The Acolyte Episode 7 Review: Stupid Jedi And Smoke Monsters 

I get more actual value out of Erik Kain's reviews rather than watching the series, so I'll stick to that.

gotta love torbin’s paper thin motivation of desperately wanting to go home 😂 and then killing himself out of guilt years later

Mother Aniseya turning into a smoke monster seems pretty useless since she can still get stabbed while as a smoke monster. Why did she even do that then?

How would you see other people's memories? Dumb writing. Explained in Rick and Morty; Morty: "Hey, how come I was able to see those other people's memories? I wouldn't have been around for that." Rick: "Yeah, sometimes I gotta do a little editing, Morty."

Strong enough force power to hold up a metal bridge. Not strong enough to just hold up two little girls. Pretty much says everything about this show.

Why are there oil lamps in an electrified building.

1- That intro hahahaha 2- I want to see an audit of this show. No way they spent 180mil on this.

Lee Jung-jae is a great actor. Pity he had diddly squat to work with.

Imagine the two girls actually leaving together, going to Jedi school, Mae hating it, going back to home - but everyone is dead/left. And now the conflict and quest for the truth is actually real: Neither of the two girls have seen what happened, Mae being convinced to take revenge, while Osha trying to stop her. I mean, have real conflict. Have one Jedi and one Sith girl, and let them fight as the main protagonists. If you extend the Jedi phase, you could have Mae falling for Qimir (hopefully after 18+), and show similar stuff, but an actual story. Establish the girls with different characters and motivation, and have them maybe becoming "grey" together - when they finally find out, that the mothers as well as the Jedi were in the wrong (you would have to work on that a lot)... If they then build a team together to rule the galaxy or whatever, I am not so sure about. But if Headland really wanted to continue in multiple seasons, she would have built up those main characters in any way. Without a basis, how should you justify to spend actual money on Disney Plus Plus? It's more like Disney Minus.

The thing with force lightning in ROTJ is - it's the emperor. It's supposed to show how next level that guy is. Luke can do nothing to stop it and even Vader is mortally wounded by getting some of it. Dooku using force lightning? Maybe not the best decision but was a nice way of showing how much power Yoda had.

Yes. If the girls were raised in isolation, how would they even know about the Jedi (let alone aspire to be one)?

Hi. I'm the "time is a flat circle" guy. Gotta say, I've lost my sense of humor at this point. There's no way the writers of this show intended the plot structure seriously. I honestly believe they're trolling us. I know that may sound absurd, or paranoid, or conspiratorial, or whatever. But how do you explain the critical event of the whole series turning on yet another absurd cliche - the death of Coral, I mean? They MUST know. Joke's on us for still caring.

The show isn’t written well enough for Sol to be a villain.

my main complaint with all these new random force powers is the continuity issues they always present. they establish a character has some power only to have them inexplicably never use it again even in situations where it would be the perfect solution

“The power of one, the power of two, the power of stupid”.

Dude, the intro song had me dying! Great stuff!

The movie industry in my country nicknamed ''Nollywood'' creates movies with compelling stories on a budget of less than $20,000. How a $180m production cannot write even basic commonsensical dialogue is beyond me.

Thank you Erik, you've been one of the few prominent critics who's been keeping a fair account of this show. I really had high hopes for it but it's been such a disappointment.

i think they mean to imply that since the twins share a conscience that they give off the same presence in the force, thus it is hard to tell them apart only thru the force

I loved the intro! Lol 😂

At this point I think AI shouldn't just written the whole series. Probably would have been light years better.

The behaviour of the Jedi in this ep is the strangest thing for me, followed by Sol strapping Mae down to tell her this guilty secret he’s been carrying (which is I assume I killed your mother) that she already knows cos she was right there and witnesses it (or is it that he chose osha over her? Is it that choice that leaves him feeling guilty and he needs to confess? Sol wanting a Padawan, for reasons, is now mirroring Qimir wanting his own acolyte. So is the message that Qimir’s motivation is as just as Sol’s? Or Sol is really a villain like Qimir? Whatever; this is definitely the worse ep. Every time I watch this I go rewatch a few episodes of Andor to clear the bad taste of the Acolyte from my mouth. Roll on Andor season 2🤞🏾

Another great review . I enjoyed it much better than anything the Acolyte has done in seven episodes so far. That into AI song was GOLD!

My kids pronounced the show as stupid a couple episodes ago so we haven't had it on since then.

i dont think anyone has an issue with the whitches black magic possession nonsense. its more that the mother was obviously about to posses Mae and Sol was provoked into an attack.

To quote Plan 9 Alien Commander Eros, " stupid, stupid, stupid!". Seriously, compared to other current Quality fantasy/sci-fi, Acolyte is approaching "Plan 9" levels of incompetence, only with the benefit of a mysteriously spent $180,000,000(!?) budget!

180 million dollars and a script that could not pass a community college night creative writing course. Beyond criminal.

I need an hour loop track of that intro song! So addictive! So good!

I’m choosing to believe the “carl” montage was just for me ❤

The episode added no value to the series that couldn't have been managed with a tighter Ep.3. And it created more problems. The Jedi are revealed to be shallow, undisciplined, unaware and flaky. The witches seem excessively paranoid - so we should have seen some evidence of WHY, not just some babble about the coven on the run. If the planet only recently sprang to life, why is there an ancient mine site? What is the portentous hole all about? Is it all a Sith lab for open air experimentation? Is there dark side cloaking? I dunno, but jfc tell us, show! Where are the Sith anyway? I'll mention it again - Mother Anesaya was the initiator of the violence, against Torbin, when she mindgraped him. The rest was just escalation, largely by Coril. Master Indara should have issued maximum defense orders, maybe try to save a kid, but fought their way out. And nuked the place from orbit, just to be sure. Damn, that's a show I'd watch.

I love films that get me thinking and debating. Take Inception for example, I’m convinced Dom is still in the dream. When he goes to see the chemist, he spins his talisman but is interrupted before you see whether it keeps spinning or not! Similarly in Minority Report when Tom Cruise is caught and haloed I think what follows are his dreams/desires. These are ideas you can ponder, revisit and Discuss. With the Acolyte I’m just left with confusion, annoyance, irritation. - The Jedi are evil or stupid now. Why? For what purpose? -Sol doesn’t recognise Mae but then he knows it’s Mae and disables her on the ship? How did he know? -What is Torvin guilty about? Being so desperate to go home he races off to grab the girls and events go from there? Why does any of that make him kill himself? Just because a show poses questions doesn’t make it good for viewers. Instead of leaving me feeling excited to watch and rewatch to find clues to the conclusion, I’m just left totally gobsmacked at how awful this is. I’m watching it to get to the end to see if maybe it’ll all come together. But hey I’m an optimist.

I think the show is a subversive storytelling. It’s showing how not to write a limited episode season. It’s quite educational really

Thanks for the review. Your story ideas at the end is pretty much what i have had in mind for the rewrite i wanted to try out after the show ended, maybe make a little comic out of it, because i don't have that amount of money to waste, like Disney... The investigative part would have fit more for a murder mystery than what was shown in episode 1 of this show. Absolutely pathetic. Murder happenes, we see who it is, next thing a person with the description is captured right away... wow... how exciting...

ok that intro song was... strangely amazing lol

You thought we wouldn't notice mega man and Mario but I did 😉

Your 'version' if you want to call it that is vastly superior. It's really concerning that there are, presumably, large teams of paid writers making these shows and they're fumbling some really basic story principles and it's coming out really messy. Like you I think there is a really good show hidden within. Thanks for your videos, keep it up (also 100% agree about the weird gatekeeping of new force powers)

Coral part killed me.

Ok so this is the only way I can tell you that I agree with your Forbes review of episode 8 entirely. And also of the show at this point. Can't wait to see review video of episode 8. We are not toxic fans we just see what's wrong.

Erik can you invite Paul Tasse on your show. You both have competing ideas of how the current Starwars is holding up. I’d love to see you both debate.

If they had made the jedi the good guys and the witches the bad ones, this woulda made more sense and made a better TV show

From what I've seen of the show, it seems like they've taken the concept of the Dathomir witches and built the story around that, then changed their minds last minute. One of the witches is dathomiri, and there was a dathomiri padawan of the same age as Osha, played by Daphne Keane, who's a big star. What if she was originally the main character, and the showrunner wanted to go off script.

I'm here because of your Forbes article on this dumpster fire of a show. LOVE your content 🙌

Nice Philly soul feel.

man the coral clips are golllldddd!!!!

I think even the 'mid' episodes of Star Trek or SG1 were better than this entire series.

Regarding new Force power you are certainly right. Regarding the witches misty power If one describes the force as a thread it makes sense. They pulled their own threads and got misty. The coven connected their threads to the Wookie to control him. And as Indara cut them the threads snapped back at them like a power feedback and killed or incapacitated them. Palpatine force lightning was a good representation of how the force was explained to Luke.

Giving a more extensive backstory and building up the jedi to have a strong presence really would have boosted the impact of losing Kelnacca, Torbin, and Indara. It's just annoying that this seems to be the most characterization of them, which is largely filled with largely predictable interactions. Having dives into each jedi before or after their death would make their deaths feel significant. Wow, this is who we lost. I also think not diving into the nature of the witches' magic and their ritual as well as the background of their birth to be another miss or bottled up detail. I was expecting that the twins' origin prompted jedi involvement, but it seems to have little impact. This plot is more driven by Torbin losing his cool. Ugh! No involvement of qimir either, which means to me he's bottled away for a second season! The show could have had an easy second season. But they just choose not to go for the interesting option or the more expansive idea. So we get an episode that rehashes the significant story beats of a prior episode with unsatisfying additions that have not rolled into the great reveal this was building up. You could have easily expanded the role of these individuals and saved qimirs reveal for the finale. And yeah, it feels like the core ideas were already established, and the bridging seems to have failed to bring a natural cohesiveness and quality touch to them.

Could he possibly have had a hard time distinguishing between them in the force because their symbiotes are identical?

When the reviews are better than the actual series!

This is just the 40k side of me talking, but after Episode 3 I was like: "The Jedi are perfectly justified in wiping out this coven of *_obvious dark siders,_* and they'll have to really, really be comically bad to portray them as the villains they want them to be." After Episode 7, my 40k side is going: "THE JEDI DID NOTHING WRONG. THEY ARE PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED IN -PURGING THE HERETICS- WIPING OUT THE COVEN." With all respect to Paul Tassi: claiming that Sol is the villain of the show is the grand poobah of all bad takes. Also, these writers using the Force as 'purely moving the plot forward' this entire show annoys the hell out of me. It's so inconsistent it's not even funny. Hell, it'd be better if we didn't see Sol holding up the crumbling bridge with the Force. Headland has repeatedly stated she wanted to paint the Jedi Order as the bad guys and the Sith/Dark siders as sympathetic... and she is hilariously failing at that.

Love the intro songs.

omg the song lolllll

My favorite part of this show has been watching Paul Tassi publicly destroy all of his journalistic credibility!

Kudos for trying to fix the script. Apparently at Disney they don't hire persons to read one, before greenlighting it and spending $180 mln. Honestly I cannot imagine what the creators did with the money when I read that Dune Part 1 had $165 mln and Part 2 $190 mln... P.S I wonder if they used AI for ep 7's credits music too.

I said the same thing. This feel like it was a well writen script that they shoehorned in the twins and forced everyone to make a bunch of really dumb decisions to make it all work

I think the show should have started with some flashback scenes of what happened in Brendok, maybe Sol and all escaping the fortress in flames. And they should have better structured the flashbacks across the show. The acolyte is a masterclass on how not to write a TV show. Anyhow, trying to paint Sol or the Jedi as villains is ridiculous. They're just grossly incompetent. Whoever wrote this didn't share George Lucas's values nor vision.

I remember seeing the manalorian season 1 and luke and being so excited then I remembered it all leads to the force awakens and the terrible rise of skywslker. Now we’re randomly going back to a nameless period where nothing once again matters: I can’t wait to like Star Wars again one day

I have a song I wrote for this. Like a vergence, touched for the very first time, like a verr err err errgence...

There are some really interesting ideas in this show, but my god they were handled so badly. And yeah, the twin thing seems unnecessary except as a cheap plot device to turn this into a "mystery" (which is dispelled pretty quickly), aside from outright coopting the Anakin vergence creation arc. Now, if this episode (in terms of Jedi history) with the witches is intended to show how the actual Sith learn to create life (which would change Legends stuff, but it is Disney's to mess with), then that would be pretty cool. They have one more episode to show that. I'm doubtful with how messy the storyline is right now, but we'll see. In any case, they didn't need twins for that to work. In fact, having the twins be one soul or person split into two physical bodies seems like a recipe for instability. Maybe that explains the two ladies chaotic decision-making? I dunno.

I watch it just because it's Star Wars and I know it's only 8 episodes and they're short. Yea, I didn't have any great expectations going in, especially after I saw the trailer with the Sith mask reveal because I think that initial look was not great. (I think they have reshaped the helmet/mask, seems like they have done a few things like that) I thought they were going to do something with the Aboleth Sith legend because of the way the mask looked, they still could in the 27 minutes they have left.

Yay, references to Lost! How very star warsy of them😅

Even if the show is bad I think Disney still hitting their view count target cause seems like every one is just hate watching the show anyway. I don’t think they care about the quality as long as the view count still there.

I am starting to love your opening AI songs. Man, your reviews are more interesting and fun than TV show itself which speaks more than words and it is really embarrassing for Diesney. Or at least should be.

Xbox raised prices....COD Tax

The writers are not even trying

The series can't pay attention to detail because they cheaped out on the runtime. The episodes are too short to fully tell anything.

I initially thought this would be a case of a multiple "unreliable narrator" type deal where various POV's are presented, nothing is resolved and it's left to the audience to pick their own interpretation. Good old lazy, mystery box writing instead of actual storytelling. It's worse than that because the "unreliable" part has been taken away and replaced with the "forced narrative" that everyone was expecting anyway. What's more they did a terrible job. Very little is coherent and cause/effect has no logic, internal or external. We are just left with a motherload of contrivances so the plot can happen. The characters have no agency in this show. They don't drive the plot, they are hogtied and dragged along with it. That's why everyone in this show is instantly forgettable.

Im not sure the Jedi can sense the difference between the twins, if they're not really twins but actually each one half of the same force entity (which in our world is the same as identical twins but here seems to be something different🤷🏻‍♀️)

Loved the Jedis acting so silly song! It's a shame that they screwed up what could have been quite a good show. Typical Disney!

Thank you for honestly critiquing this show unlike your colleague Paul who gushes over crap.

I need the intro song asap

Again, the music! A.I. must be stopped. it's too gooooodd!! hahaha

This is what happens when DEI is your main focus. Thanks Disney. You have actually ruined Star Wars

Jedi the first order?

We're getting distracted by the bad writing and overlook something truly horrifying about this show: Torbin's arc. The guy deletes himself over something he felt he did wrong as a CHILD. And the show does not present this as something horrifying, as a tragic action by a damaged mind. Instead, they're presenting it as a logical and understandable choice, as if it's an end he deserves and he realizes he does. No indication either that Mae would be wrong in the slightest for edging him on. Why is a show like this, that presents self deletion as a justifiable choice, allowed to market itself to young teenagers? It has a TV-14 rating in the US and an even lower rating in many other countries, children as young as 12 are supposed to be watching this. I don't understand why there doesn't seem to be any uproar about that.

😂😂😂😂please do some Intro music to a 70's porn movie "how deep is your love"

All socialism

It's cute that you care. You can use the YT ad money for therapy once this show is over.

I wouldnt say there's good bones here. That would imply structure. Some decent DNA is present. Some decent ideas that played out horrendously. The twin thing. The jedi assassin. The parallels between Qmir and Osha. Hell I'll even admit the literal dark side seduction could have been employed well. But the story is so haphazard nothing good could be planted for us to enjoy the eventual blossoms.

KORRAL

Dude you're being way too kind. This episode was bizarre and ridiculously stupid. I know you acknowledged those things but you still talked about the show as though there's a foundation that's worthy of discourse that's meaningful. It's really not. Sigh... But keep on truckin bro!

What if "Those kids are poorly treated by these witches", nope, you will not get that story from these group of women writers who are trying hard to portray the witches as the good guys and the Jedi are the evil minions of a corrupt institution. This type of agenda driven story is what makes this show a bad one and have barely coherent plot. I would wager our imagination in trying to bring coherent to this jumble mess would be more interesting and imaginative than these writers could even muster! 🤷‍♂️

Hey, there’s some positive review bombing occurring….. so many 5 stars lately it’s almost comical.

I love Star Wars. I don't want to spend my time shitting on Star Wars. I really don't like all the chud channel financially-incentivized rage-bait content that so many people seem addicted to. I've tried to focus on finding the positives with this show, and with episode 5 and 6 it seemed like we might be starting to move towards something a bit more substantial/worthwhile, compared to the first half of the season. But this episode ... man ... I honestly can't think of a single positive thing to say. Horrible story, horrible dialogue, bizarre character decisions, muddled performances, bizarre story beats (the fire really had no other cause than Mae and lantern 🤡) and all in all, utterly pointless story telling. We're now left with _one_ episode to try to salvage a story out of this mess. They spent two episodes, almost 70 minutes, trying to tell a story in flashback format that really has already been covered by dialogue in other episodes. The only thing of use we learned is that Sol killed their mother (which honestly, seemed contrived and out of character while also being anticlimactic). They've ignored the only interesting part of the story (the Sith) while focusing on the weakest part of the whole story (the Twins (whose conception story is still largely unanswered)). They could have had a simple and effective scene with a reckoning/showdown between Sol, Qimir, and Osha (and Mae if, the twin thing has to exist), where either Qimir or Sol reveals who killed the Mother (a variation on the "No, I am your father" scene) - that's literally all that was needed. Simple as that. Instead, we got a whole lot of nothing. What a waste of time, money, goodwill, and potential.