‘The Acolyte’: Can Manny Jacinto’s Bulging Biceps Save the Flailing Show?

The Acolyte, Disney’s latest attempt to bring Star Wars to the small screen, received a surprising jolt at its halfway point. The Disney+ series has languished in its uncompelling revenge plot that threatens to consign it to the same forgettable heap as Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi before it. Yet, while the show hasn’t improved, it has found its feet—or rather, its arms? Manny Jacinto’s arms, to be exact. Manny Jacinto’s toned, well-defined, often perfectly wettened arms… wait, what was I saying? Oh yes, The Acolyte is still bad but Manny Jacinto’s rocking bod might save it.

Though Jacinto’s Qimir was present in earlier episodes, it was his reveal as “The Stranger”—the Sith benefactor to Mae’s (Amandla Stenberg) Jedi-hunting murder romp around the galaxy—in Episode 5 that showed us that there’s a sexy side to the force. The twist itself wasn’t a surprise, but what was hard to foresee was, despite The Acolyte taking every opportunity to get him wet, how much of a thirst Jacinto’s soaking wet abs would inspire in everyone. Just go look at Twitter to see how rabid it’s become—no, go look: People are helpfully clipping The Acolyte up so you can just watch Jacinto’s bits if you want to.

The unmasking of Jacinto as the series’ big bad also coincided with one of The Acolyte’s rare bright spots—literally, this show is so dark—thanks to a technically impressive and, at times, exhilarating lightsaber battle between a band of Jedi redshirts led by Master Sol (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae) and a Qimir intent on retrieving his would be apprentice, Mae from their potential custody. It should have served as a memorable set piece to mark the series’ halfway point, instead it’s been overshadowed for serving Jacinto’s biceps.

Thrilling as the encounter is, it’s also brief—bookended by a tedious trudge through the forest and a sixth episode that sees Qimir espousing tired philosophy in between gun shows. In returning to its sluggish, monotonous pace, one could, justifiably, dismiss the buzz now surrounding The Acolyte. Indeed, it remains hard to pretend there’s much worth watching in the series. But it’s hard to deny how much the change in opinion about the show has been inspired by viewers’ desire to just stare at him—to just take it all in.

That’s something to which Osha (also Amandla Stenberg) clearly isn’t immune. When, following the battle in Episode 5, Qimir absconds with her to an “unknown planet”—thanks Disney’s comically large location tags—she catches him bathing in a pool and, when she declines the offer to join him, he emerges and she looks right at it. It’s a rare sexually charged moment for the franchise. The Acolyte may lack a compelling narrative, but in the space of two episodes it’s become a recovering Tumblr user’s dream.

Yet, tracing the lines in Jacinto’s muscles is only a distraction. It may briefly bring more viewers to The Acolyte but it’s hard to see it signaling a significant shift that can save the series from itself. Indeed, as the series returned to its lumbering and tepid plot in Episode 6, the buzz surrounding thirsting for Jacinto does lay bare how ineffective The Acolyte is as a narrative, exemplified in the very same scene that brought us sexy Sith Qimir in the first place.

As he makes short work of Sol’s unnamed Jedi pals, Qimir also dispatches Sol’s apprentice Jecki (thanks for showing up, Dafne Keen) and demonstrates why we should avoid chiropractors on Yord (Charlie Bennett). It’s a sudden break in the color and movement that briefly felt like shades of Star Wars at its best. A pair of moments that should, in a better-handled series, feel emotionally profound and shocking. Yet, the sudden deaths of two named characters, ostensibly those close to Osha, ends up feeling about as important as Qimir killing “spare Jedi #3” minutes earlier.

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Having spent all of 90 minutes with Yord and Jecki, in which they’ve only been boiled down to either wearing a scowl and being nice respectively, there’s simply no reason to care that they’re gone—even Osha immediately moves on to ogling Qimir’s lightsaber. Nor can The Acolyte give us any reason to care about any of these characters. It’s just a shallow hop from one scene to another as it fights to fit into Disney’s oddly short runtimes, with so little room for emotional development in between the constant exposition required to keep what story is there moving. Can we be blamed, then, if we can only focus on how hot Jacinto looked while murdering Osha’s new and old best friends when the series can’t bring itself to explore any character beyond what appears on the surface?

It cuts to the heart (sorry, Jecki) of The Acolyte’s issues. In a series that uses, like so many forgettable Star Wars series before, a flood of reference, shock factor, and fake outs in lieu of real storytelling, it struggles to ever show us anything meaningful or affecting. It simply tells us that we should care about characters or makes Lee Jung-jae mug at them with a vaguely sympathetic air, but fails to actually write a compelling story around them.

Jecki’s death, the umbramoths carrying Qimir away only for him to float down minutes later, the baffling switcheroo as Mae escapes with Sol—it puts me in mind of similarly shallow storytelling in prestige TV. Remember the collective groans of disappointment when The Walking Dead threatened to give Glenn (Steven Yeun) an unexpected death at a dumpster, only to chicken out? Or the outrage as Varys’ (Conleth Hill) storyline was suddenly cut short in a Game of Thrones rushing to its end? These should serve as warnings that this kind of storytelling, which assumes the audience is unable to grasp complex or meaningful emotion, doesn’t work. Yet it’s exactly the narrative The Acolyte embraces, seemingly in the hope of creating shocking moments that play well in social media.

To be fair, it’s done that. Manny Jacinto is a hit. Perhaps in the burgeoning relationship between Qimir and Osha and the wild reaction to Jacinto’s arms, we are catching a glimpse of what Star Wars really needs according to its fans: something visually stimulating, real tension, relatable humanity. Yet, because of how little oomph The Acolyte has, how tepid and vapid it is under its shallow surface, we have to project all of that on Manny Jacinto’s raw sex appeal and where that might take the show.

In the face of a concerted effort to review bomb the series, driven by middle-aged men in baseball caps, there’s something refreshing in The Acolyte finding a positive online presence—even if the focus is more on Manny Jacinto than the series’ limited offerings. There’s just not enough substance in The Acolyte for it to run with that new popularity, to do something interesting with it. In a story that lacks any sense of depth, we’re encouraged to never look past the surface, to never ask questions, and just accept what we’re seeing can parade as narrative. Yet, in asking us to only look at the surface, it allows us to disconnect and become distracted by the prettiest surface on show: Manny Jacinto, who always looks like he’s just gotten out of the shower.

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