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So....The Mandalorian


Filthy Jawa
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Thanks for backing me up.

 

Sure, there's something driving the show, but that could legitimately go on forever. The A Team was on the run, but the story wasn't about their court martial.

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I'm all on board for vast overarching stories, long-running story arcs that culminate in some "thing."

 

But I love this. I view it like picking up a new comic every week (which is not something I ever actually did lol). I don't think a ton about it in the interim, but I'm still really excited to see what happens next. Knowing that, for the most part, the story for that week is self-contained.

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You don't have to even go back to westerns or pre-Buffy. The first couple seasons of The Clone Wars was a bunch of micro stories strung together like the Mandalorian is now. It took Rebels a season or two to get off the ground, as well.

The reason I'm going back to Westerns is because that's what this show is.

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You don't have to even go back to westerns or pre-Buffy. The first couple seasons of The Clone Wars was a bunch of micro stories strung together like the Mandalorian is now. It took Rebels a season or two to get off the ground, as well.

The reason I'm going back to Westerns is because that's what this show is.

 

I understand your point. It's a space western in the same way Firefly was. My point is that Mandalorian is being written in much the same way the CGI shows were, and this season they are just establishing the universe. The nuance some are saying they are missing will come in time. That's how Filoni does it.

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Thanks for backing me up.

 

Sure, there's something driving the show, but that could legitimately go on forever. The A Team was on the run, but the story wasn't about their court martial.

After reflecting on your points, I understand and agree with you. I do enjoy a lot of episodic TV shows and the A Team and Knight Rider were two of my favorite shows as a kid. Maybe it is a shift in my own personal interests. Pretty much everything I enjoy now is one long narrative.

 

I would offer this one thing, even the A-Team had a runtime around 45 minutes or so and you know going in almost exactly what the plot was going in. Even though the people they help are different, they are all essentially the same character. The Mandalorian episodes are what, 25 minutes or so long and the plot and the characters are completely different from episode to episode (which is a good thing), but with the 25 minute runtimes the stories feel rushed to me.

 

With that said, I am rewatching the PT and I am actually enjoying AotC (apart for the Anakin/Padme romance) so really don't trust myself for reliable opinions.

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Shows used to be 90% episodic. Some-- like say the OGBSG or Quantum Leap, had a runner storyline (in both of these cases was FIND HOME) that was an extension of the set-up, and would devote maybe an episode a season to it.

 

Soaps always had the market cornered on serialized long narratives. Twin Peaks deserves credit for bringing the long form narrative to the Prime time mainstream.

 

Thinking of The Mandalorian as an old school episode series helps a lot-- but things have changed so much, it does seem like an outlier.

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The door scene with the Devaronian was great! That whole fight was reminiscent of the airplane fight from Raiders for me. Unfortunately the soft ending of the show kind of ruined it.

I figured he was leaving them alive the whole time. Im sure thats not the last we've seen of them!

 

Although it probably is for this season.

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I liked the episode too, but I feel like this is the first time it felt like Star Wars on a TV budget. The FX were uneven-- the guard droids looked great, Zero looked like a dude in padding. Those X-Wing pilots looked like they were straight out of a fan film.

 

But Clancy Brown in SW is awesome. Back when the PT was announced my dream casting had him as s Sith Lord.

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I have seen six episodes of THE MɅNDɅLORIɅN and liked all six at more or less the same level with no real ability to critically discern the level of quality fluctuating between them so I guess I'm just gonna be watching this dumb show until either the baby or Mr. Mamdamamorian dies in the series finale or he drops the baby off @ Planet Minch or what-have-you. I'm in for the long haul on this, this is not a Rebels (2014-2018) situation where I give it up after a few seasons. (Am I a mark? Am I a rube? Will I dump anything into my eyeballs and earholes so long as it's familiar and satisficing and unchallenging? Maybe a 'yes' to all of those questions. This honestly does not bode well for the future but then again ... what does?)

 

I think there are really three or so shows a'bippin and a'bopping around inside of this show, with each one among them occasionally coming to the fore and receding to the back in turn :

 

- You are a hardworking parent trying to balance your work life, your home life, and your religious obligations. It's tough but worthwhile! And the reason I phrase this as 'you' is because the main character on this show feels like even more of an audience surrogate than is usual for the *cough* *spit* franchise - a masked, taciturn, reserved withdrawn fellah who tends to repeat rote phrases; he's basically a video game protagonist. I actually welcome this, I like this show a lot, for much the same reason I like Rey & Finn so much, smoothing and shaving down the marble to make a character so simple and pure and unadorned that anyone anywhere can relate to them and see themselves in them is a good thing, especially when one spends even half a moment considering that the entire set of stories in Star Wars takes place where and when and to whom and how. This aspect of the show really plays for me, and this is the show in general that I prefer.

 

- Star Wars! Remember this? Remember that? Take a look at this guy from that place! This functions on multiple levels depending on one's own level of intermittent familiarity with the *sneeze* *fart* franchise, so sometimes I'm just tickled pink to see stormtroopers in mussed up armour and sometimes I'm correlating this stuff with Daniel Keys Moran and Karen Traviss and John Wagner; I imagine if this show had come out in, like, 2006 there'd be even more stuff about it I'd see and recognize and relish in and, honestly, pedantically dispute ad nauseum.

 

- A sloppily edited kids show!

 

I think all three of these shows don't always mesh well together, I mean, it's not like they're mutually exclusionary by any means but still it can feel kind of jarring as we switch between shows, but not to too debilitating effect enough that it'd stop me from enjoying when the next show comes up in the roster. I can watch a bunch of dummies run around the same set for fifteen minutes doing whatever, I guess, so long as eventually spaceships I like to see on a screen show up. I can watch a comically broad minor character wearing a bad latex monster mask who seems way too human for Star Wars, kind of feels like he stepped off a UPN sci-fi/fantasy show from seventeen years ago or Space Cases, I can watch that dude bumble around so long as he gets trapped in f-f-f-f-ff-rozen carbonite eventually. I can watch you learn that there are all kinds of families; sometimes a family is you, your dumb green frogeating senior citizen baby man of a son, your muscled lesbian friend, a hot widow, her kid from the previous marriage, Eugene Cordero, a robot on stilts, and lots of other people besides, and you can all eke out a hardscrabble existence in remote isolation for a while until you're forced into a Seven Samurai pastiche and then you have to move on, it's not safe for your son, you've gotta go! I can watch that.

 

Best bits so far :

 

* Mandamo cutting that Quarren in twain with the irising door (this is actually a totemic moment for what Star Wars is, to me, probably the best one the new stuff has offered so far since that weird vulture-thing bonking its beak against the metal wreckage in the first half of The Force Awakens, explaining it properly would take a little while, it involves Robert A. Heinlein, Samuel Delany, what science fiction is and what it isn't, you know)

 

* a Salacious Crumble seeing himself on a spit (I kind of half-audibly groaned in frustration at the whole 'Look! Remember! Recall something you are familiar with! Activate your mirror neurons, plebe!' element of it all when the camera showed the dead one roasting, but the moment was saved by having a living one of 'em aware of its fate, that takes something kind of rote and pedestrian and goes way too far with it in a way that I applaud)

 

* IG-88½ out there Tik-Toking around

 

* The Mandamorian Batman '66ing his way up the side of a Jawa Sandcrawler

 

* Gina Carano switching the stick of an extra so the pointy end is facing outwards

 

* generally, the HITG of it; just a consistent element that's unendingly delightful to me

 

Oh, סוף כל סוף, because Werner Herzog said the kid is fifty years old this is where my dumb TPM-addled brain goes :

 

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I couldn't get out of my head that she was coming off like Bellatrix from Harry Potter. Like, intentionally haphazard and a little crazy.

 

Well, the actress played Tonks in Harry Potter so I wouldn't be shocked if I was close to spot on!

I really enjoyed the episode. I didn't even mind the visuals. But, yeah, I didn't like the Twilek...honestly the whole team felt a little cookie cutter and Bill Burr was playing Bill Burr.

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Dave Filoni directed The Clone Wars movie. The only movie rated worse than TPM. He has written and directed most of the animated series. The strong point of those is the storytelling over a period of time. So I have no problem giving him a trilogy to helm. Direct? No. But he can set the stage for future projects.

It's really misleading to even call that a movie. They basically re-packaged the three episode pilot arc as a film, it was never meant to be screened in that way.

 

Filoni has a habit of doing stand-alone episodes in the first season of his shows before he really starts exploring the deeper narratives. He did the same thing in Clone Wars and Rebels. Clone Wars was a real mess in the first season, it did a lot of adventure-of-the-week episodes with some really cringey humor. But it got real deep and then really dark very quickly. Rebels sort of did the same thing, but you could tell he'd learned his lessons the first time around.

 

I liked what he did in his episodes of Mandalorian. You can tell it was a first time live action director, but I think it's safe to say he's well on his way.

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I couldn't get out of my head that she was coming off like Bellatrix from Harry Potter. Like, intentionally haphazard and a little crazy.

 

Well, the actress played Tonks in Harry Potter so I wouldn't be shocked if I was close to spot on!

I really enjoyed the episode. I didn't even mind the visuals. But, yeah, I didn't like the Twilek...honestly the whole team felt a little cookie cutter and Bill Burr was playing Bill Burr.
Bill Burr playing Jason Statham?
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