Star Wars: The Acolyte - Eps 3 & 4 Spoiler Review

[Music] this episode's brought to you by Magic spoon go to story and because we're learning new chunks of information so I decided to wait I'll probably do another check-in after the next two and then another one at the end of the season before I jump into the review just a quick reminder we're now only a couple days away from an event that I'm doing with my good buddy Christian harof live in New York City at a venue called The Green Room 42 you can check the description below to find out how to get tickets if you could be there in person that's great we'll also be doing a live stream so you can watch from home but yeah I'm excited to get back to New New York and I would love to see you out there we're going to be talking movies taking questions and I think it's going to be a really good time so let's loot back first to episode three from last week and you know I'm just going to do spoilers throughout here so if you haven't seen the episodes you should probably pause and watch them or if you don't care you can just keep watching because pretty much everything I have to say about the show really does have to go into plot details last week's episode apparently caused quite a stir I have to say I wasn't fatally offended at the concept of Force using witches I remember way back when Force awakens was being developed there were rumors of Sith witches so I I think that's been part of the mythology for a while and honestly the issues that I've had with the show don't really have much to do with the characters that are included in them it's more of just the actual show itself some of the writing some of the acting Etc which is what we're going to talk about in that third episode which was a full flashback episode we met the young versions of Osha and May and their disagreement about the force and what they wanted to do and I do think that the argument that they had with each other was a little um I guess simplistic I mean literally saying the Jedi are bad the Jedi are good that is a prequel level writing from my point of view the Jedi are evil type dialogue and as I said in my last review I understand that some people say that well that's typical of Star Wars but I don't necessarily think that means it should be fully embraced it is odd that the whole setup for OSHA and May's past seems to embrace Concepts that caused a lot of disagreement among the fan base in previous iterations of Star Wars you have the Ryan Johnson approach of we're going to challenge the conventions of Good and Evil and what if the Jedi aren't really good and what if these Sith really weren't all that bad this isn't about good or bad this is about power and who is allowed to use it and then you also have the inclusion of things from the prequels like medoran and the idea of Immaculate Conception I think that you know I get where it's coming from I mean I did chuckle a bit at the idea of the Jedi strolling into this coven and saying you can't take children and train them in the force that's our job that's what we do the jury's still out on a lot of these things but it does seem like one of the aims of this show is to sort of make everything Shades of Gray so it's not you know the dark side and the light side of the force which is something that you can do it's been done in previous Star Wars movies and shows in the past it is a controversial thing because there are going to be some people who love it and some people who don't love it so much I would say that the big difference here is that when it works or has worked in Star Wars in the past they've been projects that have a lot more finesse than this one does I didn't do a full Standalone review of episode 3 largely because it's very obvious that this is a mystery story and so we're going to learn things slowly as we flash back and forward through time and we're obviously being led to believe right now that started the fire that killed everyone in the coven but she was either wielding the world's most powerful lamp or there's more to this story than we know and it's a rule of thumb that if you see a possible explanation for something and then there's a little bit of a Time Gap and then it looks like something happens that was a direct result of that person's actions it may not actually have been the result of their actions if it was May and this impossibly flammable lamp that did Start the Fire and kill everybody then I think that that that's a bit of a disappointing answer to that mystery that was set up at the beginning of the show but I I just really heavily suspect that we are going to return to that series of events and we're going to learn more about it supposedly one of the influences on this series was rashan which is the same event through multiple perspectives and so I'm willing to give the story a little bit of credit I'm like all right I'm going to see where this goes because I don't think that episode 3 is as full of answers as some others seem to believe that it is I will say that I haven't been particularly impressed with the performances of the actors playing OSHA and may really at any age so far and really amandela Stenberg is the actor that we see the most and she's done some really good work but I think she's hamstrung a little bit by the dialogue in this show especially when she's playing OSHA I feel like she's kind of fallen into that Anakin Skywalker trap of just not being able to sell the script that she's been given because I know that both Hayden Christensen and am manless Stenberg are capable of much much stronger work than we've seen in their respective projects or at least for Hayden Christensen in the prequels I think he's certainly done a great Redemption tour and shown us a lot more to Anakin in the years after it isn't easy to sell that sort of dialogue and I think the fact that Amanda stenberg's performance as May is better than her performance as OSHA is evidence of that because I think that may is a better written character with more complexity to her I think that OSHA just doesn't really have that many dimensions yet Beyond you know being the good sister so episode 3 for me really was just kind of taking in the first chapter of this flashback and hopefully not the answer to the overall mystery and then we have last night's episode 4 which was much more frustrating for me first of all because of the length when you look at the length of the episode it's a 34 quote unquote minute episode but really when you take out all the credits and you take out the recap it was about 26 minutes long which is only a couple minutes longer than your average Network multicam sitcom episode and it was a short episode that had the combination I think of not really doing much and also ending on a big Cliffhanger I think you can have shorter episodes if you're doing more in them but there just didn't seem to be much to it when they found all those bugs in the forest and one of them took off and soul sliced it with the lightsaber I'm like okay we're going to get this group of Jedi versus all these crazy Forest flying bugs that sounds like a pretty decent action sequence but then that just didn't really happen episode length should be dictated by story but I don't think that the story fit the length of this episode in the bygone days of network TV you used to be obligated to produce around 22 Episodes a season and so you would have these different ones that kind of felt like filler or felt like okay well the writers just had to come up with something to to talk about this week but we're not in that era anymore we're in the streaming era it's an era where you can make shows be as many episodes as you want you can make shows be as long as you want them to be and when you're doing a show especially on a week- toe release I just don't think it was a good idea to make an episode this short that ends the way that it did and I have a conspiracy theory I know that's crazy someone with a conspiracy theory about Star Wars Andor Disney but I do know that some critics were sent the first four episodes of the show for review purposes I didn't see any of them before but I know a lot of people saw those first four and part of me wonders if they shortened episode for or structured it to end on that Cliffhanger in order to sort of jazz up the critics to basically say all right this is the last episode you're going to see it ends on this big action Cliffhanger maybe that would sort of get him to go like hey oh man the acolyte oh I saw the first four episodes and I can't wait to see more I'm not saying that that's what did happen but it would certainly explain why this fourth episode was the length that it was and why it did end on that big Cliffhanger which could be a good strategy for critics but I don't really think it's the greatest strategy for people watching at home and again you can have shows that end on Cliffhangers but I think that you have to give people a little bit more leading into it in order for it to feel like a satisfying episode this didn't really feel to me like much of a satisfying episode and it wasn't just the episode length I had some issues with there was a big plot development that I certainly hope we have a lot more to learn about which is May's character turn of being this person that is on a quest for vengeance to somebody who decides you know what I'm not going to do this I'm just going to turn myself into the Jedi and you know this is the end what I'm going to do is surrender myself to Kaka and then turn myself into the Jedi she leaves cir hanging up and walks away and you know there's really no clue in this episode that that's not what's going to happen I thought watching it when she was talking about the fact like you know I'm not going to do it I'm just going to go I'm like okay what's she setting up what's the trick here but she then just kind of waltzed into kela's Hut and seemed ready to actually give herself up now there is a possibility that maybe she was setting things up for kelca to die so that she could say that she's responsible for the death of a Jedi without a weapon that involves another character that we'll talk about later maybe that's something that will be revealed later on I'm still not really sure with this show if it's not as clever as it thinks it is or if it's smart enough to lay red herrings to make us definitely think that something happened this way but that's not the way that it happened and I kind of have suspicions about which one it is but I'm going to wait and see how these last four episodes play out but if we don't find anything else out about this drastic character turn then that's just going to be another thing on my list of disappointing things as far as the writing of the show I'm basically at the point that it was so quick and so kind of out of the blue I'm thinking that there has to be more or else it's just a a horribly written character Arc so that's going to be something I'm looking for in the episodes coming up what is the explanation behind this in the show may very well give us that explanation honestly this list of things that I keep saying okay well the show better give us an explanation for this or else it's going to be really disappointing is getting longer and longer and I mean The Optimist in me is is really working overtime with this show one thing that's not in is that Kila is dead killed off screen no less the second cool Jedi in the series that's killed moments after they're introduced in the present day and yes I know that we are certainly going to see more of kaka and flashbacks but I was really excited for this character I think in my first review I said this has the potential to be an all-time fan favorite character and he's gone from our present timeline before we really see him do anything and so now when we see the character it's all going to be with the knowledge that he's on borrowed time he doesn't really go forward from this one fixed point in time and for this to be the second time that they've done that it feels like you're recycling a bit of a beat or a plot beat um we'll see if there's any further explanation I'm sure we're going to find out who it was that killed him but I I don't know if I'm really that much of a fan because I was excited by the concept of a wi Jedi on screen of course the Cliffhanger of the episode revolves around the arrival of what appears to to be a Sith though whether or not this is the Sith master has yet to be determined I'm almost sure it's not and it seems pretty obvious that it's camir right I I mean he was pushing May to keep going with her Mission and kind of saying like well you know it's not really a test you should really go through with this and then they did the thing that is always a tell as far as a big reveal which is that he's left alone and unsupervised and then a mystery person shows up and you're like oh who is that nine times out of 10 it's the character in the show who was left alone and unsupervised and I felt a little bit like those moments in the Superman comics when you know Superman shows up and somebody turns around and goes like Oh Hey where's Clark Kent that's sort of how I felt last night it's like well there's one major character that we left alone in the woods so I think the odds are pretty likely that it is that character and there's really two ways that this could go number one they telegraphed it in a really obvious way or number two they kind of set up a red herring for us to think it's him but it's not actually him and I guess we'll probably see in a week or two which one of these wins out it could be that this is the answer to the May character mystery maybe she knew what was actually going on and she basically told him a false plan in order to get him to go kill Kaka so that she wouldn't have to and then she could report back like hey I was responsible for the death but I didn't have to use a weapon that's a possibility she kind of had that moment where she looked up and was like oh okay that's why I say I'm not really going to pass final judgment on anything with the show plot-wise just yet because they are rolling things out slowly week by week I think that it's risky because they're going to be a lot of fans that are turned on by it uh not in the weird way and then there are going to be a lot of fans that are frustrated by it and I have to say I'm I'm a little more frustrated by it so far than I am intrigued by it uh but you know we'll see what the developments are in later episodes there's also some lore stuff in the episode like the appearance of kiotti Mundi which I've already heard is apparently prior to his canonical birth date maybe he and Professor mcgonagal used the same time Turner to turn up earlier in the lore than they were supposed to based on what people thought of their birth dates I don't know that's the thing with with lore and deep lore and stuff like that uh there are people out there who are much better at that stuff than I am and and they run great channels uh I am usually the plot guy the story guy the reaction guy uh I am not the lore guy so there may very well be a lore answer that is able to put this mystery back together or maybe they just didn't have the budget for a CGI Andor puppet Yoda so they had to keep the High Council out of the picture I don't know you let me know go go research I'm going to put you to work go research and let me know why honestly four episodes in at best it seems like the acolyte is going to be an extremely backloaded show we're mainly just setting up things to explain later which will work if the payoff is worth it there is a lot of pressure on these last episodes and I haven't been particularly impressed with the writing on the show thus far but I'm still not ready to write the show off just yet I am an optimist and I'm not as some people might say a Disney shill or whatever I'm not out here saying like no no guys please keep watching the acolyte I really would like for it to turn out good because I like good shows why why would anybody want to waste their time watching a bad show I I hope this doesn't go down the bad show Road it may very well and I will say that if these last episodes don't satisfactorily resolve a lot of these mysteries from the first few episodes my opinion of the show is going to plummet rapidly because there's a lot of stuff that I'm kind of going like all right we'll see that if it doesn't turn out well it's just going to kind of all compound uh and then retroactively I think those disappointments are going to kick in for the early episodes and that's why I say there is so much pressure in how they're going to resolve this this was a choice it was a choice to set the show up this way you have to know if it's a mystery that you're going to put that pressure on the back end and I think that the real thing that we have yet to prove is whether the writers of the show are up to the task a lot of people are probably screaming and have been screaming at their monitors that know they're not I'm still willing to wait and see it is tough though with the show it feels like a lot of times they take one step forward two steps back I was watching last night and they were out in this beautiful Misty location and I said to myself oh wow that's so great that they're shooting on location and they're shooting outside because I'm so tired of them being in the volume and then they literally cut to the rest of the episode on Star Trek sets inside the volume I'm like well isn't this just the way this show works is I'm like oh okay I like that and then the next thing is like oh I'm not so sure about that one so if we're looking at my updated ranking or rating of the season on my personal scale it is still squarely in the its fine category and think that these next episodes are going to be very influential as far as whether that moves up or moves down very rapidly what do you think though what do you think of the show so far let me know down in the comments below and before we go I want to thank the sponsor for this episode magic spoon this episode's brought to you by Magic spoon I am a cereal addict no joke I eat cereal for one meal almost every day of the week but as you get older it's important to watch out for stuff like sugar and empty carbs when you eat that's why glad I have magic spoon stocked in my pantry I have the magic spoon variety pack that contains four flavors cocoa fruity frosted and peanut butter this pack has 0 gr of sugar 13 to 14 g of protein and four to 5 G of net carbs with only 140 calories per serving it's also high protein keto friendly glutenfree grainfree and soy free it's hard to choose but my go-to is the fruity flavor it has that great taste I remember from when I was a kid but with more protein and less sugar and it stays crunchy in milk for as long as I'm eating it which is always a bonus for any cereal afficionado it's great to know that I can have my cereal eat it too and stay conscious of my carb and sugar intake go to questions asked remember start your day off right with a delicious bowl of high protein cereal at m [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Dan Murrell

Views: 47,181

Keywords: dan murrell, dan murrell movies, movies, star wars the acolyte, the acolyte, star wars acolyte, star wars the acolyte review, star wars acolyte review, star wars acolyte spoiler review, star wars the acolyte spoiler review

Id: SfSSkbiGwXQ

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024