The Mandalorian
I finished watching The Mandalorian! I have thoughts. And, for once, a relevant -- and tongue-in-cheek -- use of my "heckle the muppet movie" icon.
- In the end, the thing that annoyed me the most eternally was not the Panopticon Keyfobs, although, make no mistake, I'm still rolleyes about that whole plotline. Which was dropped as soon as it was no longer useful, but hey, Star Wars has been dropping plotlines ever since Obi-Wan Kenobi was supposed to get really powerful when he was struck down. Whatever, it's on theme for them.
No, what annoyed me the most was what I've complained about before, about leaning in so much into Found Family that the reasons for estrangement/not having Family Of Origin is dealt with in a perfunctory, dismissive manner that I dislike. In this case, Din is a foundling. Okay, how does that occur? His parents shove him in a root cellar that is more than large enough for three people to hide in. Immediately thereafter is a droid shooting and then Din is rescued by a Mandalorian, who jets him away with his jet pack.
Are Din's parents dead? We are supposed to assume they get murdered just off screen in the seconds between Din being hidden away and the Mandalorians showing up to save the day. That is not shown in the narrative. As far as the narrative is concerned, Din was hiding for a blink of an eye and then someone grabbed him and took him away. No attempt is made at finding his parents or other relatives. No attempt is made at keeping him with his friends or neighbors. They just kidnap him!
We are not supposed to see this as that, though. We are supposed to see this as a rescue. And if they'd done just a bit more work, then okay. But that did not happen and it bugs me. I'm all for Found Family! But please do just a bit more work to make it clear that someone's an orphan without other options before you forcibly abduct into a found family. Especially since the theme of s2 is finding Grogu's species/people so he can be reunited with them! There are literally cowering civilians in the background as Din is being taken away by the Mandalorians! - side foray: they do not seem to do any real attempt to find Grogu's species which, if Yoda was such a prominent person, is there literally no info on the galactic holonet? Do we fanwank this as Imperial censorship? People in the Rebellion knew Yoda; is "what species is he" not an important information to have? Does no one remember? Despite what Kuiil says, the Empire lasted much less than one human lifetime, and plenty of species live longer. But Star Wars also doesn't seem to know what it wants to do with "were the Jedi famous or were they legends no one believed in". You can fanwank that they're on the Outer Rim, far away from that kind of thing, but, uh, the way they use hyperspace makes it seem like everything is just down the block from each other. "Space is big", yeah, well, Star Wars isn't.
But this ties into the question of families of origin. Grogu's family gave him up to the Jedi, but that species is long lived enough that it is entirely possible that his parents are still around. That is, if the Empire didn't go murdering everyone. Which is a possibility! The Empire sure enjoys murdering folks! But, like, if his planet is still around, it's fully possible so is his birth family. And the Jedi got him in the first place, so the Jedi had records of where he was, and so the Republic had records. He could not have come from nowhere. He had to come from somewhere.
I am fine with handwaving this part since no one has a clue or any way of finding anything out, lacking perhaps the resources or knowledge of resources combined with desire, and Grogu is capable of telling Ahsoka or Luke if he 1) knows this info, and 2) wants it acted upon. There's a balance between "this is a toddler" and "this toddler is also 50 years old" that I don't think the show necessarily threads that well, but is certainly something to keep in mind. Like, it is clear that this is not a case of "this is a very very short adult who doesn't speak". This is definitely meant to be a child. Din is deliberately positioned in place of a father and not as an equal partner and companion to someone else his age.
But if Grogu wants to go back to his parents or original family, it's possible (depending on how the Jedi did things and how much I believe books that have been thrown out in the name of profits, back when Owen Lars was Obi-Wan's brother) that he knows enough to know how to get that across and chooses not to. I have no objections to him choosing Din. I like families of choice where they choose each other! - Also, it has not escaped my notice that, since Grogu was a Jedi student during the Republic era, he has more formal Jedi training than Luke has.
- Concept:
Grogu, telepathically: Skywalker? Any relation to Anakin?
Luke: I am a Jedi like my father before me.
Grogu: Your dad owed me a hundred bucks.
Luke: I'll get right on that. - I liked how the terrestrial sets mostly looked like places people actually lived. There was street litter and graffiti and a lived-in feeling.
- Westerns are not my genre, so I cannot comment on how well it fits the Western theme, but my impression is that Western fans like the homages. I just enjoyed some of the camera angles, which osmosis tells me some of them are from films and the like. Also I could just brush off anything I didn't understand as being a reference to something else. Like, why is that episode called "The Siege"? There's no siege anywhere in it! I assume this was some Western reference. I don't even care that I'm wrong about that and it isn't, it just lets me shrug things off and move on.
- I also appreciated that Grogu was a doll and you could tell he was a doll because he'd put his arms outward like you're meant to pick him up from under them and then they'd pick him up by carefully grabbing his sides. It was like, no, you are a doll, we will carefully pick you up from the middle. Squeezing your rib cage uncomfortably? What rib cage? They pretty much never held him or picked him up like you would a toddler. I would occasionally amuse myself by playing "where are his legs" and "how big is his torso". Also, like, the characters treated him like a doll, not a person. I expect a certain level of handwave in terms of physical injury and shoving people into things/falling from heights. But. No eye or face protection when in a speeder or jetpack. Being taken into the atmosphere by droids to a ship without a helmet. Being along for the ride without any safety gear at all! So that was a fun distraction. Grogu is a 50 year old toddler that everyone treats like the indestructible muppet that he is. "Should we strap the kid into a car seat on this speeder? Naw, stick him in a messenger bag, kid's a muppet, he'll be fine." At least wear a baby wrap or something, Din!
- I was a bit meh on the exposition dump about Mandalore, especially as it came from An Enemy, and it's like, I would sure go look up to see what other info there is about Mandalore, but see: all my issues with Star Wars "canon". I am sure whatever exists about Mandalore will be happily ignored by any future seasons, so why should I bother? I am not going to care more about Star Wars canon than the people who make Star Wars do. I used to! But that was before many bullshits and I am out of fucks to give.
- But, like, the whole "you get to rule Mandalore by defeating the person who has Special Sword Of Fancy Doom and there is no other way of getting to rule it, you don't have any other way to do it, Divine Right Of Kings I Mean Swords." HOW IS SUCCESSION SUPPOSED TO WORK? Give it to me straight, is the only way of passing power to defeat your predecessor in combat? Because I can see many flaws with this, both in theory and especially in practice! It should absolutely work that you can surrender it to someone else. Or that you could stage some ceremonial combat and pass it off that way.
Because that was a deeply bullshit thing to do to Bo-Katan. Ambitious Woman Works Hard To Achieve Thing; Unambitious Man Accidentally Achieves The Thing Without Trying. And then the narrative doesn't let him surrender it to her since it matters to her and it doesn't to him??? Much bullshit to craft the narrative this way. - supreme executive power is derived from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical acrobatic ceremony
- Also quite frankly, why does it matter? Why do you need to be the Divine Ritual Of Combat ruler of Mandalore, since all agree that it was very much destroyed. You can go be the rebuilder of Mandalore. You don't need to find a magic sword to do that! You need to go to Mandalore to do that! Why aren't you doing that? Do you think getting a magic sword will fix all your problems, including the sect of Mandalorians that possibly have never even heard of this tradition?
- CGI Luke Skywalker was slightly more convincing than CGI Leia Organa in Rogue One but... this was a show with a muppet that barely moved, and that muppet was more convincing than Luke. I recognize they had to do what they had to do, but I'd've preferred it if Luke had just kept his hood up the whole time and we didn't have to de-age Mark Hamill.
- I had no faceblindness issues. None! I did have a few moments not being able to tell the Season 2 Mandalorians apart just based on masks but they mostly didn't wear their masks, so it didn't matter (and if they wore their masks more, I'd not have had the problem.)
Now, I'm not congratulating myself too much. It wasn't until Fennec's second appearance that I went "...she looks familiar? Am I supposed to know her???" and it turns out that yes, that's Ming-Na Wen. In my defense, she's wearing a helmet in her first episode? (I recognized none of the voices for the droids. "The credits say Taika Waititi is in this episode? Richard Ayoade is in this episode? ??? ??? !!! ???". "Oh. That's the droids. Carry on, then.") (wtf I watch so much British comedy, you would think I could recognize Richard Ayoade's voice. And I could! Once I knew it was him.)
In summary, people have faces but I don't know anything about that. - This is actually my first experience of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars media properties. I recognized her based on fandom entirely. And then she name-dropped Grand Admiral Thrawn, so I get to be pissy about what EU canon made it through to "real" canon and which did not, which is always my favorite thing to be about Star Wars canon. (It is frankly impossible to separate my experiences of Star Wars from my experiences of the Star Wars Canon Wars. Back in the day, someone had a sig along the lines of "canon wars are arguing that one made-up piece of fiction is more real than another made-up piece of fiction", and that was true then, and it is even truer now. I have conceded the canon wars, but the emotions remain.) (I like Thrawn! But you know who else I like? MARA JADE, INTRODUCED IN THE SAME BOOKS THAT THRAWN WAS.)
- Plot-wise, uh... it had a plot? For all that it's two seasons of eight episodes each, it still managed to have filler episodes. I could have done without the frog passenger episode entirely, thanks. But the show did have clear quest lines.
- Characters... uh, there were characters. Din was a total blank slate, to the extent of me doing Surprised Pikachu at the few times when he took the helmet off to reveal an actor underneath it, doing acting things and emoting. The very modulating voice thing with the helmet on combined with the body language makes me wonder that perhaps Din's bigotry to droids derives from people thinking he's a droid. (Aside: did they do ADR for his lines with his helmet on? They had a very different sound to them than with his helmet off; was that recorded/modified on set or later?)
I enjoyed pretty much all the characters. Also I feel that all of them were better developed than Din was.
Okay, except for Grogu. He also didn't get much development. I'm fine with that, since wiki informs me that "The dynamic between the Mandalorian and Grogu embodies a theme of parenting and fatherhood prevalent in The Mandalorian, with the character also raising questions about good and evil and nature versus nurture in the series." This assertion is unsourced, but there's a section on it later on and oh my god what the fuck what show did they watch. What good vs evil, what nature vs nurture, he is a toddler. He does some Toddler Mischief (tm), some of which I was very unamused by (no really why did we have the frog passenger episode why did they do that to me), but that is not GOOD VS EVIL, NATURE VS NURTURE, what is this, what the fuck. Yes, he does a force choke! That is clearly Toddler Mischief, not actual malice and evil. What the fuck. - Also wow the body count on this show.
- In terms of who they killed off and brought back... I was surprised that they brought back the bounty target from the first episode to be an abused, ill-treated employee in the second season. Why? Because alien makeup. They killed off Kuiil, got rid of droids, only brought back the human from the prison break episode... but also brought back an alien character when they didn't need to. I was assuming they made some of the recurring decisions based on CGI budget/makeup concerns, but possibly they weren't? I did notice we went from having three Season 2 Mandalorians to only two of them without comment; unnecessary character? Too many to juggle?
(I suspect we are not meant to see Horatio Sanz's character as being abused. Because bad bosses who threaten you and force you into dangerous situations where you can die are funny, especially when you can't leave your job without him sending a bounty hunter to kidnap you again.) - So, in summary: I enjoyed it but I don't think it would have been any kind of cultural success without the doll, and even with that, I did not get as much of that pull? Some of it, sure, but the rest of it... idk. I do not see the giant appeal of Baby Yoda. He is cute, yes. He also barely moves and I kept being distracted by various aspects of it. But they found a marketing niche and they went with it.
I wish they had done more with the part where he's fifty years old. Oh and where he's been this whole time, who had him, what was going on. He's a toddler and he's fifty years old, there's so much to be mined there. There's also a lot to be mined from the possibility that, no, he's not a toddler, he's an adult and short compared to humans (and even to his species, if we assume Yoda is more typical in terms of height?), and he's using the toddler parts as camouflage. Now that would be cool to explore. Grogu And His Little Brother Din Explore The Universe. - Also unexplored that should be: the Season 1 Mandalorians talk about the foundlings, money or resources going to foundlings... where are they, I want these foundlings, I want Uncle Din, I want Grogu having peers to hang out with, I want that community of Mandalorians and their foundlings. I want Din finding the Season 1 Mandalorians again and plopping Grogu down in a game of hopscotch. Where is the community of this found family religion??????????
- You would think for being a professional bounty hunter/kidnapper, Din would have the kind of resources/resourcefulness to better find Grogu's species, but perhaps his whole kidnapping thing is he gets given the panopticon keyfob, he follows it to the end, he beats the target up, brings them back, repeat. He does not have to look things up on the holonet.
I also cannot deal with how no one knew what Grogu was doing was using the Force. Din even said "may the force be with you" to a New Republic guy, this is after both Death Stars and destroying Jabba, this is with Darth Vader being a famous Force user, this is with the Jedi having existed for thousands of years... "my kid can move things with magic" "invisible magic? Sounds like the Force." "When we had Force kids in the past, the Jedi came to get them for training, it's pretty important." "Shame the Jedi all got murdered thirty years ago." "The New Republic has a Jedi, he killed the Emperor last week." "Oh hey, there's an x-wing, let's go ask them about this." al;kdsjfal;ksdjfa;lksjfd;alksjdfla;kjsdf sometimes I can't handle it. - DID THE REPUBLIC NEVER HAVE A VIRAL TELEVISION SHOW ABOUT JEDI WHO GO AROUND SOLVING CRIME AND USING LIGHTSABERS? DID THE REPUBLIC NEVER HAVE A GIANT FILM FRANCHISE SURROUNDING THE KIDS IN JEDI SCHOOL? WERE THERE NO ROMANCE NOVELS, I ASK YOU, WERE THERE NO ROMANCE NOVELS. THEY SHOULD HAVE HAD BEST-SELLERS LIST JUST OF "FORBIDDEN LOVE" JEDI/NON-JEDI ROMANCE NOVELS. DIN SHOULD GO INTO A DUSTY OLD BOOKSTORE AND THERE SHOULD BE MYSTERY, HORROR, TRUE CRIME, AND THE FORCE SHELVES. THERE SHOULD BE SOMEONE ON THE OUTER RIM WHOSE ONLY KNOWLEDGE OF THE FORCE IS FROM KINKY PORN. WHERE IS THE CULTURE. WHERE IS THE WORLD-BUILDING. DID THEY AT LEAST MEMORY-HOLE AGRICORPS WHEN THEY GOT RID OF THE REST OF IT? I'M FINE WITH GETTING RID OF AGRICORPS. YOU DON'T GET TO BE A JEDI BECAUSE OF A SUPPLY AND DEMAND PROBLEM, SORRY KID.
- I digress.
- Anyway as the saying goes, Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.
- I do not want to end the write-up there, but other things I want to say are all like "there's so many worldbuilding possibilities" but 1) it is very possible they are world-built elsewhere, and 2) that's not the answer I want because I don't trust any consistency between Star Wars entities. So. I hope season 3 does worldbuilding and we get to see both the S1 and S2 kinds of Mandalorians again, and I want them interacting, and I want in depth Mandalorian-ness in a show called The Mandalorian, which I assume is not too much to hope for. It's probably gonna happen. I will likely not be disappointed.
- I will end this off by saying that I was one of the people who did not find out until after the first season had finished airing that the "Baby Yoda" that I was hearing about was not, in fact, a backstory show about when Yoda was a baby. I would have liked a show about when Yoda was a baby.
However. That does lead to a comment about how the show does "The X": the Mandalorian, called "Mando" by everyone (leading to many questions about what the Season 1 Mandalorians called him). The Child, called kid or other nickname. Horatio Sanz's character seems not to have a name, just a species. The Mandalorian armorer is just "The Armorer" in subtitles and seems to have no other name. Kuiil is initially "the Ugnaught". Grogu's name is the only one that even makes the slightest sense that his name isn't given. These make it seem like they are archetypes, not characters. Din's not a character in his own right; he's just a random Mandalorian bounty hunter placeholder character and easily replaced with a different one. The Armorer could be anyone. Kuiil could be anyone. They are just sketches holding down parts of a script. We only get Din's name at the end of the first season, as some kind of reveal: yes this person has a name, yes this person has a face. Kuiil is a brief sketch of someone who helps in his initial appearance; when they come to him for more help and get more information, that is also when he gives his name. Names come with backstories; when we find out Grogu's, we also find out that he's had Jedi training.
Still. I prefer characters, not archetypes, and I really prefer it when characters all have names. It makes my life easier. Is this a Western thing? This is not a Star Wars thing, which is known to give names and backstories to characters you see running across a room.