The Mandalorian - A Masterclass In Wasting Time

you know one of the things that really appeals to me is a TV show or a movie with a tight efficient screenplay the kind of thing where every scene and carefully crafted piece of dialogue either advances the story tells you more about the characters involved or builds your understanding of the world they live in sometimes they even manage to do all three at the same time for example the Edgar Wright movie Hot Fuzz has got to be one of the most efficient and perfectly balanced scripts I've ever seen constantly feeding the audience important information that rewards careful viewing and gives them all the hints Clues and setups needed to make the payoffs work properly later on but never bombarding them with so much Exposition that it becomes overwhelming or pulling contrivancies and sudden Revelations out it's ours to explain stuff that was never even hinted at before unlike some movies I could name which makes it kind of frustrating when screenwriters decide to go in exactly the opposite direction hammering together tedious and long-winded scripts that take forever to advance their stories and seem almost designed to waste as much time as humanly possible and honestly it's tough to think of a better example than the Mandalorian which is practically a case study in stretching out 10 minute Concepts into 40 minute episodes the first two seasons were already pretty bad for this kind of thing relying on lots of slow walking and very deliberate dialogue to pad out the run time but I think it really fell off a cliff in season three when the writers seemed to abandon all concept of meaningful storytelling and to illustrate my point I'm gonna break down episode 2 of season 3 which in my opinion has got to be one of the most clunky inefficient pieces of script writing I've seen in years and I've seen a lot believe that now the general backstory for this episode is that Mandel got busted for removing his helmet which is a big No-No in Mandalorian culture and it basically got him exiled from his clan to redeem himself he needs to go to the Mandalorian Homeworld Journey down into the underground mines beneath the planet and bathe in the Living Waters of mandal or nice stuff the only problem is that the planet is now a toxic uninhabited wastelands or so everyone tells them at least I guess no one bothered to actually check though so the first thing he does is drop in to see Apollo Creed because he's decided he needs backup for this Mission so he wants to rebuild the assassin Droid from season one that goes about as well as you might expect and he's told that the Droid needs a special part that apparently nobody has anymore because it's convenient to the plots so Mando's like whatever and then he goes to bokeh tan for help next but she's like nah it'll be fine because she's sad that she doesn't have the darksaber anymore so basically nobody's willing or able to help him in his totally arbitrary fetch quest which is where episode 2 picks up the episode begins on the planet Tatooine because of course it has to begin on Tatooine gotta make use of that volume screen somehow anyway hillbilly mechanic ladies have an argument with an alien and then some droids and then some Jawas before Mando arrive waves and in case you were wondering yes this entire scene is completely irrelevant to the plot and it goes on for two minutes and five seconds by my watch so Mando shows up and asks for the special part that he needs to rebuild his murder Droid but she's like nah we don't have it take this R5 Droid instead so he takes it and he has a very lengthy chat about nothing in particular and finally he's on his way to Mandalore with baby Yoda in tow we're six minutes into the episode by the way and nothing significant has actually happened yet then they arrive at Mandalore and there's another lengthy flying sequence for Mando tells us a bunch of stuff that we already know this sequence lasts for a grand total of 2 minutes and 20 seconds so they land on the surface and Mando sends R5 to scout ahead and measure the atmosphere or something which kind of baffles me because isn't the point of an atmosphere that it's you know kind of all around you and haven't you already been flying through it for the past two minutes and 20 seconds nah whatever so R5 trundles off into a nearby cave very slowly and then they lose contact with it which forces Mandel to exit the ship and go after it this sequence lasts for 2 minutes and 50 seconds this time I'd like to point out that we're barely 11 minutes into this episode and about seven of those minutes have more or less just been pointless filler so Mando goes into the cave to look for the Droid very slowly and then he gets attacked by some warlock people because the script needs an action sequence I guess and then he takes the Droid back out to the ship and goes back inside with baby Yoda this time why is he taking baby Yoda into an unknown environment that's already proven to be extremely hazardous when he could just as easily order the ship to lift off with baby Yoda inside and circle the area safely until he gets back don't know what I do know is that we're now 14 minutes into the episode and we're only now doing something that could have been accomplished in the first five minutes so they push on underground and there's more extremely slow walking and looking at stuff which isn't strictly a bad thing in this case because this is an important moment that deserves time to breathe Mando's taking his first steps on the home world of species a place that no one has set for and in years just like the Moria sequence in Fellowship of the Ring in fact a lot like the Moria sequence and Fellowship of the Ring the problem though is that this show is [ __ ] riddled with slow ponderous walks like this and if this sort of thing happens all the time then there's nothing unique or significant about it now anyway wouldn't you know it Mando gets ambushed and captured by a giant spider Droid thing I mean this really feels like the kind of enemy that you should have wiped the floor with at this point but whatever baby Yoda is now the only person in a position to help him so instead of using his mighty Force powers to free him or crush the Droid out of existence he instead decides to fly all the way back up through the mines past the morlocks into the ship back to Boca tan and just hope that somehow his arrival is enough for her to totally understand the situation and that she's willing to help despite telling Mando to piss off earlier and that she's able to get there in time to rescue him I mean how long does all this [ __ ] actually take hours days don't know but what I do know is that we're now 23 minutes into the episode and about to redo all of the stuff we did previously to get to this point foreign flies all the way back to Mandalore walks back into the cave very slowly looks down on the minds of Moria again fights the Morlock people again then kills the giant spider Droid thing and rescues Mando with the dark saber then he walks into a pond and somehow manages to sink about 500 feet under water in a matter of seconds and she has to go in and save him again and basically no one else has a better idea so [ __ ] it the thing is all of this stuff is designed to do precisely one thing waste time it's the writing equivalent of busy work having characters approach their objectives in the slowest most inefficient way possible backtracking and repeating the same events in the same locations and having people fall victim to contrive problems that they absolutely should be able to solve themselves and why because it's a show without the creativity to come up with good ideas or the skill to implement them in a smart and interesting way the whole narrative thrust of this episode is to get Bo Katan and Mando to team up and go to Mandalore together so he can redeem himself with his clan and give her the dark saber so she can fulfill her Destiny to lead her people back there the stuff that actually facilitates all of this could be trimmed down to about 10 minutes of screen time and everything else around it is just there to pad it out so what could we do with these two characters insteads well imagine for a moment that Mando goes to Boca tan and instead of being sent on his way and wasting about 20 minutes of screen time getting them back together he strikes a deal with her come with me to run the lore and help me get to the magical [ __ ] Pond and I'll find a way to give you back the dark saber we'd get to see them working together to get through the minds of Mario fighting enemies overcoming problems and interacting with each other along the way there's tension and mistrust and the stakes are high because each of them desperately wants to get something from the other the audiences left to question whether one's going to betray the other and maybe they each have a chance to sell out their partner for their own benefit But ultimately choose to do the right thing and battle through to the end together gaining a better understanding and respect for each other along the way it's simple stuff but you'd be surprised how effective it is to take two popular characters and force them to work together to overcome a difficult Challenge and it's infinitely more interesting than watching the TV equivalent of player 2 speedrun in the same level that stumped their May and the real ball Lake here is that the Mandalorian is practically built around time wasting inefficient scripts like this and it's all time that could have been so much better spent giving characters actual personalities an understandable motivation expanding on the world and the lore constructing interesting scenarios and writing dialogue that does more than vaguely Shuffle the plot in a forward Direction it's sloppy lazy unimaginative writing of the lowest order taking ideas that feel like they were scrolled on Post-it notes in a five-minute brainstorm insertion and pumping them up into full-length episodes without worrying about pesky little details like is there enough story to actually justify this or does this even make sense but hey if you happen to be an aspiring writer looking to hone their craft then it's basically a textbook example of how not to write screenplays so [ __ ] man maybe the Mandalorian does have a useful purpose after all anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 1,044,143

Keywords: Disney, Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, critical drinker, review, funny, best, feminism, feminist, mando, Bo Katan, yoda, grogu

Id: a4QTD_WzVhw

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023