THE ACOLYTE Showrunner Offers Insight on The Surprising Opening "You Have To Go Hard"

The first two episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now available to watch on Disney+, and it opens up in a surprising way that seemed to shock fans.

I wasn’t expecting things to play out the way they did, so it was definitely a jarring start to a story that just seemed to get less and less interesting as it wernt’t on.

If you haven’t watched the first episode yet, there are spoilers ahead! Showrunner Leslye Headland recently offered some insight on the opening and why she made the decision that she did.

The series begins with a duel between Master Indara (Carrie-Ann Moss) and assassin Mae (Amandla Stenberg).

As you know, Moss was being billed as a main character in the series in all of the marketing for the series, but it turns out that’s not the case at all. The creative team kills her off in the early moments of the show.

This is a Jedi character whose skills would not have allowed herself to be killed so easily, but, you know, that’s how the story was written.

When talking about why they made the decision to kill off this character, Headland explained: "From a filmmaker perspective, I just felt like with the cold open, especially with a new story, that you just have to go hard.”

She added: “You have to say the Jedi are going to take some Ls; you're not going to know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And it's going to feel very visceral."

Headland continues, "Even if you already know it's going to happen, it doesn't have to be a big gotcha moment. It just has to be a moment where the emotional and the physical – meaning the fights – melt together.

“Carrie-Anne, not just being an action legend, is also a phenomenal actress. She was able to play all those beats within the fight as well as, of course, her death scene"

I get it, I understand what they were trying to do, but if they were going to do that, then they shouldn’t have built the character up to be a Jedi that would be unbeatable, when she was killed off it just wasn’t believable. Moss’s character would have kicked Mae’s ass and not allow her to take her out.

I’m just saying that if they were going to kill off a Jedi character in the story, you’ve got to set up the fact that she’s not the most competent Jedi and is someone who is beatable.

Manny Jacinto, who plays Qimir in the series went on to say: “Having Trinity in Star Wars, it really sets the tone of what the audience should expect. This isn’t going to be a type of Star Wars that we’ve seen before. It’s going to be more physical. You just set a completely different tone.”

So far, after watching the first two episodes, I’m not sold on it. What are your thoughts on the opening sequence of the show and the decision to kill off Moss’s character?

Source: GamesRadar