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No Mandalorian thread?

10K views 144 replies 29 participants last post by  Rev Drucifer 
#1 ·
A little surprised by that.

I've been watching this with my girlfriend. Bulletpoint review:

1) It's entertaining - I can nitpick things here and there but it's been a lot of fun.
2) I have no clue what or if there's going to be an overarching story, or if it's going to be a Lone Ranger style "The Incredible Adventures of the Mandalorian and his Sidekick, Baby Yoda."
3) Baby Yoda steals pretty much every scene he's in. My girlfriend just coos and squeals uncontrollably whenever he comes on screen. We got caught up on episode 6 last night, and she had to go back afterwards and rewatch a few scenes because she didn't think Baby Yoda had a big enough role in this episode. I don't disagree.
 
#103 ·
Well, I am sitting here, unable to move, because I am emotionally shaken by this most epic piece of Star Wars since the original trilogy.

i would say "I'm not crying, you're crying", but frankly, that would be not quite true - as I did, indeed, also cry.
 
#107 ·
That was great, but am I the *only* one with some reservations? :lol:

I think one of the things that really worked about The Mandalorian in Season 1 was that it was fairly self-contained. You had a brand-new cast of characters, rooted in a relatively lightly-explored corner of Star Wars lore, and at the very end there's a reference to an artifact that surfaces elsewhere in the Star Wars universe, but it pretty much is a story that exists outside any of the other stories in Star Wars. And that's refreshing, cvonsidering how slavish the final trilogy was.

Season 2, though... criticism about it being back-door trailers for a number of since-announced series aside, one of the problems for me is they seem to be going full Marvel cinematic universe here, with everything that entails. Major character from The Clone Wars shows up, Boba Fett becomes a major character, and none other than Luke Skywalker shows up, in full CGI glory, to save the day at the very end.

This also starts to paint some continuity problems. Grogu was pretty clearly a survivor of the slaughter of the younglings, meaning he's been out there in hiding during the entirity of the original trilogy. He also ages at a glacial pace, so he's either still alive, and at most a teenager, during the final trilogy, when Luke is in exile and shut off from the force after Ben Solo's little stunt at his training camp, unless he was killed there (which, surviving the slaughter of the younglings and NOT surviving Ben Solo's attack would be a special sort of irony), or he dies at some point in the upcoming season(s), in which case my girlfriend will be inconsolable. If Luke knew about and had trained Grogu, then Leia must have known about him too, and while he's still pretty young, a Jedi with by that point more than a hundred years of training would be an odd resource not to pull into the war.

I kinda wish they hadn't pulled Luke in - other Jedis were still in hiding, with Samuel L. Jackson's Mace Windu being a prime contender if he'd - like Luke before him - survived that fall, and doesn't have any inconvenient storylines to get entangled in later on so the story arc would have been pretty free to continue on its own, with the assumption simply being that the reason Grogu doesn't show up in any of the later movies was that he had somehow been hidden from other users of the Force.

Idunno, though. The storyline just got messy in a big way last night, and there's a LOT of ways for the writers to fuck this up or paint themselves into a corner that didn't exist a few weeks ago.
 
#108 ·
While I gave The Rescue some praise, namely from the direction of Peyton Reed, and I guess most of the writing from Jon Favreau, I'm on this boat too.

Disney are weaponising the Star Wars canon. Agreed that part of the charm of the first season was seeing a new story with new characters outside the films in the same galaxy far far away. Season 2 was slowly showing less interest in that and going back to world building using familiar faces. Bo Katan and Ashoka Tano were more interesting in the Clone Wars series than the continuity references they play here. And Disney know this. Those who don't care much about the EU stuff can just easily watch that series right after Mandalorian since the same streaming service can offer just that. This is Disney understanding the fandom and exploiting it, since there's a lot of fan money around. This isn't exactly a bad thing, but I've said in an earlier post when hamfisted fanservice still leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I enjoyed The Rescue up until the Deus Ex Machina moment. I'm sure the last of the Jedi rocking up was an ode to Yoda's last words, but it felt like the easy way out. Also completely undermined with Ashoka being in the series already. They could've easily introduced somebody new, a whole new jedi. They spent the first season introducing new characters with arcs. Why bring back the same familiar faces again? Now I'm all up for continuity, hell I'm not completely burned out with Disney's Marvel factory. But with Star Wars, different story.
 
#109 ·
I don't think it would have worked with anyone but
Luke,
honestly.

Like, yes, any Jedi could have shown up to fight some droids and take Grogu but IMO all the other options are kinda shit. I keep seeing buzz about Mace Windu but personally, I think that's dumb. :lol: For one thing, I think the Star Wars universe is all tapped out on retconning deaths after the Palpatine mess and bringing back Boba Fett in the very same show. For another, that brings up all the same timeline problems that Drew mentioned with Grogu down the line. Ahsoka has already made clear it's not gonna be her. That leaves you with a handful of characters from other cartoons/video games/whatever like Ezra Bridger, Kyle Katarn (who isn't even part of the canon anymore) or Cal Kestis. Cal would have sorta worked given the ending of that game, I guess, but then 90% of the audience would be going "who the fuck is this guy!?, which is also the problem with introducing a new character. I dunno, it just seems way more ham-handed to me than Mando's story briefly intersecting with Luke Skywalker.

Also, all these alternatives assume that they're intending to spend a lot of time on Grogu's training in future seasons. There's no way Disney writes as big a cash-cow as baby Yoda out of the picture for long, but that goodbye was clearly pretty final and communicating that we're done following Grogu's story for a while. IMO, the fact that it's Luke swooping in to grab him kind of underlines that because yeah, of course we're not gonna spend extensive time with Luke Skywalker on this spinoff show about a fairly small-stakes adventure in the Star Wars universe. If you had some minor Jedi do it, come season 3 people would be expecting to get a bunch of Jedi training montages with Grogu, and it just doesn't seem like that's the direction they're going.

Also, given when this show falls in the chronology, repeatedly introducing new Jedi really undercuts the idea that Luke has to rebuild the Jedi basically from scratch. It's fine to have Ahsoka out there doing her thing - especially since she's not really part of the order and all that - but I think introducing yet more Jedi that secretly survived the purge or have been hiding in the outer rim or whatever is starting to push it. If there are fully trained Jedi who are capable of taking on students hiding out in every nook and cranny of the galaxy then it kind of detracts from Luke's story in the main SW movies in a pretty big way, IMO.

Anyway, to me the bottom line is this: the sign of a good, earned twist is that you look back and realize all the signs were there all along - you just didn't put them together. The entire season has been Mando trying to find a Jedi to hand Grogu off to. Mid season they find a big ol' Jedi space phone that Grogu uses to contact...we don't know who. He gets sent there by Ahsoka, who can't/won't train him. We know the show takes place shortly after the Battle of Endor, which means Jedi, and particularly ones powerful/trained enough to hear, understand, and follow that kind of a communication through the Force are exceedingly rare. We only know of one who is actively looking to rebuild the Jedi. Luke is the only one who makes sense.
 
#110 ·
I'll admit, all of these are pretty good points. I'm still not wild about the choice though.
First, I can think of a few other good ways out of that tight spot at the end of the finale.
1) Grogu is inexperienced and unstructured, but still very strong in the force. Luke did away with a few of the dark troopers with force alone - Grogu could have probably done something dramatic there that, at least, would be no LESS deux ex machina than having Luke Skywalker show up.
20 Din got his ass handed to him and only barely defeated ONE dark trooper... but that was before he had the Darksaber. Their armor clearly isn't imperveous to lightsabers based on what Luke did to them, and Din hasn't fought much with a sword yet, but adapted pretty quickly to fighting with a spear - there's already some major tension/resentment with Bo Katan now that Din has the Darksaber, and Din going out there and absolutely massacring the dark troopers with the Darksaber might go a long way to reconciling her to the idea that he's the guy who's supposed to be trying to rebuild Mandalore. As an added bonus, there's nothing particularly deus ex machina about this as a solution.

And, of course...

3) we're looking at this as a framework where these are all fixed events, so how else do you save everyone from a platoon of dark troopers starting to beat down the door. This is a problem for the characters, because the writers PUT them in this problem, so naturally simply considering putting them in a DIFFERENT problem should be on the table when discussing how to get them out. I actually thought shooting the darktroopers out into space, and then having them all fly back a couple minutes later, was kind of a nice touch - these are rocket powered droids, so when you think about it what felt like, in the moment, a pretty final solution actually wouldn't have held them back for long... But, what if instead Din had successfully managed to shut them back down and put them back to sleep? Or what if four had gotten out rather than one, the platoon had been 20, and while it was still a hard fight he did manage to take down four of them while delaying the rest? There are a lot of little things that could have been done along the way to take what seemed like an insurmountable problem, in the final scene, and given them a few ways out that wouldn't have required Luke Skywalker showing up to bail everyone out. After that, who knows. I'd say maybe Ashoka could have a change of heart and agree to train Grogu after all, and this could be something of a redemption arc for her, though that's complicated by her having her own series coming up now (unless Baby Yoda hops series...?). Her decision not to is mutable, too.

Though, I suppose Luke being an active character in this world adds another wrinkle - Din is tasked with bringing Baby Yoda to a Jedi, and spends two seasons searching for one, to fulfill his duty. And, like, not a single person he talks to stops and thinks, "Oh yeah, that hero of the Republic, the guy who blew up the Death Star, and then just in case he hadn't made his point, did it again, and helped found the Republic, with his sster Leia... That dude? Isn't he a Jedi? Why don't you go talk to him?" :lol:

EDIT:
Also, if Baby Yoda isn't back in the Mandalorian in tie for the Season 3 premiere, there's going to be a fucking riot. Disney, I HAVE to believe, isn't stupid enough to try to continue the show without him. I'm not sure how they're going to do it, but the majority of people i know watching this aren't here for the history of Mandalore or the Darksaber or Boba Fett, they're here fr Baby Yoda.
 
#111 ·
I've always been really against signing up for Disney+, but I love both Star Wars and Marvel, so I've been tempted to sign up even if only for a month or two so I could watch this show, but the main thing that has stopped me is how, even though Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world, they do not have a PS4 or Xbox One app. I looked online and apparently they DO have an app in the US stores, but not in the Japanese one. Then you might think "Then just download it from the US PSN Store," but it seems that some Japanese users have tried to down the US app and sign in with a Japanese account and it hasn't worked, and also that they've tried to use the PS4's or Xbox One's browser to go to the Disney+ site, but that it always returns an error. I also checked my smart TV and it has over 30 streaming services (such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Rakuten TV, YouTube, Fuji On Demand, and all the most popular streaming services in Japan), but no Disney+. Considering Disney+ was released in Japan over a year ago, it kind of blows my mind that there's no console app, nor any widespread smart TV app (I say "widespread," because apparently SOME Japanese smart TVs do have it, but the vast majority do not). It's especially confusing considering how huge of a company Disney+ is. Do they expect everyone to just watch on their PC's web browsers?
 
#126 ·
No. The Mandalorian isn't perfect.
It has episodes that I would never watch again and no episode is nearly long enough to watch and was quite repetitive at one point. What is good however is good.

That being said, I've felt that SW should have made a Boba Fett trilogy in the vein of John Wick meets Deadpool (not the comedy, thr grit) You make it the gritty SW film series and show a whole other side of the Galaxy in being a Bounty Hunter. Sure. We are getting T.V. Series but there is nothing like having a the film production of a movie. That Mandolorian has it but it still isn't all the way there.

Otherwise, I enjoy the show and Mando as a new character of the SW Universe.
 
#129 ·
To be fair, most people who are watching it now would have impossibly high expectations based on coverage. Really I'm happy to have genuinely fun Star Wars content in a space Western format that respectfully shows all kinds of aspects of the universe.
 
#132 ·
I actually didn't mean it to come across that negatively. I still enjoyed it, but other than Mando gathering his troops RPG style, the plot's more than a little thin. What the hell was the point of the prison ship episode?

We finished S1 tonight and enjoyed it though. It's good fun, though this certainly isn't Chernobyl. :lol:
 
#134 ·
That actually reminds me of something I thought the entire time I was watching the show, right from the first episode. It really felt like a video game. Like, Mando's abilities, weapons, and gadgets are all straight up out of a video game. How he switches between flame thrower, those whistling birds (which he can only use like once per episode), the pistol/blaster, the rifle, the rifle that disintegrates people, his blade, his grappling line, as well as the RPG/action game upgrades he gets like his upgraded armor, his jet pack, etc. I just felt like they had designed him to be like a video game character.
 
#133 ·
I kinda like that there isn't a massive overarching plot in S1, and that it's basically just "Adventures in Star Wars" without being tied too heavily to any movie characters' story.
 
#136 ·
It felt like some sort of Lone Ranger type serial, which given the vibe and soundtrack and whatnot, may very well have been by design. :lol:
 
#138 ·
When we went up to Mass last week for Christmas, we had my in-laws check out The Mando, I think it took us 3 days to blast through both seasons. They certainly aren’t big SW fans, but LOVED Mando. Got my wife one of the Hasbro Grogu’s that she’s been talking to and carrying around almost to a concerning amount.

We decided to re-watch all the movies, as we haven’t seen any of the sequel trilogies yet, nor Solo. We made it through the first 3 pieces of shit. Man, I always forget how bad they are until I get into them. I really can’t believe no one on set spoke up with, “Hey, I know we’re going to CG the rest of this scene, but really? You all think Hayden delivered his lines in an acceptable fashion?” Granted, the dialogue itself is fucking terrible, but still, a good actor can at least add something to shit lines. My favorite was in Attack Of The Clones when he was assigned to watch Portman, they do their initial greeting then the next scene is him crying like a little bitch and throwing a hissy fit about how everything is unfair. I don’t know if they figured the audience would assume some days have passed between those interactions, but the way it was set up in the movie, it was like he went from “Oh, nice to see you again. LIFE ISN’T FAIR TO MEEEEEEEEE WAAAHHHHH!”

I’m anxious to see the newer flicks and revisit the original trilogy as it’s been about 10 years since the last time.
 
#140 ·
SO. Just finished 2nd season.

I thought the Must Bring The Child To One Of His Own --> Go to planet X --> Hey I need help --> Ok, but let's accomplish this mission first --> Oh, you need to go on this another planet --> Repeat ... Was getting nowhere.

But THEN.

Best ending ever.
 
#141 ·
Late to the party again but we just watched the episode with Michael Biehn's cameo.



He says something along the lines of "I have no quarrel with you, Mandalorian", just like he said "My fight's not with you, Holliday" in Tombstone. Had to be intentional.
 
#145 ·
Well, I can definitely thank The Mandolorian for reigniting my Star Wars enthusiasm. I’m a bigger fan now than I was when I was 8!

We just marathoned all the movies in chronological order. What is it with them taking a male lead and just creating the worst fucking characters with them? Anakin and Kylo are both little bitches and rarely displayed anything but that for their screen time. I knew right from the start of Kylo having a bitchfit on the wall of computers with his lightsaber that it his character was going to let me down and I was not wrong. My wife’s got a crush on him and thinks I was jealous, but he’s just a little bitch throwing hissy fits.

If they ever do a Pink Floyd documentary, Adam Driver HAS to play Roger Waters, he looks EXACTLY like him. Surely he can tap into his Kylo role and bring out the little bitch within to pull off Waters, too.
 
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