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... )

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... )

Season 3 of The Mandalorian has started to drop on Disney+. It looks like the first episode was released yesterday.


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Game of Thrones S7E6, "Beyond the Wall" involves a climactic battle: "The Battle of the Frozen Lake", as people call it. While the battle is narratively powerful, the writers took a lazy shortcut the writers took broke my suspension of disbelief. A heroic rescue that's shown arriving in 12-16 hours really should have taken more than two weeks to ( Read more... )

One thing that struck me as I started watching Andor, the latest Star Wars spinoff streaming on Disney+, is, "OMG, the Irish have colonized the galaxy!" At least one-third of the characters speak with obvious Northern Ireland brogues. Most of the rest have other various British Isles accents, including a lot that sound to my ears like northern ( Read more... )