How I Wouldn't Do Foreshadowing

It appears the Acolyte has been a huge moneymaker for Youtube content creators watching it in order to pan the series to people with no intention of watching/not watching it.

Having said that, nothing I've seen convinces me that at any point in time "The Acolyte" has been unfairly treated. Unless we take as the first premise of the case of unfairness, that it is fair to allocate a budget of $180 million for eight episodes of a show intended for an incredibly small target audience.

I would put it to you, that it would be forgivable to say that either such a large investment should target the largest possible return, or in the interest in reviving interest in an IP, several smaller bets could have been made to see which one sticks.

Anyway, I haven't watched the show, have no intention to watch the show and am resolutely in the camp that I would prefer there to be less, rather than more star wars content. Given that that is physically impossible, I would settle for Star Wars content to simply stop. I am not hanging out for a return to good star wars, given that I don't think it has ever been achieved. 

What falls into my lap, is an opportunity to ask myself the question: What makes a hack writer?

And film critic youtubers "Film Threat" published a video with the following thumbnail:

I haven't watched the video, it asserts, and I don't even know if this is the case, that the Acolyte like many streaming service content contains a mystery box. My hack test is can I deduce the contents of the mystery box from minimal evidence?

So exhibit one:

Importance to story as a function of layout.

Exhibit two:

Carrie-Anne Moss dies in first scene, allegedly the first seven minutes.

If we all haven't deduced that Carrie-Anne Moss is the most likely candidate to be the guy in the mask, the prize in the mystery box then I don't know what to say. In the above picture you can see the namesake "Acolyte" weilding something like a butterknife to attack Trinity.

So bonus Xibit:

Apparantly the first on-screen instruction the master gives the Acolyte is: "If you kill a jedi with a weapon they won't die." or something.

The prediction reads thus: If the writers of the acolyte are indeed hacks, then the master will take off their mask to reveal they are Trinity from the Matrix.

What I'm willing to concede now, is that if the hood doesn't come off to reveal it is the expensive high profile actress given prominent position on the series promotional material juxtaposed to the character she is disguised as in the same way, what I understand to be the identical twin protagonists are juxtaposed, then it is a clever bluff, red-herring etc. making novel use of star power to throw us off the scent. I don't know what would be a satisfying reveal though, because the opposite of foreshadowing is deus ex machina.

Like when in Psych series 5 finale when fraud psychic detective Shawn Spenser finally sees the face of nemesis serial killer Mr Yin, there's no "reveal" beyond the fact that they got Lance Reddick the actor who played Robocop to cameo as Mr Yin. The reveal is like "ooh did they get Lance Reddick to cameo?"

By contrast, the reveal of the antagonist in Umberto Eco's "In The Name of The Rose" is incredibly satisfying because it makes total sense of a confusing and complicated mystery even though the plot is discovered too late to prevent any deaths but William of the Baskervilles and his student Adso, the detectives in the mystery.

In real life, if you find a series of prostitutes murdered via strangulation and dumped in the woods, we might infer that the killer is likely a male acting alone. Beyond that, it could prove to be almost anyone. If one were to make a documentary miniseries on Gary Ridgeway it likely could not be structured as a mystery, because it doesn't lend itself to a parlour scene where the Poirot deduces which of the suspects is indeed the murderer. Poirot would at first conclude that the killer was a man with a car and likely a drivers license. After gathering half the population of the state in a train carriage, there's no real way for Poirot to point to Gary Ridgeway and say "but because you sign your cheques with a looping 'y' I knew it had to be you!" 

Indeed as the identity of Jack the Ripper is most likely to be. But if you are watching a mystery like the very well-made non-hack 'Broadchurch' Olivia Coleman in the opening scene walks down a street where we meet every single suspect including the killer, so it is all foreshadowed for a satisfying reveal.

A film that would be misconstrued as a mystery is "Anatomy of a Fall" where the premise demands a mystery to set up a situation where a child has to decide if his mother is a murderer or if his father was suicidally depressed. There is no answer nor reveal to the mystery, though the director and writer choose to open and close the film with the dog, whose ball is never scene beyond the opening shot of the film, suggesting that the ambiguity arises from everyone overlooking the possibility that the dad slipped on the dog's ball and fell out the window.

These are all good pieces of foreshadowing. I put it to you, that a hack tries to tell us who the mystery box is as soon as they can, then try to get us to look the other way. Ideally, you do so before you reveal there is a mystery that begs an answer. You get people to rule out a suspect by faking their death.

That's hack foreshadowing 101. 

One of the best reveals, with foreshadowing paying big dividends can be found in the movie "Hot Fuzz" where the writers went to serious effort to create two superimposed plausible conspiracies supported by evidence. Simon Pegg figures everything out, with the one failing of not crediting how insane the conspiracy could be.

So I think 4 episodes of The Acolyte have been made available as at watching. I am yet to watch "The Last Jedi" though I did watch "Solo: A Star Wars Story" on a long haul flight.

Should it turn out Carrie-Anne Moss was just a bait-and-switch purely for the spectacle of killing off a big star in a single scene give or take a flashback at some point. Then, I mean. Well whatever, it doesn't make The Acolyte good, or worth making, or interesting. Just less predictable.

If however, people have to eat their hats because they didn't see Carrie-Anne Moss being revealed to be "the big bad" then I will simply be disappointed in the human race.