I’m so sad ‘The Acolyte’ was canceled before it could make good on this long-awaited character’s introduction
What a tease.
Outside of its thrilling lightsaber battles, which were the best of the live-action side of the Star Wars franchise, there was only one brief moment in The Acolyte where had I been hooked up to a heart monitor, it would’ve exploded.
For just a few seconds in what we can now call the series finale, we got a small tease of an alien character in raggedy robes watching a ship depart from within a darkened cave. To people who didn’t grow up reading Star Wars expanded universe novels, this meant nothing other than maybe a tease for a new character for a second season that will never arrive. As someone who did read a lot of these novels, that moment that I was so excited for I now look at as a promise that will never be fulfilled.
Darth Plagueis is a character that has never shown up on screen except for those fleeting few moments at the end of the series. But there is a chance you may already be familiar with him thanks to the power of memes. Senator/Emperor Palpatine’s “The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise” speech from Revenge of the Sith has reached meme critical mass. Plagueis was Palpatine’s master for decades before Palpatine killed him, as Sith do.
The relationship between Palpatine and Plagueis is detailed in what is considered one of the all-time great Star Wars novels: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. It’s a weird book in that it’s a prequel to the prequels, and it suffers from all the same annoying tropes prequels (including The Prequels) tend to have. Blatant references to events that will later transpire. The needless inclusion of characters you will formally meet in another story. It’s jammed with mostly successful attempts at clarifying plot threads left dangling from The Prequels. It’s got odd shoutouts to real-world stuff that doesn’t make sense to bring up in-universe. For example, Luceno has characters straight up say the subtitles of Star Wars movies in normal conversation. If you’ve ever wondered if an author can, or should even try to seamlessly incorporate “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Revenge of the Sith” in dialogue, the answer is no, but Luceno tries multiple times. Despite all that, the book is still an incredible read, and it’s all due to its two central characters.
Plagueis may be the one with his name on the cover, but it’s Palpatine’s book. It’s Emperor Palpatine’s origin story seen through the eyes of his doomed master. He trains Palpatine for decades in ways that feel oddly paternal and caring but in the way only stoic military dads who’ve seen some shit can express themselves. It’s all that stern stiff-upper-lip, tough-but-fair kind of child-rearing but with super-powered murder.
Plagueis isn’t the reason Palpatine is evil and wasn’t even the first person to see that evil in him (his dad knew it when Palpatine was just a baby). But he fostered it, and over decades developed it into the monstrous all-consuming power at the center of the galaxy and nine movies. So much of what makes him work as a character, and what ultimately fuels the book, is how his stoicism plays off of Palpatine’s eager sociopathic rich kid entitlement. It feels like a mirror image of the Anakin-Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon dynamic from The Prequels. Without it, the book would just be a bunch of answers to questions nobody cared about.
Now that there’s a chance that I may never get to see that fascinating take on Sith master and apprentice relationships depicted in live-action after having been promised it, I’m left wondering how they would’ve portrayed Plagueis. For as well-developed as he is in Luceno’s book, he still mostly exists to explain how Palpatine went from a run-of-the-mill sociopathic rich kid to a secret Sith senator. The writers of The Acolyte would’ve had an opportunity to apply all of Luceno’s work developing a compelling, enigmatic villain to a new context with new characters and a new story, but with the same endpoint. Kind of like what Dave Filoni and his writers did brilliantly with Grand Admiral Thrawn in Star Wars: Rebels and slightly less brilliantly in Ahsoka.
Would they have shown off Plagueis’ ability to heal himself with the power of the force? That’s Plagueis’ whole deal, and it’s a running theme in nearly every major Star Wars property in the Disney era, from the sequel trilogy to The Mandalorian. I’m sure it’s going to get some heavy play in James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie. It’s a topic that the movies and shows are telling us is vitally important to the franchise. And yet, they just canceled a show featuring a character who, for years, was the center point of that entire thematic element.
I can only assume they canceled The Acolyte knowing that they don’t need Plagueis or the coven of Force witches to tackle the themes of creating life and reviving the dead since they’ve developed new avenues toward it. Rey brought Ren back to life in The Rise Of Skywalker and is getting another movie or three. The Mandalorian’s over-arching story seems to revolve around the scientific side of Palpatine’s immortality. It lived in the background of the animated series The Bad Batch. All that’s already developed, so why keep around a tepidly received show? Just because it would have featured the meme guy?
That’s the nature of modern mega-franchise storytelling: making narrative promises you might have to rescind as plans change with the ebb and flow of profits. The fact that TV shows often get better when they’re given more seasons to find their footing is a relic of the past that streamers would rather you didn’t remember so they can pivot to the next thing without having to pay residuals or renegotiate contracts.
All I’m left with are questions. How would Plagueis have played off of Manny Jacinto’s Sith character and the twins? Would the entire series have ended with Plagueis meeting Palpatine? And, perhaps most importantly, if Darth Plagueis, the book, was a prequel to The Prequels, would that mean The Acolyte would have ended up being a direct prequel to the prequel of The Prequels? I may never know. But probably.
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