For some odd reason I decided to watch Disney’s new show, The Acolyte. I guess all the buzz about how bad it is got me intrigued. And it’s bad, to be sure. It’s not all that fun, though, since it’s very slow. Each episode could have five to ten minutes trimmed from it without removing any plot points, dialog, or important reaction shots. Which is not to say that they wouldn’t benefit considerably from trimming some of that, too. The episodes are about forty minutes long and with decent editing for pace, I think they could easily be twenty five minutes long without feeling rushed. Which would make enjoying the badness a lot more fun.

Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that The Acolyte is, at its core, a mystery. It’s not detective fiction; it’s more like a suspense thriller—you don’t know who the good guys are or who the main character can trust. Everyone has a story, we only know parts of them, and we don’t know if any of these stories are true.

Now, when this kind of thing is done well, the fun is that you start to figure out who you can trust because there become cracks in the stories of the people you can’t trust. Things they say or do don’t quite fit in and though they have explanations, the explanations don’t quite fit.

Frankly, I think it’s quite rare for this sort of thing to be done well because it’s very hard to pull off. But what really doesn’t work in this genre is having gaping plot holes early on. For example, having a fire break out in the vacuum of space which gets put out by smothering it with a fire extinguisher. Later on, when a stone building catches fire like it’s made of paper soaked in gasoline, you can’t say, “That couldn’t have come from the fire Mae started because there was no way for it to spread so quickly in a stone building. It must have been the Jedi and they used Mae happening to set fire to a book as a cover!” You can’t say this because the idiots who wrote a scene with metal catching fire in the vacuum of space easily might not realize that stone doesn’t catch fire as readily as paper soaked in gasoline. Then again, for all we know, they did and the pointless scene of the metal-on-fire-in-outer-space was meant to prepare us to accept stone catching fire.

I think that the way you’re supposed to watch this kind of show (that is, what the makers of it hope you will do) is to turn off the rational part of your brain and just feel whatever the music and acting is telling you to feel in the moment with no reference to having seen anything before. Which really doesn’t fit into the suspense thriller genre, in which the primary pleasure (outside of the frequent action scenes, which The Acolyte is sparse on) is intellectual.

This also makes guessing the identity of the sith master (or whatever he’s supposed to be that’s t he obvious equivalent of the sith) no fun. My best guesses—based on the psychology of the writers so far, not the plot—is either master Vernestra, mother Kora, mother Aniseya, or someone we haven’t met yet. I think that the fourth episode is trying to set us up to believe it’s Qimir (the character that Critical Drinker refers to as “discount Ezra Miller”), which means that it’s almost certainly not him because it’s too early for it to be him. Now, in a well-written show, you could consider various bits of evidence presented within the episodes. In this show, that would be a waste of time because anything that you see could easily just be the writers being incompetent. And even my guesses about who the sith is are based on the assumption that a character being in the same scene as the sith means that they definitely can’t be the sith. For all I know, that’s not true and master Sol or Yorg is the sith.

This is one thing that, for all its flaws, I have to give The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson never wrote anything that depended on you remembering anything else he wrote or thinking that it made sense.