I'm sure we all know about the low audience scores given to The Acolyte. Rotten Tomatoes was sitting down at 14% since around the third episode, and was that low up until at least the last episode. Now that it's nearly a week out from the season finale, I figured I'd take another look.
The Rotten Tomatoes score has gone up to 17% and other review platforms have gone up a bit also.
So I decided to read through a few of the recent ones. Here are two examples:
The showrunners accuse fans of "review bombing" but are apparently just fine with artificial review boosting. I saw a bunch of these double reviews and nearly every single one talked about things like diversity, a "fresh take", production values, etc, all in that typical bland corporate-speech type of language.
Whereas the negative reviews are detailed and specific without ever getting into racism, bigotry, sexism, or other things fans are often accused of. If you read through the negative reviews they are often well thought out criticisms of the story itself and the quality of acting.
I just wanted to bring this fake review boosting to the community's attention. If you enjoyed the show, that's awesome. But it's dishonest to dilute honest and fair criticisms of a show.
I noticed the jump from 14% too, lol. Good catch.
I tried so hard to like The Acolyte, even after all the review hate centered around misogyny and race, but the show was so bad, I got swallowed up by the Dark Side. I think the thing that pushed me over the edge was the episode with the witch force cult writhing and chanting, it was literally the definition of cringe, it stayed with me so long I legitimately couldn't enjoy a singe scene after that, but forced myself to watch to the end of the season.
In terms of Star Wars shows, the quality of Andor stands alone.
Edit: Also, the thing that really bugged me all the way through was the fact I thought it was canon that the Sith were an established ancient anti Jedi Dark Side Force order, but they had "died out a millennia ago". Why did all the Jedi in The Acolyte act like they've never heard of Sith before.