In S2E11 of Breaking Bad Walt and Jesse are on the rocks. Their effort to set up a rag-tag drug gang with three of Jesse's stoner friends as dealers has collapsed. Badger was arrested in S2E8, Better Call Saul; Combo was killed by rival dealers. Skinny Pete quit, and Jesse is blaming himself for Combo's death. Walt is pissed at Jesse for almost ( Read more... )

It's a few days late, but since I'm such a science fiction fan I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of wishing everyone a happy May 4th.


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The season 3 finale of The Mandalorian continued the season's unfortunate trend of weak, amateurish writing. It's like the writers know what the conclusion to each episode needs to be but aren't sure how to get there given the various side plots and characters in play, so they just jam it all together with eye-rollingly obvious leaps of faith over ( Read more... )

We're getting near the end of season 3 of The Mandalorian. After S3E7 there's only one more episode, the season finale, in the season. ...Which is a shame because t he writers only found The Way after stumbling badly through the first half of the seasonIn S3E7, "The Spies", Bo-Katan leads two now-united tribes of Mandalorians back to planet ( Read more... )

Chapter 22 of The Mandalorian, "Guns For Hire", is a corny but good episode. Unlike earlier episodes in Season 3 which I ridiculed for being corny in a bad way- mostly for laughably bad plot writing- this one is plotted well with just a bit of lighthearted, knowing humor to keep it amusing. I was laughing with the writing rather than laughing at it ( Read more... )

Season 3 of The Mandalorian has gotten off to a rocky start. The first two episodes suffered juvenile writing and seemed like fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000. Late in ep. 2 the writers found their way back to laying out a classic epic storyline for the season but then backslid to cheesy, juvenile plotting in ep. 3. Ep. 4 was no better, and ( Read more... )

Season 3 episode 4 of The Mandalorian, titled "Chapter 20: The Foundling", could just as well be called "Timmy Falls Down a Well". It's like the parody trope of the old Lassie TV show where the dog Lassie whines at a human and the human says, "What's that, girl? Timmy fell down a well?!" and then the whole town rushes to rescue Timmy from a well. ( Read more... )

Oh, man. Just after season 3 of The Mandalorian escaped the MST3K parody-ready juvenile writing of S3E1 and seemed to set up an epic story progression in S3E2, along comes S3E3 and throws it all away. 🙄 Chapter 19, "The Convert", reverts to amateur writing with loose ends and unearned plot points. It also commits the grave mistake The Book of Boba ( Read more... )

Okay, so I didn't actually write about episode 2 in my blog a few days ago, The Mandalorian Season 3 Eps. 1-2. It was getting pretty long, and in writing it I was getting pissed all over again about the episode's cheesy writing that made it like fodder for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It turns out that ep. 2 isn't as ridiculous as ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago we started watching season 3 of The Mandalorian. It's TV we've been looking forward to ever since the second half of that other Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett, turned into Boba Fett Writes a Book About a Someone More Interesting. Here are my thoughts after watching the first 2 episodes.

The Mandalorian definitely has ( Read more... )