The Mandalorian - This Is NOT The Way

this is the story of The Lone Ranger played by Pedro Pascal unexpectedly taking charge of a weird alien looking creature with magical blood and tasked with transporting it safely across a hostile World why is there The Last of Us footage playing as I speak God damn it this is the wrong script hold on let me just put up the Mandalorian one yep okay here we go this is the story of The Lone Ranger played by Pedro Pascal unexpectedly taking charge of a weird alien looking creature with magical blood and tasked with transporting it safely across a hostile Galaxy I always wanted to like the Mandalorian oh yeah oh no my friend this is a mistake a terrible mistake they've gone too far this is mad from its Inception it's been occasionally optimistic fundamentally unserious almost always a bit careless and usually quite good fun coming off the back of the profound disaster of the sequel Trilogy here was a show that had few pretensions no delusions of grandeur no desire to stamp its Mark in the mark of its creators on the Galaxy of the Saturn we live in an age where not being an evil [ __ ] counts as a pleasant relief and so it's impossible to separate the mandalorian's early success from the Epic disaster of what came so soon before it that early success disproves the lie that Star Wars fans are impossible to please Mando is full of glaring floors including in its law in its World building which are superficially at least supposed to be its strengths it's a show designed for people who aren't paying it complete attention something to have on while you're doing something else the show's initial success in depicting the Star Wars Galaxy in something like a recognizable form with all its Charming variety is its self a kind of distraction a fan base desperate to inhabit that Galaxy again has been invited back into it and our minds have been left to wander off as Mando's um I suppose we have to call it Mando's plot holds at most half of our attention the more attention you do pay to season one and especially to season two the less enjoyable the show becomes why after seeing a flashback to Mando's childhood during the Clone Wars do we then cut to a scene of the armorer telling him with mystical vagueness about this mythical set of people known as Jedi as though they weren't intimately involved in the war we just saw why does Mando always make the worst possible decisions using the best weapons and the worst moments and the worst weapons and the best moments why does he always forget that he has a spaceship in those situations where it would be incredibly useful for him to have remembered that he has a spaceship why go to the trouble of explaining the history of a town like moss palago only then for the Expositor to tell us that they knew about the Great Dragon that's currently destroying said town before they built the town on top of it how and why the tracking fobs work unfailingly throughout season one only then to disappear and never be mentioned again despite how fantastically useful and easily distributed they used to be and so on and so on there are several examples from every single episode of this show and the number of these errors tends to increase with the later episodes but many like the show despite these flaws and many more were and are determined to like it whatever its flaws because it represents a superficial turn toward the Halcyon Days of Star Wars a stumbling turn to be sure looking over your shoulder through clouded eyes probably a bit drunk memory most definitely hazy but yeah it's nostalgic enough an innocent show for a more civilized age its flaws are irksum though because so many of them in season 1 at least were fundamentally sloppy careless and needless true narrative flaws occur where writers write themselves into positions where they cannot Bud utilize a ridiculous contrivance to solve it there are true narrative flaws in Mando but I don't think they constitute the majority of its errors the majority could be solved by characters simply not uttering stupid lines or by a slight tweak to the setup to better marry cores with consequence or by having Mando take different and more sensible actions to achieve the same result that being the case the flaws are both more frustrating and to a sympathetic audience more forgettable they're frustrating because they are so easy to fix and they're forgettable because ah [ __ ] it we're not really paying attention to this show are we at least it looks a little bit like Star Wars each episode of the show has tended to have a clear enough idea of where it's wanted to go but they've seldom been especially fussed about how they've got there hence nonsensical contrivances to manufacture fight scenes and set pieces ig-11 appearing from nowhere to pick up the baby he's supposed to nurse and protect and then driving them both straight into the midst of a few hundred Stormtroopers that's a pretty good example hence also fill a dialogue that through mere carelessness just happens to contradict itself and everything around it and so on and so on there writing process for each episode of this show seems to be this is where we are this is where we want to end how do we make this happen hmm I don't know how about we have Mando try and use a face scanner while wearing his [ __ ] helmet yeah that's that's that's cool that'll do the show as a whole however has never been quite so clear on its premise or on its destination hence many of its constituent Inspirations buddy cop Lone Ranger family adventure competing with each other some of season 1's strongest moments were Mando's self-sacrificial attempts to save grogu since this affords him the semblance of much needed character and motive some of season 1's strongest moments were also his solo missions with the prisonship adventure coming most readily to mind but the shows struggled to marry these two approaches the prison ship was only possible because they literally locked baby Yoda in a cupboard for the duration Mando's self-sacrificial moments only came about because he inexplicably brought baby Yoda along for whatever that particular ride might have been making the need for his self-sacrifice seem all too often very convenience the show couldn't be both a series of Standalone Adventures following a simple guy trying to make his way in the universe and a continuous Story made of interconnecting arcs and Journeys but it tried to be both and this created problems you get the sense it was sold on the basis of its premise but its unexpected success Shackled it to a purpose it was never meant to fulfill which is why its narrative issues stack up the longer the show goes on it was simply never meant to tell this kind of story in this kind of way these will be in criticisms it's worth highlighting a couple of things deserving of qualified praise because hey I just hate everything you see I never praise anything by comparison or praise the specific bits of otherwise bad shows that actually work Mando has always had a pretty strong cast of recurring characters colorful mostly well performed oftentimes quite Charming with personalities and backstories that either distracted from or highlighted the lack of the same in its protagonist depending on your tastes and viewing habits grief kaga Kara June and season 1's ugnot quill stand out while Botox Karen has the advantage of carrying in a lot of character work done in other shows not a point of praise for the Mandalorian admittedly but contributing to the vague sense that the character does actually belong in this universe and has something like a history here its recurring ancillary characters though not especially deep they seldom need to be also add color and personality and selectively charm to the universe they often seem like people you would expect to see in a Star Wars production if that sounds like the faintest of all possible praise oh my this character kind of has a personality well consider everything else Star Wars has done in the Disney era hell we got through three feature films without ever establishing a personality for most of the protagonists other characters had significant potential though that was wasted to varying degrees Verna herzog's villainous turn as the client in particular who gave us something almost interesting in his ideological defense of the Empire The Empire improves every system it touches Touched By Any metric safety prosperity trade opportunity peace only for the much more boilerplate Sinister disappointment of moth Gideon to cut him down for no very good reason in the Preamble to season 1's most nonsensical battle sequence but in both cases you get the sense that the vague idea of a character is there there was the sketch or the outline of an intriguing villain the floor then is not in the intent but in the delivery this can't really be said of the main cast however where several fragments of competing ideas struggle for dominance and none really establishes itself stronger Side characters and weaker protagonists is a weird and not uncommon trait in modern media Mando works up to a point because he is a blank protagonist it more or less demands that the audience read motive and purpose onto him because for all his blathering about the code his relationships really have very little grounding you and I can sit here and say well he immediately Falls for baby Yoda because of his foundling backstory I guess because he sees the resemblance to his own past this is what turns a ruthless cold-hearted mercenary into a loving sorry good father but we doing quite a lot of work on the writer's part here it would require a conscious deployment of good faith in interpretation because if you look at it as a Critic at what the show actually establishes you have to acknowledge that Mando's pre-show character is at best Loosely implied and his character switch in season 1 episode 1 is from something ill-defined to something conveniently plastered on from what why and to what end throughout season 1 the show didn't so much struggle to answer these questions as it blindly skirted them entirely we don't really know who Mando is we can't really trace the origin of his attachments he doesn't really have a personality while grogu's character is cute his personality is cute the origin of all of these things is cute and everything he does is done to be cute otherwise we're told he's about 50 years old but that species grow at different rates meaning that he's still a baby except where the show requires him to be more intelligent than a baby in which case he can understand complex instructions and handle complex tasks until the show requires that he's a baby again in which case he reverts species grow at different rates indeed some of them grow and regress several times within a half an hour episode apparently continuing on the theme of qualified praise there is of course lots of fan servers across seasons one and two obvious Nostalgia bait but it was usually unobtrusive and by and large it fit the present-day world it was depicting early on pitroids on Tatooine are there because that's their job the Jaws act as Java's act where Jowers are supposed to act an atst falling into the hands of a militia is the believable consequence of a collapsing and retreating Empire even if the way they went about taking that down was typically the longest and least sensible of all the strategies they had at their disposal but in the show's earlier stages this all contributed to the distraction watching I mentioned at the top it did feel for the most part like a faithful enough depiction of the Galaxy we've all wanted to go back to contributing to our immersion and helping us avoid paying attention to the writing this gradually declines into obtrusive Nostalgia bait however replacing the razor Crest the ideal bounty hunting ship with an N1 Starfighter is like force-feeding fans member berries with a blunderbuss it was lovely to see it sure but it's so spectacularly unsuited to his life and his job of course seeing grogu stick his head out of the top is cute great for merchandising but it actively subordinates the fictional world to Real World Sales pitches and thus harms the immersion that was once the show's strength this kind of thing gets worse the longer the show goes on and as will shortly see becomes completely ridiculous as we enter season three and yet all that being said the show has consistently brilliant visuals superb production value an Innovative score some brilliant and even iconic design work ultimately it doesn't lack the ingredients for Success if anything it has or it's had too many and the chef has been too incompetent to make a proper meal of all of that Mando began with an intriguing premise it had money it had heart it had presumably the best intentions but eventually a premise has to be turned into a story and that is where everything goes wrong with this show in part this is because the Mandalorian spends so long on its side quest in Filler episodes that its main Arc such as it is doesn't have the time or occur with the frequency required to establish itself the vast majority of Any Given season is little more than filler again its premises and its Inspirations compete with each other they do not align Mando the Bounty Hunter is supposed to conflict with Mando the surrogate father in universe but in fact he conflict with him out Universe the attempt to balance these two concepts and approaches is responsible for a huge amount of the narrative and writing flaws displayed across the first two seasons the close of season 2 presented a chance to finally Rectify this Luke's implausible appearance and his decision to take and train grogu ought to have been The Point of Departure grogu's Arc is done at least for now at last we can focus on whatever Mando's purpose is but then the book of Boba Fett happened a lot of the criticism of grogu's return to Mando in the book of Boba Fett is simply that this event which is pivotal to the events of one show in fact took place in another that's certainly unconventional but I don't consider it bad in its own right not necessarily if the ambition is to create or to recreate a shared expanded universe having the story set within it overlap can be a good thing since both Baba and Mando are Disney Plus shows you don't have the access problems presented by for example Marvel's attempts to overlap its cinematic in its streaming Productions if you can watch the Mandalorian you can watch the book of Boba Fett and vice versa for no extra cash the problem though is that these two things must then be written as one production not as two separate ones with a bonus Arc to tie them together and the Mandalorian has trouble presenting itself as one production the worst of all worlds sees in fact saw a long tedious comically inept and largely irrelevant Boba Fett show that alienated its audience long before it presented us with the information vital to understanding the next season of the Mandalorian asking people to sit through hours of Dances with tuscans to suffer the pointless plot of boba just for the brief payoff of Mando and grogu's reuniting is put politely as possible not a good plan the rest of the season being equal parts irritating and unintentionally comical and offeringly redundant more or less invited the fan base to skip the book of Boba Fett only to return to the much more popular Mandalorian or so we thought then having missed a vital piece of what passes for its story for anyone who justifiably passed over Boba Mando's second chapter ends with his ship destroyed and grogu gone and his third chapter begins with a new ship and grogu back with the most consequential actions happening during the intermission if you were then to go back and watch the book of Boba Fett with a mind to catching up on what you missed you would likely bail anyway after the first couple of episodes because an intermission is preferable at least you get to take a [ __ ] rather than watching [ __ ] on the screen let the mandalorians episodes of The Book of Boba Fett both look and feel so very different from the rest of the production and taken in isolation from a much more natural beginning to Mando season 3 than the one we actually get only lends more weight to the suggestion that that was the original intent and that those episodes were lifted from their planned running order and paste it in to bolster a flagging Boba Fett show one of the problems dogging the Mandalorian since its Inception has been that its consequential episodes are few and far between the bulk of Any Given season being filler and so the trade-off for boosting an irredeemable Boba Fett show is that Mando's third season was stripped of its consequential beginning instead it debuts with more filler something that's become less forgivable and more irksome the longer the show has limped on what made season 1 a curiosity and season 2 a bit of a slog has by season 3 come to seem at best careless and at worst as though the writers have taken the show's popularity for granted and that's just one small part of the wealth of evidence the prosecution can muster as we will shortly see because it's not just that Favreau and Co Are Taking Liberties with our time it's that their scripts have become so staggeringly careless even by the standards of a very careless show that you'd be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted who do these hacks think they are what do they take me for it's not to credit the writers that they've tried to smooth the gap between Mando and the Book of Boba Fett by reducing the former to the latter's low level none of which is to say that the show is hateable it isn't far from it it's still kind of enjoyable just not for the right reasons in season 1 you could occasionally laugh with as well as at the show you can still laugh at the show and in the modern media landscape that probably does count for something one of the biggest reasons for Mando's relative popularity at the start is that even at its worst it's always been a bit fun it's never been too serious it's never felt evil or consciously destructive it doesn't give the impression that it hates its fans or the universe it's set in or the franchise it's a part of any more than a sincere but catastrophically written bit of fan fiction gives the sense that its author actually hates the thing that they are unintentionally parodying Mando remains kind of fun still makes you suspect that it's harder than the right place it's just that its brain has been distracted to the point of dementia as and when the series Shuffles off this Mortal coil I don't think we'll look back on it as we did The Last Jedi and conclude that it hated its own existence arm out of its fans but the longer it goes on the more these fans will get the sense that they've been taken for granted and that their Good Will was squandered by lazy writers who were capable of much better but couldn't be asked to show it and Star Wars fans are so impossibly hard to please but so many for so long were satisfied with the simple combination of superficiality and vague good intentions now then since this little overview of the show's recent past has inevitably brought us up to the present I suppose it is probably about time we review what season 3 has given us so far so strap yourselves in it's um yeah it's it's it's quite a ride the Disney plus subheading for season 3 episode 1 is the Mandalorian begins an important Journey prompting anyone still watching to exclaim what another one you might think given what we've already said about the natural beginning of this season occurring halfway through the book of Boba Fett and given that this episode absolutely requires the viewer to be familiar with those events in order to understand the premise that the obligatory flashbacks in the introduction would cover well those events but that would make an awful lot of sense and this is an episode of the Mandalorian so naturally it's not quite what we get instead we get flashbacks to ig11's death at the close of season 1 to grief cargas rebuilt City on Navarro dumando's first meeting with botox Karen and then finally to the other bit of very important information from Boba Fett mention of Mando's excommunication and the task he has to undertake bathing in the Living Waters beneath the ruins of Mandalore to earn his repentance so already we're left with a slightly confusing mess various Snippets of information we can assume that the flashback to the blacksmith sending him off on his quest is the important Journey this episode is supposedly beginning though of course this episode isn't beginning that at all because that began in the flashback to the book of Boba Fett of the rest we've been remind ended that Botox Karen exists and that Navarro is a place and that ig-11 blew himself up way back in season one some of these clips seem more obviously relevant than others yes it's good to be reminded of the other characters who one presumes will go on to play some kind of role in season 3 but what of the Droid what possible relevance could that have you might wonder the answer is absolutely none so naturally we will spend most of this episode pursuing that these flashbacks are not having established all that much the writers evidently felt the need to manufacture some pretext for filling in the book of Boba Fett's sized hole in its own narrative so we open with the armorer in a cave on a new Sandy Planet smelting some of that incredibly rare Bhaskar that she's always smelting in every scene in which she features leaving us to wonder just how the hell she keeps getting a hold of it she's making a helmet for a young Mandalorian recruit played by Jimmy Kimmel's nephew nepotism being the only Force more powerful than the force in this galaxy far far away I praise the production values in the introduction and I'm sure I will praise them again throughout this video but it's worth pointing out here that the Mandalorian helmets look pretty Naf in this scene and in their subsequent scenes the old beaten up and battered ones work pretty well and Mando's shiny Chrome Dome looks cool enough and imposing and all the rest but a good proportion of those we see in our reintroduction to the covert here look far too new their matte colored paintwork befitting something from Power Rangers not this show there are plenty of ways to go about fixing this the new helmets could have a rougher Hue more flaws and Imperfections from substandard ore for example their paint jobs could be you know less [ __ ] as it is they look like something you'd pick up off the shelf in a toy store and given this is Star Wars you probably can what we're seeing here is an initiation ceremony Jimmy Kimmel's nephew is old enough to join their ranks so he's been given his helmet this makes the mandalorians basically the opposite of the Jews I guess made to recite the Creed swearing on the ancestors and all that and then suddenly a crocodile which is not the last time this show will do suddenly monster to move itself alone there are a few things to note about this in the first place it begs the question just how long have they been here it's implied here and later that they've been in sconced in this little cave for quite some time in which case did they not know that their ceremonial Lake was inhabited by giant prehistoric munching Monsters the blacksmith detecting its approach would imply they did know this though you'd think they might then have chosen to relocate somewhere away from Lake Placid for the sake of the children oh and this is only the second most ridiculous monster related plot point across these first four episodes it gets considerably worse later in the second place you'll note that Jimmy Kimmel's nephew who I guess will call the nepolarian is a child and not an especially tall one and he's been standing in water that comes up to his knees you will also note that crocodilosaurus here is what 20 feet tall so how then could it remain fully submerged until mere inches away from where this small child is standing is there some sort of underwater Cliff just behind the boy I mean that would make some superficial sense though Croc by here would then have crashed into that Cliff so no no that still wouldn't have worked then in the third place and as is a consistent theme for this show why the hell do these trained soldiers and mercenaries many of whom have jet packs and all of whom used ranged weapons decide the best way to tackle this amphibious toothy [ __ ] is to run toward it and fire at it from feet away from its huge death mouth why why for [ __ ] sake does one of them try to use a flamethrower at this watery wanker why do they decide to fly up and place bombs on its clearly armored back rather than it's clearly less armored sides and belly why the [ __ ] did they fire rope darts at a 50-ton giant monster what exactly did they think they would achieve by doing this the thing must weigh like 60 times more than all of them put together they're not gonna pull it it's probably the worst tactic you could possibly have deployed so obviously it's the one they go for and it's not as though the writers here have the excuse that they're new to all of this the exact same trick was tried in the battle against the Great Dragon in season 2 though there with the added nonsense of the tuscans not letting go of the ropes when it started yanking them around no you're still holding on Vector it was incredibly dumb then it is incredibly dumb now what you want to do when attacked by a giant slow ground bound dinosaur is get away from it and shoot it from a distance something that's very easy to accomplish if you're wearing a jet pack but no they persist in standing right next to it and shooting at it ineffectually as it Waddles around until finally Mando shows up in his N1 and Torpedoes it killing it instantly and sending guts flying everywhere toys need to be sold so then baby Yoda sticks his head up from the dome by the way you might be wondering hmm I wonder what they will do with this huge carcass that's lying in front of their cave that's far too big for them to move well the answer is nothing it's just gonna disappear later and nothing more needs to be said about that this predictably insane action sequence dispense with the show now has a chance to redo the scene setting that the book of Boba Fett stole from it the blacksmith tells Mando that he removed his helmet so he is no longer a Mandalorian Mando says the Creed is about Redemption she replies that it's no longer possible because Mandalore has been destroyed he puts a trinket on the table with a Mandalorian inscription on it explaining that he was given it by some Jowers who got it from a traveler who said he had visited Mandalore which suggests that the planet might not be all glass and poison gas after all so if he goes there and bathes in the waters he can be redeemed after all the armorer says yep and so off he goes now the problem with this scene is that it's necessary out Universe because no sane person stuck with the book of Boba Fett all the way through it's not necessary in Universe because they've already have this conversation Mando learns nothing new here he isn't given new information or a new task or new tools or new context he's not gained anything by returning to the covert to replay the conversation he had had in the other show the armor against new information Mando showing her the trinket that fittingly for this show seems to have just been spawned in his backpack off screen because [ __ ] the setup I guess but she doesn't need this new information either condensed the conversation has Mando show up and say that thing you told me before that's the thing I need to do isn't it she says yes he says and I can do it can't I she says I guess you can and then he leaves we are now more than a quarter of the way through the opening episode of this season and absolutely nothing has been achieved we could have sat watching Mando have a [ __ ] for 10 minutes then get to his feet and say I guess I'd better be off then that is the same depth of content at a push the mention of mandalore's poisoned atmosphere might count as new information but well no it doesn't actually justify the rest of the episode but it is what the show considers to be set up for the rest of the episode the problem is Mando already knows the rumors about the poison in the atmosphere he didn't need to return to the blacksmith to have this confirmed to him or to receive it as new information so so no actually there is no way in universe that this isn't just a pointless rehash of a conversation he has already had off to a great start I'm sure you'll agree now I mentioned that the show thinks the little snippet of info about the poisoned atmosphere excuses the rest of this episode why does the show think that well because Mando concludes that to test whether the atmosphere is indeed poisoned he will need a Droid we'll learn in a later episode but he doesn't need a Droid after all but the writers hadn't written that bit yet so for now this is what they're gonna go with if unwisely you paid attention during previous Seasons you would know that Mando began with a severe dislike for Droids thanks to his childhood experiences in the Clone Wars It's a premise the show could have done rather a lot with but unfortunately that became inconvenient to the plot so the writers decided to do away with it and have Mandu be fine with droids after all sorry gang come on you know droids Chris needs a good once over Joey likes droids now this is called a character Arc however discarding this part of his backstory because it had become inconvenient has itself now become inconvenient so Mando can't just use any Droid but the job will later discover he doesn't need a Droid 4 in the first place oh no he needs a Droid that he can trust and this is why the recap at the beginning showed us ig-11 because though that Droid absolutely obliterated itself to buy time for their escape and hasn't been seen since for the understandable reason that it no longer exists it's also the only Droid in the entire galaxy that Mando trusts so we're after Navarro to retrieve it even though it doesn't exist anymore some significant time has passed since we were lost with all of these characters I believe Favreau suggested baby Yoda has spent years training with Luke in the book of Boba Fett which I mean I guess okay then anyway in that time Navarro has turned into a lovely thriving little Spaceport its main export would appear to be Easter eggs since the walk through the streets is absolutely full of them cook droids those salacious crumb things quirky alien musicians TV droids from the Coruscant Senate chamber Etc we come upon a statue dedicated to ig-11 which is already suspiciously convenient no one else on this planet witnessed his sacrifice it can't have any reputation at all and even if the statue was erected on the sole orders of grief karga who never haveinced much care for the Droid in the five minutes of screen time they shared the rest of the population must be a little bit non-plussed to see a statute of this unknown Droid given pride of place in their High Street hell it'd be even more suspiciously convenient if it turned out the statue was actually made over the top half of ig-11 not least because the entire thing was so clearly destroyed in season one and the whole point of the self-destruct function as it repeatedly told us was to prevent precisely this thing from happening manufacturer's protocol dictates I cannot be captured I must self-destruct do not self-destruct but that would all be completely absurd wouldn't it so no I'm sure it won't happen it's the Mandalorian it definitely will happen we reintroduced to grief which which now I say that yeah that's a meta comment isn't it we reintroduced to grief cargo he's a magistrate now a high Magistrate on Navarro and he's invited Mando in to catch up on all times there's a construction boom he tells us there's money to be made Mando helped the town once so in return grief offers him land and a big house that sort of thing Mando says Nah because you know here's another recap for the book of Boba Fett for your benefit audience it's complicated I completed my quest he returned to me I removed my helmet and now I'm an apostate and then they're interrupted by a protocol Droid who informs them that suddenly Pirates the Pirates spend some minutes attempting to gain access to a school because they think it's a pub which might have elicited a brief smirk except that they then continue to demand that they'd be allowed to drink in the school and they continue and they continue and it goes from being a joke into becoming an extended standoff scene even though they know it's a school and even though griefs invited them to drink back in his office but but no we needed the standoff so here's the manufactured pretext on we go and on we go the Pirates are upset that grief won't do business with them anymore he tells them to go back and tell their captain that Navarro which notably lacks any security guards whatever is no longer friendly to the Pirates thereby you might think putting a big fat crosshairs on his entire Community a shootout ensues and Mando kills most of the Pirates they now have an additional grudge against this magistrate and his entirely defenseless Town not only has he slagged them off and rejected them he's also seen a bunch of them killed all save one of them in fact now I spotted this problem on my first watch as I was watching and I have no notable history as a criminal navigating The Intergalactic Black Market you've just told these heavily armed and angry pirates that your defenseless Town hates them and won't do business with them so you'd surely have spotted the danger you've just put yourself in obviously you're a Sitting Duck a fat Sitting Duck the one thing you wouldn't want is for word to get back to the pirate Captain because if it did he would come back and rape kill and eat that duck and not necessarily in that order so what does hardened World wise formerly ruthless criminal and Bounty Guild head grief cargo say to the one surviving pirate he kills him right to stop word of his vulnerability reaching the captain no no he doesn't because that would make sense instead he explicitly instructs the surviving pirate to go back and tell his captain what just happened and that the town is respectable now so [ __ ] you up the Barnacles yes he lets him go with all of that information basically inviting the Pirates back to raid the town Mando to his slight credit does think this is an odd decision as well he asks are you sure you want to let him go and grief replies he'll let it be known that Navara was respectable now and not to be trifled with you [ __ ] [ __ ] that's insane he knows the town's undefended because only after he's let the pirate go does he turn to Mando and say he needs a marshall this is the show's Opportunity by the way to gently move beyond the unpleasant Gina Carano stuff Marshall Cara June has been vicariously rose tea code she can't come because she's off doing super secret things with the Special Forces I make no comment on that old controversy because frankly I lack the time or the will and there's too much to criticize in the show itself like for example grief letting the pirate go while knowing his town is undefended like for example the fact he only offers Mando the job of protecting the town after he lets the pirate go like for example that in the previous scene he offered Mando a plot of land with the express promise that he would be able to and I quote you can settle down you can hang up your blaster live off the fat of the land it's a peculiar show that wastes an entire episode nominally trying to revive an ancillary character from two seasons ago while being on able to remember what its own characters were saying two seconds ago but I guess that's why John Favreau gets paid the big bucks Mando says Nah again because he's too busy effectively repeating the conversation the show forgot took place two seconds ago only for grief to say apologies I didn't know you were here on business even though that was pretty clearly the conclusion of that conversation the show forgot took place two seconds ago I appreciate the offer but I have some matters to look after Lester we forget why we're here we are very conveniently standing beneath the ig-11 statue again and Mando explains that he needs him back grief correctly points out that ig-11 was destroyed but Mando points to the Statue and says these are his parts are they not so um just for your benefit guys and you know if I could for his as well let me just play IG 11's death scene again you know the one we saw a flashback to in the introductory recap Avengers I cannot be captured I must be destroyed thank you there were quite clearly no parts left the Salvage that was the point of the self-destruct mechanism to begin with but even accepting that the show was retroactively dialed down the force of the explosion how did Mando know this when he last saw ig-11 it was walking through molten lava and then it exploded how the [ __ ] could he have known in advance that bits of ig-11 survived and were kept and were made into the statue usable beds the most important bits that's three massively implausible assumptions to make what if none of that had been true what if only half of it had been true what if the only surviving part had been one of his fingers well he'd have had to use another Droid wouldn't he which he'd have been fine with because the show dispensed with those trust issues ages ago it's just that it forgot about that but grief says fine so they dismantled the statue and start trying to fix it which Mando can kind of do actually it turns out it's as simple as hot wiring a car so you're telling me that they cared enough about the Droid to turn it into a statue but not to even try and turn it back on okay then it doesn't quite go to plan alas ig-11 reverts to its pre-nursing days and tries to execute the bounty on baby Yoda again giving us a brief Terminator reference Mando who offed the Droid pretty easily in season 1 episode 1 with a single Blaster ball to the head is conveniently incapable of shooting it in the head this time because otherwise we couldn't have got the Terminator reference in but then a protocol Droid knocks the statue over and crushes its head giving Mando the chance to deploy a James Bond tier quip now that's using your head so it's busted again however and to use grief's words fortunately the planet has attracted a bunch of Babu Fricks taking one last look sir [Music] who are famously the finest droidsmiths in the Galaxy so they take ig11 to them the Fricks say they can't fix it because the memory circuit's broken so Mando tells him to put in a new one which forces us to ask as if we hadn't several times already why you wanted this Droid specifically because you trusted it even though you got over the trust issues ages ago you revived it once and it defaulted to murderbot settings you've just been told its memory circuit is completely broken now I am no Babu Frick but if you have to replace most of its body and all of its mind it's not really the same Droid is it Mando this isn't some Droid of Theseus Paradox the whole reason you're insisting on getting the old ig11 back is that you want the old ig-11 bag you've already pranked it once because it had the wrong memories and so wasn't the same Droid and you're now proposing to replace its entire memory core which might turn it into some anodrine factory settings assassin Droid but then if you wanted an Anodyne factory settings assassin Droid you could have just bought one you metallic moose do you get the sense that maybe just just perhaps the episode is I don't know filler the Babu Fox reached the same conclusion and so Mando offers to find a new memory circuit they say that yep they could fix it with a new memory circuit though they're very hard to find because they don't make them anymore just just buy a new Droid for God's sake but no we are off now on a side quest so we can get the part we need to complete the side quest we started at the beginning of the episode which was necessary to complete the side quest that we need to complete to get back to the main quest that we learned about in The Book of Boba Fett gray writing flying away from the planet Mando and grogu get ambushed by the Pirates in case we missed that they were pirates all those many times they were specifically referred to as pirates one of them goes all parity briefly and announces himself by saying Avast which is a peculiar decision as they don't otherwise speak like Pirates at all and you kind of think the writers just should have decided on one or the other either you pirate these guys up to 11 or you don't you don't just throw in the odd very piratey word and otherwise present them as generic goons a space battle follows that looks very pretty as you would expect though it's also something of a conundrum there's a whole rich undefended town down on the surface the Pirates have detected that its only Defender who only showed up by chance anyway is now leaving that planet if you're the Pirates do you a swoop down on this now defenseless town and loot and plunder and pillage to your heart's content or do you be wait to Ambush the soul Defender as he's leaving the planet if you picked a congratulations Not only would you make a better pirate than these chuckle [ __ ] you're also smarter than these disgustingly well-paid writers if you picked B you are a [ __ ] and these disgustingly well-paid writers might even hire you Mando takes out most of the pirate fighters in a generally impressed visual display albeit one that was crying out for a soundtrack Redland of the asteroid Jason Empire but they're never even threatened to emerge but the last remaining fighter baits Mandu into the path of the Flying Dutchman where the mandalorian's own player on Davey Jones is waiting on a ship that looks suspiciously like a re-skinned version of the Superstar Destroyer eclipse from the old expanded universe Mando has previously informed us that Davey Jones specializes in hijacking and such so you'd think that perhaps his capital ship might have come equipped with tractor beams another snaring and snagging devices that would make hijacking possible to begin with but because the plot needs the ship to have no tractor beam it has no tractor beam and Mando activates his big engine and zooms away before the Flying Dutchman can fire on him it's not clear as yet whether Davey Jones will recur as a villain in this season though he doesn't reappear in any of the four episodes we'll be reviewing today we await with breath that is whatever the opposite of bait it is now we were rough on a side quest to a side quest to a side quest to find the new memory circuit for ig-11 but rather than go straight there wherever there is the show seems to think that we now need to be reminded that Botox Karen exists because we saw her in the recap at the beginning but she's not had a scene yet so instead of going off to the side quest to the side quest to the side quest we make a brief detour to another site Quest as Mando flies off to Botox Karen's Castle on a planet in the Mandalorian system to have a brief chat she's sitting all alone in the big old castle because as she houghfully informs us all her followers abandoned her after Mando took the darksaber you know all the followers that she had before she had the darksaber yeah they abandoned her because she continued to not have the darksaber reasons why do we find all this out well because Mando has come here to um join her to join her faction why [ __ ] knows but he has this is her opportunity then to [ __ ] about her followers leaving her and such they stole the stolen Fleet and went off to be mercenaries all across the Galaxy meaning you'd think we'll get a long reuniting the clan subplot at some point in this season though again we don't get much more than a hint of that across the first four episodes the scene is an excuse for some Mando law Exposition albeit quite conquerly deployed Mando himself has come here to join her in her quest to retake Mandalore even though his side quest was to find the Droid to test the atmosphere of Mandalore where he was going anyway to make sure it's not poisonous even though he doesn't need to it's unclear why it should have suddenly occurred to him in this moment to try and join her before doing all of that knowing that he has the dark saber anyway that she's previously explained was her only hope of completing the mission he's come here to join Iran and given he seemingly had no plans to do this until well right now actually it's become so important to him that he ditched the side quests side quests side quest to come here but then would it not have occurred to her to check if the planet she wants to retake has been poisoned except that now she's decided it's all pointless anyway because the planet's been completely poisoned and destroyed which calls into question why she ever thought she could retake it and why she's so pissed off that she can't she dismisses Mando's care for the planet as mere Superstition in the very scene where she's lamenting she can't uphold the Superstition of uniting the Mandalorian Clans by wielding the darksaber the show seems to recognize this slight contradiction it actually has Mando tell her to make up her mind there's nothing magic about the minds of Mandalore they supplied beskar ore to our ancestors and the rest is superstition that planet has been ravaged plundered and poisoned you said that the curse was a lie make up your mind but she Hopson tells him where the minds are so he leaves promising to find out if the planet is really poisoned in case what we'd forgotten the premise for the episode Yeah Yeah the more you think about it the more the word clunky just doesn't quite suffice the whole scene is just very very jarring internally its characters flatly contradict their own past statements and beliefs but even the scene's placement is weird wouldn't this have been a better first scene begin with him reaching out to Botox Karen to be rebuffed so then to resolve to carry on the mission alone which sets him off on the stupid droid Quest everything here seems distinctly disordered anyway that's the end of episode 1 and believe it or not it only gets significantly worse from here so without any Ado whatsoever on we go to episode 2. thank you this one is quite special in that it has the dubious distinction of having made me Shout at the TV several times and it takes quite a lot to make me do that so let's begin we're back on Tatooine yay it's been so long our old friend Pele motto yes she has a name is scamming erodian it's Boon to Eve which you'll remember from episode 1 possibly Mando turns up with baby Yoda in the cockpit posing the question how does he get from his little bubble Dome into the cockpit but then if we start asking basic mechanical questions like that we'll never get through the video so let's park that for now there's much more serious nonsense to discuss mano's here to pick up that memory circuit for ig69 Pol Potter tells him that neither She nor the showers she [ __ ] I'm not joking but I wish I was oh they get me what I asked for in exchange I let him pick through my dumpster can possibly find one so why doesn't he buy this crunky old R5 Droid instead he says he can't take R5 because he needs one that can handle spelunking down in the mines while testing the air to see if it's poisonous he also says he doesn't have room for it even though he absolutely does because that's what grogu's merch Dome is for you [ __ ] she says he can have it for half price which doesn't fix any of the serious issues preventing him from purchasing it it can't Splunk it's not good on adventures he doesn't know it so he doesn't trust it remember we just had that whole episode that clearly established pointlessly but clearly that he could only possibly countenance taking one very specific Droid and that that's why he's here to begin with there's absolutely no way he can give up on ig-11 and take R5 so of course that's exactly what he does Verve [ __ ] oh okay this is the first time I shouted at the TV this scene makes the entirety the entirety of the preceding episode absolutely [ __ ] redundant why why even bother why go through the whole rigmarole of trying to fix ig-11 taking up an aid of the entire season's run time only to have him now turn up and Tatooine and say yeah [ __ ] it I'll just take a different Droid instead why would you do that what were you thinking favro did you even read your own script uh so you revived Mando's distrust of droids in order to excuse him going to one specific planet to recover a Droid that obliterated itself way back in season one you spend that entire episode piddling about with him trying to fix it you clearly establish in Mando's mind that he can't take any other Droid you have him repeatedly told that the Droid is broken you have him go on not one not two but three side quests each nominally geared toward him fixing this one specific Droid you've then send him to Tatooine on one of those side quests where he's offered another Droid and he very clearly explains why the other Droid Isn't suitable on top of all the reasons given in episode 1 for him not taking any other Droid you do all of that and then you have him say yeah I guess I can take R5 after all this is the narrative equivalent of attempted suicide the script is literally attempting self-deletion before our very eyes it's really it's it's quite astonishing this is why I'll insist that you don't even have to like the Mandalorian to acknowledge that season three is worse than one and two I don't recall any instance of the scripts for those two seasons actively trying to [ __ ] each other in the Way season 3 episode 2 [ __ ] season 3 episode 1. it's like some weird nihilistic piece of performance art how utterly pointless can this episode make the previous one how much time can we persuade the fans to waste before they get sick of it are you okay John Favreau is this some desperate attempt to get yourself fired I would believe it but then you know you're working under Kathleen Kennedy so you must know that the only way to get yourself fired from a Star Wars project is to have a good idea bad ideas are fine she'll give you a whole feature film for those those holy Allah's invisible testies Batman this show okay anyway so with Arthur in a [ __ ] with R5 installed in grogu's Old space pod Mando is now off to the Mandalorian system again meaning that he's gone from Navarro to the Mandalorian system to Tatooine and back to the Mandalorian system across two episodes you could have inserted his visit to Botox Karen here it would have made more sense being much more efficient could have panned out in the same futile way you'd have just saved us time and Mando some fuel and from go to Navarro then go to Tatooine then go to visit her and then go to Mandalore it's just yeah it's just efficiency off he goes down into the atmosphere of Mandalore bringing to mind Luke's descent to dagobar through the clouds and the rain and such The Show Must want us to believe that he is the first Mandalorian ever to try this since the purge which doesn't make a great deal of sense since his whole reason for being here to begin with is mandal those religious significance and Botox Karen's followers all left her because she failed to uphold their religious prophecy so do you mean to tell me that the planet is so significant that no one until Mando bothered even to drop a Droid off to the surface to see if the planet is really as [ __ ] as they think it is I wouldn't buy it except that I have to buy it if I'm going to stick with the show so I guess yeah begrudgingly I'm gonna have to buy it Mando takes the time to explain to us that the clouds in the atmosphere make off-world Communications impossible oh report and make it quick as I am short on time during the hyperspace lane from the surface we won't be able to communicate with anyone out of atmosphere so we have to be careful liar we reached the surface and he sends R5 to and I quote we need you to scout ahead and analyze the atmosphere um Mando do you know I mean you do know right you know what an atmosphere is that the Droid doesn't actually have to scout ahead for this bit he can he can just do it from the ship because the atmosphere is kind of you know everywhere the you semi-senteen creature viewing this video might point out well the atmosphere in the minds might be different than the one on the surface and you would be right to point this out but the show hasn't bothered differentiating these things and in any case we're about to discover that it's not necessary to differentiate them because this entire subplot is is yeah it's pointless R5 goes off to the main entrance to take a sample but disappears behind a rock and goes off scope so and yeah this is the second time I yelled at the TV so Mando decides to go out and have a look for him he tells grogu that he'll pressurize his helmet so the whole atmosphere thing was [ __ ] redundant to begin with he'll pressure his helmet and go outside he further tells grogger to seal himself in his part which doesn't exist anymore because they took it out to install R5 he then goes for a wander and the camera goes back to grogu who was not sealed himself in his non-existent part and is just looking out from the recently opened cockpit meaning of course that if the air was toxic he would now be dead meaning too that if Mando his sorry good father had looked back even once to make sure he hadn't accidentally gassed his child he'd not have needed to pressurize his helmet anyway and by the way if his helmet can filter out atmospheric toxins and such can't it tell him if the atmosphere is toxic and then he does look back and he sees that grogu hasn't sealed himself in the non-existent part and he sees moreover but he's very much not dead and his response isn't oh my God I'm so happy you're alive it's not even I thought I told you to see all yourself in your part or hmm I guess the atmosphere must be fine after all no it's don't worry kid I'll be right back it is this kind of [ __ ] that is going to guarantee writers are made unemployed by chatbot AIS how do you cram so much self-defeating contradictory nonsense into such a small space of time by this point of my first viewing of this episode I was firmly of the opinion that this entire season would actually be improved if you stripped all the dialogue out of it because the dialogue can't even be relied upon to reference the things happening on the screen anymore and you do have to wonder whether this isn't in part a consequence of Pedro Pascal being a lazy ass hat and dubbing in all his lines from the comfort of his living room or wherever he does his recording these days because surely surely if you had actors speaking lines from the script while on the set surely someone would have noticed that the lines don't match the actions and events surely on set someone might have said wait but he just had sealed yourself in your pod and he and he hasn't done that surely somebody would have [ __ ] noticed that the episode appears to be working from two different drafts of the Damned ripped but no instead we get this down in the mines Mando gets accosted by some hairy creatures who might have clued him into the atmosphere not being toxic but whatever and he decides to give the darksaber a run out which is of course slow and difficult and altogether less efficient than almost any other weapon he has but this is Mando and he does nothing better than using the wrong weapon for the job he beats them and rescues R5 and they go back to the ship at this point Mando actually stops grogu from opening the cockpit until R5 confirms the air isn't toxic even though he himself opened the cockpit just a couple of minutes ago without that data and he was at the fact that it might gas the little frog kid to death happily R5 confirms that yes the atmosphere is breathable and this leads Mando to observe that Botox Karen was right Mandalore isn't cursed which means I now have to play you the clip from the first episode where she says exactly the [ __ ] opposite oh my God there's nothing left planet has been ravaged plundered and poisoned was right Mandalore is not cursed go away and so for no descendable reason this means that rather than leaving him in the safety of the chef Mando can take grogu down with him into the mines he knows to be inhabited by evil hairy monster things because because this is the Mandalorian and this is just the kind of crazy [ __ ] that Mando does I wonder if it'll somehow become relevant again later they go further down and further down and further down Mando is of course aware of the evil monsters and alert in case they stage another Ambush and so you might think that he'd turn on his heat-seeking Predator Vision thing that his helmet has that lets him detect heat sources and pretty much everything else because you know that would be the right decision but because it would be the right decision he of course does not and instead turns on his helmet torch okay then the mines are old and leaky he tells us that the water leaking from the pipes will flow down to the mines and the Living Waters within which is what you might call a soft problem because it at least raises the possibility either that these waters are themselves living water or else that the Living Waters have been so diluted by the spillage but they'll no longer be magical but that does constitute a bit of a nitpick compared to the glaring holes in the rest of the plot so will not linger on that finally near the bottom of Moria just before the bridge of kazadum Mando gets ambushed by a curious machine creature that one presumes has just been lying in weight down here for what decades hoping that one day someone might come by that it can grab for its nefarious purposes the subsequent segment is rather strange and horrific because from inside the machine comes another machine creature and for a minute I have the terrible suspicion that they had found some way to bring back General Grievous it Bears a superficial resemblance it makes some of the similar noises it even uses a similar weapon for the glow sticks we remember from Revenge of the Sith but happily I believe that to be mere resemblance and not a Revival quite what it does down here and why is unclear however one contendably suppose it mostly feasts on the monsters mostly and yet it seems very well prepared for more heavily armed and armored prey and well equipped to deal with them by deal with them I mean it injects Mando with some sort of sleepy serum then trusses him up in a cage and connects various tubes to him and begins siphoning out his blood but not before grogu attempts to use the force to free him and gets detected meaning little grogu scurries back to his egg and then has to escape the mines as with everything about grogu certainly everything about him when he has to move it must surely be a conscious attempt at but it's so bad it's good and to be honest I'm not wholly against it people kicked up such a fuss about the overuse of CGI in the prequel trilogy and CG Yoda's comparative lack of charm next to the puppet that complaints about puppeteered grogu must leave the creators wondering just how the hell they're supposed to win for myself I quite like the janky marionetting I think they do add some distinctive old-timey charm and cuticiness to it and to the extent it's supposed to look a bit funny the fact it does in fact elicit the occasional laugh constitutes the rarest of things in this show a job well done albeit it does yank the tone about something terrible when it's used in the wrong place and this scene arguably constitutes the wrong place we've gone from horror to Comedy in the time it took grogu to hop into his egg and will very shortly be back at blood stealing horror again so it's not all that clear what tone the writers were striving for here grogu blasts his way past a couple of monsters with the force and makes it back to the ship where Embrace yourselves for this there is actually a payoff to an earlier piece of information shocking I know but when Mando purchased R5 Pol Pato did mention in a throwaway line that it was capable of piloting the ship and the payoff for that is here as grogu points at the map showing Botox Karen's castle and R5 Pilots the ship away it doesn't change the fact that R5's presence completely broke the previous episode but you know it is evidence that occasionally the writers do pay attention to what they're writing Botox Karen is displeased to see Amanda's ship return and suggests to her Droid and only friend that they might get rid of him once and for all which plan might in her mind have involved I don't know challenging him in combat to win back the darksaber because I'm pretty sure that's a thing she could and should do but which plan in the event translates as telling him to [ __ ] off again this damn scrub is dampened to death when she realizes that Mando isn't aboard and grogu has come alone so from being prepared to tell Mando to bug her off she instead becomes suddenly very concerned for his safety R5's data tells her where to go so she hops sin and admittedly lovely looking spaceship and goes down to rescue him speaking of occasions where it would be better if the characters didn't speak at all during their descent looking out over the bombed out ruins of the city she turns to grogu and says didn't always look like this it didn't always look like this but surely even little baby grogu would consider astoundingly [ __ ] obvious and therefore astoundingly [ __ ] super derogatory Goku agrees to guide her down further into the mines and it's worth noting the size of the doorway through which they have exited the ship here and how it's not quite wide enough for two people to stand abreast just an observation no relevance really it's not as though the show will later decide that three giant baby pterodactyls can fit through it or anything absurd like that off they go down the mines and Botox Karen randomly and pointlessly takes off her helmet to deliver a very quick line about how her family used to rule this civilization before putting the helmet back on again as the quest proceeds every time her helmet comes off the acting gets worse so it is probably for the best that she will shortly confine herself to it she girl bosses her way past some hairy monsters with considerably more ease than Mando demonstrated meanwhile not General Grievous is busy siphoning Mando's blood all those many thousands of blaster bolties tanked all over and this is the first villain who's thought to bypass his armor progress has been made Botox Karen grabs the discarded dark saber in a fight ensues in which she beats first the normal not General Grievous and then the armored up not General Grievous again with far greater ease and dexterity with the darksaber than Mando showed though with Once saying that this is probably one of those occasions where girl bossness is Justified given Botox Karen's long and storied history in the animated shows where if you care to find it you can see her learning these skills and gaining these powers and abilities as for Mando's General incompetence that's not especially Justified but it has been his default through the three seasons he's had so far with rare and notable exceptions and so we cannot hear accuse the show of reducing him to elevate her he was already pretty much on the ground she rescues him and they have a chat about how miserable Mandalore now looks but he refuses to rest because he needs to go take a bath in the Living Waters for reasons the show really ought to have addressed or at least considered and so naturally did not he picks up the darksaber again and that is all absolutely fine the rule as I recorded is that it must be one from the owner in combat and so technically it couldn't pass to Botox Karen even though she rails against precisely that kind of superstition In This Very scene but it's also the thing she's been hankering after for as long as we've known her the thing in which all her dreams and aspirations are hinged the things she lost and with it seemingly those dreams and aspirations as well the thing she finally got her hands on in the last scene and wielded in battle you would think she would have some reaction any reaction at all would do the seeing it taken by Mando again something small would have sufficed a lingering look of frown a sigh just something to remind us how important this thing is to her but either it's the botox preventing that kind of facial dexterity or it just didn't occur to the writers in any event Mando picks up the darksaber and we proceed as though it's of no significance at all it's just another tool on his belt we get more ruminations on the downfall of Mandalore and the mandalorians as we descend more of her cynicism about superstitions and such then the loss of her father and almost something good here since the show seems oh so vaguely aware that all this stuff should move Mando quite profoundly the show is faintly aware of the irony of their respective positions she who lived here saw its Splendor she whose father died for the plan in the faith and the people that Mando never knew but somehow values more you've got the potential for a complex interplay of character motive and ideal here survivor's guilt coupled with religion mystified by distance stories so fantastic to him but mundane to her she's so flippant about the thing that animates his entire reason for being her father dying in fulfilling the code he lives by but she does not there's a huge amount you can do with all of this stuff an amount so vast even the writers of this show can't ignore it completely but if there is to be a payoff for any of it it's not coming yet it's not coming through any of the four episodes we've seen so far instead and in this scene Mando simply pauses and looks at her a while and says this is the way and you find yourself hoping hoping that that line is as significant as it should be then again Mando's always been a blank protagonist it's that that makes him popular because you can read into him all manner of thoughts beliefs values and opinions you can even apply all your knowledge of the law to him and he becomes much more fleshed out in your mind than he's ever been or likely ever will be on the screen I don't say that just to be cynical there is a real value to that kind of characterization or lack thereof but its ultimate worth must rest with the intent behind it do the writers know this is what they're creating or have they accidentally hit upon it because they're too lazy or incompetent to apply ideas of their own sadly the plot then moves forward again they find the Living Waters Botox Karen narrates a bit more of the law most notably the blindly named mythosaur which will probably come to learn a lot more about as she gradually morphs into Daenerys Targaryen mythosaurs are giant creatures believed to be extinct which the mandalorians of old were said to have ridden of which there is a legend saying man Global rise again when the Mythos will return presumably written by Botox Karen so it goes Mando goes into the Living Waters and promptly sinks like a stone and on First Watch I honestly thought he'd been grabbed by some monster the one second watch I'll say it's just not especially clear what is clear though is that although he's been underwater for about two seconds by the time Botox Karen leaps in he's contrived to sink tens if not dozens if not hundreds of feet and has conveniently and instantly lost Consciousness she even has to use her jet pack under the water to get down to the bottom to retrieve him I'm not sure what the show wanted us to believe happened here but there's absolutely no way he could sink faster than her jetpack propelled her or as far as he did or as quickly as he did and there's no way he could have been dragged down there by a creature leaving it enough time to disappear entirely by the time she entered the water it really just plays out like a convenient way to get both characters into the murky depths where Botox can indeed get a glimpse of a probable mythosaurus lurking down there which of course Bando didn't see because going underwater causes him immediately to pass out she rescues him they jetpack all the long way back up to the surface and that's the end of the episode important to note for the next one they've both now bathed in the waters and as yet neither has removed their helmets meaning by the questionable logic of the code they are both redeemed this will become relevant presently before we move on to the next episode I do want to stress and I hope I've made this at least slightly apparent that there are bits about all of this I do still like the Aesthetics some of the World building in the backstory and above all the fact that everything we see on the screen is meant for the world it's depicting and not as some coded or oblique commentary on our world it's one of the things that makes the Mandalorian watchable and even enjoyable despite the catastrophes frequently inflicted upon it by its writers as I said at the top it's a show that benefits from only having half your attention and which does its damnedest to make sure the other half is off somewhere in the Galaxy it's Saturn telling or remembering or imagining other stories that could and should be told a sentence that unfortunately has to end with the word instead it really is a crying shame that its competence in this area is at least matched and is increasingly being overmatched by The Staggering incompetence of everything else the best of the Star Wars shows with the exception of Andor is actually the worst show you could possibly make with all these ingredients and just when you think it might be staging some sort of narrative recovery it jilts you at the altar so with that out of the way we progress illogically but at least chronologically to episode 3 the one that wishes it were Andor [Music] episode 3 begins where you'd expect it to and then go somewhere very different for questionable reasons we kick off in the minds of Moria where Botox Karen has hauled Mando up from the depths but apparently not bothered checking whether he's alive or even trying to resuscitate him she's left him lying there potentially full of water so she can have a stare but although this show may eventually have her replace him that moment is not now so he belatedly starts coughing and comes back to life he takes a vial of the water for safe keeping then Albert confirms that he wasn't in fact dragged all the way to the bottom of the well he merely fell which is physically impossible for the reasons previously stated but oh well he also confirms that he didn't see the mythosaurus down there and Botox Karen doesn't think it worth pressing the point so they hop back aboard her very pretty spaceship and head back to her castle you'll know that despite having previously taken her helmet off at random moments to deliver inconsequential lines she is so far not removed it to deliver any of her lines since rescuing Mando from the water and this will become relevant presently for now the show decides to take inspiration from the old arcade-style Star Wars games Rogue Squadron X-Wing and such and a host of tie-in deceptors suddenly appears to attack them this all looks lovely but once again it would have been better had all the dialogue been stripped from it in the first place we're not alone in wondering where the tires came from Mando asks this question as well and Botox Karen mentioned something about pissing off Imperial Warlords which not only doesn't answer the question but actually poses more that the show doesn't bother to account for Tie fighters Thai interceptors as we know are short-range Fighters they have no hyperdrives either that size couldn't get this deep into space on its own meaning they must have come from a nearby planet or from a capital ship not that the show even attempts to reach this conclusion we having reached that conclusion must then ask if they came from a nearby Planet then there's been an imperial warlord in the same star system as Botox Karen's Palace for what two years so why is it taking them this long to attack given by her own admission she's royally pissed them off that's a minor World building stuff the stakes in the Chase come from her informing us that her ship's Shields will not hold for long so Mando has to man a turret to fend them off even though it's not at all apparent that this Alters their condition at all there is still the same number of ties shooting the same number of times from roughly the same distance away Mando being a pretty Naf shot himself that's not especially concerning providing that we don't get a piece of dialogue later in the sequence that downplays what we were just told were the stakes our Shields aren't gonna hold you take any damage just Shields good job oh and we also get a completely needless throwaway line from Mando to inform us that interceptors are a lot tougher than Tie fighters which is one of those things that really could and should have been shown rather than told it all looks great of course the chase culminates in Mando dropping from the ship on the move to land appropriately on the landing pad getting to his N1 just in time to escape a conveniently summoned straggling Interceptor that the reasons having to do with but it would be cool wasn't with the main group and was just casually hanging back waiting for his Q to enter the scene I've praised the soundtrack already in this review though I think it once saying that season 3 hasn't been quite so Innovative or even so appropriate as the previous two seasons this doulas has something to do with the original composer Ludwig garanson having been replaced for this season by Joseph don't call me Shirley he's still using some of gorinson's themes and signatures and in this scene definitely overuses them since Mando's Telltale discordant whistly flute thing plays whenever he does anything and he does quite a lot like so foreign I will praise the visuals a little more though before we move on to my eye the ship battle looks better than much of what we got even in the sequel Trilogy and especially in the force awakens if you recall Finn's X-Wing Squadron rescuing our pathetic excuses for Heroes from mastanata's Castle you might like me I've been a bit disappointed with the way the ship's movement strayed Into The Uncanny Valley maneuvering too tightly and cleanly for objects of their weight going at their speed it's a gripe more than a major criticism but I think it does want saying that special attention has to be paid to movements like this when you're creating your ship's entirely via CGI because you don't have that innate sense of physics that comes from maneuvering physical objects around to create your scenes models have weight and when the models are static you're moving camera likewise has weight and seeing these objects arraigned in front of you gives you a more intuitive sense of what they're capable of than when they're arranged digitally that's not to say you can't recreate it digitally and you can recreate it quite easily but it is to say that you have to make more of an effort to account for the physics of the thing that you're making this scene in Mando manages that in a way that the force awakens quite often did not that being said Mando continues his habit of using the least likely weapons for the moment at one stage hitting an oncoming Interceptor at point-blank ranged with a torpedo despite having a perfectly good laser cannons on the front of his ship that presumably cost much less to replenish Botox Karen manages to hold the interceptors off long enough through a combination of her skill and their incompetence because their Imperials and that's just how they work for Mando to come up behind to take out a few more of them and finally through an insane but cool looking maneuver Botox Karen takes out the final one R5 Falls over this is funny Mando asked her if she took any damage and she says just Shields which yeah does kind of detract from the Peril invoked by the last mention of shields but oh well we are still doing a fly simulator though and anyone who's ever played the old Rogue Squadron or X-Wing games will be familiar with the way New Missions and objectives are introduced through a combination of dialogue and flashing icons on the screen which is exactly what happens here hang on I'm seeing something on the scope it turns out the interceptors weren't the only Imperial ships to have spawned seemingly from nowhere a squadron of Thai bombers was also deployed from The Ether and they're now bombing the [ __ ] out of Botox Karen's Castle again prompting us to ask just why the hell it took them this long to get around to doing that like any good Rogue Squadron game the mission then becomes chase the tie bombers and shoot them from behind but then a dozen or so more interceptors show up and so they have to break off the pursuit so they do indeed break off the pursuit and run away R5 Falls over again this is funny and also completely out of place since the scene is supposed to convey that these bastard Imperials have bombed Botox Karen's home again which you'd think would be immediately sad and also sad on a meta level bringing back nasty memories of The Purge though the show doesn't ever really make that connection in the minds of its characters so we just kind of move on Botox Karen observes that this is quite a lot of ships for an imperial warlord and we'll just have to take her at her word on that because really who's to say what the normal amount of ships were in Imperial warlord is if the warlord is rocked up on a Star Destroyer it's actually not very many at all if he's from a planet with an old Air Base on it it's likewise not very many ships but never mind my theory at this stage by the way is that the warlord will turn out to be moth Gideon because the show has been and will continue to be deliberately and almost hilariously cagey about where he is and what happened to him the only alternative I can think of is Grand Admiral thrawn and I can't believe there was once a time when I'd have been excited to see him in live action before the dark times before Disney they jump away back to the Mandalorian covert and we jump away then to a Sumptuous looking Coruscant which is where we're going to spend practically all of the remaining episode the opening recap to this episode reintroduced us to Dr Pershing who you might remember from early in season 1 and late-ish in season 2. he is the scientist who under orders from first the client and then moth Gideon was trying to inject grogu's magic blood into test subjects for nefarious and nebulous cloning related reasons he was captured in season two and now we're being reacquainted with him on Coruscant he's part of some rehabilitation program for ex-imperials and well there is quite a lot to be said about all of this and I think the best approach is to take it as it comes for now I'll say that this extended 40-minute Side Story copped an awful lot of flack that more properly belongs to everything else in the Mandalorian it's actually less stupid than the rest of the season so far but it's also much longer and much more ponderous and less flashy and action-packed it feels distinctly like a Pastiche of Andor in the tone it attempts to strike and because it actually tries occasionally to tell a character-led story and because among its typical Mando style nonsense it actually does try to convey some interesting ideas I'm sure there is quite a large overlap between people who hate Andor and people who unironically adore the Mandalorian please ignore the footage on the screen I don't know how it got there unfortunately for the writers of this show it doesn't do and or well enough to satisfy the five or six people who actually liked Andor while it does too much of Andor for people who'd otherwise quite like the Mandalorian meaning it effectively pleases nobody but we're going to come to that in a moment for now Mr pershing's speech there's rather a lot to say about his speech I will summarize it first without comment Dr bashing gives the speech about his scientific work and research to a large Auditorium full of corazon's well-to-do high society types he talks about the work he did for the Imperial Remnant and how his intentions were pure but Twisted by evil people who wish to use cloning for their own evil ends he thanks the amnesty program for saving his life and pledges himself to use his research to Aid the new Republic he gives us and his audience his backstory he lost his mother when he was young to a rare heart condition that couldn't be cured because and I quote simple organ cloning was not available on his home world this is what inspired his research perfecting cloning Technology Building on the work done by the kaminoans his goal was to effectuate a cloning technology that could combine the best attributes of multiple clone donors rather than simply recreating a single person from a single donor and that's pretty much it where the [ __ ] do you where the [ __ ] do we begin with this uh the problem the problem let's start with the problem which is the problem we'll encounter throughout the episode anyway the problem is that there is some good in all of this but like pershing's research it has been corrupted by shitty people to produce something faintly horrific from the top then the stuff about the amnesty program the new Republic attempting to reintegrate former Imperials and using their works and designs and researches for good instead of evil is a good premise you can do a lot with that it has a solid grounding in the real world Dr Pershing is essentially the idealistic Von Braun type Nazi scientist who is useful enough that the Allies employ him rather than sending him to prison there are implied depths to the new Republic and the wider functioning of this world we glean through this little passage a wealth of stories of History politics and whatever else we have to clean this because the show alas doesn't really do much with any of the ideas it's introducing here in fact it's shortly going to destroy much of the good work by revealing that this genius scientist who's been invited to give the Coruscant equivalent of TED talks on his cloning research has actually been stuffed in some random Warehouse the rest of the time and his day job is simply filing paperwork but we will come to that in a moment sticking with the speech his stated motive and his stated aim don't really align the former invites as many historical problems as the previous sentence invited historical possibilities he bemoans the lack of simple organ cloning before going on to invoke the work of the kamino ones two things that don't easily marry it reminds us that cloning was very well established in the Star Wars Galaxy before all of this while telling a story that relies on the absence of cloning as a well-established technology now I believe there are reasons given in the old expanded universe that attempted to explain why cloning which was quite recently used to create a whole massive Army and the original backbone of Imperial forces had all but disappeared by the time of the original trilogy I am not aware that anything within Disney's version of the EU has attempted an equivalent explanation the episode actually tries to dismiss the question entirely with a throwaway line about the new Republic having made cloning illegal which doesn't explain a why B what happened before the new Republic C why there should have been a blanket ban including say cloning organs for medical purposes or D how any such band could possibly have been enforced with 100 efficiency George Lucas created the difficulty by making cloning such a pivotal part of the prequels but it was never an insoluble problem the problem stems from poor attempts to solve the problem Disney's Canon has it that cloning was a thing then it seemingly disappeared except that then the Imperials were still doing it until they weren't and despite Dr Pershing here giving a TED talk about it within a relatively short time that elapses between this Ted Talk and the rise of Skywalker cloning has faded in the minds of the new Republic who commissioned the Ted talk to Secrets only the Sith knew Pershing Begins by explaining that his motive was the death of his mother from a heart condition because simple organ cloning wasn't well established but again the existence of the Clone Army shows that it was and must have been given you know clones have organs hell we in the 21st century can manipulate stem cells to create specific organs it's very hard to see how and why the medical implications of the Camino ones work haven't been widely and cheaply adopted as standard across the Galaxy Pershing then aligns a gap where reasoning is supposed to be to explain that his ultimate goal was to create a cloning technology that allows for the combination of traits from separate donors which wouldn't have saved his mother which was the reason he embarked upon this quest to begin with but which is also implausible given the Camino ones were able to meddle with the genes of the Clones they were making accelerated aging and enhanced obedience were part of the sales pitch for their Clone Army after all and Hell the writers should be well aware of all this since they quite recently produced The Book of Boba Fett and do you remember boba's origin that demanded only one thing an unaltered clone for himself pure genetic replication no tampering with the structure to make it more docile and no growth acceleration it's unclear exactly what combining the genetic traits of two donors could achieve but meddling with genes generally could not with the apparent exception of recreating force abilities though even that is a pretty dicey proposition one of the problems George Lucas created that might in fact be insoluble is the reduction of the force to a biological mechanism in midichlorians could the caminoans not simply have identified the genes required to create or attract mediclaureans yet that is the only exception that Springs to mind the purpose of cloning for a general population for medical purposes is not to make them feel sensitive it's to cure heart and other organ problems the purpose of genetic engineering a distinction this speech pretty much aligns is to preclude those problems in the first place pershing's groundbreaking research was in a field already established and its purpose was to solve problems that should logically already have been solved via means that wouldn't actually have solved the problem credit is due I guess for the show even broaching something like character Motif and World building but much more credit is lost for the incompetent way they've gone about it and that is not the last time in this episode that will have the cause to say that believe me pershing's speech has been watched by another even less memorable character from earlier Seasons who is conveniently also part of the rehab program she was so irrelevant that for the scene in the opening recap she was only credited as com's officer it's uh it's yeah it's this woman comes off as a woman you remember her right more recently spotted being a generic girl boss in Ant-Man 3 Quantum of Solace or whatever that film was called she's going to become relevant again in a minute after a terrifying encounter with some rich people Pershing takes a car back to the rehab accommodation which is one of the rare occasions in which default the visuals in this show they're in an open-topped car flying at Speed high up in Coruscant and yet wins well wind just doesn't exist on this planet apparently creating quite an uncanny effect we see the backdrop flying past but that's quite clearly what it is is a backdrop absence of little details like wind ruffling clothes and hair is the difference between a believable and unbelievable scene it is such a simple problem to fix either stick a big old fan in front of him on the Sound Stage or even more simply put a roof on the car a little glass bubble is all it would have taken and you'd have had a far less jarring contrast between foreground and background Dr Pershing is invited for a drink with a bunch of other amnesty program enrollees who for reasons unfathomable have been given number designations rather than names I say for reasons unfathomable that's not quite Fair the whole stick of this elongated portion of the episode is dehumanization none of these people are individuals their individuality is quite deliberately stripped from them numbers instead of names dead end menial labor routine clinical examinations from faceless robots it's all very well it's very Andor and it's actually done reasonably well the episode shows the tensions between Conformity and self-fulfillment and deploys a few accurate and effect of means by which the latter can be crushed to produce the former the question though which doesn't occur in Andor because of the difference in setting is why why should the new Republic be deploying what in Andor was shown to be experimental and punitive measures enacted by a dictatorial Empire this is not necessarily a flaw but everything depends on the depiction of the new Republic going forward the point of all this is to suggest and later to show that the new Republic is replicating the worst features of the ancient regime and if that is the point then it's a big thing with significant moral implications there's nothing wrong with asking what was it all for of the rebels victory over the Empire and all the rest you can do fascinating things with that question you should do fascinating things with it and the old expanded universe did some very interesting things with the evolving character of the new Republic but it has to be a question that's consciously asked with a mind to its consequences and the problem here is twofold in the first place the only Star Wars writing team that's demonstrated rated itself capable of handling this type of question is not working on this show and this show has demonstrated the opposite of the skills required to interrogate what it's setting up here in the second place this isn't really an open-ended question we all know what this is building toward and the depiction of the new Republic and the sequel Trilogy does not support the idea that it lapsed into the character of the Empire it replaced I need to go see the Senate right away tell them I insist the Republic take action against the first order the respect will the Republic listen not all the Senators that go on sale on the contrary it's portrayed to the extent it's portrayed at all in the very few mentions it gets before it's blown up by Starkiller base as complacent not tyrannical or cruel Leia still serves it at the time of the force awakens her frustration is with the ignorance and carelessness of its leaders not with its fundamental moral nature all this leaves you with the sense that this isn't really being done with a key eye to World building but rather that the writers for this show observed what was happening with Andor and simply try to transplant the effect without understanding what made it work and by work I mean logically and philosophically arguments about pacing and characterization and the other common gripes with that show are handled in a video on my second channel it's a shame because in isolation what the Mandalorian is doing here is or could be quite interesting but it doesn't have the luxury of isolation it has to build off and towards something and alas that isn't what it's doing but anyway treating it with as much isolation as we can possibly afford it what makes these scenes interesting is their ideas while their deployment and pacing kind of lets those ideas down having kicked off with a high octane Starfighter battle were then slammed into Ultra slow motion which does afford time for some genuine character work but which doesn't even try to smooth the gaps between these two very different approaches there's some Queen to not terrible bander between the rehab and Rollies reminiscing about their time with the Imperial Remnant on the outer rim and an anecdote about biscuits that will somehow become relevant later then illustrating one of these subtler differences in quality between actual and or and or light we see Pershing in his bedroom reading up on Coruscant that's um that's Coruscant the center of Imperial rule center of the whole galaxy seat of the emperor Center of Galactic politics for hundreds if not thousands of years so so yeah totally irrelevant little planet that until recently Imperial scientist couldn't possibly have ever heard of or been familiar with until this point yes he absolutely needed to read up on this honestly the way these Star Wars shows forget their own timeline is just staggering like the references to cloning as Secrets only the Sith knew in the rise of Skywalker or indeed references to the Jedi as some ancient religion earlier in this very show it's like the writers have collectively thought it would be very convenient if years were decades and decades were centuries and because that's convenient they've made it so via a biscuit transition that lets us know comes officer what's it a likes Pershing and B has access to mysterious status of Imperial gear we find ourselves in the morning after with Pershing fresh out of his high society Ted Talk working his dehumanizing record-filing job in a basement and once again it's worth highlighting the difference between what Andor does and the way this show tries to ape it without understanding it take the prison sequence in Andor a genuinely brilliant application of Jeremy bentham's concept of the panopticon it's an example of architecture married to Social and penal philosophy everything about it is consistent every use within it contributes to the use of the whole the design of the panoptagons is a central tower with prison cells arranged around it in a circle such that every cell is visible to the tower but the tower's occupants are not visible to the cells the idea which all well goes on to borrow from in 1984 is that the threat of surveillance Allied to Collective punishment makes actual surveillance not unnecessary but far less necessary you know you might be being watched everyone else knows you might be being watched and that they'll be punished for any transgression that you make resultingly it's in their interest to ensure that you never transgress and vice versa in case you or they are being watched you've internalized Authority which produces mutually reinforcing social control which paradoxically reduces the need for punishment and and or depicts all of this in most of its subtleties in the architecture of its prison and the roles of the inmates it is an incredibly astute show by contrast the Mandalorian grasps the basic feel of the thing but not that philosophical and mechanical totality the thrust of this episode is as mentioned dehumanizing the subject in the name of Rehabilitation and almost all of it is geared toward proving this effect pershing's dalliances with the comms officer are perhaps even consciously designed to evoke Winston Smith's stallions is with Julia in 1984. the brief snatched glimpse of humanity Love and Hope giving the contrast that only emphasizes the Triumph of the regime and exposing him to a vulnerability the regime will later exploit and yet because the Mandalorian decided it had try and cram in some retroactive World building it breaks its mechanical and mental continuity by beginning with a TED Talk designed to play up the individuality of its victim these two devices are simply not part of the same system the first detracts from the system the rest of the episode is supposed to be imposing all that being said it actually does the Winston Julia relationship reasonably well notwithstanding the thousands of problems already identified I'm not describing every particular here as reminiscent of the show's pacing issues it would take far too long but Pershing and comes off as a what's it go to a Fairground type thing and they are shown becoming friends the idea that she has a ray of humanity in his sea of drudgery the one bright star he can see in a black Sky guaranteeing that she gains his trust she's the only human he interacts with so the only human he can trust it's also the only example I can think of where foreshadowing is accomplished by Ice lollies she tries to convince him that he should continue with his research despite the new Republic's ban on it because following orders is what got us in trouble in the first place and again in terms of character work this isn't [ __ ] it's reasonably competent to playing off established characterization and it does pay forward to a later Revelation none of this is exceptional stuff except by the standards set by the rest of this show but it is unusually competent likewise the contrast in the next scene with pershing's routine psychological checkup I'm morally certain the episode has taken heavy inspiration from Blade Runner 2049 pershing's routine interrogation by this Bland empty Droid representative is relevant of K in 2049 who has asked rapid fire disconnected questions in order to gauge his emotional state through response times Expressions ticks intonation all manner of microscopic indicators this episode competently repurposes the basic mechanic and uses it to further the dehumanizing premise repeated meetings the same Bland asinine corporatized questions with pershing's character progression given to us by his shifting emotions in response to those questions once again pretty good enough in isolation though it lacks the subtlety of either its principal Inspirations comes officer Watts it finally goes Pershing into continuing his research but he struggles he lacks the suppliers and the knowledge required to obtain them knowledge that she possesses as hinted at by the biscuits yes from earlier and having done foreshadowing by isolates we also get some fairly neat foreshadowing in soundtrack [Music] foreign you can make out the weird quasi-throat singing score from Anakin and creamy sheaves operatic liaison in Revenge of the Sith as Pershing approaches comes off as a what's it to take her up on her offer this episode gets a lot of the little details right which is why it is so astonishing that it and Manda as a whole get so many of the bigger details wrong if you discount the problems with motive and World building and pacing this is where the episode begins to [ __ ] up even in isolation because Mando's writers Hawk their Wares on the strength of their action sequences and their action sequences are somehow still quite [ __ ] if you pay any kind of attention to them Pershing and comes off as a what's it have to take a Sky Train over to a salvage yard where they'll find the mobile lab station that he needs we'll get to the problems with coruscant's decommissioning and Salvage yard in a moment but on the train there are ticket inspector robots there are only two of them both ticket inspector robots begin inspecting tickets from the same direction the same side of the train meaning of course that anyone who wants to avoid them can just you know walk the other away now I've done my fair share of ticket dodging and I'm pretty good at it but Pershing and comes off as a what's it don't even have to use the simplest devices they don't hide in the toilet or anything like that instead they just walk away from the ticket inspectors this involves hopping between carriages which is believable on an earth-based train with a corridor linking them but here we're talking jumping across open space thousands of feet in the air which seems like a bit of a health and safety hazard to me nevertheless it's what they do all the way to the other end of the train know how we know we've reached the end of the train well the fact that there are no other carriages might be a clue the fact that all they can see is open space in front of them the other might also be a clue but because this is the Mandalorian and the people who love this show aren't big on detail the writers decide they won't leave any room for doubt that this is in fact the end of the train so Pershing turns to comms office of what's it and says the end of the train yeah thanks thanks I guess what do you imagine they'll do traveling at tens if not hundreds of miles an hour well naturally they decide they'll jump they'll jump off the fast moving train to land improbably but very conveniently on some well-placed trash mats how very lucky that the basic rules of momentum just forgot to apply themselves in this precise moment do not try this at home kids even C-3PO would be too tactful to tell you the odds of your survival anyway they've reached the decommissioning in salvage yards and so here we have some chunky World building [ __ ] ups to contend with again yay probably the most minor of them is why are there Salvage and decommissioning yards on Coruscant it's a hyper densely populated capital city where space is at such a premium that their skyscrapers are built thousands of feet in the air there are whole planets dedicated to salvage we know this from Fallen order it's where we begin the game after all we know this from Andor it's where we begin the show after all we know this from the old expanded universe where if my memory serves we have planets like old mantel notable for the their extensive junkyards we know there are planets and systems like goredia and fondor with huge shipyards that could make use of the materials gained from Salvage which could handle decommissioning which could even repurpose outdated designs there are plenty of places better suited to do this than Coruscant it's like sticking several square kilometers of toxic waste disposal in the middle of San Francisco and um well actually but the bit that pissed me off rather more than that was wait why are they decommissioning top of the range Star Destroyers that's [ __ ] ridiculous the OT went out of its way to reinforce that the empire was technological leagues ahead of the rebels we frequently get lines like what good are snub Fighters going to be against that and from akbar's capital ship Star Destroyers the OT made sure we knew that the rebels were punching well above their weight though they were Plucky that their chances of success were slight that the weakness of the empire was its arrogance not its military inferiority the Galaxy is under on a revolution resulting in a changing government it has not been defeated and subjugated by a militarily and technologically inferior Force the new Republic needs Star Destroyers it would use Star Destroyers because they'd be a huge upgrade on the ships available to the Rebel Alliance held the Imperials themselves kept older models in service as all real militaries do as long as they possibly could it's why there are several classes and subclasses of Star Destroyer moreover this show has told us several times that the imperial Remnant are still out there and are still a great threat any Imperial Commander or Admiral with access to a star destroyer or an 8080 or other ships of the line or heavy Ordnance would have used those things to gain their power to establish themselves as Warlords precisely because they are so spectacularly Advanced compared to any local or Regional competitor to secure its position the new Republic would have needed to use as much Imperial Tech and Resource as possible until it was sufficiently Advanced that it could recommence the normal business of technological progress decrease positioning Star Destroyers is a self-destructive move these people deserve to die they're demonstrably not up to the job of ruling the Galaxy I mean [ __ ] it can we just have Palpatine back the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be oh no actually no [ __ ] that go away now Chief please into the inexplicably decommissioned Star Destroyer they go which is the show's occasion to make Star Destroyers the anti-tardis Star Destroyers are about a mile long to say nothing of their width and height and internal space and dimensions yet it takes Pershing and comes officer what's it a mere few seconds to find the science lab meaning the only explanation is that the labs are conveniently placed right next to the front doors Pershing starts Gathering the random bits and Bobs he needs to restart his Advanced cloning lab and naturally they all fit into a suitcase in possession of this they make the leave but Shakara the authorities arrive they run away but they get captured which occasions the shocking Revelation as befitting her evil Red Ice Lolly com's officer Watts it is a baddie she set him up and I have a few questions about this because well I mean isn't this the literal and legal definition of entrapment here acting on behalf of the state comes officer wants it has induced criminal behavior in a subject whom all the previous tests showed was conforming to the terms and purpose of the rehabilitation program he was by all accounts a normal functioning proto-member of society he was a proto-success he was misled by an agent acting in concert with the authorities without whose influence he would never have committed his crimes I mean what the shuddering [ __ ] is the point of the rehab program if the people in charge of it randomly and capriciously decide to sabotage individual subjects of that program why has any of this happened the answer naturally is that the plot needed it to but and I'm not at all sorry to keep making the Andor comparisons it's another example of the Mandalorian doing a pastiche vandoren without much more than a basic superficial understanding of the way that show was written this is pointless cruelty inflicted for the convenience of the writers not pointless cruelty that the writers have made fit into the context of the world they're making the only way out of this is if you continue to depict the new Republic as essentially the Empire with a human face but I'm pretty sure that's not going to be its characterization going forward because all this is only happening for convenience's sake so Pershing is arrested and taken into a mind [ __ ] lab where he is subjected to something called a mind flare repurposed Empire attack that was once used to destroy the minds of its victims be which the new Republic scientists have ostensibly repurposed in a milder form too and I quote soothe select traumatic memories and again the show is seemingly aware of the Empire parallels is seemingly aware that it's making a broader point about the essential sameness of the old and the new regimes but again this is the Mandalorian and the odds of it sticking with the depiction are so small never tell me the odds likewise again in isolation the scene is quite effective Bland offensively inoffensive music Bland offensively inoffensive scientist who claims he's been through the process himself and demonstrates the appropriate lack of Personality it does the horror aspect pretty well but and again again this is the Mandalorian it's not Andor meaning it can't sustain internal consistency never mind meta consistency comms officer Watson is present to observe the procedure she asks to be left alone to watch because he's her friend the scientists say okay fine I guess and she turns the dial up to 11 meaning this mild Readjustment has turned into a grade A mind Scrambler suitably horrific I suppose but horrifically problematic as well the minor problem is why the hell have they built this machine with the ability to reach the maximum level in the first place the much bigger problem is when the scientists return to discover that his mind has been [ __ ] to such a degree that he's been reduced to the intellectual level of Hassan paika there is literally just one suspect in the sabotage and that one suspect has ensured that she is the only suspect by asking to be left alone in the room oh well it's the Mandalorian I'm sure we'll all have forgotten about it by the next episode comes after what it is praised with her compliance with the program one of the scientists says it's nice to know that for every failure there's a success like her even though the failure was a success and was only made a failure by her in full cooperation with the authorities so this is fundamentally flawed the scientists leave Persian gets turned into Hassan Pika comes off as a what's it sinisterly eats a [ __ ] biscuit and that is not the end of episode 3 because we're finally back with Mando and Botox Karen who've arrived at the Mandalorian covert there Mando proves that he's bathed in the Living Waters by handing over the vial he is thereby redeemed even though he could have taken his helmet off at any point in the interim and nobody would be any the wiser Botox Karen is likewise Redeemed by Def fault because she bathed in the waters by rescuing him and hasn't taken off her helmet in the interim either even though she's been shown to take it off frequently and with little cause and she had no preconceived reason to change this long-established pattern of behavior incidentally this covert of religious Fanatics you see Mandalore as their unreachable Mecca have in this moment learned that the planet is not cursed or poisoned or anything of the kind so naturally you'd expect them to fly off there as soon as possible to reclaim it right this being the Mandalorian though naturally that is not what they do and that is the end of the episode it genuinely feels a bit wrong to praise it because the kind of Praise I'm handing out you had some good ideas here it's a good try is what you'd give to a teenager you know attempting their first script not seasoned and established writers paid Oodles of cash to Hell major shows in what was once the biggest cinematic franchise in the history of mankind the fact is one of the better episodes across the entire run of the Mandalorian on a writing level is an even bigger in Diamond but well we've got a long way to go so um we go to episode four [Music] this is where things really nosedive and by nosedive I mean your nose dives into a mound of gelatinous feces episode 4 begins with a training montage showing various mandalorians training to be Stormtroopers by which I mean that the first shot shows them firing randomly into a lake target practice without targets promising stuff others very slowly practice melee combat with varying levels of unsuccess a couple of them shoot flamethrowers at each other literally fighting fire with fire and it's not at all clear what they're hoping to accomplish with any of this inexplicably a couple of them are practicing jetpack Maneuvers over the same Lake the rest of them are randomly firing into which is surely just asking for trouble if you want to show these people honing their skills as the expert Fighters you keep telling us they are show would it have been too much to ask that ucg in some moving targets over the lake show us how accurate they are or that you get the extras in for your fist fights who not lose to a white belt this is supposed to be an establishing shot yeah what in the name of furry penis is it actually establishing it's not even establishing location we know Mando and Botox Karen are here it's where we ended the preceding episode ideally you'd establish a great many things in this single shot location skill of the mandalorians the weather whatever the [ __ ] else but no this is an establishing shot that establishes less than nothing because it actually deprecates what is supposed to be amongst the most ruthless Warriors in the Galaxy well done the favrilorian strikes again I know too that they still haven't left for Mandalore even though they now know it's habitable but oh well Mando decides that it's time for grogu to learn combat for some [ __ ] reason which sounds absurd as a premise and is only more absurd in practice once again the show cannot decide how mature grogu actually is incompetent baby surprisingly intelligent [ __ ] incompetent baby surprisingly intelligent [ __ ] surprisingly intelligent baby incompetent [ __ ] it just shifts as the scene demands and this particular scene demands that he be surprisingly into intelligent [ __ ] the mandalorians themselves spot the nonsense of this idea Mando plunks the little frog guy down and says next Challenger and he's challenging Jimmy Kimmel's nephew The nepolorium Who we've just seen when a competitive yet inept wrestling match intended I guess to demonstrate his Competitive Edge I say inept wrestling match because they had to cut the scene to secure his victory I guess finding a kid capable of the astonishing martial prowess required to trip over another kid was just too much for the casting team to handle having incompetently characterized the nepalorian as a proper hype in competitive Mandalorian proto-warrier which does count as characterization of a Kind the show proceeds to act against its own work the nepolarian gets to choose the weapons for this sparring match and if you were a very competitive kid who just best at your nearest rival in physical combat and you wanted to score a win to prove yourself and you were placed against the two foot high [ __ ] child what weapon would you use wrestling again maybe some sort of melee weapon a done perhaps since a little alien creature only has three fingers and couldn't actually shoot one anything really involving physical strength or dexterity and coordination yes you would choose anything except what he goes for but because that would have been very inconvenient for the writers hyper competitive physically Superior stronger taller generally more ruthless opponent child chooses darts and by darts I mean wrist mounted paintball guns okay then the nepalorian rightly asks why grogu doesn't wear a helmet and is told that grogu is too young to speak the Creed so is too young to wear a helmet the Napoleon rightly points out that this makes grogu too young to fight the correct answer is yeah the Gap actually you're correct but the show believes it's afforded itself an opportunity for a moral lesson so Mando says the Creed says that one does not speak the Creed unless one knows the nepolarian says well I know Mando says perhaps this lesson is for you then now I think I I know what the writers think they're doing here but but no actually I mean sense since this makes not and he continues to sense this make not by flagrantly violating the Rules of Engagement to let grogu win even though the nepolarian would have won have the same rules been applied to him follow along if you can they each given a set of wrist mounted training darts and they're told they may fire them in any order even though the order makes precisely no scintilla of a [ __ ] of a difference the nepolarian shoots one and hits and the fight stops so Mando can give grogu a pep talk the find recommences the napilorian shoots another Dart and hits and the fight stops so Mando can give grogu another pep talk from which we might deduce but this is a three-step turn-based jewel no well no indeed because when the fight recommences grogu does some deliberately bad looking but kind of cute flips back and forward and then hits the nepolarian with all three darts at once and apparently this counts as a win and not a huge [ __ ] cheat the nepalorian's dad who is the large one played by it turns out Favreau himself whom we shall henceforth be calling the chunky Lorien because he's relevant in this episode for the first time ever repeats one does not speak unless one knows and by knows I assume he means knows that the rules will be bent out of shape when the plot requires a main character to win because frankly that's the only rule in this show the nominal Rules of Engagement have been dispensed with entirely the nepalorian walks to the edge of the lake where in episode 1 we had suddenly crocodile asaurus and this is the moment where I entertain Myself by asking you imaginary audience member who has never seen the show what you might imagine happens next and this is entertaining because suddenly a pterodactyl is the kind of answer you could only come up with if you had seen the show and so understood that suddenly a monster is its favorite plot device so suddenly pterodactyl appears and kidnaps the repellarian the chunky lorian stops Mando from shooting at it in case it kills the napilorian instead a bunch of them activate their jet packs and take off after it only to run out of fuel and lose it damn you might be thinking that's unfortunate no one could ever have seen that coming except that Yes actually they could have seen that coming because it turns out this is not the first time that this has happened even though the chunky laurian says on takeoff that they should follow it to its Lair once they've all run out of fuel he says it always gets away so um so so hold on a minute I could I could believe just about that the crocodile asaurus from episode 1 was a surprise but here the suddenly pterodactyl kidnaps a child and this isn't news to anyone I'm I'm a bit confused are you telling me show that they know of its existence are you telling me that it's kidnapped multiple children that has lifted Jimmy Fallon's niece and Stephen Colbert's cousin and James corden's brother actually [ __ ] that there's no way it's big enough to lift the relative of James Corden but the point stands the suddenly pterodactyl Has Lifted many of your children and it always gets away and yet not only did you think it worth jet packing after it you haven't moved out of your cave or you know [ __ ] it gone and hunted and killed it after the first time why not your mandalorians for [ __ ] sake you are not Capital you don't just let the Foreigner steal your children and then shrug and say what you're gonna do happily Botox Karen takes after the suddenly pterodactyl in her spaceship unhappily this also manufactures a Monumental [ __ ] up on multiple levels a why haven't the mandalorians done this themselves before now they must have spaceships otherwise how the hell did they reach this planet Botox Karen goes after it then comes back to tell them that she will go alone later to climb the cliff up to its nest meaning well why didn't she do it when she left the first time and then C when she does return and when they do plan their Ascent to mount shicho they say they can't take ships or use jet packs because if they do the noise will scare the suddenly pterodactyl away even though even though Botox Karen just did that right here in this [ __ ] scene for [ __ ] sake show so we get opening credits and we return to Botox Karen saying that she kept a high altitude and followed the creature to its lair meaning of course that D why couldn't they all flow over it in her ship and airdrop onto it like we saw in the previous episode Botox Karen is mentioned sets out her plan to return a loan to the lair and climb the cliffs which she can do because she did it all in basic training again leaving us to ask why did you come all the way back to tell us that this is what you could do when you could have just done it the answer as ever with this show is because the plot wouldn't work if she did that so she comes back which gives mandu and the chunky lorian the chance to volunteer to join the Expedition and the blacksmith the chance to volunteer the rest of the training Corps though given how incompetent we've just seen them to be this fills us with no confidence at all that they will succeed the chunky Lorien explains that they can't use jet packs in case the Beast hears them and the armorer says that if it hears them it will kill the child as opposed to what so what are you expecting it to be doing to the child already nursing it bathing it feeding it [ __ ] it it is a Disney production after all but seriously this is the second time we've been told they have to let the Beast get away in case it kills the child what do they think it's planning to do to the child there are two plausible outcomes eat it or feed it to its own children and yes we'll get to that in a moment for now the volunteers are assembled and off they go to the foot of the mountain meanwhile because we need the mandalorians to actually do something with manageable Stakes they once again leave grogu behind but rather than locking him in a Cupboard this time they take the opportunity to fill in bits of his backstory specifically his Escape during order 66. remember how Mando got flashbacks to his childhood while the armor of forged bits of his armor well the same mechanic works for grogu yeah it's like poetry is so if they rhyme except that while season 1 took care to ensure that Mando first gave the armorer something to forge since then she's just been permanently forging this incredibly scarce material and so just happens to have some best guy lying around that she can work on in order to trigger grogu's PTSD which occasions are a long flashback to corazones and the Jedi Temple during order 66. this all superficially looks great as you would expect but falls apart when you pay attention again as you'd expect some Jedi are guarding grogu the Clones burst in they shoot most of the Jedi but some of them survive the initial Onslaught so they walk around a corner and then just seem to forget that there are a bunch of clones right behind them which should buy rights have got them shot in the back but no the director here has taken the distinctly childish approach of if I can't see it it doesn't exist meaning that simply walking around a corner taking the Clones out of shot makes those clones disappear the surviving Jedi get accosted from the front again but they managed to shove grogu and his egg into a lift before they all die the Clones reach the door and fire a good few rounds into it before the doors close but somehow fail to hit their target meaning that grogu descends and gets rescued by Jar Jar Binks yeah this is Jaja specifically this is Ahmed best the guy who played Jar Jar and whom we're all now supposed to believe was ridiculed on Twitter for that crime time even though social media as we know it didn't exist at that time I've got nothing for or against best in that sense he was unwise enough to take the role but the crime really is George Lucas's for creating the character to begin with what I do have against him in this episode is that he acts much better in a green suit and Prosthetics than he does in person and his only real contribution to this episode is a few comical this is my serious face moments to its credit the scene just about manages to summon some of the terror a youngling must have faced in this epocal moment but given the weight of all this just about is really a staggering waste of potential Disney Star Wars has recognized the pivotal nature of Order 66 but almost always fails to exploit it to anything like its true dramatic potential just imagine that you were a youngling trying to escape the temple the only home you've ever known as it collapses around you escaping the Troopers you grew up thinking were your friends seeing your mentors and teachers and everyone you've ever looked up to gunned down by the very Authority you were taught to serve it's such a brilliant terrifying tragedy that even these writers see the utility in returning to it time and time again but then ask yourself of all these callbacks have any actually done the moment Justice even Fallen order which I'll usually credit as being better than any of the Disney shows for all its imperfections kind of rushes through the moment the best defense of the prequels was always that for all their flaws in dialogue and humor and aesthetic what they captured brilliantly was this epic Greek style tragedy the grandness of the story they were telling the Disney shows combined have probably spent as much if not more time reliving that moment but even combined have they even captured an ounce of the emotion Revenge of the Sith gave us the Epic vision of the Epic scale an epic perspective these shows and these games have given us multiple chances to particularize the Epic to experience the tragedy on a personal scale and yet well what collectively they've bonalized it they've reduced it to a mentality they've treated it as a mere premise among premises a device among devices without ever actually commanding what it means what it felt like even as those premises invite us to do that the death of the nameless kid in Revenge of the Sith the one who almost makes it to bail organa's Cloud car has more raw feeling than the experiences of any of the protagonists we've now been shown to have experienced the same event anyway magwindu and grogu born a convenient clone bark speeder that has an even more convenient sidecar that even more conveniently fits grogu's egg just perfectly and we're off on another Chase through the Coruscant Skyline which looks very pretty and makes very little sense for example their speeder is very quickly spotted by a couple of lat gunships which join the pursuit you'll recall that in Attack of the Clones it is very clearly established that besides their impressive array of lasers their guided missiles are among their most potent weapons that film had to go out of its way to explain why when Anakin Obi-Wan and Padme chased Count Dooku speeder aboard one of these gunships they were not able to fire any missiles because Dooku and ended the franchise pretty much there and them here though no excuses even attempted the gunships pursue and don't once even look to fire their Rockets because if they did the show would end there and then further issues arise the gunships very quickly managed to score a hit on the speeder and mcwindow informs us they hit the engines which you might think means they're [ __ ] how can the speeder possibly fly never mind escape the gunships if its engine has exploded never mind though because it turns out the speeder doesn't need a functioning engine it can fly along just fine without one for as long as the plot needs it to yet another example of characters in this show speaking entirely unnecessary lines that only serve to create stupid problems the chase winds up being quite destructive with mcwindow taking the speeder through a train tunnel and dodging the oncoming train just in time with the pursuing gunship crashing headlong into it now it's far from impossible for the new Empire to fight this PR battle after the fact the Jedi betrayed us some tried to escape in stopping that escape the Empire incurred some collateral damage a few hundred people on a train killed here a few civilians shot there but it does teach her on the edge of unraveling Order 66 both by making the events much more public than they were shown to be at the time and also for showing this that so many Jedi were able to escape with relative ease in the first place if all it takes to escape is a Jedi of the caliber of mukwindu to reach the Temple's Outer Limits and pinch the nearest speeder surely dozens of Jedi would have managed a similar feat and if Dave filoni continues in his way well probably hundreds of Jedi managed it because the guy is an asshat the train crash is a minor PR blunder though compared to what happens next the engine does finally remember that it's been shut and gives out fortunately within Glide range of a landing platform and it's not just any Landing platform it would appear to be an officially designated Royal Naboo Landing platform on which we see Park the Royal yacht pad may fly several times throughout the prequels and the animated shows one which even Disney's box lore tells us is reserved for Royal and diplomatic person snow it's guarded by Naboo Security Forces this makes it shall we say quite a sensitive asset for reasons that add further questions about how easy it seems to be for Jedi to escape the Persian Coruscant it turns out these Naboo chaps are maguindu's friends and he's radioed ahead to get them to prepare the ship for launch mcgwindu and grogu crash onto the platform grogu's egg inexplicably stays firmly in place even though mcquindu who was holding onto the handlebars was thrown off by the Collision but before they can board the ship another gunship arrives now let's say you are the Gunship pilot you are pursuing a Jedi you absolutely cannot let that Jedi Escape you see him on the landing platform with a spaceship right next to him do you a open fire on that ship immediately to prevent his Escape or B land next to that ship and disembark slowly giving the Jedi time to board the escaping ship if you picked a well done you are more competent than the Empire the only conceivable reason for them to do this is that as I mentioned this is a a very important ship belonging to a very important Sovereign planet and they cannot Brook The Diplomatic Fallout that would come from them firing on a diplomatic vessel but that reason is precluded because the Clones first act upon landing and disembarking from the gunship is to Massacre the Naboo Security Forces which naturally gives mcwindow and grogu time to board the ship and take off and only then do the Clones send completely different ships to try and take it down a couple of v-wings chasing it through the atmosphere firing ineffectually giving mcguindu time to jump to hyperspace and Escape imagine now that your old creamy sheave you get back from Mustafa you fix Darth Vader you've returned to your office and you sit there smugly basking in the glow of your accomplishments all things considered this has been a pretty good day and then just five minutes later as you're settling down to a nice bottle of whatever the Star Wars equivalent of scotch is an official comes in my Lord he says we have a slight problem we accidentally let the Jedi Escape we might have we might have massacred a load of Naboo security and tried to blow up their Royal yacht they're very annoyed and they want to impeach you it's treason then and with that grogu's PTSD flashback ends and we return to the present where the armor has forged grogu's first piece of armor if you don't count the mithril vest he's wearing it's a rondel that's almost as big as he is to go on top of that mithril vest that I had completely forgotten he was wearing and has been wearing since the book of Boba Fett leaving us with the admittedly very funny prospects that Goku might want they get a full set of miniature Mando armor to waddle around him no no no no well let's see if I can't watch anymore destroy the Sith we must over with the merry band of chuckle fox hunting the suddenly pterodactyl they land the ship a short walk away from the mountain they're supposed to climb and they decide that it being the evening now they'd best settle down for dinner and a nap and make the climb tomorrow and by which point you would think the kid thereafter will have been dead for more than a day I mean what exactly do they think suddenly pterodactyl's been doing with it all of these many hours why did it kidnap the kid in the first place if it wasn't going to eat him or feed him to his babies and why given the kid is the chunky lorian son is he so calm and happy with the idea of waiting a whole night before trying to make the climb he'll later reshoe tactics and caution entirely because it's his son but here he's fine with delaying until the morning some father you are dude but hey at least it gives us the chance to answer another long-running fan question I did like this where they all kind of disappeared into their little or areas away from each other to eat I didn't like that I liked what they were trying to do with that because much like with grogu's backstory two fan questions um what how did grogu Escape um I was passing 911 how did grogu Escape oh god there goes the last two dollars bro oh no oh sorry I give up folks you heard it first Starship fuel doesn't melt best car beans oh my God we need we need the uh the Youtube edits of Yoda having flashbacks and what was the Lord's trying to say then he's gone is he gone he's gone five hours later what I was trying to ask okay you have do you have the grogu question which is how does grogu survive Order 66 and then you have yeah [ __ ] sorry um then you have how does how does Mandu eat when he always has to wear his helmet so this scene is supposed to answer the fan question and they answer it in a really stupid way which is that we all have to walk off somewhere else as opposed to just turning around and not looking at each other which you think would have been the easier way of doing it morning finally Dawns and so they begin climbing they are not especially quiet in their Ascent which again would have made an airdrop so much quicker and more efficient and more effective but never mind up we go climbing in full armor carrying huge and heavy guns even though they've made it very clear they're not even allowed to use those now our hope is that the child is still alive so we have to make sure not to fire on the Raptor will kill the foundling of attacked it had happened before when it has taken others God [ __ ] yes up we go once at the summit they find the suddenly pterodactyl isn't even there and Mando uses his heat vision he almost always forgets he has to detect a vague blob of indicating life forms predictably enough it turns out the life forms are the suddenly pterodactyls babies who squawk a bit and then suddenly pterodactyl suddenly appears again as for what's been happening to the nepalorian during all this time it turns out he's been safely ensconced in its stomach for more than a day and the suddenly pterodactyl only now decides to regurgitate him for its kids to eat almost as if it was just waiting for the plot to catch up with it the junkie lorian flies at it with his jetpack and only contrives to get himself captured and it takes off again with the nepalorian and its talents and chunky Lorien in its mouth meaning the rest of the hunting party has to fly off after it you'll recall this is only happening because the chunky Lorien refused to attack it earlier in case it killed the kid but I guess I guess they just kind of forgot that bit of the setup because here they show no qualms about taking it out with the aid of a suddenly crocodile of course managing to rescue both the junky Dorian and the nepalorian before they go down with it yay everyone lives happily ever after now you'll recall earlier that I asked you to note the size of the doorway aboard Botox Karen's ship because it was then impossible to envisage fitting anything much bigger than a human out of it well it turns out no because somehow they've managed to cram all three of the suddenly pterodactyl babies aboard for reasons and out they come ready to be adopted by the mandalorians and presumably ridden into battle in future episodes so I guess we're gonna call them drogon rhaegar and viserion as a reward for Botox Karen's exploits the armorer uses yet more of her infinite supply of very rare beskar to Fashion a new shoulder piece which he chooses to have emblazoned with the mythosaurus emblem during the crafting process Botox Karen asks the armorer how she would respond if told she Karen had seen a real-life mythosaurus and the armors like yeah of course you have love no but I've really seen it uh yeah yeah yeah sure keep taking the meds bow and that brings us to the end of episode four which I think given how long this video is is where we will leave the show for now I want to stress again that I don't hate the show even it is still very entertaining in the way watching efap take apart Batwoman was very entertaining it's almost lovable even just not for the right reasons but it would be remiss of me not to point out that this show has been held up and some still try to hold it up as an example of good Star Wars something like what Star Wars is supposed to be and I'm afraid if you are so minded then you are out of your mind I understand the reasons I've tried my best to accommodate them throughout this video but the fact remains that while entertaining this is an appallingly written show what it does well is superficial and The Superficial is very important see all those who shot on Andor on the dubious grounds it didn't feel like Star Wars and or didn't demonstrate its adherence to the franchise through superficial things like iconography and settings familiar scenes places in people people it issued fan service for the most part and fans have been so hard done by in recent times that fan service has become much more important for its scarcity the Mandalorian tries by contrast to make you love it in the way that and or did not it is nominally at least a more familiar production and it baits the fans in with a hefty dose of nostalgia and an innocent Carefree jawn through the old locales it's got plenty of action blasters spaceship battles lightsabers swinging and these are all ingredients that remind us of Star Wars in its happier days but the fact it found it so easy to win over the hearts and minds of the audience has allowed its writers to take liberties with that audience at least as much as its iconography what once made Star Wars Star Wars was the stories it told these didn't have to be especially clever in fact they benefited often from their Simplicity but that Simplicity was built on solid foundations good character work adherence to the logic of plot and narrative Star Wars is or was at any rate more than a skin deep production if the audience is telling the studio as it did when the Mandalorian first came out that we are satisfied with a superficial resemblance to the old days than a superficial resemblance is the very best we are going to get and because that superficial resemblance doesn't require the writers pay any attention to what they're making it will eventually be consumed by nonsense entertaining nonsense maybe but nonsense all the same

Channel: The Little Platoon

Views: 1,324,888

Keywords: Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Mandalorian Season 3, the mandalorian season 3 trailer, The Mandalorian season 3 finale, Moff Gideon, Cara Dune, Baby Yoda, Mandalorian Grogu, Mandalorian Luke Skywalker, Star Wars Andor, Mandalorian Season 4, Mandalorian Season 2, The Mandalorian is bad, The Mandalorian review, The Mandalorian critique, Mauler Star Wars, The Last Jedi, Boba Fett, Mandalorian Boba Fett, Manalorian Darksaber, Bo Katan, Ahsoka, Ahsoka trailer, this is the way

Id: vyOPqnp8BaM

Length: 130min 13sec (7813 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023