Ian Thomas Malone

Monthly Archive: April 2023

Tuesday

25

April 2023

0

COMMENTS

Classic Film: All I Desire

Written by , Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The allure of the American dream has never been super compatible with the realities of agency. The charm of 1950s suburbia, with its white picket fences and heteronormativity, pushed women into their preordained roles, with little concern for any desires contrary to the picturesque image of a happy life. For many, their only true choice was conformity or exile.

The 1953 film All I Desire centers its narrative on a woman stifled by her lack of agency over the course of her life. Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) is a vaudeville actress barely scrapping by in her career. Having abandoned her husband and three kids for a life in the theatre, Naomi faces her dwindling prospects with an understandable disdain for the cards she’s been dealt. A letter from her middle child Lilly (Lori Nelson) requesting her presence at a high school play gives Naomi the chance to go back home, to see all that she left behind for a chance at fame that never panned out.

Based on the 1951 novel Stopover, director Douglas Sirk crafts a subversive family drama that challenges the idealism of suburbia. Naomi’s abandonment of her family put a great strain on her husband Henry (Richard Carlson) and eldest child Joyce (Marcia Henderson) to keep their household together. The close-knit town of Riverdale, Wisconsin is too small for secrets, the ramifications of Naomi’s old affair with Dutch Heinemann (Lyle Bettger) resurfacing a decade later like no time had passed at all.

Stanwyck largely carries the narrative through its brisk 80-minute runtime, bringing a much-needed natural degree of sympathy to the complex protagonist. Naomi is not a very likable person, but Stanwyck never tries to endear her to the audience, instead focusing on the carnage that ensues when people are forced to grapple with pre-programmed existences. You don’t need to like Naomi to understand why she did what she did or feel the pain of someone forced to retrace their steps through hostile territory.

The narrative itself leaves a lot to be desired. Henry and Joyce are both fascinating characters who don’t get much of a chance to shine. Henry’s relationship with Sara (Maureen O’Sullivan), Lily’s drama teacher, plays second fiddle to a more predictable pairing, refusing to muddy the waters of interpersonal conflict. All I Desire could have been a damning indictment on the forced idealism of suburbia, instead conforming to a 1950s audience who weren’t ready to see the dream of the middle class crushed before their eyes.

The film’s overwhelming desire to play it safe undercut what could have been a masterpiece. Instead, All I Desire rests comfortably as a lesser entry in Sirk and Stanwyck’s storied canon. There is some staying power in the themes presented, a contemporaneous indictment against the idealism that is still hoisted up nostalgically as peak Americana. Everyone would be well to remember that the 1950s had plenty of problems too.

Wednesday

19

April 2023

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COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 24

Written by , Posted in Blog, Star Wars, TV Reviews

Last season’s finale reduced grown adults to tears, not simply for the nostalgia of deep fake Luke, but because the show had invested heavily in the arc of its characters. Season three began with a quest for Mando to take a bath because he once took off his helmet, only to conclude with the retaking of Mandalore and the radical rollback of his people’s fanaticism, reuniting with the sect of their religion that likes a little vitamin D on their faces. The show rarely seemed interested in cohesive plot progression, or the relationships between its lead characters.

To some extent, “Chapter 24: The Return,” might have been dead on arrival. The Mandalorians might be forgiven for not knowing there was some giant secret Imperial base on their homeworld, though no one seems to wonder what happened to the Tie Fighters who blew up Bo-Katan’s base on Kalevale back in the third episode of the season. For a warrior people, the Mandalorians don’t seem terribly interested in making plans.

We the audience, know nothing about their strategy. We didn’t even really know how many of them there were until the closing sequence of the episode, where maybe a hundred or so Mandalorians attended Bo-Katan’s celebratory bonfire. The show doesn’t need to stage a giant battle sequence that wouldn’t fit in the budget, but it also made no effort to explain why anyone would think leaving a single person aboard their Imperial Light Cruiser was a good idea, sacrificing their best ship to a handful of fighters.

Why did this happen? Who thought this was a good idea? Until last episode, the only times we’d seen groups of Mandalorians in action was in service to saving people in need. Heroism can carry a certain undercurrent of stupidity when you’re risking yourself to save others. These past two episodes have shown the Mandalorians acting like reckless fools for no higher purpose. No wonder they lost their homeworld. They don’t seem like very smart people.

The sheer recklessness of the Mandalorians undercuts the emotional turmoil of Mando seeing Grogu in danger. Mando was 100% complicit in the poor strategic planning that got them there. The fight sequence utilizing R5-D4 to operate the shields was some of the show’s most impressive choreography, though poorly served by the droid’s continued cowardly antics.  In most other episodes, that battle alone could have carried the entire episode.

Everything wrong with Disney’s love of StageCraft was on full display with the air battle between the Mandolorians and the jet troopers. The frantic cinematography couldn’t do much to salvage the cheap special effects. The choreography conveyed no cohesive story, just blurs, and laser blasts. Everything felt cheap, rushed, and narratively empty.

The return of Moff Gideon was as anticlimactic as the destruction of the darksaber. It’s clear the show only brought him back because they needed something for the finale. The darksaber, rarely ever used on the show, served as little more than a plot device because the people who worked on The Clone Wars thought it would be fun to see on a live-action show.

There’s a certain irony in Gideon’s efforts to wield the force in an episode where a baby who abandoned his Jedi boarding school displayed an uneven relationship with his own abilities. The narrative trope of the child prodigy struggling with their gifts falls a bit flat when Grogu probably would have been better off training with Luke for most of the season instead of doing practically nothing with Mando. He could have even shown up at the finale like he did in The Book of Boba Fett, which would have actually given the show some weight.

The episode’s conclusion aimed to pack an emotional punch, but the narrative to adequately sell any beauty in Mando adopting Grogu. As rushed as things felt with Mando leaving Mandalore to live on Nevarro, an episode after the Mandalorians left Nevarro to live on Mandalore, three episodes after the Mandalorians left that unnamed desert planet to live on Nevarro, the closing scene accomplished one important objective. This show knows it’s time for a reset.

The season three finale was an embarrassing, sloppy conclusion to a season defined by narrative laziness. This show has lost its way. Thankfully the fix is rather easy, if only the writers could develop something resembling an attention span. Time will tell if viewers stick around to find out.

Tuesday

18

April 2023

2

COMMENTS

Star Trek: Picard’s third season is one of the franchise’s finest achievements

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Star Trek: Picard was built on the noble premise of exploring arguably the franchise’s most beloved figure against a backdrop that wasn’t just a reboot of The Next Generation. The execution of its first two seasons ran into some regrettable issues. A series that was simultaneously trying to establish a new cast, redeem the Romulan and Borg races, build on synth lore, and examine its titular figure’s complex relationships with franchise titans such as Q and Data, alongside tertiary TNG characters like Hugh the Borg and Bruce Maddox was always going to be a heavy lift. The first two seasons were often defined by sluggish pacing that didn’t see the urgency in all the complex storytelling the show ostensibly strove toward.

Many might point to the acclaim of season three as indicative of the show giving into nostalgia. The real triumph of Star Trek: Picard’s final season is its cohesive, determined storytelling. Retaining only Jean-Luc (Patrick Stewart), franchise stalwart Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), and Raffi (Michelle Hurd), the single original Picard character to retain a starring role across all three seasons, the show balanced out its roster with a compelling mix of fresh faces and legacy characters, including the entire core TNG cast. Three seasons in, Picard finally figured out how to balance its affection for the past alongside the franchise mandate to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

For a season that riffed most of its core premise off storylines already thoroughly explored in Deep Space Nine with the changeling infiltration of Starfleet, as well as the not-so-original secret child trope in Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) the real X-factor has been the USS Titan. Picard is the first new Trek series to take place in the timeline established by TNG, DS9, and Voyager since the opening sequence of the 2009 Star Trek reboot. The Titan actually feels like the Starfleet many of us grew up with, not the bleak deconstruction favored by prestige television.

Picard found itself an unlikely sleeper gem in Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick). The curmudgeonly foil to Picard and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) could have been an easy person to hate, but Stashwick quickly sold audiences on one unassailable truth. For as fun as it’s been for the audience to watch the crew of the Enterprise save the universe all these years, rank and file Starfleet has to be pretty sick of their nonstop drama. Shaw provided audiences with a sympathetic conduit unwittingly roped into their shenanigans.

The Titan serves as a place where the legacy characters can meaningfully interact with newer characters. The show took great care to establish figures like Sidney La Forge (Ashleigh Sharpe Chestnut) independent of her famous father (LeVar Burton), who everyone knew was bound to show up. Raffi and Worf (Michael Dorn) provided meaningful plot progression independent of the Titan, while Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) navigated the complexity of her place on their ship with ample grace, a triumph for fans who always wished for more for her character. Frakes delivered similar career-best work as Riker, the grief of a father channeled through his interactions with Picard and Troi (Marina Sirtis).

The success of season three’s story reflects the essential nature of its cast to the conflict. Unlike previous seasons, you actually get the sense that these people need to be a part of this particular adventure, a pivotal time in these figures’ lives. The show does a serviceable job looping in the previous two seasons, while also undoing plenty of their resolutions in less satisfactory manners, particularly with regard to Data (Brent Spiner) and certain antagonists vital to Picard’s entire arc. We the audience know that Picard exists because Paramount needs subscribers for its streaming service, but the show finally stopped feeling like it was reverse engineering ideas in search of a purpose.

The other big triumph of the season is the way the show managed to present satisfying episodic storytelling alongside its broader narrative. Early episodes such as “Seventeen Seconds” or “No Win Scenario” could have easily belonged to the 90s Trek canon while serving as pivotal setup for the rest of the season. The mandate for this season might have been to say goodbye to Picard, but the show also managed to lay out a compelling rubric for how future series, including a much-anticipated spinoff, might handle this beloved era of Trek lore.

It would be an oversimplification to lay the blame for Picard’s earlier failures on the show’s original, far less compelling cast that have almost all been sent packing. Season three sells the idea that the magic wouldn’t have been there if the show hadn’t tried other things first, even if they didn’t work very well. The TNG crew also aren’t all necessarily there to make up for the sins of Picard either, but earlier crimes in the form of the lackluster swan songs provided by Insurrection and Nemesis.

Season three is one of Star Trek’s crowning achievements, the gold standard for how franchises can blend in legacy characters while maintaining vitally present plotlines that don’t completely rely on nostalgia. There are so many obvious throwbacks here, the motherlode of which was dropped in the season’s penultimate episode. The passion burns brighter because we the audience have finally been given ample reasons to care.

Tuesday

18

April 2023

0

COMMENTS

Classic Film: Criss Cross

Written by , Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Storytelling favors cohesion for obvious practical purposes. Audiences are not exactly wrong to crave narratives that fit neatly within the confines of the medium’s natural parameters. Noir as a genre prefers to bask in the messiness of the human experience. Adapted from the novel of the same name, the 1949 film Criss Cross explores the nature of a man forced to confront how detached his fantasies are from reality.

Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) returns to his old Los Angeles stomping ground hoping to rekindle a romance with his ex-wife Anna (Yvonne De Carlo). Steve’s storybook reunion with Anna at their old bar is quickly dashed by the reality of Anna’s present life, entwined with mobster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Working as a driver for an armored truck company, Steve decides that the easiest way to win Anna back would naturally be to involve Slim and his goons in a robbery heist in order to double cross them, armored-trucks typically considered too dangerous to loot.

Director Robert Siodmak has a knack for building easy suspense. Lancaster is an easy muse for the noir genre, an expressive actor with a fantastic range for Steve’s uneasy pain, bringing to life the cluelessness of many attractive men to see their own responsibility in their life’s trajectory. Life hasn’t given Steve what he wants. He’s mostly to blame for that, a reality that noir illustrates with such bleak beauty.

The film at times does fall into the comfortable mechanics of heist plotting at the expense of its own characters that lie at the heart of the story. Siodmak keeps things interesting through his brisk 88-minute runtime, albeit making a bit of a mess with a third act that needs to cover too much ground. Noir is a forgiving genre for such dynamics, chaos finding an appropriate outlet in Steve’s delusions of grandeur.

Criss Cross basks in noir’s proclivity to deconstruct the flawed nature of man, powered by Lancaster’s innate charm finally that’s confronted with its own limitations. Plenty of men think they can do anything. Film likes to sell the idea that we can. Who likes to be told that we don’t have in our individual power the ability to change the course of not only our fates, but the entire orbit around us?

Noir can often be a bit of a downer, humanity’s grittiness exposed through the often-idealistic Hollywood lens. Criss Cross puts enough distance between its egomaniacal lead and the audience to provide some interesting glimmers of hope. The film possesses some truly inspired twists that cut against the grain of typical Hollywood fare, a reminder that some stories can hold power not through their reliability, but through the potent reality that we as individuals need not fall into the same traps. You can always change your fate, but it to have some humility along the journey.

 

Wednesday

12

April 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 23

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Much has been written about season three’s seeming ambivalence toward addressing the emotional ramifications of Mando and Grogu’s reunion that happened on someone else’s show. It seems likely that Grogu was not originally supposed to be in this season, at least not by Mando’s side. The season has barely featured Star Wars’ only current cultural sensation, perhaps the single most valuable character across Disney’s vast empire, for any purposes that don’t involve cute memeable moments for the internet. His only substantive character moment came in episode four, itself a handcrafted viral moment featuring the return of millennial icon Ahmed Best.

The baby that singlehandedly redeemed the launch of Disney+ has been sidelined in favor of a character who made her debut in the eightieth episode of a children’s cartoon which The Mandalorian heavily leans on to fill out its own lore. Convolution may be one of this show’s predominant issues, but the bigger problem is a simpler matter. This show is absolutely horrible at basic plot progression.

“Chapter 23: The Spies” essentially starts off by abandoning the accomplished objective of the entire pro-helmet Mandalorian sect two episodes prior, to fight off space pirates so they can build a settlement on Nevarro. After putting up a few tents, the arrival of Bo-Katan’s anti-helmet buddies and their repurposed Imperial light cruiser apparently has them ready to pivot completely toward the imminent, impromptu reconquering of Mandalore. What’s the rush? This show has endless time for side quest antics but can’t even bother to explain anything resembling a plan, something each of the three original Star Wars films made time for.

The sight of the Mandalorian fleet was a bit jarring when juxtaposed against the handful of helmet people we’re used to seeing. The idea that Bo-Katan would continue to fly her ship The Gauntlet with Mando, Grogu, and R5-D4 just after reclaiming her leadership spot was beyond clownish. Who exactly is flying all these ships? What was the point of Greef welcoming them all if they’re just going to leave two episodes later?

This show has never featured more than two dozen or so Mandalorians on screen at the same time, obvious limits of the StageCraft technology. This dynamic is unnecessarily complicated by the show’s refusal to engage in any sort of meaningful exposition. If you don’t show more than twenty people ever, and you don’t say there’s more than twenty people ever, how is anyone supposed to take this whole war seriously? These people have supposedly survived for thousands of years yet there’s barely enough to field a football team, let alone garrison several massive ships.

The return of Moff Gideon is a bit of a mixed bag. Giancarlo Esposito is always fun to watch, especially when he’s setting up Grand Admiral Thrawn, the crown jewel of the no-longer-canon expanded universe. The obvious strides toward the sequel trilogy serve as an unwelcome reminder of how little has happened since Gideon was captured just a handful of episodes ago. This show apparently has nothing else to do but reuse its own villains.

Baby Yoda gets to ride inside IG-11’s (IG-12**, because there are fewer droids in the galaxy than helmet people) corpse, for some reason. Mando left Grogu behind to hang out with complete strangers last episode, but now he feels comfortable bringing a baby to war instead of leaving him with Greef, despite claiming that he’s not able to pilot the droid. This would all feel more like nitpicking if it wasn’t all so stupid.

The Mando-chess fight between Paz Vizsla and Axes Woves served as a microcosm for everything wrong with this episode. Bo-Katan claims it was a matter of time before the two cultures clashed after a minor board game dispute. Maybe if they spent more than five minutes together as a people before going off to war, they might not get so easily pissed off at each other. There are barely ten Mandalorians on the ship and they’re ready to kill each other over the Star Wars equivalent of the designated hitter.

The action sequence was fairly silly. The jet troopers had the high ground, Star Wars 101, while many Mandalorians, including Din himself, didn’t even have rifles. The sets looked repetitive, sequences that were eerily similar to those from Chapter 12 of last season, as well as Part V of Obi-Wan Kenobi. The return of the Praetorian guard was certainly fun, but the uninspired fight choreography kind of sucked the air out of the room.

Mando’s capture and evil Gideon speech aside, the Mandalorian could have easily killed the troopers in their convenient bottleneck. Paz Vizsla took out most of them himself, only succumbing to foes that Bo-Katan didn’t know about when she ordered the retreat. This whole sequence was a pointless mess that couldn’t be redeemed by Esposito’s charismatic acting or the emotional ramifications of Mando’s capture.

Chapter 23 packs no narrative punch, the production of the season’s ambivalence toward cohesive plot progression. This show’s creative braintrust is as lazy as its CGI. The cute puppet is finally not enough to save this lazy experience masquerading as prestige television.

Thursday

6

April 2023

2

COMMENTS

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a beautiful, soulless cash-grab

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Video game adaptations often struggle with an innate reality of the genre. Playable protagonists like Mario are often left fairly undefined as characters. Video game Mario doesn’t really talk behind catchphrases like “Let’s a go” and “Mamma mia.” Villains like Bowser, adorable side characters like Toad, and retired damsels in distress like Peach define the personality of the franchise. Mario is mostly there as the avatar for the player to take it all in.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie doesn’t necessarily pretend like Mario has much of an identity so much as it ignores the issue completely. Mario debuted back in 1981 in the arcade game Donkey Kong, back before video games needed plots. Along the way, Luigi has been established as a cowardly little brother, a convenient sibling dynamic that the film adaptation leans on as the core of its own narrative.

The film mostly follows the Mario Bros. efforts to establish their plumbing business in Brooklyn and Queens, sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom while trying to get to the bottom of a city-wide flood. Separated from his brother Luigi (Charlie Day), Mario (Chris Pratt) quickly stumbles upon a territorial dispute between Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), queen of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser (Jack Black), ruler of the Dark Lands who hopes to use the Super Star to marry Peach and conquer their broader, semi-defined universe that also includes the Jungle Kingdom, ruled by Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen). Cranky’s son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) is also there, for little reason other than somebody thought it might be weird for him to not be in the The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

The plot is immensely perfunctory, a slight riff off the game’s original premise that does its best to do away with the franchise’s regressive themes. Peach is still basically just there to be the object of everyone’s affection, but someone else gets a turn to be locked in a cage. Bowser does grapple with the idea of consent, following Super Mario Odyssey’s lead in presenting villainy that’s fit for the post-#MeToo era.

Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic do a fantastic job with the technical work, including plenty of Easter Eggs that are bound to please adults in the audience. The film actually brings the silly concept of platforming to life in a way that feels authentic rather than perfunctory. The animation is top notch and the score serves as the film’s secret weapon, well-timed sequences that elevate many gags beyond mere nostalgia.

The voice acting and script are both competent and unremarkable. Of the voice cast, Black seems to be the only one who’s truly enjoying himself. Day suffers from an absence of humor fit for his style. Pratt and Taylor-Joy seem to have showed up content to play leading characters, neither bringing any sense of personality to either character. Rogen is aimlessly clownish as Donkey Kong, forced into a generic chest-pumping rivalry with the decidedly less macho Italian plumber.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie seems genuinely concerned with putting on an authentic experience for children and their parents alike. The first-rate production values almost redeem this bland, soulless blockbuster. With a brisk runtime of only 92 minutes, the film hardly overstays its welcome, a product of the reality that there’s hardly any narrative that needs addressing. The themes are shallow and the conflict is more than predictable for anyone who knows what Mario is.

Much of the film’s narrative issues stem from the one major element where Horvath and Jelenic truly broke from the canon. The decision to give Mario and Luigi a broader extended family may have made some sense from a broader industry perspective, the kind of feedback you might glean from a focus group. The time spent on characters nobody cares about detracts from all the film’s other ambitions, particularly in the third act where it wants to stuff in tributes to Donkey Kong and Mario Kart into an already bloated dynamic.

That sense of ambition might have been admirable in a world where the film had already laid out its themes, but The Super Mario Bros. Movie doesn’t really have a message. There’s little to take away from this movie other than the fact that it’s beautiful and decidedly not as bad as its 1993 live-action predecessor. Kids will enjoy this movie. Parents won’t want to gouge their eyes out. That might be enough for many to justify the experience, but something this beautiful made with so much obvious love should not be such a soulless, generic cash grab. This movie is pathetic and sad.

Wednesday

5

April 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 22

Written by , Posted in Blog, Star Wars, TV Reviews

The Mandalorian has spent most of its third season grappling with its conflicting interests between episodic and longform storytelling. Last week’s episode blended the two quite effectively, albeit in a rather inexplicably abrupt manner for a show with no real runtime constraints. There’s nothing stopping the show from engaging in meaningful character development alongside its fairly self-contained adventures.

Part of the fun of The Mandalorian is the way the show can jump across genres. “Chapter 22: Guns For Hire” is essentially a buddy cop episode. After a scene reminding the audience of who Bo-Katan’s old friends were, the show mostly gives itself over to a silly droid caper on the planet Plazir-15, ruled by Captain Combardier (Jack Black) and the Duchess (Lizzo). The show did a laughably bad job trying to come up with an explanation for why this nonsense needed to serve as a precursor to Mando and Bo-Katan’s intended helmet missionary work, but Black and Lizzo were entertaining to watch. It’s a little unclear why Mando felt okay leaving Baby Yoda with complete strangers, but we got some cute Grogu antics out of it.

The return of the Battle Droids, stalwarts of the prequels, was a bit of a mixed bag. The show abandoned much of the cringe comedy that defined the Battle Droids in Revenge of the Sith, but the chase sequence with Mando and the Super Battle Droid fell a little flat. No droid has ever moved like the Super Battle Droid in this episode, looking far more human than machine. Star Wars droids are not known for being nimble.

As a location, Plazir-15 was a much-needed breath of fresh air over the show’s preference for one-note planets or stale CGI, but the special effects weren’t necessarily great either. Thankfully the practical sets were pretty beautiful and the CGI showed plenty of variety, even if the planet came across as fairly sparsely populated. It seemed odd that neither Mando nor Bo had previously heard of this place when their local Ugnaught population seemed to know his old friend Kuill. Is this universe so big that people don’t know all the planets, or so small that everything revolves around a handful of families and people overlapping with each other across the decades? Star Wars has seemingly reverse-engineered their species’ entire culture to center around their debut appearance in the Cloud City garbage room in Empire Strikes Back.

The episode took a weird stance on capitalism and democracy. Captain Combardier and the Duchess ceded power to plurality rule, but the show clearly took the stance that the citizen’s exit from the working class was incompatible with a happy life. The droids are also apparently incapable of seeing their life through any lens but their own use value to their “creators,” the proletariat perpetually in debt to the bourgeoisie. Chapter 22 firmly established that the sympathies of The Mandalorian reside with capital over labor, a slap in the face to the franchise’s proletariat roots.

Christopher Lloyd put forth an easy crowd-pleaser as Commissioner Helgait, a Count Dooku-worshipping head of security. Helgait was a very predictable villain, and his Separatist nonsense will sail over most casual fans’ heads, but Lloyd was a lot of fun causing low-stakes mischief while envisioning himself as the living embodiment of a long-failed movement. An over-the-top villain isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world for something like Star Wars.

Director Bryce Dallas Howard continued her streak of excellent action sequences, aside from the sloppy Super Battle Droid chase. The fight between Bo-Katan and Axes Woves was an instant highlight of the entire season, Katee Sackhoff firmly establishing herself at the heart of the show’s emotional core. For a season that’s been oddly light on Grogu, Bo-Katan seems to be the only person with a clear character arc.

The show had to bend over backward once again to come up with a reason for Mando to hand over the darksaber without turning the show’s protagonists against each other. Mando using the transitive property to explain how Bo had actually bested him already was pretty pathetic, the kind of empty narrative hole that can’t be covered up with a cute puppet. This show does not enjoy doing its homework when it comes to long-form plot progression.

Chapter 22 made for entertaining television, but the episode also highlighted some of the show’s broader problems. The Mandalorian isn’t the low-stakes Western it once was. This show has broad ambitions for Mandalore and the fall of the New Republic, but it never seems interested in laying down the actual groundwork that brings these stories together. Something’s missing about this season that goes beyond its complete abandonment of exploring the relationship between its two key characters after reuniting them on a completely different show. The Mandalorian clearly wants to be more than The Baby Yoda Show, but it doesn’t necessarily know what it wants to be either.