Quote:
Originally Posted by OutOfTheCube
I think the first season was actually better as they didn’t devote half the episodes to back door pilots for new series and spend so much time with already known SW characters. This season appeared to abandon much of the original premise instead opting to be a live action follow up to the cartoon series’. I liked the Boba Fett stuff as it worked in with season 1, a lot of the other characters felt tacked on and fan service-y. Especially the CGI Luke cameo was a bit of a groaner - like it could’ve been any other Jedi in the whole galaxy, but how long can a Star Wars thing go without shoehorning a Skywalker in somewhere, right?
I saw before the episode someone suggest Cal Kestis be the one to show up, and I think that would’ve been much stronger. It would’ve lined up with Cal’s mission from the end of the game, the game used the actor’s likeness so they could’ve had no awkward CGI, then would’ve afforded some interesting crossover ideas for Jedi Fallen Order 2.
|
If you go back to comments in this thread about last season's episodes most of the criticisms levied against the show were that in many episodes nothing of importance to the greater "save The Child" narrative happened. So-called "filler episodes". I think the same criticism could be made for this past season, but it's being papered over with references to the original films, the extended universe and the cartoons.
Today's tastes in entertainment are such that episodic television is unpalatable, and shows the likes of
Law & Order or
Star Trek: the Next Generation—where the week's previous episode was usually never spoken of or referenced ever again—would be DOA. When you're basing your new TV show on Star Wars it's just too tantalizing to resist referencing other works in that 'universe', partly because lots and lots of the fans absolutely adore "fan service", and partly because people won't put up with the pacing and episodic plots that
The Mandalorian is really a loving homage to: old Westerns.
I spoke of
Law & Order above because there's a reason
SVU is still on TV and its progenitor was cancelled ten years ago. The original
L&O was a crime-of-the-week show where we barely got to know the main characters outside of work.
SVU always delved further into its characters' personal lives and maintained season-spanning background story lines. In classic Westerns you often didn't learn any great details about the gunslinger protagonist, but modern audiences won't put up with that.
I also referenced
TNG specifically because many of the same problems you've seen with this season of
The Mandalorian you see throughout the run of
Star Trek: Discovery.
Discovery is essentially built on references to prior Star Trek characters and stories. That's all that show is about
: references to other Star Trek shows. (That's all the recent movies ever were too.)
The Mandalorian is threading a fine line with it. This season has been much the same as last, in that Mando spent episodes travelling to new places and meeting new people and nothing overarchingly "important" to the greater narrative happened, but by the end of the season he's in enough peril that he rounds up the people he's met over the season to help him overcome his dilemma. It's an old trope and they do it very well. What was different about this season vs. last is that the motley group of characters Mando met last season (the Ugnaught... "Khuill?" sp?, Cara Dune, Greef Karga, Fennic Shand, etc.) were entirely new characters and this season lots of them were characters we already knew (Boba Fett, Bo-Katan, Luke Skywalker). There's a bit of a danger to what they're doing because it doesn't take much to push the narrative from simply "interweaving our stories with other stories in the known 'universe'" to "fan service", and just a half-step even further into "our own characters are not interesting enough to support our own narratives, so we're going to shore it up with references to other shows' characters and events" (e.g.
Star Trek: Discovery).
So far I'm enjoying the ride and I'm not too proud to admit that I was giddy to see a still-young, post-ROTJ Luke, even if it was "fan service" and something of a
deus ex machina ending. It was cathartic, as others have said, to see what Luke in his prime was capable of. I think it also serves the story well because there is some logic to showing Mando what Grogu really could be capable of and hence why he ought to let him go, despite how terribly sad he is to do so. It also serves well to show why the Empire and people like Gideon were/are terrified of Jedi Knights. Whether it was director Peyton Reed's idea or someone else's it was brilliant to shoot Luke's scenes very much like the Vader scenes in
Rogue One, to show that even nigh-invincible super-robots are, to borrow a phrase, "insignificant next to the power of the Force". Even if we know Luke's motivations are virtuous it makes Gideon and other 'Imps' a little more believable to see them just as afraid of a cloaked man with a lightsaber as the rebels were of Vader. Seeing them recoil in horror at the sight of Luke makes their motivations seem a little greyer. There's an old saying that the best villains are ones that convincingly believe they're the heroes of their own stories, and that becomes a lot easier to believe when you see the protagonists looking like villains.