Star Wars Black Series

The Stranger was the best part of the Acolyte, and I can't wait to get his figure. But from the Acolyte Visual Dictionary, we learned some other really cool things about The Stranger that weren't certain in the show.

First off, The Stranger IS NOT Darth Plagueis' Sith Apprentice. Like the Jedi, The Stranger has no idea the Sith Survived and still exist,plotting in the shadows.

And the second, The Stranger actually is the first Ren. He is the first member and creator of what will become the Knights of Ren. Which is why his helmet/mask has similarities to Kylo's and other Knights of Ren's masks. And it plays Kylo Rens theme occasionally when The Stranger is on screen.

Cool character with lots of potential.
 
The Stranger's fight choreography was really good, and I liked the introduction of cortosis, but I think they really benefitted from some causality slight of hand.

Spoilers if you haven't seen it yet


He murders a bunch of nameless Jedi and you're, like, not at all shocked. But it convinces you it's a low-stakes fight because they brought a bunch of red shirts to do the dying. So you're confident nobody else will- oh shit, Jord! And then they get you again. You've just come down from the surprise death of a named character, thinking "yeah, they really got me with that- oh shit, Jeki!!"

They use your genre savvy against you to up the shocks. I don't think you often see this kind of story telling used for fights.
 
The fight definitely goes from "are Jedi subject to the inverse ninja law" and then he ups the stakes once and that's shocking, then he ups the stakes again and it changes the whole arc and expectation of the story. the show really does break a lot of the established/expected structure of live-action Star Wars.
 
Not to mention our first on-screen instances of
lightsaber bleeding and someone actually giving in to the Dark Side. Not counting Anakin, of course, whose turn was much slower and drawn out. I'm glad we finally saw someone give in to the temptation (though seeing Qimir all shirtless and wet probably helped in that regard). It's what I was kind of hoping would happen with Rey in TLJ, even for a little bit. It's nice seeing Jedi be all good and well-behaved, but I love those moments when they give in. It's what made me love characters like Barriss even more.

I loved season 1, but I do feel like things were gonna get really interesting in season 2. I really hope we see these characters again in some form, especially Qimir/Stranger. I know we get hints of his backstory, but I really would've loved to learn more, and to see the darker sides of the Jedi fleshed out. I know we don't know why Vernestra did what she did, but I have a feeling that, like season 1, it would've presented it in a way where we get both sides to the story and are allowed to make up our own minds.
 
joshsquash729 said:
I loved season 1, but I do feel like things were gonna get really interesting in season 2.
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I think my biggest complaint about modern television, not just this show, is the way networks give up on projects after what would have amounted to the first 1/3 of a single season of a pre-"prestige television" era show. I wonder how many (take your pick of your favorite long running show - Babylon 5, Buffy, ST:TNG, Vikings, whatever) beloved shows we would have been denied if networks pulled the trigger and killed shows after the first eight or ten episodes.

I know part of it is responding to the fact that nobody has an attention span or time to sit with media anymore (hell, Netflix rejects scripts if they're too complex because Netflix considers itself "second screen" entertainment and does not greenlight shows that you need to spend your whole focus on) but I know personally there's been at least three or four shows recently where I struggled with the first season, got into it the second season, actually started liking it in the third, and saw it canceled there, right at the point a show pre-streaming would have been wrapping up Season 1.

Short form stories are great, some of my favorite shows only had eight episodes a season, but man, we don't let shows cook or breathe anymore.

For obvious reasons the old anime joke springs to mind about how the first season is about an awkward kid getting powers and sweating around hot girls and ten seasons later it's about the importance of killing God...
 
docsilence said:
I think my biggest complaint about modern television, not just this show, is the way networks give up on projects after what would have amounted to the first 1/3 of a single season of a pre-"prestige television" era show. I wonder how many (take your pick of your favorite long running show - Babylon 5, Buffy, ST:TNG, Vikings, whatever) beloved shows we would have been denied if networks pulled the trigger and killed shows after the first eight or ten episodes.
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Right. All good examples (at least the ones I'm familiar with) but it's really REALLY rare to get a show, whether it be drama, sci-fi, or even comedies, where the first season is the same quality as the final one, or at least close. I can certainly name a few, but there's also plenty of shows, even network shows with full seasons, where it took two or three seasons for their engine to really get up to speed.
docsilence said:
I know part of it is responding to the fact that nobody has an attention span or time to sit with media anymore (hell, Netflix rejects scripts if they're too complex because Netflix considers itself "second screen" entertainment and does not greenlight shows that you need to spend your whole focus on)
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Which explains a lot. Netflix has a few things I like but I mostly come to it to rewatch old favorites anymore. Right now they're getting a bunch of my time because I'm rewatching Better Call Saul, which is one of the shows where I feel it maintains an amazing quality throughout and doesn't have even one bad episode.
docsilence said:
Short form stories are great, some of my favorite shows only had eight episodes a season, but man, we don't let shows cook or breathe anymore.
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And there's some shows where they intentionally told their entire story in one 'season', with 8-10 episodes and they're amazing. In the age of rapidly cancelling shows before given a chance to find an audience, I appreciate when storytellers get it all out at once like that. But cancelling a streaming show for not finding an audience after a month still makes no sense to me because with Network... yeah, no one's watching cancel it, I totally get that. But with streaming? Word of mouth may take a year sometimes but it's something that is ALWAYS available. Network show, oh damn that sounds great but I missed it! Ah well. Maybe it'll be streaming on an app thirty years from now when someone invents that. But on a streaming service? One night I may be sifting through my voluminous watchlist and finally get to that series one friend told me was worth checking out, get hooked, and tell five coworkers about it the next day.
 
Ru1977 said:
Right. All good examples (at least the ones I'm familiar with) but it's really REALLY rare to get a show, whether it be drama, sci-fi, or even comedies, where the first season is the same quality as the final one, or at least close. I can certainly name a few, but there's also plenty of shows, even network shows with full seasons, where it took two or three seasons for their engine to really get up to speed.

Which explains a lot. Netflix has a few things I like but I mostly come to it to rewatch old favorites anymore. Right now they're getting a bunch of my time because I'm rewatching Better Call Saul, which is one of the shows where I feel it maintains an amazing quality throughout and doesn't have even one bad episode.

And there's some shows where they intentionally told their entire story in one 'season', with 8-10 episodes and they're amazing. In the age of rapidly cancelling shows before given a chance to find an audience, I appreciate when storytellers get it all out at once like that. But cancelling a streaming show for not finding an audience after a month still makes no sense to me because with Network... yeah, no one's watching cancel it, I totally get that. But with streaming? Word of mouth may take a year sometimes but it's something that is ALWAYS available. Network show, oh damn that sounds great but I missed it! Ah well. Maybe it'll be streaming on an app thirty years from now when someone invents that. But on a streaming service? One night I may be sifting through my voluminous watchlist and finally get to that series one friend told me was worth checking out, get hooked, and tell five coworkers about it the next day.
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I've actually got writer friends who had scripts rejected by Netflix specifically with notes to "dumb it down - assume the viewer is also playing on their phone at the same time." Thanks, I hate it...

Netflix also was for a while, and may still, be canceling shows based exclusively on its first two-week viewership. Ever notice the cast and crew blitzing their show on social media? (It was super obvious before everyone abandoned Twitter.) My favorite example of this was watching "1899," which was my favorite kind of spooky story (give me weird shit on boats! I love weird shit on boats!) and I was literally watching it, running on the treadmill, and saw a notification pop up that it wasn't renewed. It had been out for 21 days.

I have no idea what metrics Disney uses for their shows, though. Will there be another season of Ironheart? Who knows! Maybe they'll just shoe-horn her arc into a film like they did with Kamala's. Disney is very weird, but I think they may be bigger-picture planners with their docket of shows where as Netflix is splooge it on the wall and hold a blacklight over it to see if you made art.
 
The Acolyte, like a lot of these shows, was a mixed bag... but it wouldn't have taken much to clean it up into something more respectable and cleaner from every angle. Like a lot of shows these days, it just suffers from 1st draft syndrome. I'm surprised no one watched (or read) the power of many chant and didn't say "hey guys, the internet is going to meme this to hell, we're at a very contentious period in the fandom, we could work this into something with way less cringe potential." It's almost like they knew they were courting controversy for PR purposes, and it dipped too much into the dark side.

That said, The Acolyte may have had me the most excited out of any of the D+ shows since S2 of Mando. I was really interested in where we were going to go with the remaining characters, and there was nearly a blank slate for S2 to ditch what wasn't working and focus on what was. Andor was, of course, great... but there wasn't any mystery there, we're just waiting for Rogue 1 to start. The Acolyte finally gave us some legit bad guys and some high flying lightsaber work, and the galaxy felt new again.

I also love that Qimir is the first Ren. As a Sequel Trilogy fan, I'd love to see more of that lore fleshed out, especially that it begins pre-PT. The comics didn't really hit the nail on the head, I think. Well, I'll settle for his Black Series figure, for now.

The "second screen" concept fills me with an existential dread for the future of absolutely everything. Fingers crossed Gen Alpha eventually pushes against phone culture the way Gen Z is pushing against no-show socks. Rebel, children!
 
I love how a good action figure can rekindle my love for a property I was MEH on. The new Han and Chewie have done that for me. Finally got around to finishing Bad Batch's last season. Loved it. Then Watched Tales of the Underworld and especially liked Cad Bane's backstory. This week I will start Tales of the Empire and The Acolyte. All because I bought 2 great figures a week and a half ago at Walmart. Lol.
 
I adore the Tales of... series. They're all just bite-sized bits of lore that work so well. I keep thinking I'm kinda settled and less interested in Black Series so much these days, but if I get one really nice figure my imagination takes off again. Barriss got my brain cells going this week for sure, and I'm trying to find just the right place to put Ronin in the collection because that's a character who really could exist anywhere.
 
I'm excited for Embo, but worried about him ending up being a traffic cone. I'd also like them to revisit Aurra Sing and give her better articulation.
I will throw cash at whatever company (Hasbro/SHF/MAFEX) gives me an IG-88 that doesn't look like an anthropomorphic pile of baby forks.
 
Red Ogre said:
I'm excited for Embo, but worried about him ending up being a traffic cone. I'd also like them to revisit Aurra Sing and give her better articulation.
I will throw cash at whatever company (Hasbro/SHF/MAFEX) gives me an IG-88 that doesn't look like an anthropomorphic pile of baby forks.
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I took the gear off the BS IG-88 and put it on the Mafex IG-11. It isn't perfect, but it works for me until we get a decent redo of 88
 
Red Ogre said:
I'm excited for Embo, but worried about him ending up being a traffic cone. I'd also like them to revisit Aurra Sing and give her better articulation.
I will throw cash at whatever company (Hasbro/SHF/MAFEX) gives me an IG-88 that doesn't look like an anthropomorphic pile of baby forks.
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They've been more-or-less killing it with the skirts, be they softgoods or soft plastic, so I have faith. I'm surprised they haven't gone back with some of the IG-12 parts and redone IG-88. 12 ain't perfect either- it's just a wonky design that's difficult to translate to plastic- but it's certainly the best one we've gotten.
 
Just as an example of how fucked up Netflix is; The Dragon Prince was one of their best-rated animated shows ever. It had 7 seasons. Critical reception was favorable literally, literally, 100% of the time. No critic has had an unfavorable overall opinion of the show. It averages like 8 out of 10 or higher depending on where you look. Nominated for more than a half-dozen awards, and won two of them.

The creators are literally crowdfunding the next chapter because Netflix isn't interested.

Explain that to me like I'm five.
 
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