Ian Thomas Malone

mandalorian Archive

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.

Wednesday

12

April 2023

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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.

Wednesday

5

April 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 22

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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.

Thursday

30

March 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 21

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

The Mandalorian premiered at a precarious time for the Star Wars franchise. Hitting Disney+ just a month before The Rise of Skywalker landed with a thud in theatres, Mando and his adorable sidekick offered a palette cleanser to anyone depressed by the narrative abomination that was the sequel trilogy. One of the main draws of The Mandalorian was the distance it afforded viewers from the endless nostalgia sucking all the air out of the mainline franchise.

Season three is clearly intent on closing the gap between the series and the films a bit. The return of Dr. Pershing and his love of illicit cloning, along with the emphasis on Coruscant and its messy political landscape, point to an unpleasant reality that’s kind of hard to ignore. It seems very likely that Grogu’s DNA/midichlorians will be used as the foundation for whatever Snoke was.

Chapter 21, “The Pirate,” blends a few of the show’s plotlines together in a well-paced, action-heavy episode. The episode’s most important achievement was the validation of Nevarro as a position of narrative value rather than a convenient place to kill time whenever the show thought it might be fun to check in with Greef Karga. It is somewhat refreshing to see the show actually weave its older supporting bench into its long-term plans.

The return of Captain Gorian Shard was undercut by Nevarro’s inexplicable lack of defenses, Karga looking fairly inept at urban planning in the Outer Rim, a dynamic that’s harder to forgive when the episode leaned so heavily on his army-wrangling prowess in the early days of the show. The townsfolk were shown to have blasters at the end of the episode, but it’s more than a little lazy that none of them were shown to have lifted a finger when Shard first attacked. A meager attempt at a defense would have been understandable given the ship’s overwhelming firepower, but nobody even tried. How does Nevarro normally handle any sort of crime or violence?

Having no one around to blast the giant spaceship that was later destroyed by a single N-1 starfighter, Karga turns to another recurring character, Captain Carson, to send the New Republic to help. Carson visits Coruscant in person for seemingly no other reason than to bring Elia Kane back into the fold after spending most of Chapter 19 following her adventures with Dr. Pershing. Colonel Tuttle’s apathy toward Nevarro effectively sets up some cracks in the New Republic, but it’s hard to call any of this particularly satisfying when Coruscant still feels so small despite having seemingly billions and billions of people living in the city.

The idea that R5-D4, used up until this point almost solely for comic relief, is some kind of rebel spy in active communication with Captain Carson is beyond absurd. Elements of the fandom have for decades leaned into the gag that R5-D4 is actually a hero of the Rebellion, deliberately sabotaging his own motivator in A New Hope so that R2-D2 could take his place. There’s even a canon story about R5-D4’s adventures, released as part of a charity book in 2017 celebrating the 40th anniversary of the franchise. It’s laughably silly to think that Pelli and her Tatooine junkyard are part of some grand conspiracy to drag the Mandalorians into helping remnants of the New Republic defend planets that didn’t sign the charter, but I guess the show wants to lean into this nonsense for whatever reason. Not everything needs to be connected!

The R5-D4 foolishness did serve a broader narrative purpose. The Mandalorians have looked a little aimless hanging out in their undeveloped rock fort. Defending Nevarro not only gave their tribe a chance to actually do something, building toward a future for their people instead of merely hanging on to relics of the past.

Chapter 21 contained multiple wins for religious zealotry. Paz Vizsla pulled an amusing bait-and-switch on Mando by pointing out the losses they’ve endured for his helmetless ward before urging the tribe to come to the aid of another man who tried to kill them all. The Armorer recognized the power of uniting their people regardless of who likes to feel some sunlight on their face every once in a while. Her sequence with Bo-Katan could have benefited from some additional build-up, something I mentioned last week, but it was still an effective way to move the Mandalore plot forward.

It’s also rather refreshing to see that the Armorer is taking Katan’s word on having seen the mythosaur, a rarity for a person in power to believe their own constituents. Between the mythosaur and the darksaber, Katan and Mando are clearly on a bit of a collision course, but for now it was rather touching to see the Mandalorians united, and accepted, on their new, likely temporary, home.

The action was very entertaining, if not a bit ridiculous. It’s hard to tell which group of pirates were more incompetent, the fools on the ground or the ones in the air, but the whole thing looked like a cross between Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, and Swamp Thing. For a blockbuster movie, that might be a bad thing, but the absurdity mostly worked as a mid-season episode of television.

The return of Moff Gideon has seemed inevitable since last season’s finale, sucking a little air out of the episode’s final scene, reminding us all of how light this season of The Baby Yoda Show has been on Baby Yoda. “The Pirate” demonstrated all the things that make The Mandalorian great alongside troubling concerns that the show is trying too hard to tie too much of Star Wars together. Distance from the sequel trilogy was one of the show’s biggest selling points. Some fans would prefer to pretend Snoke never existed, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that luxury. The Mandalorian is playing with fire at the risk of its own legacy, sacrificing its own self-contained beauty for a chance to redeem past failures.

 

Thursday

16

March 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 19

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As a show, The Mandalorian is going through a television equivalent of puberty these days. What started as an episodic space western with an adorable breakout character is starting to embrace the idea of having an actual supporting cast, no longer content to treat Din Djarin as a Man with No Name-type stand-in. Whether a pivot toward serialization is a good idea remains to be seen, but Chapter 19, “The Convert” didn’t exactly present the best case for less Grogu in a world where many are perfectly fine with “The Baby Yoda Show.”

The episode started off with a bit of an unfortunate whiff. Mando takes his bath, completing his redemption arc without getting eaten by the Mythosaur, a win for any of us who were worried that the show might spend its entire season centered around helmet drama. Rather than build on actual narrative stakes between Mando and his reunited son, or Bo-Katan, the show throws us into a very rushed space battle with terrible CGI, unfunny R5-D4 antics, and plenty of plot holes. One could accept that Katan’s ship’s radars might not pick up a bunch of Tie Interceptors, but fans have known since the very first Star Wars that Ties can’t fly far without a carrier. The idea that Katan’s home is being bombed by a squadron with seemingly no warning or explanation for how they got there is clownish behavior for a franchise that does little else besides lean on nostalgia, the kind of stuff that can’t be covered up by Grogu rapidly opening and closing his pram, which isn’t as cute as anyone making the show thinks it is.

One can kind of see the logic in exploring a character like Dr. Pershing, who helped set up Team Mando’s Grogu rescue in the season two finale. Dedicating the majority of the longest episode of the series thus far to a tertiary villain is a tall order before anyone considers the Andor-sized elephant in the room. Right in the middle of The Mandalorian’s broader narrative identity crisis, the show made the inexplicable decision to start riffing off the only Star Wars show that could legitimately call itself a serious drama.

Andor is the only live-action Star Wars show that doesn’t deploy StageCraft, technology that’s often ruined The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and too many recent Marvel movies. While The Mandalorian is often one of the only Disney products to properly wield StageCraft, Andor, with its lavish practical sets, is one of the most beautiful shows on television. There is no world in which The Mandalorian’s Coruscant looks better than Andor’s. It’s unclear why the former even tried. Putting aside the differences in practical effects vs. StageCraft, it makes no sense for a series fresh off a two-plus year hiatus would bench its leads only to deliver its audience a cheaper version of a show many of them had undoubtedly recently seen.

The Mandalorian and Andor serve two very different audiences. The latter carries substantive, serious stakes, obviously intended for adults. The former is the standard bearer for an entire streaming service, a glorified live action cartoon. That’s not a bad thing either. Diversity of content is supposed to be a good thing, even if this episode reminded us that apparently Coruscant has “one trillion” permanent residents, even if the same handful of people keep showing up across this galaxy that can’t help feeling small as a result. This plotline had no business being in The Mandalorian, except maybe because The Mandalorian doesn’t know how to be The Mandalorian right now.

Some of this awkward Coruscant dynamic might have been averted if Dr. Pershing’s adventures with Elia Kane, who fans might justifiably mistake for a new character given how long it’s been since season two, had been broken up with a scene or two with Mando and friends in the middle of the episode. The end revelation sort of justifies this, as it might looked awkward for Katan to have a dialogue-heavy scene without removing her helmet, but the show didn’t exactly look great spending all that time on two characters plenty would have forgotten about. The sympathy the show wants its audience to feel for Pershing is totally undercut by the ease with which he instantly slipped back into his old cloning ways, a former villain violating the terms of his amnesty for seemingly no reason other than he thinks he knows better than people who didn’t try and perform lab experiments on the cutest character in television.

The episode almost redeemed itself at the end when Mando and Bo arrived at the Mandalorian hideout. There is clearly a darksaber-sized conflict brewing between the two, Bo keeping the mythosaur sighting to herself. Putting aside the silliness of the living waters of Mandalore, Vizsla delivered a compelling sequence on the nature of identity when she accepted Katan into their tribe, despite the latter belonging to a completely different sect of Mandalorian lore. Katan, who once sought the darksaber to lead her people to salvation, suddenly falls backwards into the same kind of found family dynamic she’s clearly been longing for during all of her throne sulks. As confusing as the rival Mandalorian factions are, and as clunky as the show dumps its exposition, this episode concludes with real narrative stakes established between two of its best characters, though the show may not be well-served by keeping Katee Sackoff under her helmet for too long.

Chapter 19 was an unfortunate dud that ended on a compelling note. The show started to take baby steps toward the plotline that consumed much its first two seasons, the value of Grogu’s DNA, but perhaps at the wrong moment. We don’t need a Dr. Pershing-centered episode before The Mandalorian has actually taken a moment to evaluate the nature of the relationship between Mando and Grogu, the latter of which will undoubtedly stick out like a sore thumb the longer his dad hangs out with his helmet clan. We certainly don’t need bargain bin Andor with StageCraft effects. We’re almost halfway through the season and things only start to feel like they’re headed in a cohesive direction.

Thursday

9

March 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 18

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

The Mandalorian used to be a show about found family, the bonds of love stretching beyond matters of blood. The show is still sort of about that, but now it’s mainly about a grown man trying to redeem himself from the heinous crime of taking off his helmet, first to rescue his son and then to say goodbye, a farewell that was scrubbed away on a completely different television show. Fans are not necessarily wrong to wonder why any of us should care beyond the basic reality that Grogu is still very adorable.

After a solid premiere that efficiently, if not awkwardly, set the stage for the rest of the season, episode two doubled down on a couple of utterly tired Star Wars tropes. As a company, Disney has always had an unhealthy love affair with nostalgia, something that essentially ruined the sequel series. I doubt many members of the audience watching the original film in 1977 ever thought that R5-D4 would become an important character more than forty years down the road, providing unnecessary comic relief on a show that already has too many characters capable of fulfilling that role, but here we are.

The Mandalorian can’t let Tatooine go. Production clearly enjoys the ease of filming on desert sets, but the overuse of Peli both last season and in The Book of Boba Fett exposes this show’s broader issue of its weak bench. Mando used to meet new characters every week. Now he just seems to travel in a circle visiting the same handful of people. Amy Sedaris is certainly fun, but no amount of comic relief can cover up the awkward narrative mess that was Peli throwing her astromech droid on Mando for no real reason. Why does she want to get rid of R5-D4 so badly? Does anyone actually care? R5-D4’s cowardly antics were tiresome and not amusing in the slightest.

Star Wars also loves its MacGuffins. The Force Awakens used a “map to Skywalker” as a major plot point, presumably because J.J. Abrams needed a substitute for the Death Star plans in his near shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope. No one seemed to notice that the whole quest to obtain the map was rendered moot by Luke’s apathy in The Last Jedi, a breathtakingly bad display of narrative plotting for a multibillion-dollar franchise. The whole quest to take a bath in Mandalore is essentially just as stupid, something for Mando to do because the show needs something to focus its attention on when Grogu isn’t eating something or being cute.

What happened to Grogu being in danger if he wasn’t properly trained by a Jedi? He’s clearly not as much of a baby anymore, a decent pilot, though Anakin already displayed that N-1 starfighters could be expertly flown by complete amateurs in The Phantom Menace. The most realistic part of the whole episode was Bo-Katan snapping out of her throne sulking upon sight of Grogu’s adorable face.

The ruins of Mandalore featured dull, lifeless special effects accompanied by static cinematography. Disney’s StageCraft technology supposedly costs tens of millions of dollars each episode, yet the cheap ugly CGI can’t even pull off a single wide shot with a character in it. It’s utterly pathetic how far the standards in science fiction have fallen. The Mandalorian has often deployed StageCraft better than most other Disney properties, but this episode, unfortunately, laid all its worst inclinations to bare. The shots were dark, frantic, and worst of all, boring. Give me Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks any day over the hideous abomination in the eyes of man that is StageCraft practically every time it’s been deployed in recent memory.

“The Mines of Mandalore” tried to address the elephant in the room which is the nature of Mando’s quest when Bo-Katan called out his ridiculous escapade. Mando wasn’t necessarily wrong to point out that ceremonies and traditions are what define our cultures and communities. The trouble is, his place as a Mandalorian is ill-defined and out of place with the show’s style as a space Western. Just as Grogu doesn’t belong with the Jedi, Mando doesn’t really belong with his people either. Maybe the show will head in that direction, but for now, it’s a bit tedious to spend this time on this confusing mess of a plotline.

Dave Filoni’s outsized influence continues to be felt with the Mandalore exposition, completely missing why a general audience enjoys watching the show. The beauty of a western is that anyone can follow. It’s unclear how many casual fans could follow along with the last five or so minutes of this episode, dumping tons of dialogue that are bound to confuse anyone who hasn’t seen The Clone Wars or Rebels, two animated series that originally aired on Cartoon Network and Disney XD respectively, channels almost entirely aimed at children. Star Wars is certainly family-friendly entertainment, a reality that riles plenty of adult viewers, but it’s a bit of a stretch to expect that a general audience made the time to watch the animated spinoffs explicitly written for kids.

Episode two was ugly, convoluted, and worst of all, boring. This show makes no emotional investments in its characters, coasting entirely on cute antics and nostalgia. The episodic format does give the show plenty of space to turn things around, but this season’s broader arc is an absolute dud. The sooner the show can find a new narrative to focus on than redemption for Mando’s helmet, the better.

 

Wednesday

1

March 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 3 Review: Chapter 17

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

There is no precedent in television history for The Book of Boba Fett’s decision to hand over two of its seven episodes almost completely to The Mandalorian, let alone in a way that completely undid the latter’s superb second season finale. There are undoubtedly millions of Mandalorian fans who did not make it to the fifth episode of Fett’s unremarkable season and have no idea how or why Mando and Grogu were reunited. Season three’s opener “The Apostate” at times didn’t seem particularly concerned with that reality, exacerbated by the more than two-year wait since we’ve had an actual episode of The Mandalorian.

The show has hardly missed a beat after moving on from its initial two-year arc, quickly establishing the stakes for Mando’s re-entry into his people’s good graces. The sequence featuring the giant crocodile was among the best uses of StageCraft after a stretch of extremely lackluster special effects in The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania among others. The Mandalorian continued its streak of superb effects alongside some beautiful practical sets, including a gorgeously revamped Nevarro that looks a teensy bit like Batuu from Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

The scene with Greef Karga was a little clunky, offering a bit of necessary exposition while Grogu engaged in some of his most memorable antics, using the force to spin Greef’s chair and eat his desk candy. Mando is right to note that the situation with Grogu is complicated, but the episode passed on an opportunity to explore this dynamic between the two, even with Greef serving as the closest thing Mando might have to a confidant on the show.

The decision to rebuild IG-11 makes some narrative sense, Mando wanting a capable droid to explore the perils of Mandalore. The comic relief centered around IG-11 going rogue fell a little flat, indicative of the show’s broader relationship with its extended cast. The season two finale featured a full room of allies on Mando’s side when Luke Skywalker appeared. Now, Mando seems weirdly short on allies, though Cara Dune’s absence was deftly explained after the actress self-canceled off the show with her Majorie Taylor Greene-type antics. Nevarro feels weirdly small, Greef looking like he runs the show alone in a town with the resources to make an IG-11 statue in the square but no suitable alternative droids to help Mando’s mission besides a broken potentially homicidal bounty hunter turned nurse.

Letting Shard live was inexplicably reckless, a move that bit Mando in the ass almost immediately, albeit in service to a stellar space sequence. It’s clear Shard, and maybe Moff Gideon, will be thorns in Mando’s side down the road. Mando’s refurbished N-1 starfighter is one of the best throwbacks to the prequel trilogy that new Star Wars has given us, a beautiful substitute for the Razor Crest.

The show found itself a bit caught in the weeds with the return of Bo-Katan, who has fallen from grace among her people after failing to acquire the Darksaber in Mando’s possession. The show handled the exposition with some grace, but this episode was the first time that The Clone Wars and Rebels felt truly important to the plot rather than merely enhancing the experience. The overarching plot is understandably becoming more complex that the self-explanatory arc of the first two seasons. It’ll be interesting to see how much season three relies on established Star Wars lore moving forward.

“The Apostate” was solid television that never felt like it needed to make a big splash to compensate for the long hiatus. As a show, The Mandalorian has often produced its best work with fairly self-contained storytelling, but the demands of Mando’s mission will undoubtedly introduce a greater sense of serialization into the mix. The episode didn’t do a great job bridging the gap from Fett’s “Mando 2.5” dynamic, but it certainly served as a strong premiere in setting up the rest of the season.

Tuesday

5

January 2021

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COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 2 Review

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

Season two of The Mandalorian began with a fairly daunting task. The show built an enormous amount of goodwill during its freshman effort for crafting a narrative that carried the aura of being far-removed from the rest of Star Wars lore, even if the constant, subtle Easter Eggs tended to suggest otherwise. As the sequel series faltered, The Mandalorian suggested that the future of the franchise rested in standalone storytelling.

All the recent announcements of close to a dozen new Star Wars series throw a wrench in this whole thesis, but it’s clear that The Mandalorian had been inching toward this destination for a long time. The chance to feature series favorites such as Bo-Katan, Boba Fett, and Ahsoka Tano transformed what was once predominantly an episodic meme-factory for the hijinks of an adorable puppet and his adopted father. Season two will be defined as the point where The Mandalorian stopped explicitly being “The Baby Yoda Show,” and not just strictly because the cute little fella finally got a proper name.

The perfectly executed season finale should rightfully spark melancholic feelings toward the change in status quo for The Mandalorian, which now finds itself firmly entrenched in Skywalker lore. Season two featured plenty of episodes defined by their self-contained adventures, from the slaying of a Krayt dragon to the head-scratching detour to ice-spider planet. Individual victories from episode to episode are bound to take a backseat to big mic-drop moments.

The Mandalorian built an enormous amount of goodwill for moments crafted by its own characters. For a man who rarely shows his face, Pedro Pascal brought an impressive depth of emotional range to Din Djarin, subtly setting up the tear-jerking departure of the final episode, where he bucked his traditions and removed his helmet. Those are the kind of set-ups that The Mandalorian excels at, but it’s harder to recreate that dynamic when the complications of decades of fan-nostalgia begin to occupy the same space.

Season two benefited from an untapped reservoir of guest stars, rewarding longtime fans for their dedication in following the animated series, comics, and broader Expanded Universe. Soon there will be other places to find those highs, including The Book of Boba, which will air at the end of this year. The Mandalorian will hardly be the only game in town.

Show creator Jon Favreau improved upon season one in practically every way imaginable. The episodes felt more vital, even as they relied upon their own self-contained adventures. The show eased up on its love of rocky desert planets. Grogu didn’t lean too hard into his status as a walking meme, aside from perhaps the moment where he decided he’d practice the Force by swiping blue macarons. For all the moments in season one that felt like the show was dragging its feet, season two moved the ball forward in practically every episode.

Season two built on the strong foundation of the first while expanding the narrative to define The Mandalorian’s place in Star Wars lore. Favreau accomplished all of this while not losing sight of his two heroes that made all the magic in the first place. A cameo from Star Wars’ original hero may be the most noteworthy thing to come out of the show, but The Mandalorian ensured that the franchise won’t be defined by its first family.

It is weird think that The Mandalorian may have already established its legacy two seasons in. The streaming world it helped established will look very different when the show returns, presumably in 2022. It may be a bit overblown to say that The Mandalorian “saved” Star Wars, a billion dollar entity that can absorb some lackluster installments.

The urge to reach that conclusion comes from a fairly natural point. There may come a day when the show loses itself in endless callbacks, a fate suffered by the sequel trilogy. The Mandalorian is great TV. That’s pretty much the only thing that needs to matter.

Tuesday

5

January 2021

0

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 2 Review

Written by , Posted in Blog, Podcast

Join host Ian Thomas Malone as she breaks down The Mandalorian’s excellent second season. The Baby Yoda Show covered a lot of ground this year, finally bestowing a proper moniker on the little fella. As Grogu heads for the Jedi Temple, Ian talks about what worked and what didn’t for season two.

Ian’s written review: https://ianthomasmalone.com/2021/01/the-mandalorian-season-2-review/

Saturday

19

December 2020

2

COMMENTS

The Mandalorian Season 2 Review: Chapter 16

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

As a franchise, there’s little Star Wars loves more than the past. Two of the three entries in the sequel series existed primarily as shrines to nostalgia, while its middle installment sparked endless controversy for daring to engage the idea that maybe we should, “let the past die.” The Mandalorian has mostly charted its own course, albeit carrying plenty of crowd-pleasing Easter eggs along the way.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a current work possessing deep reverence for its broader lore, as the season two finale proved. Great storytelling can be powerfully enhanced by interweaving the present in with the characters fans have grown to love. Luke Skywalker never looked more powerful than when he was mowing down Terminator-esque Dark troopers one by one, delivering on a wish fans have clamored for since Return of the Jedi.

This episode combined all the best elements of the show, a near perfect finale. The show’s supporting bench was mostly all-hands on deck to rescue Grogu from Moff Gideon’s light cruiser. Dr. Pershing is a fairly compelling tertiary character, though his quick defection to Team Mando seemed a bit rushed.

The stand-off on the Imperial Shuttle was perhaps the episode’s lone clunky bit of fan service, a back-and-forth over the ethics of blowing up Death Stars ripped straight out of Clerks. A chief complaint of the Skywalker Saga as a whole has been how small the galaxy seems with everyone knowing every else. Between the shuttle and Bo-Katan’s instant familiarity with Boba Fett, it felt like this episode was crafting an intimate family drama rather than a giant space epic.

The action sequences were predictably phenomenal, giving the female members of the team plenty of chances to shine while only just barely dipping into the cringey “girl power” energy that Avengers: Endgame consumed to excess. The Dark troopers were appropriately menacing, even in scenarios where they didn’t really get a chance to wield their full power. Mando destroying one with his flamethrower might suggest that they’re easier to beat than the show lets on, but it’s understandable that none of Mando’s crew didn’t want to test this theory too much.

Moff Gideon has been a pretty menacing figure despite only making sporadic appearances. Giancarlo Esposito has a gift for playing characters who display a transactional sense of villainy. For a second, he really makes you believe that he’s simply okay letting Mando and Grogu walk away, before swinging the Darksaber right at Mando’s back.

The fight itself was pretty solid, though the sight of an old man parrying with an armored bounty hunter, albeit one who was recently bashed in the head, ran the risk of carrying on past the point of plausibility. Gideon seemed like a likely candidate to not make it past the episode, though Chapter 16 opted not to add to the show’s body count. All hands are still on deck for an eventual war on Mandalore, as the show is increasingly hinting will be its focus for next season.

Luke’s entire sequence was perfect, a moving tribute to the franchise’s most beloved hero. The use of body-double Max Lloyd-Jones mostly worked, though the dialogue portion was a bit clunky. The sight of R2-D2 brought tears to my eyes, a beloved character who was woefully neglected by the sequel trilogy.

Luke never got a chance to bask in the limelight after beating the Empire. Regardless of how you feel about his well-crafted arc in The Last Jedi, it is a shame that Star Wars turned the page on Jedi Master Skywalker without giving Hamill a chance to enjoy Luke in his prime. This episode was a great tribute for those of us who lament the end of the Expanded Universe.

The most impressive thing about the last ten minutes of the episode was the way it managed to give simultaneously both Mando and Luke their tearjerker moments. Mando taking his helmet off to say goodbye to his adopted son had been hinted at, but it played so powerfully here. Grogu not wanting to leave was perfectly complemented by R2’s exuberance at seeing the young child.

The whole scene worked on so many levels, combining Star Wars’ vast lore with the affection we’ve built for our current cast of characters. The franchise finally used nostalgia not as a crutch, but as a seasoning for its carefully curated buffet of emotion. It’s hard to think that The Mandalorian will sideline its breakout character for very long, but the show succeeded in presenting that as a possibility.

“The Rescue” represented the finest chapter in the Star Wars saga since The Empire Strikes Back. The episode utilized every single moment to its advantage, both in the present and with regard to planning for next season. Both Mando and Grogu will have their hands full with new adventures next year, giving comfort to those who might still be sobbing over the idea of their separation. It’s hard to think of a better way to end this era of The Mandalorian.

If that wasn’t enough, we were treated to an excellent post-credits scene where Boba Fett and Fennec paid a visit to Fett’s old friend Bib Fortuna at Jabba’s Palace. Fett hasn’t had nearly enough chances to shine since his introduction, playing bit roles in the past two episodes. Looks like a spin-off is on the horizon, along with all the other Star Wars projects in development.

Quick programming note. We will return with a review of the season as a whole. Be sure to check out Estradiol Illusions’ weekly podcast recaps. Thank you so much for following along with us every week! Happy Life Day.