Wear the Right Armour to Fight Dragons
Happy Halloween, everyone, and The Mandolorian is back with a not particularly Halloween-ish episode. Jon Favreau for the first time directs an episode--for both seasons he's written almost every episode but this is his first time directing one. This partly explains why this episode, "The Marshal", is better than the average episode from season one though not nearly as good as the one directed by Taika Waititi.
"The Marshal" has a great premise--the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) has to get a small mining community on Tatooine to work together with their enemies, the Tusken Raiders, to defeat the Krayt dragon who preys on them both. This is a beast that's been teased since we saw its bones in A New Hope and the design and effects team do a bang up job with the pay-off.
Watching these poor little mortals trying to kill this behemoth, which turns out can spit tides of acid, is like watching something from Mody Dick. Favreau establishes the thing's massive scale really nicely when he shows banthas to be but a bite-sized snack--and we know banthas are the size of elephants. Because the first bantha in Star Wars was an elephant in costume.
Timothy Olyphant guest stars as the titular marshal, really more of a mayor, trying to hold things together in a town that was tyrannised by a mining guild since the Death Star was destroyed. It's nice to see that, in fact, for some innocent people, life did get worse when the Empire could no longer keep order. Real universes are complicated like that. I also like that the Sand People aren't made out to suddenly be pacifist sufferers just because they're indigenous. That wouldn't just break continuity it would be boring.
I still generally get the feeling the show is intended to be like a Spaghetti Western but by people who fundamentally don't understand Spaghetti Westerns. The score is one problem--the absence of any John Williams music continues to feel strange, especially with the opening logo, but it's also oddly understated in a way that's neither Star Wars nor Spaghetti Western. If you listen to the scores of classic Spaghetti Westerns, their most distinctive qualities are that they're experimental and operatic. Not just the ones by Ennio Morricone--they're frequently comprised of strange and often bizarre vocal choruses and rock elements when they're not beautiful, exuberant, symphonic melodies. You could say maybe The Mandalorian is aiming for a different tone than that but, I must say, something closer to those old scores would've perfectly fit the story of fighting an alien dragon on a desert world.
Altogether, something feels off in ways I can't always put my finger on, though I tend to assume it's the show's new special effects technique that allows artificial backgrounds to be created on a sound stage. There's something about shooting on a sound stage that changes the way actors and environment behave that is almost indefinable but unmistakable. Obviously this technique is great for the budget they're operating on but I wonder if it can't be improved. Maybe the the actors should squint more, maybe there should be more dirt, I don't know.
I liked the beginning of the episode with the Gamorrean prize fight though the Mandalorian leaving that guy to be eaten by the mysterious beasts felt a little silly, like it was there just to prove what a tough guy he is. It was reminiscent of Batman Begins and further cemented my impression that the Mandalorian is much more like Batman than a Spaghetti Western hero.