The first season of The Acolyte wrapped up the other week, and while the finale picked things up somewhat (at least if you ask me), it seems doubtful that the show will escape the bad reputation it's gained among Star Wars fans. The series has been criticized pretty mercilessly, sometimes for legitimate reasons (the pacing is slack, the show feels out of step with Star Wars, the characters seem to switch motivations every other episode) and dumb ones (the show has Black women in it and is therefore bad). Will Disney look at that and want to grant the series a second season?
Well, maybe, because according to Collider, the show has remained near the top of streaming charts put out by Reelgood, which measures demand by tracking how often people are talking about a given show or movie online. That's not the same thing as hard ratings numbers, and it's possible a lot of that discussion is about how bad The Acolyte is, but buzz is buzz.
That said, showrunner Leslye Headland has heard "nothing" about whether Disney wants a second season of The Acolyte. She's taking it as an opportunity to relax. "I don't even know how many years my brain has been going, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Acolyte, Acolyte, Acolyte— just constantly solving problems, constantly thinking about it. It is very weird to now be in a place where I don't need to do that," she told Entertainment Weekly. “My brain is still doing it. It's almost like if you're running, you can't just stop, can't shut off.”
The Acolyte showrunner has plans for Yoda and Darth Plagueis (if she gets a second season)
The season 1 finale left a lot of threads hanging, so clearly Headland and her team intended for there to be more episodes. Osha ran off with Qimir and will presumably start learning from him how to use the Dark Side of the Force. Qimir erased the memories of Osha's sister Mae, who went back to the planet of Coruscant where she talked with Jedi leader Vernestra Rwoh. Vernestra Rwoh apparently has history with Qimir we don't know about.
Oh, and Yoda showed up at the end. So did a creepy-eyed alien dude named Darth Plagueis, a major figure in Star Wars mythology who showed up onscreen for the first time in The Acolyte:
“That's why it was important to introduce Yoda,” Headland told EW. “If you were going to introduce Plagueis, then you needed a formidable other side of that. As somebody that knows who Plagueis is and knows where the lineage of the Sith is headed, it would be imbalanced if you didn't have somebody on the light side who carried as much gravitas. So to me it just made sense.”
I think it's interesting she talks about these characters this way, like Yoda and Plaguies are two sides of the same coin. Yoda is iconic, but I wonder how many people have any idea who Darth Plagueis is. I'm not a Star Wars superfan, but I've seen every mainline movie, Rogue One and a bunch of the Disney+ TV shows, and while the name rings a bell, I certainly didn't recognize Darth Plagueis on sight in The Acolyte. He just looked like a creepy guy in the bushes to me.
Maybe I'll come to know, love and fear him should The Acolyte season 2 ever get off the ground. In the meantime, all eight episodes are streaming on Disney+.
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