara knows there could have been other witches like their coven).

Mae could have simply gone on the offensive without saying anything. If Mae does respond, it shouldn’t be to state the obvious when both Indara and the audience can see what’s happening. Her response could simply be “Retribution,” or “Justice.” That gives the audience motive and intent and tells us more succinctly than anything that there is an established history or past connection between the two characters.

Indara extinguishing her saber in response to “A Jedi doesn’t pull her weapon unless she’s prepared to kill,” seems foolish because even if Mae’s bias is confirmed if Indara keeps her blade ignited, the logical response from a seasoned fighter and defender of the people should have been “If that proves the only way to stop you I will do what I must,” because Mae’s the instigator who made it clear she’s there to kill Indara anyway, we know the Jedi will obviously fight in the name of self defense, and Mae made it a point to hurt a bunch of other people unprovoked in the fight leading up to this line first; how is she any better than the person she’s challenged with that accusation?

If Mae does have a genuine reason to believe what she says, then covertly drawing another blade with the audience knowing her intent results in said audience NOT believing she has a genuine reason to say it and is only using it as a means of getting Indara to lower her defenses. That combined with her instigating an assault on bystanders won’t make the audience see her as a sympathetic character, even if/when her motives against the Jedi are later revealed to be justified. She’s already proven to be deceptive so there isn’t really a reason to believe anything she says regarding her justifications/motive after this 🤷‍♂️

(Unrelated: Though I’m sure it’ll probably be revealed later, I’m not exactly sure why Mae left Indara’s lightsaber if she made it a point to go after it in their fight.)

(A note on the technical side of things: If the story hadn’t immediately revealed and confirmed for the audience in the first two episodes that the assassin is an entirely separate person, part of the mystery as to who the assassin really was could have been the clue that the assassin’s hair is longer than Osha’s. That detail is irrelevant since the reveal happens in episode two though, but if they’d wanted to build the mystery for longer and have us looking for clues and wondering if Osha is the assassin or later wondering which of the two it could be, it would have been good if they gave the assassin the short hair and Osha the longer hair. The first episode already made us suspicious (Is Osha an assassin and a very good liar in the face of questioning, or is she actually innocent because everything she says on the freighter is true and it just happens to be suspicious? Or is Osha being possessed or mind-controlled against her will and without her knowledge into being an assassin for a time, blacking out entirely and waking up with her regular life and lack of memories as the perfect cover? Or is Mae’s spirit inhabiting/controlling the same body as Osha with Osha entirely unawares? If that’s the case, does Mae know that she’s also Osha in that scenario or are both twins kept in the dark?) If it was the case of two separate identical people, on rewatching the episode the audience would have been looking for the clues that would lead to the reveal; an assassin can cut her hair upon returning to her regular life in an attempt to blend back in and cast suspicions of her appearance on Ueda elsewhere, but you can’t grow eighteen inches of hair overnight.)

(But like I said, once you’ve already revealed who the assassin is in this mystery, there’s no reason to rewatch the story in an attempt to see how they set that mystery up, so those suggestions are irrelevant anyway)

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Exposition, Character Building, and Poor Scripts: Osha and the freighter sequence

The dialogue with Fillik sounds kind of boring because it’s too generic. It could have been made more specific to those people to really show her relationships and history on the freighter, building up suspicions and lack of alibi. An example that comes to mind is Cassian’s introduction back on Ferrix as he’s going through the town, making points of contact with a dozen different people. We really get a sense of who those people are and what they want in just a few lines of dialogue, whereas Osha and Fillik sound like surface-level coworkers; “What I do with my time off is none of your business.” “No rest for the wicked, huh?” “Well the wicked rest, but when they do they usually don’t brag about it.” None of that really gives us anything besides the normal water cooler talk you could get at any office, regardless of whether your coworker may secretly be an assassin.

Since Fillik doesn’t come back in the freighter sequence after their work on the hull, it seems like he’s only there to establish that Osha doesn’t have an alibi for the previous night and Indara’s murder, but if you’re just going to reveal with pretty damning evidence that she didn’t do it in the beginning of the next episode, why set her up to be suspicious in the first place with that dialogue? Either swap it out for something more interesting, or if you want to keep the line because you do intend to keep her a suspect for longer, have Fillik come back towards the end when she’s being questioned.

In that scenario we see this: The door to her bunk is open, he hears her getting upset and goes to investigate, he can vouch for her character to Yord and the padawan, and/or Yord asks him specifically if he was with her the previous night. If Fillik is a close friend and can see Osha’s in trouble he can come up with a lie and cover for her. It can complicate things for Yord and possibly give Osha some time/evidence on her side with an alibi, considering she’s being accused of murder, or Fillik could even be angling to give Osha a chance to escape. If Fillik hesitates because he recalls their first conversation of the day, it could be enough evidence for Yord to conclude that Osha needs to be taken in for questioning.

Either way you do it, you’re using more characters who have already been established as a means of organically complicating the plot and interactions in the next few scenes, weaving these people together and opening up more opportunities for organic exposition so we don’t have to hear the same things being said twice

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Exposition: Telling vs. Showing

I mentioned above that there doesn’t seem to be a logical cause and effect happening within the show. If they suspect someone of killing a Jedi Master, why are they sending a knight and a padawan to apprehend them? It doesn’t matter if Yord knows Osha: the fact a Jedi was killed should have told the council that 1. The assassin obviously has an issue with them, so any prior history between them is negligible and 2. The assassin is powerful enough to kill a Master, therefore two people of lower ranks with less experience and capabilities are not likely to succeed where a Master failed, and the council is putting them in danger by doing so.

Moving on to exposition: Audiences shouldn’t be hearing exposition through one character telling somebody’s entire backstory out loud, especially when the person they’re saying it to is the one they’re talking about. The entire questioning scene with Tasi and Yord is telling the audience who Osha is and how Osha came to the temple and the tragic circumstances under which she got there. It’s boring to listen to and it’s bad, lazy storytelling. It seems like the writers had a bunch of information to get out in order to move to the next plot point, and it won’t be the last time it happens. Osha’s backstory should have been revealed in relevant bits and pieces as circumstances developed.

Within the scene, Osha should have had a much stronger reaction to Yord bringing up the topic of grief (especially if they both know it’s not something she was able to reconcile). He’s the one who showed up out of the blue and brought it up and forced her to talk about something personal in front of a stranger.

In my opinion, I don’t think Yord should’ve known anything prior to Osha’s arrival at the temple. It leaves no questions to be answered for later; mysteries (and stories in general) are supposed to start with a lot of unanswered questions.

A way to change the scene on the freighter is to instead have first had a scene on Yord’s ship before he and the padawan arrive. We see Yord deep in thought, conflicted about having to arrest an old friend especially given the crime that’s been committed, and Tasi Lowa is introduced by listing the mission details on a datapad, going through it again before they dock but realizing Yord’s acting uncharacteristically quiet or somber, and asking Yord why it’s significant that he was sent to apprehend this person in the first place. Yord is reluctant to answer, Tasi presses for more information, Yord eventually reveals that the target is somebody he knows.

“… How do you know an accused murderer?” Tasi says carefully.

Yord’s expression remains conflicted as he docks the ship, not meeting his padawan’s eye. “Because we trained together at the Temple.”

This creates intrigue regarding Osha, tells the audience the council chose Yord specifically, that silence and somberness is out of character for Yord, and that Tasi is forward thinking and inexperienced, hence her need to ask questions.

I think I would have liked for Yord to at least attempt to compel Osha to tell the truth since that’s what he did to the Nemoidian officer on the bridge. Osha resists because he didn’t ask. Her being able to resist further establishes that she had training at the temple, showing rather than telling us more about her character. How she responds to that compulsion would inform Yord (by extension the audience) of her character, and regardless of her emotional response it raises suspicions around her.

On the other side, Yord could ask her if he could search her mind for the truth and if she says no -> suspicious, but if she says yes and he can’t find anything, it gives his character reason to doubt she did it, furthering the mystery, though his padawan could then point out “Unless she really is powerful enough to have killed a Jedi Master, which means she’s powerful enough to hide it from you.” Everything can be used to further the conflict and give it more complexities while still feeling like the natural progression the story would take. Yord will ultimately decide during the span of questioning, given what else they glean from her responses and Fillik’s possible interruption, that even if he could sense she was telling the truth they should still bring her in. Maybe a Jedi Master will be able to tell if she’s lying.

Having Yord be quiet, observing Osha’s responses while Tasi questions her on her whereabouts and opinions on the Order and Indara would have also built up his character as intelligent/capable of deductive reasoning and cautious/prepared in the face of danger, thus being the right choice to send on a mission to apprehend somebody who they believe capable of killing a Jedi Master. He shouldn’t have been revealing all of his cards while he was there in the first place— People will reveal themselves as they talk the longer you stay quiet.

Now the questioning scene is open to them asking specific questions regarding Osha’s recent activity without being bogged down by the past. The padawan goes in understanding why they doubly need to remain on guard, she’s able to ask questions specific to Osha’s whereabouts and see if she has an alibi with witnesses for the night before, Yord is able to ask questions specific to the Temple without having to spell everything out, and Osha can gather from their questioning that a crime has been committed and that she’s considered a suspect. Yord asks Osha questions specific to Osha’s past relationship with Master Indara, tensions rise between them as Osha starts to ask her own questions, piecing things together and asking what happened to Indara, Fillik could come in and the questioning broadens to him like above, and the four of them are interrupted by the witness being escorted in and saying “That’s her, she’s the one that killed the Jedi!”

The scene has its own building tension, we get exposition in the form of forward momentum, characters discovering things as they happen, and it would logically (like it should have in the canon scene) result in Osha having a much stronger response and protestations at being wrongfully accused of a pretty heinous crime against somebody she had no reason to kill. She should have been either verbally or physically fighting back/resisting being dragged away, the revelation as much a surprise to her as it would have been to the Jedi including Yord and Tasi when they heard it at the temple. Her protests can still be followed up with her vehement denial of such a thing, fiercely stating that she knows the council will believe her. Depending on how you want character relationships to develop, Yord can either try and fail to remain neutral as he’s cuffing Osha as she pleads and we can see that it’s a genuine struggle for him, or he manages to control his emotions to the point he can appeal to hers, telling her not to fight, that they’ll take it up with the council

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Always Be Introducing Your Characters

I have to say I don’t really care about Jecki Lon, and indifference to a character is almost worse than active dislike. There are really no strong opinions to be had one way or another because she’s not really that interesting and there’s nothing that really ties her to the plot other than to be someone to ask Sol questions he can give exposition to. She doesn’t have any flaws, she doesn’t have her own objectives, and she’s kind of dull to listen to like the rest of the side characters.

Considering her introduction is with the “Doomed to repeat the past if we don’t learn from it” conversation with Sol, I thought Jecki, Sol’s current padawan, was going to be a mirror to Osha, Sol’s past padawan, but there hasn’t been enough significant development on her part with (or without) Sol for there to be any strong correlations or parallels.

To establish some sense of objective and character flaw it would have been good for her to go digging into Osha’s past and information the Jedi temple would have on her so that 1. The audience receives exposition in a more natural way than her and Yord just straight up asking Sol a bunch of (potentially painful) questions for the audience’s sake on the ship, and 2. So we see more of her character and she’s given a proactive goal and interest of her own in the story. Right now she still feels like she’s tacked on to be an extra set of hands and act as a mouthpiece for exposition. I don’t really get much of a sense of individuality or character from her outside of “follows rules,” which isn’t enough to interest me.

A way to improve the exposition and tell us more about both her and Yord’s characters is if Jecki started digging through Sol’s personal effects on the ship or was shown to have stolen a temple dossier or files from Sol’s office to look through and get some more background on Osha since Sol should have been more evasive about answering questions about Osha, reserving his thoughts for when he’s able to track her down. Sol has already shown resistance to her questioning his past with Osha, so it would be only natural for her to continue investigating.

Jecki could have been established with the rule-following characterization but then shown starting to bend the rules after Sol evades some (better-written) more pointed questions, going against what her own character would prefer, because she sees her master not abiding by the rules they both should already know to be true (not allowing one’s attachments to interfere with what needs to be done for the greater good). It gives her enough internal justification to satisfy her curiosity, since investigation is part and parcel to how mysteries as a genre work in the first place.

With the change of Yord only knowing about Osha’s past at the temple, he wouldn’t think to go digging into anything prior to her time there since he’d have no reason to think it had a bearing on the current investigation. When Jecki’s curiosity compels her to snoop, the scene on the ship becomes more interesting because Yord could’ve caught her and started to reprimand her (also being a stickler for the rules) before she asks him if he knew anything about Osha’s past. Osha’s homeworld, details about the coven, the fire, how it was started, or the fact Osha had a twin who didn’t survive are all possible pieces of exposition Jecki and by extension Yord could find that feel more natural under these circumstances, and it gives those two characters reason to be suspicious of any leeway Sol grants Osha when they find her. Any or all of it reveals something to Sol’s current padawan about his past one, setting up how Jecki (and Yord) will interact with Osha and Sol down the road.

As the two of them discuss what they’ve found, drawing conclusions and debating in whispers, neither realize their absences were noticed, and ultimately that’s when Sol catches them both

Sol either closes off their line of questioning (their specific questions revealing more of what either character prioritizes, Sol’s responses revealing more of his own character), or he could give a cryptic, heavy answer that tells them enough to realize something bad went down that night, shutting the both of them up. It leaves questions unanswered to come up later, it reveals more of the characters, and it sets up Yord and Jecki to have their own perspectives that develop over the course of the story. They get the same information as in canon in a more interesting way, and it keeps Sol from flat out stating something he then immediately goes back on when he meets Osha again at the end of the episode. Jecki now has to wonder what it is about the past Sol doesn’t want to repeat, and at the end of this episode when Jecki and Yord see Sol save Osha and refuse to handcuff her, the two of them could then share a look of trepidation after Sol and Osha pass, both thinking the same thing: Sol may already be too emotionally compromised to make clear calls regarding the alleged murderer in their midst, and they need to watch/listen to him carefully moving forward. That creates a source of interpersonal conflict that will keep the characters (and by extent the audience) asking the right questions as the mystery unfolds.

The Jedi rule warning against attachments is meant to be a self-imposed accountability measure against caring about any singular person or thing above doing what is best for the greater good. Because the Jedi were a specific order of people dedicated to protecting others, it wasn’t just a belief system but a lifestyle combined with a martial art and specific training in the Force. A Jedi’s relationships with other people, regardless of how good and selfless they are, cannot take precedence above doing what is necessary to save or protect the most amount of people. They knew if they allowed their emotions to cloud their judgment, they were capable of harm (either directly or through negligence) greater than that of the average person because they had been specifically trained with those abilities.

Depending on how you wanted Jecki’s character to evolve throughout the season, her curiosity could either lead to jealousy, if Sol genuinely does start to neglect her in favor of Osha (even if its not purposeful on his part, Osha just happens to be who the story/mission is centered around), or it could lead to a more mature response of seeing Sol more of a peer to be held accountable and less of a mentor to be admired and followed with few questions as she nears the end of her time as a padawan, meaning she’s concerned his own perspective will be compromised because he loves Osha too much to remain objective.

Either of those could result in a more severe fight with Sol later on when he inevitably does make a bad call, and regardless of Jecki’s progress leading to that point, even righteous anger directed towards holding him accountable can be interesting and still done in a way that audiences haven’t seen before. Holding one’s mentor accountable and saying the hard things that need to be done without involving one’s own emotional attachment to the relationship creates plenty of opportunities for drama, hard decisions/discussions, and character development, furthering Jecki’s standing as someone committed to following the rules because the rules are there for a reason. That response from somebody younger and less experienced would be harder for Sol to take as opposed to people higher than him on the council. Jecki wouldn’t even have to take issue with Osha personally for that to develop, which gives her own character inner conflict as well. Any or all of that would have been a unique perspective and character we haven’t seen yet from Star Wars, and it gives the characters actionable objectives to pursue or work around the rest of the story.

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Humor/Tone Falling Flat, Undermining Characterizations and Tension

A lot of the humor doesn’t land for me because the jokes either feel like ones we’ve heard before that are now overdone, or they feel out of place within the progression of the scene, story, or characterizations, as though the writers came up with a bunch of jokes and tried to write the scenes around setting those jokes up. I’m not sure if it’s been done in an attempt to keep the show from being “too dark,” or if the target audience is younger than I initially thought, but to me they really just aren’t working.

The one that immediately comes to mind in these early episodes is Jecki’s attempt at conveying what kind of person Yord is (or what she thinks of him) by her tone, leading into a gratuitous shirtless scene with Yord that… doesn’t really tell us anything about his character. If you’re going to have a shirtless scene it has to mean something, but he’s just. Idk, deodorizing his robe for some reason. Leading right into a scene with him after the padawan’s complaint should convey to the audience something indicative of his character since the padawan’s delivery of “he’s just… Yord,” implies there’s no other explanation needed for whatever annoying thing he does that is supposedly consistent with his personality

I don’t care that it’s a shirtless scene, my complaint is that it’s unfunny, tonally out of sync, and doesn’t tell us anything besides that Jecki finds him annoying for some unspecified reason. Shirtless scenes have to say something about the character and/or the story or they’re just eye candy for the audience, which in this story feels cheap, confusing, and out of place.

Anakin’s shirtless scene while having/waking up after a nightmare in Revenge of the Sith tells us that not only does that character feel vulnerable, but that he’s there in Padme’s bed next to her and there’s a clear reason why he was there in the first place.

Princess Leia being forced into a slave girl outfit tells us a lot about her situation in Jabba’s Palace, and it tells us a lot about Jabba the Hutt and the denizens of the court. While she is also pretty obvious eye candy for the audience, it also highlights that the one person she loves romantically, who also loves her, is blind the entire time and never sees her at all, which is important for Han Solo’s characterization later when he makes his feelings clear to her, showing the audience it was never just a physical thing for them.

Yord’s not not showing off/flirting with anybody in say, a sparring arena where he’s justified in not wearing a shirt, so he’s not showing off either his appearance or skill in an attempt to impress people. He’s not lifting weights or preening in front of a mirror or fixing his hair, something that would tell us he’s concerned about his appearance, which means it’s not a case of vanity either, and nothing up to that point (or past that, seeing Episode 4, therefore half the season) tells us either of those things are part of his character.

That leads me to think the scene was supposed to be a way for the directors to tell the audience the padawan (and possibly by extent other people at the temple?) finds Yord insufferable or vain or shallow in some way, and that that’s supposed to suffice as the source of conflict/disagreement between those characters moving forward. However, that character attribute isn’t consistent with what we’ve seen of Yord so far, and nothing following that scene reinforces those ideas at all. If anything, Yord’s got the most objective eye and all of his suggestions and protests are reasonable. I think his plan in Episode 2 regarding Qimir in the apothecary was better as opposed to just blindly sending Osha in not knowing anything about this guy or the nature of his and Mae’s relationship or even what she’s supposed to say once she’s in there. For all they know these two covert assassins could speak with each other in an entirely different language in order to cover their tracks.

All of that ends up making that scene feel gratuitous and out of sync with the characterizations up to and at the end of the episode. It doesn’t serve any purpose other than to make Yord eye candy for the audience, which feels cheap, distracting, and a little insulting to the actor in my opinion, and if it was an attempt at humor, it falls flat because it wasn’t really anything to begin with. I don’t care if you as the writer/director think it’s a fun moment. If it detracts from or doesn’t add to the story, cut it out or make it better and have it mean something.

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Environmental Storytelling: Technical Design and Production

Neither Osha or Fillik feel like they’re in the vacuum of space because their tethers float, but they look like they’re moving with regular gravity. If the boots are supposed to give them traction and keep them grounded, it should take more effort to lift them to walk. Their torsos and arms would move differently regardless.

I bring it up because if employed mekneks aren’t supposed to be human because it’s too dangerous of a job, prove to me that the danger is real just by virtue of the fact they ARE outside in space.

This would be a minor thing I’d be willing to overlook if technical and design flaws didn’t keep coming up and taking me out of the story. These environments are supposed to feel lived in and in doing so the action would feel more like it was happening to characters rather than actors. It’s the difference between the practical effects of Jurassic Park still holding up today because there are actual sets and tangible puppets and animatronics to move around and respond to, versus the almost exclusively CGI dinosaurs and parts of the sets used for Jurassic World (or to use a Star Wars example, the difference between the acting in the original trilogy vs the prequels). You can tell when actors don’t have a physical set to work with— Their performances are going to feel more genuine if they’re not just backdropped by blue screens, green screens, or in this case, the computer-generated Volume.

There doesn’t feel like there’s as much of a sense of danger, which keeps the story from building background tension or feeling complicated on an environmental level. Hoth looks and feels and affects the actors as if it’s freezing in Empire Strikes Back because they were shooting on a glacier. They made the Tauntaun feel like a creature because even after the puppet froze, even after the bellows to make it breathe froze, the props master had everyone grab a bunch of cigarettes and blow smoke into a bag specifically so they could get a shot of the Tauntaun’s breath fogging the air.

Conversely, the ice planet in the first episode of The Acolyte doesn’t feel dangerous because we don't see the environment affect the characters. None of the actors act like they’re in sub-zero temperatures, save for the second time we see Osha wake up (though that doesn’t carry through to her going out in the blizzard and being in the cave); even if you argue that the Jedi have some supernatural way of keeping themselves warm without wearing extra layers, that’s still a conscious choice they’d have to make and we need to see it happen or acknowledged, and Osha should still have been affected regardless. There’s never a single moment we see any of the characters’ breath fog the air.

It’s the kind of practical effect you notice because it’s missing. Osha should have had ice stuck to her hair and over her skin, her lips chapped and changing color, we should have been able to see her breath, and she should have been shivering violently at having crash landed on a snow planet and been unconscious long enough for the snow to pile up in drifts. I’d argue there’s even a pretty notable example of what it looks like for a main Star Wars character to wake up after being knocked unconscious and exposed to the ice and snow for hours on end. If you feel that’s an unfair comparison, I direct you to episode 3 of this same show when the coven is out on the mountain and you CAN see their breath in the air. If you have enough money to CGI a starship, you have enough money to add that in post.

Another example of the set not effectively telling the story is the apothecary in the second episode. It looked like a bar, nothing’s labeled or has a sense of organization or specificity the way a lab or pharmacy would have, Qimir is passed out as if he’d been drinking, and the dialogue of “sampling the merchandise” has been used before in a lot of other media to reference drugs or alcohol, so the audience isn’t going to conclude that it’s an apothecary. The scene where Qimir makes the poison feels too convenient and a little odd since they made it look and sound like he’s easily mixing up a cocktail, and he's not even hunting around the shop for specific ingredients, explaining what he’s doing when she asks him to make something on the fly, instead just grabbing a couple unmarked bottles within arm’s length.

(A side note: If Mae grew up using bunta for hunting, how does she not know how to make the poison for master Torbin herself?)

The end scene of episode two is another standout example of both the bad script and ineffective set design. The scrappers trekking through the forest are shot on a well defined path clear of brush with an obvious view of the ship they “stumble upon,” which makes the line “Hey look a ship! I bet we can scrap it for parts!” seem silly since it’s pretty openly and conveniently placed within their path and line of sight. The dialogue is pretty sparse and cliché (“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this!”) before they walk right onto the next set location we need them to get to for plot reasons all “Oh look, I wonder what that could be 🤔.” If these two are lost in the woods, give us a view of them in profile obscured by trees and actively wading through brush at chest height while they bicker, and then make them stumble out into the clearing or notice the ship through the trees and go to investigate. If the showrunners are trying to tell us the Wookiee Jedi is in a hard-to-reach remote location in the middle of nowhere, they failed to do that because it looks pretty easy to just walk right into this guy’s front yard. If he’s in self-exile or hiding on purpose, have him shoot a warning shot from inside or on top of the ship, or have the scrappers fall into some traps or something. Do something more specific to tell us about the world or characters

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Most of the above complaints stem from a poorly written story, and what results means it’s not interesting to watch even as a layman or passive viewer. They have some really interesting ideas, but without good scripts, you can’t come up with interesting characters or actions for those characters to do because you haven’t written those characters with enough specificity or conflicting goals. Combine that with minimalist sets that don’t create enough of an environment to interact with and you can’t do any interesting camerawork. Having exposition given almost entirely through dialogue leaves no room for visual or environmental storytelling and missed opportunities for places where characters’ past and relationships could be furthered through the expressions they have and the actions we see them take. There’s no building upon the scenes we’ve already seen, there’s no layers or nuance to peel away, and the characters telling each other everything— often including those characters feelings— means the audience doesn’t have to work to piece anything together. At best the story feels like a simple junior high novel with little narrative tension or understanding of how complicated socio-political issues interconnect and the characters have little depth and aren’t strong enough to even compel me to go along for the ride.