Star Wars has run up its tab. That's how I feel about it now: it has to pay me for all the time I spent giving them a chance over and over the last few years. Is that gonna be "The Mandalorian & Grogu"? Even the name sounds weird.
I remember when the idea of Star Wars shows had me cranked the fuck up. And honestly, it did happen a couple times - the dream. Mandalorian's first season, the end of the second season, and especially Andor all show what it looks like when you have a setting like this and leave it to people who get it. Eventually they get onto some cordyceps shit - when they do have a win, they demand that it become a lobotomized host for a raft of other aspirations. They aren't content to merely have a cool, lucrative goose. They want to fuck with the goose! Leave the goose alone.
A lot of it is just bad, by percentage - incredibly uneven. Worse than a merely bad show, there are little fingers of cool stuff poking up sometimes and a lot of empty, empty space. If it was just not good I could avoid it in peace, but because I have a mental disorder that makes me give things a chance, I'm routinely scourged. Self-flagellated, I guess.
I get paid for that sometimes, though. My favorite part of the Acolyte was the part that the writers seemed most excited about too - Baylan Skoll, who the late Ray Stevenson invested with such weary weight. He gave a voice, presence, and strategy to a different way of looking at the force - broadly, philosophically. Everybody else in that show is completely nuts, barely coherent in their actions, except for the David Tennant Robot. Yes, I know his name. But he was charting a course for this "grey jedi" stuff that keeps popping up, and I bought it coming from him because he was capable of selling it. It's a huge loss.
(CW)TB out.
