“Night” is a fantastic episode of Star Wars television.
After last week’s less-than-stellar episode, “Day,” which felt distinctly like the first half of a story that had only just begun to unfold by the time the credits rolled, “The Acolyte” has come roaring back to life with the excellent new episode, “Night.” Serving up surprises, massive payoffs to last week’s setups, and a veritable stampede of ludicrously well-choreographed action setpieces, “Night” is an excitement-filled and propulsive episode of Star Wars television that takes “The Acolyte” in some truly unexpected directions.
By and large, “Night” feels like a culmination of all that has come before it, in the best of ways. It takes the initial thrust and establishment of the first two episodes, sews in the larger mythology and viewpoints of the third episode’s flashback, and utilizes the scaffolding so painstakingly set up in the fourth episode. “Night” builds on all of this and reaches new summits because of it. It’s a big, expansive episode, with a whole lot of characters being thrown around and a whole lot happening. Yet, director Alex Garcia Lopez is able to keep us anchored in the dramatic dichotomy of the leads, Mae and Osha, as performed incredibly by Amandla Stenberg. In this way, “The Acolyte” embraces a wider breadth of influences (both from within Star Wars and beyond the franchise) and tackles its biggest production yet while remaining rooted in the core themes and emotions of this story, with aplomb.
Previous “The Acolyte” Episodes:
After the excellent hand-to-hand setpieces featured in the earlier episodes of the series, the thought of what showrunner Leslye Headland and choreographer/second unit director Christopher Cowan would do with a full-blown lightsaber duel was immensely tantalizing, and “Night” pays off that anticipation in the most satisfying way imaginable. From end to end, “Night” is essentially just a series of elongated, elaborate duels of some form or another between a multitude of characters, all staged and framed with a real deftness for impact, fluidity, and legibility.
The choreography itself, the physical movement of the performers, is stunning. Star Dafne Keen had mentioned in the press that Cowan and his team sought to deliver lightsaber duel choreography on par with something like the iconic ‘Duel of the Fates’ sequence from the climax of The Phantom Menace, and that sheer scale of ambition comes through in spades. The duels are kinetic and constantly evolving, and like the very best Star Wars duels, each escalates in such a way as to tell its own distinct story.
As with a musical number in a great musical, a great action setpiece pushes the story forward and reveals things about the characters involved in a palpable way. The oft-recited mantra of ‘show don’t tell’ is especially true here. A setpiece that offers nothing but spectacle risks growing shallow and dull very quickly, essentially making it feel like the story you’ve been watching has been put on hold for the duration of this sequence and will resume momentarily. Fortunately, Headland, Alex Garcia Lopez, and Cowan’s action sequences are anything but that, each one testing the mettle of its participants, revealing unspoken truths about them and their priorities in the process, and ultimately having dire consequences.
I especially loved how the motivations of each character in the duels were made clear. Beyond just opposition or conflict because someone has a different colored lightsaber, these sequences saw everyone involved actively pursuing a specific want, and these wants coming into conflict led to the action sequences. This is textbook Star Wars stuff, the kind of principles that led George Lucas to spend an entire trilogy building up the monumental emotional pathos and motivational disconnect between Anakin and Obi-Wan prior to their life-altering showdown in Revenge of the Sith. But “The Acolyte” is doing all of this incredibly well.
In tandem with this, we need to praise the performers themselves, so many of whom hold their own in these sequences so stupendously. Bringing emotional delivery and exacting physicality to a role is a unique gift, and one that many of the performers here have in spades. Dafne Keen is an early standout of the episode, featuring in many of the best individual setpieces and incorporating some incredibly complex choreography into a performance that feels like a natural evolution of her work in the earlier episodes. Simultaneously, Charlie Barnett does some great work here as well, bringing Yord’s infallible sense of law-abiding duty to the forefront even as he’s fighting for his life.
However, the real standouts of the setpieces are the sensational two-header of Manny Jacinto and Lee Jung-jae. In a storyline that finally embraces the inevitable reveal of Jacinto’s character, “The Acolyte” gets to have its cake and eat it too, capitalizing on the classically Campbellian roots inherent to the turn and enabling Jacinto to nearly single-handedly steal the show. He is fantastic in the role, bringing a raw physicality to a performance that feels deeply indebted to Akira Kurosawa mainstay Toshiro Mifune (specifically, his performance in the masterful Rashomon) in fantastic fashion. Meanwhile, Lee Jung-jae continues to bring a deeply palpable sense of righteousness to Sol, while also executing some insanely believable up-close choreography. There’s a moment in the middle of the episode where the lightsabers are cast aside for a moment and Lee Jung-jae engages in some no-holds-barred hand-to-hand brawling with the antagonist, and it’s viscerally impactful, ballistic stuff.
And last but certainly not least, Amandla Stenberg continues to be a revelation as both Mae and Osha. “Night” allows the actress the chance to pit the two characters against each other in a more direct way than ever before, and she knocks the episode’s key emotional scene out of the park. The fact that she does all of this, while also accounting for the complex camera movement and staging necessary to bring the two halves of her performance into a cohesive frame, only makes it all the more impressive.
The script by Kor Adana and Cameron Squires is well-paced and manages to close out the episode on some deeply thoughtful and intriguing threads beginning to unravel. It’s a ton of fun to hear Michael Abels’ score go more traditionally John Williams-y alongside the duels, even subtly invoking ‘Kylo Ren’s Theme’ at one point to insane effect.
It’s also great to see Alex Garcia Lopez come back after putting in all the legwork last week and get to savor the enjoyment of paying it all off this week. He does a great job of accentuating the action, building tension, and ultimately delivering some shocking reveals and consequences in standout visual form.
RGM GRADE
(B+)
Overall, “Night” is a fantastic episode of Star Wars television. It builds off the back of the foundations established by each of the four previous episodes in exciting ways and delivers a large helping of tremendously staged action while keeping character, emotion, and theme at the forefront of the work. It leaves one with the feeling that earlier episodes of “The Acolyte“ will now feel even more satisfying, given the direction it winds up going in, and that future episodes can’t come soon enough.
