In the fourth episode of The Acolyte, Osha (Amandla Stenberg) meets some new Jedi and Jedi-affiliated friends. One of them is a small, otterlike creature named Bazil. Bazil and Pip, Osha’s fussy robot companion, keep sniffing and beeping at each other, interrupting the mission briefing Osha is trying to follow. After, Osha approaches Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) for an awkward exchange all too familiar to queer people watching television in the last few years:

Osha: Who is that?

Jecki Lon: That’s Bazil.

Osha: Is he [dramatic pause]… or they… with us?”

This is the latest example of what I’m going to call the Globby problem, expertly parodied on The Other Two: well-meaning writers and showrunners — some of them queer themselves — trying to awkwardly insert nonbinary or genderqueer representation into their show, usually through the show’s requisite “weirdo” character. The result is, instead, often pretty othering.

In The Acolyte, Osha only asks about Bazil’s pronouns, not those of any of the other people she meets. This reveals more about Osha than I think The Acolyte’s writers were intending; the exchange implies she is actively othering Bazil and assuming he (yes, it is later revealed........

© Polygon